I don't think I implied platform choice doesn't matter. In any case, programmer aptitude can go a great deal towards making up for a poor platform choice. My point is Rails is not a silver bullet despite the ravings of ardent Rubyists.
I truly enjoy writing Rails applications, and Ruby is my preferred *nix scripting language. I've even written a few desktop applications in Ruby.
That said, the kind of evangelism you get from some Ruby on Rails supporters really kind of bugs me. For one, all the "feel-good" language that doesn't really mean anything. You don't HAVE to write RESTful, DRY code in RoR if you don't want to. It's also not the only framework in the world. You *CAN* develop equivalent applications in ASP, J2EE, LAMP, or what have you (see Church-Turing Thesis), sometimes just as easily, sometimes more easily.
Honestly, it's the right tool for the right job. Sometimes it's a case of all you have is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Then you get a power screwdriver and feel totally liberated over how much more productive you've become. Suddenly all those nails start looking suspiciously like screws and you think to yourself, hmm, I wonder.... and while you're busy either pounding in the nail with the back of the drill or etching a makeshift screw drive into its head and threading it with a soldering iron, your opponent is running circles around you hammering nails in with that hammer you are so quick to decry.
An experienced developer can write well-designed apps in any framework. An inexperienced developer can royally fuck over, yes, even a Rails app.
I found this was very true of J2EE. As soon as I figured out I didn't have to use the XML-heavy and error-prone EJBs to access the database or my business logic, or route all my HTTP requests through brittle JSF calls, I stopped doing so and quadrupled my productivity.
I actually found RoR very liberating in this regard. In the majority of cases, the framework actually makes it easier for me to do my job, and if I need something the framework doesn't do, someone has almost always written a plugin to do what I need. This frees me up to write code specific to the problem domain instead of wasting sometimes days writing repetitive glue code.
The fact that you actually envy people like these speaks volumes about your moral fiber. These people win the trust of struggling companies, ruin them, and walk off with their money. It's not something to be envied.
Moreover, the idea that MS programmers make significantly more money than Open Source programmers is nothing but bullshit FUD.
After a major upheaval at an open source software development company I used to work for, someone who thought like you stepped in and took over general management. He halted all non-.NET projects that hadn't passed release, "promoted" our standards lead to a meaningless position, quashed all internal talk of Firefox, Mac and Linux support, reassigned all developers to QA, legacy, and support staff, hired on a.NET task force composed of his own cronies to take over development, and gave himself a huge raise.
Needless to say, I got out of there pretty quick. From what I have heard, the company has missed every single delivery date since he came on. The parent company is about to dismantle them and he will jump ship with his cronies, cash in hand and calling the project another success for Microsoft before he goes on to run another company into the ground.
Unfortunately, teaching computer graphics in Java3D locks the aspiring developer into the Java platform. At least with OpenGL, you're not locked into any particular programming platform and have more choices in that regard. That makes learning OpenGL easier as well, since you don't have to already be a Java developer to pick up OpenGL and can instead learn it in your favorite language. And, at this stage in the game, there are plenty of Object-Oriented APIs based on OpenGL available.
"Refining" as you put it, or putting a raw ingredient through a chemical process to isolate or alter a chemical constituent, doesn't necessarily make it more potent or deadly. Consider that according to your definition, raw sewage is "refined" before it is returned to lakes and streams. Oh noes! You'd better go tell the treatment plants to cut it out before they make the raw sewage ten times more potent and deadly!
When heroin was discovered, its effects were largely unknown, and the results were an embarrassing smear on Bayer's reputation. Isolating nicotine from tobacco in order to obtain the chemical in its pure form for pharmaceutical distribution is quite different from acetylating morphine so it can bypass the blood-brain barrier.
If we're taking all that for granted, I'll take the dedicated T1 line for granted and go for any MMORPG. Then I'd find someone in-game and tell them I'm stranded on a desert island and wait for rescue. Assuming I don't get banned for breaking character.
That's where the Moogle Charm comes in handy. It'll spare you all random encounters in Mog's party, so you've got 1/3 of those fights eliminated. Only make sure to put him in the second or third group, because the first group has the least distance to go. In one of the other parties, place Locke with a Genji Glove/Offering combo plus ValiantKnife and Atma Weapon. In the other, place Edgar with Dragoon Boots, Dragon Horn and a Pearl Lance. Sabin and Gogo can use Bum Rush to help, so put one of them in each. Put Economizers and Gold Hairpins on the remaining party members, earrings to boost magic damage, and the gem box on Celes or Terra to allow for two magic casts in a row. Have everyone cast Quick on themselves to get two commands in simultaneously each time. These combos will dispatch most of your enemies quickly so it's a lot less of a hassle. There's only about two places per team where you can go ridiculously astray; it's pretty linear after that. Kefka's tower also has the last two dragons, without which you can't get the Crusader esper which teaches the uber Merton spell (and if you don't want to equip flame shields on everyone, it also teaches Meteor at x10).
A word of warning though. If you equip Dragoon Boots and Dragon Horn on Edgar in the final battle, he'll jump off the screen and never return, so take these off him or put him close to the end in the final battle line-up.
The wireless transfer of energy through magnetic fields is called electromagnetic induction, and it's been a well-known phenomenon since 1831. It's also currently used the world over: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer
Cut me some slack. I posted that at 3 in the morning and was grabbing for analogies.
Still, I think you'd agree that even in the cases of beer, coffee, tea, gatorade, what have you, that despite the fact that the flavor, color, aroma, and possibly texture in the case of soda, have changed, it still, from a purely mechanical perspective, "acts" like water. It still turns into ice if you stick it in the freezer. It still boils if you put it on the stove. It still conforms to the shape of its container. Its density is still approximately 1g/mL. Assuming you haven't added any thickening agents, its viscosity remains the same. That's kind of the point I was trying to make.
However, liquid water doesn't have a crystalline structure, and in ice, impurities aren't substituted for H2O molecules and forced to "act like" water. In silicon doping, this IS the case, so the water analogy isn't entirely appropriate.
Yep, but space has an almost infinite specific heat, so using it to super-cool things may take a while. Not to mention keeping it cool once it's up there, what with all that darn pesky solar radiation.
The doping is a small enough percentage that it still retains the crystal structure of silicon, so on a macroscopic level, it still looks and behaves like silicon. The crystal structure forces the boron to act like silicon, which is key because boron has two fewer valence electrons than silicon, resulting in stable "electron holes" in the conduction band that raise the overall mobility of electrons, and therefore raise the conductivity of the material.
So no, it's not pure elemental silicon, but it's still silicon. It's like saying that even if my tap water contains 10% impurities, it's still water.
No, not really an alloy, since at least one of the constituents of an alloy needs to be a metal. Silicon and boron are both metalloids, and are therefore weak conductors. The change in conductivity is created by the effect the doping has on silicon's conduction band.
It's definitely possible to travel into the future in your own time line. In fact, it's pretty damn easy. I'll do it right now! Watch............
Voila, I'm in the future!
If you actually wanted me to travel "further" into the future, give me a spaceship that travels at 99.9999% of the speed of light and I'll see you in 1000 years. It's getting back that's the bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I implied platform choice doesn't matter. In any case, programmer aptitude can go a great deal towards making up for a poor platform choice. My point is Rails is not a silver bullet despite the ravings of ardent Rubyists.
I truly enjoy writing Rails applications, and Ruby is my preferred *nix scripting language. I've even written a few desktop applications in Ruby.
That said, the kind of evangelism you get from some Ruby on Rails supporters really kind of bugs me. For one, all the "feel-good" language that doesn't really mean anything. You don't HAVE to write RESTful, DRY code in RoR if you don't want to. It's also not the only framework in the world. You *CAN* develop equivalent applications in ASP, J2EE, LAMP, or what have you (see Church-Turing Thesis), sometimes just as easily, sometimes more easily.
Honestly, it's the right tool for the right job. Sometimes it's a case of all you have is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Then you get a power screwdriver and feel totally liberated over how much more productive you've become. Suddenly all those nails start looking suspiciously like screws and you think to yourself, hmm, I wonder.... and while you're busy either pounding in the nail with the back of the drill or etching a makeshift screw drive into its head and threading it with a soldering iron, your opponent is running circles around you hammering nails in with that hammer you are so quick to decry.
An experienced developer can write well-designed apps in any framework. An inexperienced developer can royally fuck over, yes, even a Rails app.
I found this was very true of J2EE. As soon as I figured out I didn't have to use the XML-heavy and error-prone EJBs to access the database or my business logic, or route all my HTTP requests through brittle JSF calls, I stopped doing so and quadrupled my productivity.
I actually found RoR very liberating in this regard. In the majority of cases, the framework actually makes it easier for me to do my job, and if I need something the framework doesn't do, someone has almost always written a plugin to do what I need. This frees me up to write code specific to the problem domain instead of wasting sometimes days writing repetitive glue code.
The fact that you actually envy people like these speaks volumes about your moral fiber. These people win the trust of struggling companies, ruin them, and walk off with their money. It's not something to be envied.
Moreover, the idea that MS programmers make significantly more money than Open Source programmers is nothing but bullshit FUD.
After a major upheaval at an open source software development company I used to work for, someone who thought like you stepped in and took over general management. He halted all non-.NET projects that hadn't passed release, "promoted" our standards lead to a meaningless position, quashed all internal talk of Firefox, Mac and Linux support, reassigned all developers to QA, legacy, and support staff, hired on a .NET task force composed of his own cronies to take over development, and gave himself a huge raise.
Needless to say, I got out of there pretty quick. From what I have heard, the company has missed every single delivery date since he came on. The parent company is about to dismantle them and he will jump ship with his cronies, cash in hand and calling the project another success for Microsoft before he goes on to run another company into the ground.
And I used to be over by the window and I could see the squirrels and they were married.
Is that before or after you become your own grandfather?
Mod parent insightful please
Unfortunately, teaching computer graphics in Java3D locks the aspiring developer into the Java platform. At least with OpenGL, you're not locked into any particular programming platform and have more choices in that regard. That makes learning OpenGL easier as well, since you don't have to already be a Java developer to pick up OpenGL and can instead learn it in your favorite language. And, at this stage in the game, there are plenty of Object-Oriented APIs based on OpenGL available.
And now for my (semi) non-troll response.
"Refining" as you put it, or putting a raw ingredient through a chemical process to isolate or alter a chemical constituent, doesn't necessarily make it more potent or deadly. Consider that according to your definition, raw sewage is "refined" before it is returned to lakes and streams. Oh noes! You'd better go tell the treatment plants to cut it out before they make the raw sewage ten times more potent and deadly!
When heroin was discovered, its effects were largely unknown, and the results were an embarrassing smear on Bayer's reputation. Isolating nicotine from tobacco in order to obtain the chemical in its pure form for pharmaceutical distribution is quite different from acetylating morphine so it can bypass the blood-brain barrier.
Congratulations, your fearmongering has won you the right to go work for the Bush Administration.
If we're taking all that for granted, I'll take the dedicated T1 line for granted and go for any MMORPG. Then I'd find someone in-game and tell them I'm stranded on a desert island and wait for rescue. Assuming I don't get banned for breaking character.
That's where the Moogle Charm comes in handy. It'll spare you all random encounters in Mog's party, so you've got 1/3 of those fights eliminated. Only make sure to put him in the second or third group, because the first group has the least distance to go. In one of the other parties, place Locke with a Genji Glove/Offering combo plus ValiantKnife and Atma Weapon. In the other, place Edgar with Dragoon Boots, Dragon Horn and a Pearl Lance. Sabin and Gogo can use Bum Rush to help, so put one of them in each. Put Economizers and Gold Hairpins on the remaining party members, earrings to boost magic damage, and the gem box on Celes or Terra to allow for two magic casts in a row. Have everyone cast Quick on themselves to get two commands in simultaneously each time. These combos will dispatch most of your enemies quickly so it's a lot less of a hassle. There's only about two places per team where you can go ridiculously astray; it's pretty linear after that. Kefka's tower also has the last two dragons, without which you can't get the Crusader esper which teaches the uber Merton spell (and if you don't want to equip flame shields on everyone, it also teaches Meteor at x10).
A word of warning though. If you equip Dragoon Boots and Dragon Horn on Edgar in the final battle, he'll jump off the screen and never return, so take these off him or put him close to the end in the final battle line-up.
The wireless transfer of energy through magnetic fields is called electromagnetic induction, and it's been a well-known phenomenon since 1831. It's also currently used the world over: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer
http://www.wickedlasers.com/?cpe=Y3A9a2VlbnNwb3Qmc z13d3cua2VlbnNwb3QuY29t
Got you half covered. You'll have to provide the head mount.
Cut me some slack. I posted that at 3 in the morning and was grabbing for analogies.
Still, I think you'd agree that even in the cases of beer, coffee, tea, gatorade, what have you, that despite the fact that the flavor, color, aroma, and possibly texture in the case of soda, have changed, it still, from a purely mechanical perspective, "acts" like water. It still turns into ice if you stick it in the freezer. It still boils if you put it on the stove. It still conforms to the shape of its container. Its density is still approximately 1g/mL. Assuming you haven't added any thickening agents, its viscosity remains the same. That's kind of the point I was trying to make.
However, liquid water doesn't have a crystalline structure, and in ice, impurities aren't substituted for H2O molecules and forced to "act like" water. In silicon doping, this IS the case, so the water analogy isn't entirely appropriate.
Silicon dopes you.
That would explain my hangovers...
Yep, but space has an almost infinite specific heat, so using it to super-cool things may take a while. Not to mention keeping it cool once it's up there, what with all that darn pesky solar radiation.
Might make for some interesting cryonics experiments. Fiber optic cable be damned.
The doping is a small enough percentage that it still retains the crystal structure of silicon, so on a macroscopic level, it still looks and behaves like silicon. The crystal structure forces the boron to act like silicon, which is key because boron has two fewer valence electrons than silicon, resulting in stable "electron holes" in the conduction band that raise the overall mobility of electrons, and therefore raise the conductivity of the material.
So no, it's not pure elemental silicon, but it's still silicon. It's like saying that even if my tap water contains 10% impurities, it's still water.
No, not really an alloy, since at least one of the constituents of an alloy needs to be a metal. Silicon and boron are both metalloids, and are therefore weak conductors. The change in conductivity is created by the effect the doping has on silicon's conduction band.
It's definitely possible to travel into the future in your own time line. In fact, it's pretty damn easy. I'll do it right now! Watch... ... ... ...
Voila, I'm in the future!
If you actually wanted me to travel "further" into the future, give me a spaceship that travels at 99.9999% of the speed of light and I'll see you in 1000 years. It's getting back that's the bitch.
...had he listened to this first: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yz-grdpKVqg
Insert generic flame for making non-negative comment about Microsoft here.