So, I'm developing software for a smartphone. Just me and another guy. How much of our time is it going to take to get them approved by Apple?
I dunno. Who cares? What does that have to do with the issue? The issue being addressed here is internal custom apps from enterprise users, not independent development houses.
If the answer is too much, we won't bother. We'll stick to Symbian OS.
Good for you. While that's certainly an issue, and even an issue that might relate to the enterprise market (as enterprise users might want to purchase and deploy independent apps), its not the issue that was pointed to in the article, or that my post responded to, which is the ability of enterprise users to get their own apps on the phone. "Enterprise users" are not two-person development shops that hope they might be able to market apps to other users.
Open the thing up... right now. Publish the SDK. Give away tools to develop on it, and get every man and his dog writing iPhone apps and dominate the smartphone platform. But Apple don't get it. They think they know best, that they should dominate the experience. This, and the web are the next battlegrounds. Apple are going to miss it, just like they did decades ago, when Microsoft understood exactly what to do.
Oh, I think Apple gets quite well that the web is a major application battleground. I just think they seen the smartphone is more important as a client more than a general purpose platform. Are they right? We'll see...
Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis, also thinks the iPhone won't be a good option for enterprise customers because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone.
Certainly, Jobs has indicated that the iPhone will only, at least initially, support Apple-approved signed applications.
He has not said, that I know of, that third parties could not develop apps and get them approved by Apple, or that there would not facilities to alter the subset of Apple-approved apps available on different iPhones, such that those to the general public would allow all "general" apps, but not apps only approved for a particular enterprise, while an enterprise user could restrict its iPhones to only allow a subset of general apps and its own enterprise apps.
This seems to be rampant speculation with little basis passing itself off as informed commentary. Note: I'm not saying the iPhone will have these features, I'm just saying that there is no indication, that I am aware of, that it won't, so simply claiming that enterprise users won't be able to install their own apps seems to call out for some reason to believe it.
And a moderation system whereby prevailing thought is promoted while minority opinions are suppressed.
Well, no. What you see of Slashdot, and what effect moderation has on what you see, is not a function of the moderation alone, but a function of how you have configured your account to treat moderation (unless, of course, you are reading it not logged in, but accounts are free.)
Its quite possible to completely neutralize or even reverse the default effects of moderation.
No viewpoint is suppressed by Slashdot moderation, instead, you are given the tools to customize your experience viewing Slashdot to your own taste.
Ruby's syntax itself is also not as suited for a beginner, in my opinion, as there a lot of different ways to do the same thing. If you're learning by example, and each example employs a different technique, you have more to learn.
I'm not sure this is really a weakness as a language for beginners; certainly, there is more to learn before you've learned every way to do everything, but that also means that there are more different approaches (suited for different learners) that can be taken and still cover the same scope of what you can do. I don't see this as a weakness, generally, though it can produce gotchas in interpreting others code.
...is not an issue when the question is the validity of a search warrant.
It would be an issue at trial, except that the defendant here entered a guilty plea (though it was conditional, because he was challenging the validity of the warrant which produced the physical evidence.)
hummm... what sort of effect might this have on some of the municipal wireless networks being setup.
None.
Im not sure I disagree with the ruling but it leaves a line to be drawn between an ISP and someone who shares his network connection with a friend.
The probability that there will be physical evidence located in the same building as an ISP that routinely handles traffic from many widely distributed clients, and the probability that there will be physical evidence at the building with the WiFi AP to which a packet can be traced are not really similar.
Yes, its a fuzzy distinction and there might be some tricky edge cases, but that's pretty much the case in every area of the law. Nice, crisp boundaries are more the thing of theory than practical reality.
I'm sure there must be case law on the roommate scenario, since it probably comes up often in drug cases. Does anyone know what the precedents are?
It seems more a question of the credibility of evidence and whether in a particular case a given conclusion should be drawn from it; more of a thing for the jury than something you'd expect to see case law directly addressing more than tangentially.
As explained in this more detailed article about the issue, is that someone could harrass someone else by transmitting illegal material from an open WAP.
Yes, someone could. That this is possible does not, however, invalidate probable cause for search (were this an arrest warrant, of course, that would be different: while both require probable cause, what they require probable cause of is different.) And, really, the first time a search warrant got served based on that kind of manipulation would probably be the last against that subject, as they'd right-quick figure out how to secure their access point.
As always, Slashdot consists of many people, with differing opinions on any topic.
Re:first language
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You make a good case that programmers eventually need to learn low-level concepts of how their platform works in order to troubleshoot obscure bugs and optimize performance.
I'm still not sure why that means you should learn C or Assembler first.
Sure, that's a problem, but not exactly a big one. You can solve it with a global search and replace if it ever crops up, whilst some of Ruby's problems are more difficult to get around.
Such as...what? The two main complaints I've seen about Ruby features are (1) lack of good Unicode support, which is certainly can be a real problem with I18n, but isn't a barrier to its utility in learning to program, for sure; and (2) its "too slow", which, again, isn't a barrier to its utility in learning to program in it, though it may somewhat limit the applications it is suitable for.
And the problem only crops up if you're copy-pasting code from a third party who shares different coding conventions to you.
Something that newbie programmers are likely to do occasionally.
Re:Ruby as a first language?
on
Beginning Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Unless you have an understanding of functional programming in the first place (i.e., have studied the Lambda Calculus, a Lisp dialect or Haskell) I think that most newbies programming in Lisp are going to generate (at first undisciplined) code resembling the bastard child of Smalltalk and Algol, using procedural and OO methodologies, not functional ones.
I don't think that's all that true. I think it easy for people who themselves came to program through imperative and OO programming to think of those approaches as more "natural" than functional programming. But if someone's first exposure to programming includes functional programming from the outset, I don't think functional programming is any less natural than the other forms.
And I have a feeling a newbie programmer who learns Ruby first is going to end up and using constructs that combine OO and functional elements (passing closures to method calls on integer literals, for instance) rather than imperative mechanisms for basic tasks like looping, because, I can't imagine an newbie-focussed book not encouraging that. Sure, I mean, you could stubbornly try to do everything with while loops, but why?
The problem that I have with Ruby is that it is not widely used.
That is a point. OTOH, It seems to me—though I wasn't a beginner when I encountered any of them—that its a lot more beginner-friendly of a language than Java or C#.
Most of the sample code and open source stuff out there is written with the more popular languages.
That's true, but I'm not sure all that volume is really necessary. There is certainly a "critical mass" of resources necessary for a language to make a good first language, but in the internet age there are very few languages of note that don't make that grade—at least one good introductory book (and both the one that is the topic of this thread and Chris Pine's Learn to Program seem to offer that for Ruby), a few more advanced ones, and an active community and you're off. Ruby seems to be good there.
Internally, the kernel only has five priority levels. Each one is a queue, and it compares among all of them to determine which task to run, but it only compares the head of the queue. So it's O(5), which is of course O(1), but if it supported an arbitrary number of priority levels (which IMO it should) then it would become O(n) again.
Well, its O(n) in the number of priority levels, not the number of processes; conceptually, this arrangement with any number of priority levels should still be constant time with respect to the number of processes.
Because its convenient for things people need to do, and the language at the center of a popular web framework.
My internets inform me it's a high level server-side language (python for websites).
Ruby isn't "python for websites". It would be closer to say its "python, but different". Sure, its most popular application is a web framework (Rails), but that's not the same thing as the language. Python has web frameworks like Rails too.
I found an article on coding horror in the depths of my RSS reader talking about how Twitter are having no end of problems scaling their system, as they're using Ruby and it just isn't made for big, high traffic sites.
As the follow-up makes clear, the issue that the author of that post was trying to raise was with the Rails framework. Anyhow, I don't think its a huge surprise that a site that is the biggest production site running a particular framework is running into performance problems. There've also been several posted techniques for dealing with the apparent source of the barrier to optimization (the lack of an easy way in Rails to connect to multiple databases) since this issue came to the attention of the community.
If the main reason for writing server side software is web based applications, or at least dynamic content, isn't a huge factor in this how well it scales?
Certainly, scalability is a big factor. But Rails scales well enough for plenty of systems that are in production. Yes, there are applications that push its present limits; of cousre, those are also the one's which promote new development.
Nobody makes sites to be used by 20 people.
Probably not. Then again, there are many sites with more than 20 users using Rails in production. And, again, Ruby is not just rails.
Finally, if anybody can explain it's popularity to me, should I learn it?
::shrug:: If you want. I like Ruby, but I don't have any strong feelings about you learning it.
I'm currently doing freelance web dev mostly in PHP, would it be useful?
That probably depends on why you are using PHP.
In my spare time I'm writing a AJAX web app with PHP back-end at the moment and it's mostly for my personal use (task tracking from anywhere), is Ruby good here with the limited audience the site'll have?
This sounds like something that Ruby on Rails would be good at. But, whether its better for you than PHP is something you'll have to answer yourself. You might want to take a look at Agile Web Development with Rails, and see if RoR looks like it would be good for you.
Laws are legislators substituting their choices for yours and mine (because we can't be trusted to make the right choices on our own, but legislators can).
Or, more accurately, because we've specifically selected legislators for the purpose of making choices about the rules governing society (i.e., laws.)
Legislators are our choice.
Re:Ruby as a first language?
on
Beginning Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I think Ruby would be a great first language. But you may want to also look at Chris Pine's Learn to Program as well as the book reviewed here: what I've heard about it is good, though I haven't looked at it myself.
Apparently the court making that decision has no clue as to the technical ineptitude of most users that buy a wireless router.
I don't see what the technical ineptitude of the average wireless router user has to do with the legal question here, which is whether the there was probable cause for a search based on the IM containing illegal material sent from an IP traced back to the defendant. Sure, someone else could have accessed the WAP and sent the IM; search warrants aren't criminal convictions, and probable cause isn't proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
If they hadn't found actual evidence that the open WAP doesn't provide a means to blame on someone else, this guy wouldn't been inconvenienced by the search and probably learned to secure his WAP, but wouldn't have been charged with, much less convicted of, anything.
If I ever get on a jury for a law I disagree with, the defendant is going to walk either by hung jury, mistrial, or not guilty verdict, and that's that.
Of course, for that reason alone, unless you break the law by lying during voir dire, you going to be excused for cause from any such jury, so that's not going to be an issue.
Microsoft has already stumbled several times in recent memory by dismissing the ability of these internet tubes to route around their monopolistic strategies... how many more of these mistakes can they afford to make?
I'm not sure they haven't already past that point, it may be that the last mistake they could afford (and maintain their top-of-the-heap position) has already been made, and not caught up to them. One place that may have been is not staying out ahead of the OLPC. One thing that isn't often mentioned about the OLPC project (not the laptop itself, but the whole program) is that, included in it is one of the biggest ground-up rethink of usability, collaboration, security, and software and information distribution for what is, essentially, massive coordinated enterprises with common platforms.
Sure, the context is educational, but many of the issues being addressed aren't restricted to that context. If it is successful, there is going to be a lot that is applicable to the traditional, lucrative first-world enterprise market, and plenty of open-source code designed for Linux will be available for it. Potentially, it could provide the killer application that stops the question about Linux adoption from being how Linux can ape Windows features, and instead provides a compelling reason for enterprises to jump to Linux.
Didn't MS say the same thing about Linux? Seriously, didn't they?
I'd be mildly surprised if MS has criticized Linux for being a closed device you can't install applications on, but, yeah, the rest of the criticisms (which all seem to boil down to "its not Windows and all users are used to Windows and want more of it") have been used against Linux.
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Probably because Cingular made them a better offer.
I dunno. Who cares? What does that have to do with the issue? The issue being addressed here is internal custom apps from enterprise users, not independent development houses.
Good for you. While that's certainly an issue, and even an issue that might relate to the enterprise market (as enterprise users might want to purchase and deploy independent apps), its not the issue that was pointed to in the article, or that my post responded to, which is the ability of enterprise users to get their own apps on the phone. "Enterprise users" are not two-person development shops that hope they might be able to market apps to other users.
Oh, I think Apple gets quite well that the web is a major application battleground. I just think they seen the smartphone is more important as a client more than a general purpose platform. Are they right? We'll see...
And, despite your use of "juices" in quotes, none are actually identified as "Juice".
They are all identified as "fruit drinks". Which kind of undermines your point about drawing a comparison of what you are allowed to call "juice".
Well, no. What you see of Slashdot, and what effect moderation has on what you see, is not a function of the moderation alone, but a function of how you have configured your account to treat moderation (unless, of course, you are reading it not logged in, but accounts are free.)
Its quite possible to completely neutralize or even reverse the default effects of moderation.
No viewpoint is suppressed by Slashdot moderation, instead, you are given the tools to customize your experience viewing Slashdot to your own taste.
I'm not sure this is really a weakness as a language for beginners; certainly, there is more to learn before you've learned every way to do everything, but that also means that there are more different approaches (suited for different learners) that can be taken and still cover the same scope of what you can do. I don't see this as a weakness, generally, though it can produce gotchas in interpreting others code.
...is not an issue when the question is the validity of a search warrant.
It would be an issue at trial, except that the defendant here entered a guilty plea (though it was conditional, because he was challenging the validity of the warrant which produced the physical evidence.)
None.
The probability that there will be physical evidence located in the same building as an ISP that routinely handles traffic from many widely distributed clients, and the probability that there will be physical evidence at the building with the WiFi AP to which a packet can be traced are not really similar.
Yes, its a fuzzy distinction and there might be some tricky edge cases, but that's pretty much the case in every area of the law. Nice, crisp boundaries are more the thing of theory than practical reality.
It seems more a question of the credibility of evidence and whether in a particular case a given conclusion should be drawn from it; more of a thing for the jury than something you'd expect to see case law directly addressing more than tangentially.
Yes, someone could. That this is possible does not, however, invalidate probable cause for search (were this an arrest warrant, of course, that would be different: while both require probable cause, what they require probable cause of is different.) And, really, the first time a search warrant got served based on that kind of manipulation would probably be the last against that subject, as they'd right-quick figure out how to secure their access point.
As always, Slashdot consists of many people, with differing opinions on any topic.
You make a good case that programmers eventually need to learn low-level concepts of how their platform works in order to troubleshoot obscure bugs and optimize performance.
I'm still not sure why that means you should learn C or Assembler first.
Such as...what? The two main complaints I've seen about Ruby features are (1) lack of good Unicode support, which is certainly can be a real problem with I18n, but isn't a barrier to its utility in learning to program, for sure; and (2) its "too slow", which, again, isn't a barrier to its utility in learning to program in it, though it may somewhat limit the applications it is suitable for.
Something that newbie programmers are likely to do occasionally.
I don't think that's all that true. I think it easy for people who themselves came to program through imperative and OO programming to think of those approaches as more "natural" than functional programming. But if someone's first exposure to programming includes functional programming from the outset, I don't think functional programming is any less natural than the other forms.
And I have a feeling a newbie programmer who learns Ruby first is going to end up and using constructs that combine OO and functional elements (passing closures to method calls on integer literals, for instance) rather than imperative mechanisms for basic tasks like looping, because, I can't imagine an newbie-focussed book not encouraging that. Sure, I mean, you could stubbornly try to do everything with while loops, but why?
That is a point. OTOH, It seems to me—though I wasn't a beginner when I encountered any of them—that its a lot more beginner-friendly of a language than Java or C#.
That's true, but I'm not sure all that volume is really necessary. There is certainly a "critical mass" of resources necessary for a language to make a good first language, but in the internet age there are very few languages of note that don't make that grade—at least one good introductory book (and both the one that is the topic of this thread and Chris Pine's Learn to Program seem to offer that for Ruby), a few more advanced ones, and an active community and you're off. Ruby seems to be good there.
Well, its O(n) in the number of priority levels, not the number of processes; conceptually, this arrangement with any number of priority levels should still be constant time with respect to the number of processes.
The advantage is that it doesn't have Python's tab problem.
Well, yeah, those are advantages, too. Its hardly as if one advantage negates the others.
Because its convenient for things people need to do, and the language at the center of a popular web framework.
Ruby isn't "python for websites". It would be closer to say its "python, but different". Sure, its most popular application is a web framework (Rails), but that's not the same thing as the language. Python has web frameworks like Rails too.
As the follow-up makes clear, the issue that the author of that post was trying to raise was with the Rails framework. Anyhow, I don't think its a huge surprise that a site that is the biggest production site running a particular framework is running into performance problems. There've also been several posted techniques for dealing with the apparent source of the barrier to optimization (the lack of an easy way in Rails to connect to multiple databases) since this issue came to the attention of the community.
Certainly, scalability is a big factor. But Rails scales well enough for plenty of systems that are in production. Yes, there are applications that push its present limits; of cousre, those are also the one's which promote new development.
Probably not. Then again, there are many sites with more than 20 users using Rails in production. And, again, Ruby is not just rails.
That probably depends on why you are using PHP.
This sounds like something that Ruby on Rails would be good at. But, whether its better for you than PHP is something you'll have to answer yourself. You might want to take a look at Agile Web Development with Rails, and see if RoR looks like it would be good for you.
I think Ruby would be a great first language. But you may want to also look at Chris Pine's Learn to Program as well as the book reviewed here: what I've heard about it is good, though I haven't looked at it myself.
I don't see what the technical ineptitude of the average wireless router user has to do with the legal question here, which is whether the there was probable cause for a search based on the IM containing illegal material sent from an IP traced back to the defendant. Sure, someone else could have accessed the WAP and sent the IM; search warrants aren't criminal convictions, and probable cause isn't proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
If they hadn't found actual evidence that the open WAP doesn't provide a means to blame on someone else, this guy wouldn't been inconvenienced by the search and probably learned to secure his WAP, but wouldn't have been charged with, much less convicted of, anything.
Of course, for that reason alone, unless you break the law by lying during voir dire, you going to be excused for cause from any such jury, so that's not going to be an issue.
I'm not sure they haven't already past that point, it may be that the last mistake they could afford (and maintain their top-of-the-heap position) has already been made, and not caught up to them. One place that may have been is not staying out ahead of the OLPC. One thing that isn't often mentioned about the OLPC project (not the laptop itself, but the whole program) is that, included in it is one of the biggest ground-up rethink of usability, collaboration, security, and software and information distribution for what is, essentially, massive coordinated enterprises with common platforms.
Sure, the context is educational, but many of the issues being addressed aren't restricted to that context. If it is successful, there is going to be a lot that is applicable to the traditional, lucrative first-world enterprise market, and plenty of open-source code designed for Linux will be available for it. Potentially, it could provide the killer application that stops the question about Linux adoption from being how Linux can ape Windows features, and instead provides a compelling reason for enterprises to jump to Linux.
I'd be mildly surprised if MS has criticized Linux for being a closed device you can't install applications on, but, yeah, the rest of the criticisms (which all seem to boil down to "its not Windows and all users are used to Windows and want more of it") have been used against Linux.