The fundamental law of resources in this world is: if you can't farm it, you must mine it. They're a yin and yang. I come from Montana, a state which basically has only two industries: farming and mining. When you live that close to the land, it becomes very apparent who the actual producers are.
Everything else is wanking. Productive wanking, but wanking nonetheless. The welder is nothing without the miner. Without the farmer, he can't even eat. Me, as a software engineer, I'm so far removed from those who are actually producing things that what I do is as ephemeral as the wind.
I change states on a magnetic disk all day. I lift weights, run, and have a stand-up desk so my body doesn't decay while I do this ludicrously minimal amount of work each day, but because I know how to shape those bits in a certain way, society values me much more than the guy who feeds me, or the guy who mines the rare earths that make my job possible.
After doing Rails for about 4 years, and Django for about 2 months (but I've been doing python for 10 years now) ... save yourself some pain and learn Django instead, if you can at all help it.
Ruby's documentation culture is hair-tearingly frustrating. Half a paragraph, 3 examples covering the barest functionality of your module, and pages of badly-interfaced mechanically-extracted documentation made me want to punch the monitor several times a day.
Oh, but it's got a pretty web-2.0tard design-minded web site, and of course gitardhub, which is especially a joy if it goes down during a deploy.
Well gee. It's been a while since I've used Digital UNIX, Irix, SCO, or VMS.
Because they've become totally irrelevant.
Seems like a waste of resources when there are more pressing things to do than worry about the 5 people who (a) use VMS and (b) demand a bleeding-edge Apache.
This dude is ranting about the wrong thing. There are parts of Avatar and Transformers, etc, that look like you're running a game on an overloaded computer.
The problem here isn't televisions running at a high rate. The problem is film adhering to the bleeding edge of what was possible 100 years ago. 24fps is not adequate to handle lots of motion.
That's funny. Just about every HR person I've ever worked with has (a) been convinced that they're Doing The Most Important Job In The World and (b) completely incompetent and unable to deal with geeks.
You know, every day I look at websites on my iPhone, and I think to myself, "You know what would make this phone better? If the screen were smaller! Yeah!"
Read C10K? Both select() and poll() have this problem internally. You have to use one of the more advanced techniques available if you really want to scale. epoll(), kqueue() or friends.