You're not seriously comparing the way Yahoo! took over Flickr with the way Microsoft would, are you? Yahoo! just updated a copyright line. Microsoft will throw the MSN logo everywhere. I can guarantee you there are people at MS right now drooling over the prospect of getting Silverlight on that site. That's before the Vista tie-ins start to surface. I don't want to use Yahoo! Mail and see giant banners telling me I should install Silverlight. I don't want the Mac Yahoo! Instant Messenger to become the bastard stepchild like Microsoft's MSN Messenger.
Sure, you could argue that we don't really know how things would go down, but Microsoft's track record isn't exactly good in this department. Microsoft isn't exactly a company that really believes in competitive coexistence. There's a corporate culture involved that stands in stark contrast to what you get from Yahoo! The simple fact that Microsoft is willing to go to these lengths to get Yahoo! should be proof enough that Yahoo! itself doesn't mean anything to them - they want its assets. That's perfectly fine in business, but if you kill off what made the product so alluring in the first place it isn't going to do you any good. You have to realize that this is the nuclear option. Microsoft's products simply were not good enough to gain the markshare Microsoft is after. What do you do when you're not good enough and you have loads of cash? You buy. That's all that is happening here. Do you think there was anyone at Yahoo! thinking "we need to merge with Microsoft"?
And let's not forget the stuff that Microsoft will, without question, bury. Anyone running a large Zimbra installation should be very nervous right now. Hell, anyone using YUI extensively should be nervous. This entire merger/acquisition/hostile takeover/clusterfuck is a bad, bad, bad idea. Microsoft should not be willing to put itself into this level of debt to acquire a company that wants nothing to do with it, and you can be sure of that: Yahoo! doesn't want this. Any talk of Microsoft's offer being too small - while probably true - is still ultimately just a smokescreen so that they can avoid saying what everyone already knows.
I would go one further and say it isn't about technology or marketing, but rather established mindshare. If it were solely about marketing it would be Microsoft trying to get Yahoo! in order to attract more people. What it's really about is Microsoft buying customers. They don't have to win anyone over if they buy the thing lock, stock, and barrell. What Microsoft isn't taking into account is the number of people who will jump ship when that happens. Many people will live on principle alone.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You make some good points about Rails's flaws, although I'd argue that many of them are related to ORM in general and have less to do with ActiveRecord's implementation than the concept as a whole. Your mention of "interpreted" gives me pause, as it almost sounds like you're arguing that interpreted languages are inherently flawed. I'm not say that's what you're saying, but I think you can see how that could be, well, interpreted.
Of the things you pointed out, I'll candidly say that Rails deployment is perhaps the area where it is most apparent that in the grand scheme of things Rails is still something of a baby. It has (arguably) matured fairly rapidly, but there are certainly areas where there is still room for improvement. Given the sheer bullishness of the core team I'd like to think we're going to continue to make significant progress in this regard. One of the biggest problems Rails faces today is deployment in shared hosting environments, but to say it can't scale is simply false.
As I've noted in prior comments, your problem with Rails has far more to do with some of the people who use it and less with the code itself.
As a developer, learning another language is a good exercise, and most competent developers can become competent in new languages fairly quickly.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And upon what do you base this claim? The fact you're directly comparing Rails (a framework) to PHP (a language) is telling. It'd make a lot more sense to say "I think any app written in Rails could be written better in CakePHP" although that claim is obviously rather dubious, as well. To be truly appropriate, you ought to talk Ruby vs PHP. And if you get to that point you're going to have to justify what "better" actually means. What it means to you isn't what it's going to mean to anybody else and vice versa.
In the end, this debate ends up being Mac vs PC vs Linux vs Whatever. Everyone's got their opinions. What works for you is the right solution for you.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You honestly think that any app you write is going to be better than its analog built in Rails? That you are a better developer in your chosen language/framework than every other Rails developer on the planet?
And you call Rails guys arrogant?
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find this argument amusing every time I hear it. Those in the Rails community are often called arrogant for insisting on things being done "The Rails Way", when it's often your own arrogance that won't allow you to do something any other way. In either case, it's the people you have a problem with. There are far fewer legitimate complaints about the Rails Framework than there are about Rails people. You can dissociate yourself from the people and still have a capable framework.
If you don't want to do things "The Rails Way" you're free to use whatever works for you. If you don't want to use ERB write your own template system. Don't like AR? Don't use it. Sure, it's harder to go without, but if you've got a good reason for doing things a certain way you're free to do things as you wish. It's not like DHH is going to come pounding on your door because you didn't do things his way. He's an opinionated guy -- most of us (Rails devs or not) are.
The only reason to bitch about "The Rails Way" is if you're too lazy to figure out how to do it your way.
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There's a simpler reason for bashing Rails: it's a threat. It's just that simple. Any time something comes along that can feasibly put market pressure on existing technologies, there's going to be bashing.
Rails pays my bills. I honestly don't give a damn what anyone else thinks if it's meeting my clients' needs. Simple as that.
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Why the hell is this modded insightful? Microsoft told him he wouldn't have an issue. From that point forward any deviation is in the company's error, and it is just that simple. Had Microsoft told this guy they couldn't guarantee anything (as they should have) and he sent it in anyway, then sure, shame on him. They didn't. They told him it wouldn't be a problem, and as a result he had every right to expect that they would honor their word.
What you're suggesting amounts to blaming the victim, and just an in real, "serious" matters, it tends to be wrong to do so. To go so far as you are, actually trying to denigrate what that console meant to him, is - quite frankly - lame. Who fucking cares what you think? It meant a lot to him, Microsoft told him it wouldn't be an issue, and it turned out they lied. Whether you think it was a worthwhile exercise means absolutely nothing.
I'm a Rails developer, and I take offense to that. I make decent money and - more importantly - I'm happy. Your dislike of it doesn't make it a bad framework.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Apple users tend to spend more on hardware, software, and services (I know: I'm one of them), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with demanding something work as advertised. We "whiny bastards" like to feel like we're getting what we're paying for.
...just smile, sit back, and watch how badly this explodes. This is actually going to be fun. These assholes have no idea the kind of mistake they've just made.
Awesome! Another band to add to the "do not pay for" list.
I only pirate the music of groups who act in this manner, or are associated with it, as is the case here. Yay for civil disobedience!
Except we shouldn't have to. Browsers are supposed to render standards [b]correctly by default[/b]. There is no point in having a ubiquitous standard if you can't expect it to be operational by default.
The purpose of a standard is to define what should occur for a given set of inputs. Do you have any idea what would happen to the web as a whole if TCP/IP was implemented the same way Microsoft approached CSS? We have standards for a reason, and Microsoft systematically implemented their renderer improperly so as to ensure that their definition of the standard would be what people coded. Microsoft didn't want to cede authority to the W3C on this topic, they played dirty, and yet again ended up with a monopoly that has served no one but them.
We really shouldn't be buying into this nonsense. Any developer who goes along with it is implicitly saying that he or she is willing to add extraneous tags to every single page he or she builds until the end of time. In placing said tag on your page you are telling Microsoft that it has the right to dictate how you code your pages; that standards alone are not enough. We should not reward this behavior.
Now, if Microsoft wants to make the new renderer the default (assuming it actually does render the way most modern browsers do, relatively speaking), and you can add a tag to get the old functionality -- I'd be fine with that. Just don't make me fuck with otherwise perfect markup because you guys did such a shitty job implementing things the first seven times.
If the state buys a touch-screen voting system that is later proven (without a doubt) to be flawed in any of a number of ways, all of which contribute directly to an incorrect tally of the vote (the very reason the machines were procured), why does said state still have to pay for that contract? Are states not naturally covered by the same laws we are? Did they not get a warranty? Did no one even stop to fucking ask?
At the risk of a -1, Flamebait, I'd say that quite a lot of the things Silverlight is designed to solve are going to be attacked similarly on many different fronts, soon. Silverlight is a little too young to be placing so much faith in it, unless you have a vested interest in it.
I don't develop on Windows, and I'm not going to run Windows to develop Silverlight. If Microsoft is serious about it they'll release tools to make that happen, and until they do so I will continue advocating against its adoption. The web should not be ruled by a bunch of proprietary implementations. Silverlight is yet another trojan horse from Microsoft. It's designed to get people hooked so that they're forever tethered to a single, proprietary, closed-source platform, which - in case you forgot - is the exact opposite of what the web should be. Let's not give Microsoft any more power than they have with the IE monopoly, unless they're willing to play ball the way we want to.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not seriously comparing the way Yahoo! took over Flickr with the way Microsoft would, are you? Yahoo! just updated a copyright line. Microsoft will throw the MSN logo everywhere. I can guarantee you there are people at MS right now drooling over the prospect of getting Silverlight on that site. That's before the Vista tie-ins start to surface. I don't want to use Yahoo! Mail and see giant banners telling me I should install Silverlight. I don't want the Mac Yahoo! Instant Messenger to become the bastard stepchild like Microsoft's MSN Messenger.
Sure, you could argue that we don't really know how things would go down, but Microsoft's track record isn't exactly good in this department. Microsoft isn't exactly a company that really believes in competitive coexistence. There's a corporate culture involved that stands in stark contrast to what you get from Yahoo! The simple fact that Microsoft is willing to go to these lengths to get Yahoo! should be proof enough that Yahoo! itself doesn't mean anything to them - they want its assets. That's perfectly fine in business, but if you kill off what made the product so alluring in the first place it isn't going to do you any good. You have to realize that this is the nuclear option. Microsoft's products simply were not good enough to gain the markshare Microsoft is after. What do you do when you're not good enough and you have loads of cash? You buy. That's all that is happening here. Do you think there was anyone at Yahoo! thinking "we need to merge with Microsoft"?
And let's not forget the stuff that Microsoft will, without question, bury. Anyone running a large Zimbra installation should be very nervous right now. Hell, anyone using YUI extensively should be nervous. This entire merger/acquisition/hostile takeover/clusterfuck is a bad, bad, bad idea. Microsoft should not be willing to put itself into this level of debt to acquire a company that wants nothing to do with it, and you can be sure of that: Yahoo! doesn't want this. Any talk of Microsoft's offer being too small - while probably true - is still ultimately just a smokescreen so that they can avoid saying what everyone already knows.
Tell that to the people who use flickr.
I would go one further and say it isn't about technology or marketing, but rather established mindshare. If it were solely about marketing it would be Microsoft trying to get Yahoo! in order to attract more people. What it's really about is Microsoft buying customers. They don't have to win anyone over if they buy the thing lock, stock, and barrell. What Microsoft isn't taking into account is the number of people who will jump ship when that happens. Many people will live on principle alone.
Or cut it in half, depending on how it plays out.
You make some good points about Rails's flaws, although I'd argue that many of them are related to ORM in general and have less to do with ActiveRecord's implementation than the concept as a whole. Your mention of "interpreted" gives me pause, as it almost sounds like you're arguing that interpreted languages are inherently flawed. I'm not say that's what you're saying, but I think you can see how that could be, well, interpreted.
Of the things you pointed out, I'll candidly say that Rails deployment is perhaps the area where it is most apparent that in the grand scheme of things Rails is still something of a baby. It has (arguably) matured fairly rapidly, but there are certainly areas where there is still room for improvement. Given the sheer bullishness of the core team I'd like to think we're going to continue to make significant progress in this regard. One of the biggest problems Rails faces today is deployment in shared hosting environments, but to say it can't scale is simply false.
As I've noted in prior comments, your problem with Rails has far more to do with some of the people who use it and less with the code itself.
As a developer, learning another language is a good exercise, and most competent developers can become competent in new languages fairly quickly.
And upon what do you base this claim? The fact you're directly comparing Rails (a framework) to PHP (a language) is telling. It'd make a lot more sense to say "I think any app written in Rails could be written better in CakePHP" although that claim is obviously rather dubious, as well. To be truly appropriate, you ought to talk Ruby vs PHP. And if you get to that point you're going to have to justify what "better" actually means. What it means to you isn't what it's going to mean to anybody else and vice versa.
In the end, this debate ends up being Mac vs PC vs Linux vs Whatever. Everyone's got their opinions. What works for you is the right solution for you.
You honestly think that any app you write is going to be better than its analog built in Rails? That you are a better developer in your chosen language/framework than every other Rails developer on the planet?
And you call Rails guys arrogant?
I find this argument amusing every time I hear it. Those in the Rails community are often called arrogant for insisting on things being done "The Rails Way", when it's often your own arrogance that won't allow you to do something any other way. In either case, it's the people you have a problem with. There are far fewer legitimate complaints about the Rails Framework than there are about Rails people. You can dissociate yourself from the people and still have a capable framework.
If you don't want to do things "The Rails Way" you're free to use whatever works for you. If you don't want to use ERB write your own template system. Don't like AR? Don't use it. Sure, it's harder to go without, but if you've got a good reason for doing things a certain way you're free to do things as you wish. It's not like DHH is going to come pounding on your door because you didn't do things his way. He's an opinionated guy -- most of us (Rails devs or not) are.
The only reason to bitch about "The Rails Way" is if you're too lazy to figure out how to do it your way.
There's a simpler reason for bashing Rails: it's a threat. It's just that simple. Any time something comes along that can feasibly put market pressure on existing technologies, there's going to be bashing.
Rails pays my bills. I honestly don't give a damn what anyone else thinks if it's meeting my clients' needs. Simple as that.
Why the hell is this modded insightful? Microsoft told him he wouldn't have an issue. From that point forward any deviation is in the company's error, and it is just that simple. Had Microsoft told this guy they couldn't guarantee anything (as they should have) and he sent it in anyway, then sure, shame on him. They didn't. They told him it wouldn't be a problem, and as a result he had every right to expect that they would honor their word.
What you're suggesting amounts to blaming the victim, and just an in real, "serious" matters, it tends to be wrong to do so. To go so far as you are, actually trying to denigrate what that console meant to him, is - quite frankly - lame. Who fucking cares what you think? It meant a lot to him, Microsoft told him it wouldn't be an issue, and it turned out they lied. Whether you think it was a worthwhile exercise means absolutely nothing.
Insightful, my ass.
I'm a Rails developer, and I take offense to that. I make decent money and - more importantly - I'm happy. Your dislike of it doesn't make it a bad framework.
Translation: "Please don't quit."
You say that like it's a bad thing. Apple users tend to spend more on hardware, software, and services (I know: I'm one of them), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with demanding something work as advertised. We "whiny bastards" like to feel like we're getting what we're paying for.
...just smile, sit back, and watch how badly this explodes. This is actually going to be fun. These assholes have no idea the kind of mistake they've just made.
Pass the popcorn!
Awesome! Another band to add to the "do not pay for" list. I only pirate the music of groups who act in this manner, or are associated with it, as is the case here. Yay for civil disobedience!
Except we shouldn't have to. Browsers are supposed to render standards [b]correctly by default[/b]. There is no point in having a ubiquitous standard if you can't expect it to be operational by default.
Most consumers don't know they even have a choice.
YOU are asinine.
The purpose of a standard is to define what should occur for a given set of inputs. Do you have any idea what would happen to the web as a whole if TCP/IP was implemented the same way Microsoft approached CSS? We have standards for a reason, and Microsoft systematically implemented their renderer improperly so as to ensure that their definition of the standard would be what people coded. Microsoft didn't want to cede authority to the W3C on this topic, they played dirty, and yet again ended up with a monopoly that has served no one but them.
++
We really shouldn't be buying into this nonsense. Any developer who goes along with it is implicitly saying that he or she is willing to add extraneous tags to every single page he or she builds until the end of time. In placing said tag on your page you are telling Microsoft that it has the right to dictate how you code your pages; that standards alone are not enough. We should not reward this behavior.
Now, if Microsoft wants to make the new renderer the default (assuming it actually does render the way most modern browsers do, relatively speaking), and you can add a tag to get the old functionality -- I'd be fine with that. Just don't make me fuck with otherwise perfect markup because you guys did such a shitty job implementing things the first seven times.
If the state buys a touch-screen voting system that is later proven (without a doubt) to be flawed in any of a number of ways, all of which contribute directly to an incorrect tally of the vote (the very reason the machines were procured), why does said state still have to pay for that contract? Are states not naturally covered by the same laws we are? Did they not get a warranty? Did no one even stop to fucking ask?
At the risk of a -1, Flamebait, I'd say that quite a lot of the things Silverlight is designed to solve are going to be attacked similarly on many different fronts, soon. Silverlight is a little too young to be placing so much faith in it, unless you have a vested interest in it.
I don't develop on Windows, and I'm not going to run Windows to develop Silverlight. If Microsoft is serious about it they'll release tools to make that happen, and until they do so I will continue advocating against its adoption. The web should not be ruled by a bunch of proprietary implementations. Silverlight is yet another trojan horse from Microsoft. It's designed to get people hooked so that they're forever tethered to a single, proprietary, closed-source platform, which - in case you forgot - is the exact opposite of what the web should be. Let's not give Microsoft any more power than they have with the IE monopoly, unless they're willing to play ball the way we want to.
As a developer, I'm waiting for an open-source solution, so that I'm not restricted to .NET languages, a single platform to develop on, etc.