maercsrats

As for your second paragraph, you can say that about any '-ists'. I've met java, python and .Net people who all love their respective languages and just want to code in that. To me, Rubyists aren't better or worse in that respect.

Also, I call bullshit on the "razor thin margins" that carriers are making. They make plenty over the lifetime of the device contracts. Also, ask Sprint if it would like to get rid of it's iPhone deal. They are getting plenty of new subscribers thanks to the iPhone and are banking on making up their initial loss over time on their new contracts. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/analyst-who-downg...

The problem comes in on their aggressive upgrade policies. In fact, I believe Verizon just added a $30 fee for upgrades on 2 year contracts.

Apple's stock is down because the market is full of idiots. Analysts have bet against Apple for years and every quarter Apple has come up on top. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that this quarter won't be any different and overall sales will be through the roof.

Personally, I'm not very afraid of option 3 ever going away but I also am ready with a FreeBSD VM instance.

I'm sorry but, what the hell are you talking about? Many schools require students to have laptops in high school now. Teachers are constantly being told that then need to use more and more technology in their classrooms to better engage their students. If there aren't students who can afford machines then they are given one in class.

My mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

A quick aside, my mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

Dropping the rails router, controllers and rack in favor of something like webmachine and resources could potentially speed up rails and reduce the conceptual complexity as well as the stack depth.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

Our market isn't free enough, that's true, but having a totally free market tends to crush the lower class. A completely free market, after all, is like a force of nature and nature doesn't give a shit about people. I do give a shit about people and am happy to pay taxes to help those people.

Our system isn't perfect and there are a lot of problems with it, but I don't want it to go away completely.

I think there is some interesting research work going into chip stacking but it wouldn't be accessible for public consumption until it's cost effective.

The first thing I'd wonder is what the susceptibility to radiation is for spintronics. The paper "Spintronics: a new paradigm for electronics for the new millennium" says that it is as hardened as the silicon. So then I'd question how hard the graphene is and found a couple of papers about that: Unzipping and folding of graphene by swift heavy ions, Effect of electron-beam irradiation on graphene field effect devices.

Researchers out there realize the problems popping up with silicon and are working to find the solutions. It's a really cool time to be in material sciences, physics and/or electrical engineering.

There was too much randomness in his evolving. When I was evolving agents for my M.S., I used tournament selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_selection) with an 80% crossover rate for the top 2 winners and only a 5% mutation rate on the offspring. I also started off with a population of 500 individuals. This approach seemed to produce much better results.

There needs to be significant patent/ip reform in this country, there's no question about that. Google isn't necessarily a "good guy", though. There is a lot of money to be made out there and all of the big guys are using everything at their disposal to gain the upper hand.

His solution is to break up the pipeline into 3 separate types: generators, filters (for response data), and lifecycle hooks. Doing this brought the speed back up to rails 2.3 speeds and a bit faster in some instances. But those were early numbers.

You can see his talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWOAHIpmLAI

The interesting stuff happens around the 20 min. mark.

Overall, there are a lot of people who want to make ruby better and faster. Rubinius, Jruby and MacRuby are all examples. There are also people who want to make Rails faster. They are examining the slower parts (active record, rack, etc) and working to make it better.

One thing that looks like it's lacking is how to integrate ui libraries; specifically jquery-ui. Coordinating re-rendering of your views from updates from your models or events from other views isn't easy. A FSM for backbone would really help, come to think of it.

Rails 3 is much easier to pull apart and put in pieces that you want. I believe this will be even easier with rails 3.1 introducing engines as a first class citizen.

Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.

The last point is wrong. The USB Implementers Forum complained last year about lightpeak using the usb interface. The other points have some merit but, considering sony is supposedly putting thunderbolt into their new laptops, it's still too early to call the interface a disaster. Or to blame Apple about it bombing.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/17/sonys-thunderbolt-impleme...

Early on this approach worked fine and for simple CRUD stuff it's not too bad but as the researchers wanted more and more options it got difficult to sync everything; dom interactions, model data and server data. I started to investigate SproutCore and thought "This object model with bindings is just what I need!"

So, I'd really like to disagree with your comment, but I can't. The reason is because I can't integrate SproutCore with anything else that's been written for our app. I can't even get access to some of SproutCore's pieces to try and integrate it. The entire view part of our app would have to be re-written using SproutCore to use the features and that isn't viable right now.

As it stands, I'd really like to use SproutCore. There are some great ideas there and I think that some of my projects would really benefit from their projects. But right now, backbone.js + jquery-ui has hit the sweet spot of easy to get up and running and looks good. The researchers are really happy with what I've got done and I'm able to move on to other problems.

2) Maybe they will be bringing along the big guys, in the future. Java is being deprecated (http://bit.ly/cFp0GX) in the future the may require apps to use the standard API.

3) ARM chips are getting much better. The A-15 is going to be multicore and be up to 2.5 GHz (http://bit.ly/bhVKBP). It is totally possible for apple engineers, gotten from PA Semi, to string together more cores to make a more powerful process. Difficult and costly, but possible.

The problem I see with this line of thinking is that ARM is only a 32 bit arch right now and I don't know of any plans on changing that. Also, having the big guys convert their software over to using ARM instructions over intel (point 2) would be really painful, I think. LLVM and some good virtualization might help mitigate this, but I would have to research that more.

Also, I'm probably completely wrong and I'm fine with that. You have very good points and I appreciate all of them.

All of this fighting between Intel and Nvidia is really only hurting customers; namely Apple. So what can Apple do? Create an app store that makes devs standardize on an API and shift the underlying arch. An arch that 67% of their product sales are using.

Don't get me wrong, this is going to be a difficult transition, I think apps like Steam are really going to get screwed, but this is Apple's end game. They control not only all the software but also all the hardware.

That's not to say that you can't get these skills outside of school but I think you get a better rounding of skills in school than out in the field. I've met more devs who didn't go to school that can't work on really difficult problems than the ones who did.

Of course, selection bias and all that.

There is the argument of "Why not just buy a netbook for $200?" To that question, I suggest you go try out an ipad and remember that you aren't going to do any coding on it. It's a pretty fantastic machine.

That being said, I am a computer programmer in a Vanderbilt research department. At some point I will have to pick up a laptop just to do some real coding work (and SC2 when it drops). For everything else, I love my ipad.

Gotten from: http://jquery14.com/pre-release-1/new-jquery-api-site

This could be useful for helping to break down that island if it was seeded with a slurry of this bacteria.