aneth

Major flaws in both points here:

1) You can lend your Kindle out all you want and let people read your books, just as you could before. You just can't duplicate the book onto someone else's Kindle or in any other way, just as you couldn't before. This is a reasonable restriction and not any worse than it was with a physical book, which you are also prohibited from scanning, photocopying and distributing outside of fair use.

2) You can not copy/paste a physical book either. I agree that this should be allowed, but it's not a dystopian future - there is no loss over physical books here, only gain.

Perhaps Amazon should allow some sort of way to help with "fair use" citations, and maybe they should remove restrictions on public domain material. On the latter though, those are generally available for free from many sources, so the fact that you can't copy/paste on your Kindle is an inconvenience, not a dystopia.

Yes, he's at the board level, so he has no need to qualify his statement and introduce ambiguity.

If you take everyone, particularly people with great power, at the surface level of their language, you are missing most of the meaning. Indirect and qualified statements are usually that way for a reason. Read up on this - I'm sure you'll be fascinated.

If you look at the language: "I was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done"

What was he at other levels?

The presence of "at the board level" is distancing language. If he was personally fully behind the deal, he would be likely not to include that phrase and to add that information in a different structure.

My take is he's uncomfortable with the deal and was likely not fully behind it.

> Generally, peer pressure prevents that sort of behavior, he said. "It's like parking in a handicapped spot," Shaich said.

> "The lesson here is most people are fundamentally good," Shaich said. "People step up and they do the right thing."

Interesting contradiction here. Is it peer pressure or fundamental goodness?

It's nice to see the precise mechanics explained, and it might be rather "negative" to make your point, but it is a pretty obvious solution and I agree with you.

Yes, Apple was focused intently on copying Vista's technology coup.

I'm referring really to functional clarity. Fancy ruby DSLs that invoke method_missing and parse function names make for aesthetically pleasing end user code, but obfuscate the functionality for anyone unfamiliar with the code base.

Aesthetics and clarity are most certainly different in other ways (think pretty sites vs simple clear sites) but that's another discussion.

I think it's highly unlikely the patent office would ever have the sophistication necessary to distinguish a truly new approach to an algorithm or architecture from a derivative one.

Additionally, there is so much depth and breadth in CS that innovation happens everywhere and is often hidden in the bowels of universities, garages, and offices. Even an apparently novel invention is unlikely to be invented only in one place, or to be invented first by the entity that files for a patent.

Would you take the test and be curious about the results?

"Scientists" proposing "ethical restrictions" on tests because they fear the public is archaic thinking, and it's half of what I got out of the article.

Looking at the difference between the Microsoft Kinnect and the Apple iPad demos, the marvel is how Microsoft manages to make something really amazing both boring and uncool, while Apple spends 15 seconds and inspires. Fortunately, the Kinnect is a great enough device people seem to have discovered it in spite of their marketing.

Don't miss the "What's around the corner" video.

> with a test suite that takes less than a second to run

I'm jealous. That would probably save me a huge portion of my development time. Node is my top contender if I dump rails.

It would take me many days to create and test an admin with multiple objects, even a simple one, and then I have to maintain it. I install rails_admin and I've got what I need. This is for internal testing and maintenance. I don't care if it's heavy.

I suppose your logic makes sense if you're gainfully employed, but I bang this stuff out for myself and clients. A 90% solution with one line of code sure beats weeks of work.

Great work! Yehuda is brilliant, although I'm sure he's busy now and I don't know how much bandwidth he would have to address that. I think he's full bore on Sproutcore.

If I calculate (20 seconds) x (number of times I bootstrap rails), it might even be worth my time to have a go at it.

There is a bug supposed to be fixed in ruby 1.9.3 that addresses something to do with the load path and bootstrap performance, but no idea when that's due to land. If it's truly the cause, it seems like this should be a patch to 1.9.2 instead.

You might also want to see if this is related:

https://github.com/rdp/faster_require/blob/master/lib/faster...

True that gems often do more than I need, but should I? 1) Write my own authentication code 2) Write my own ical feed code (just added this in about 2 hours using ri_cal, which has way more features than I need) 3) Write my own code to inline css in email 4) Write my own Facebook API library 5) Write my own admin interface 6) Write my own SCSS and HAML processors 7) Write my own file attachment and processing code 8) Write my own background processing library 9) Write my own CSS/JS compression library

You get the point.

I use gems that save me tons of time. If not for gems, I would not be using Rails.

> Good design is a relative term. In ruby I frequently see it interpreted as: Pack as many layers of magic as possible, and then test that with as many layers of testing-frameworks as possible.

I have the same feeling sometimes. I wish the Ruby community would not be so concerned with magic and aesthetics, and target clarity.

More good suggestions. I'd love to get spork working, but rspec syntax makes me cringe and I haven't gotten it to work with test-unit. I found a plugin and a fork, neither of which I could get working.

Autotest doesn't help startup times, but it can help mitigate the problem somewhat since the tests will start almost instantly when you change a file, saving a few seconds.

It's a good suggestion, but doesn't solve the problem.

"Long startup times or not, sounds like you should probably be using autotest or watchr. 20-30 seconds is not normal. Unless the app has a massive amount of code and dependencies, that sounds like an environment issue."

Autotest helps some, but 20-30 seconds is pretty standard fare. Maybe I use too many gems, but I don't think I should forgo reusing community code to reduce start times.

Maybe it's unfair to make a generalization about "rubyists," but it seems people in the community get overly excited about something that saves 5 characters in their codebase or makes something readable to non-devs (for all those non-devs who will read your code.

Another example - the ubiquity of DelayedJob. The standard usage is to insert delay into your call chain, so foo.delay.send_emails instead of foo.send_emails. This pollutes the ENTIRE object space with the method delay, in addition to the fact that it doesn't work well on many objects. I complained about this practice and the response was that it was clearly better to write foo.delay.send_emails instead of Delayed.add_job(foo, :send_emails) or something. For me, I find any pollution of namespace where conflict is possible highly questionable, although sometimes it's ok.

Metawhere adds methods like .eq and .lt to Symbol (symbol is something like an intern string, e.g. :foo or 'foo in Python).

I don't understand how that helps. This is a problem for pretty simple Rails applications.

Besides, why should I have to set up and learn RabbitMQ to have a decently performing web framework? This is 2011 and this shit is slower than my old Java framework running on an ancient processor in 1995.

Yeah, I tried Django 2 years ago and sort of wish I had stuck with it primarily for this reason. (Additionally I much prefer the Python "no magic" philosophy, although I've gotten used to tracing through Ruby craziness.)

The Rails community (at least at the time) was so much larger and more open that it seemed like a better bet. Rails 3 was coming up and I knew Yehuda was doing brilliant things with the Rails 3.0 architecture. Plus, Moore's law right? - not helping!

I'd love for some hard core Rails guys to get in here and offer some real solutions! As much as I have issues with some things about Rails, it is largely a great tool for me, and I know it so well I'd like to be able to continue using it without tearing my hair out every time I need to run a simple test.

Pretty much ANYTHING you do. Start a console, start a server, run a test, migrate your database, run a rake task.

It's a huge productivity killer for me. And as other comments have stated, it's surprising this issue is not discussed more.

I've been a Rails dev for 5 years. I'm frequently considering leaving for another framework because of one thing: bootstrap time. Starting a test or server on my dev machine takes 20-30 seconds. Particularly with tests, this is a huge problem for doing proper TDD, particularly when you are trying to use tests to track down a bug. In that 20-30 seconds, I often console myself that we no longer need to print punch cards and wait a whole day, but that's little consolation when node.js starts up in under a second.

There are hacks and fixes to this like spork, but none of this should be necessary. The performance issues are not debated in the open enough. I don't understand how those startup times are acceptable to anyone, but I rarely get responses when I ask questions about it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5738443/why-is-rails-boot...

UPDATE: I have the latest top of the line Macbook Air - 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo with SSD.

I have other issues with Rails, but this is the only potential deal breaker. (I tend toward functional clarity instead of "human" readability in the magic debate, while most "Rubyists" would rather pollute the namespace (e.g. metawhere) and create 100 line method_missing calls to make one command slightly prettier aesthetically. And Cucumber - ugh what a ridiculous contraption that is.)

jquery is a great counter-example. Every version is significantly faster than the previous one, AND adds features.

There are so many ways this could be lying with statistics: 1) Healthier people work more - does this include the disabled? Having morbidly obese or disabled who earn little and live shorter lives will skew the stats. 2) Poorer people eat less healthily and have higher obesity, so the implications for policy are not straightforward 3) Smarter more educated people both earn more AND make better life choices, such as taking fewer dangerous drugs. There is a correlation between having the capability to manage a working career and manage your own life. 4) Those who engage in many unhealthy activities, such as alcoholism, will diminish their earnings capacity.

There are more, but that should be sufficient to breed some skepticism.

Earning power and longevity are interdependent variables. They are so closely tied that any correlation needs to be carefully examined.

Risk and trust are inherent in entrepreneurship. We all count on any number of providers to behave fairly, from technology service providers, to API services, to retailers, distributors, and other partners.

Sure, it's best to have many legs to stand on, but that is simply not the case for most early startups.

If this is really where they are headed, it is just ineffective product strategy and fuzzy thinking on Microsoft's part.

They get two things:

Technology: These are technologies Microsoft already has or could develop cheaply (say, for 1% of the cost of Skype?).

Users: Yes, no one will buy Microsoft because it is integrated in "some useful way" - whatever that means. 99% of the utility of Skype is already present without an integration - and other products can also integrate with Skype or other similar technologies if there is really a value add there. There is no sustainable market advantage and no value compelling enough to affect a purchase decision. Users have all they need from Skype - making calls one click away or some light simple integration like that is not a reason to spend 8.5B on a company.

Words like "synergy," "cross-sell," "eyeballs," etc. were no doubt tossed around the MS board room with this vision in mind. Abstract synergies don't work, and integrating unrelated products doesn't work.

Ebay bought Skype because they thought lack of telephony was the reason they were getting their but kicked by Taobao in China. Nobody cared and users weren't interested. Ebay was losing because their pricing and service model were wrong for the market, but it's easier to buy companies than fix your own, so that's what they did.

> it could help strengthen the corporate MS position

People are going to continue to buy Word, Windows, and Exchange because they have a commodity video product "integrated"? I don't think so.

The most valuable asset of Skype is not the technology, but the social network and user base. That however is not all that valuable since, unlike Facebook, Skype is mostly a 1:1 communications model easily moved to another network. When people want to communicate, they will use whatever is easiest. Skype has minimal and diminishing revenue potential, adds nothing to MS core products, and the social network is not all that sticky. It's a dumb buy by a dumb company. I haven't heard a positive word said about Microsoft product management by an employee in 3 years of time spent in Seattle.

I haven't met in the flesh anyone who uses it regularly, and I know a lot of iPhone 4 owners. I'm sure there are people who do. It would be interesting to get some real data. My impression is, as with every video chat service for 30 years, it has very limited use because people just don't want to video chat most of the time.

If Microsoft somehow owned both of those services, would it affect Microsoft's prospects? Certainly not. FaceTime is a gimmick that few people actually use use. Google Voice is bridge between soon-to-be legacy voicemail and cellphones and the future, which is unlikely to be owned by either Google or Microsoft. Neither business would help Microsoft grow again, and neither will Skype.