Raspberry Pi you mean? From what ive read they are taking orders but im not sure they have started shipping. They got delayed because of some faulty port of some kind. Might get one when I have the time to play around with it, they seem cheap enough

What they "wrote it in" is much less relevant than "what they are executing when people actually visit their site". DUCY?

Isn't that just the “good developers can write good code in any language” argument?

some of you are really bad at reading and/or really good at getting trolled. i wonder where these quotes came from?

pretty sure "compiling our php code to a giant monolithic compiled executable" counts as "overcoming problems with the platform".

are you Mel?

Why would what they "wrote it in" be less relevant when nearly the entire list of complaints is about why the author hates writing in the language?

I have been working on ruby on rails for the last 2.5 months after having not done any web stuff in 10+ years or programming in a long time (and never at a high level). Since I had to learn a bunch of different stuff at once, as well as getting used to linux (never used anything but windows) it was a steep learning curve, but now I am learning quite quickly and having a good time.

I figure I'll just throw out all the resources I've used to anyone on these forums that is interested in RoR.

Setup: I'm running ubuntu 11.10 on a virtualbox with a windows 7 64 host. Plenty of tutorials on how to setup a virtualbox, and how to setup RoR on ubuntu using RVM (just do this, it'll make your life easier. Don't try to use RoR on windows, it's just more of a hassle than it's worth). Macs are also perfect to work on as well. I then connect to it through a host-only adapter, and do my editing on windows using sublime 2 (which is a nice lightweight text editor). If anyone is interested in using this setup just PM me and I can walk you through it, as I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why I was being a moron. I run console commands either in the virtualbox or using putty.

Resources:

codeschool.com is pretty awesome actually. Rails for zombies is a free intro course, as well as "try ruby", both of which have screencasts followed by in browser code challenges. They also have a bunch of pay classes on html/css/jquery/intermediate rails stuff, which is only like $20/month and you get prizes like free peepcasts (pretty cool stuff on there) or a free month of pro subscriptions on railscasts.

The best resource by far was the book Rails 3 tutorial by Michael Hartl. You basically build twitter from scratch using RSpec (testing framework), git (version control), both of which are great to learn. There's enough good CSS/HTML in there to help you along if you're stuck with that as well, and it's great to see stuff like authentication written from scratch. I also loved the screencasts of the book, which were something like $80 but well worth it. 15+ hours of him talking through the creation process which is super helpful. I think there's a new version of the book/screencasts coming out, so check to see that it's the 3.1+ version before getting it at this point.

Learning how to do test driven development (TDD) with rspec is just huge. I haven't found another resource that's 1/2 as useful as that book. It's just a practice you should adopt if you want to develop in RoR.

railscasts is a great resource, and once you start working on your own you should just check to see if there is a cast up for the problem you're working on. Saves a lot of time, though he does neglect to test in them (for time constraints).

safaribooksonline is well worth the money to get access to tons of books on programming for something like $20/month.

I'd start by doing the sample twitter app a few times until you 100% understand everything that's going on in there, including git and rspec (you should probably skip the tests the first time through, but make sure to go back and learn them). Then start adding stuff to site like comment support, private messaging, an API, etc to learn. Then build your own site from scratch. Doing is the best way to learn once you get a handle on stuff.

When you start really make sure you get a handle on the MVC (model view controller) logic, and also making sure you understand about REST is important too. Most intro sites/books go into these, but don't just gloss over them as the sooner you understand them, the sooner you'll start getting the big picture.

And if you ever get bugs just google them, there's usually a solution on stackoverflow (or search that site) and you'll get unstuck very quickly.

Hope this helps someone at some point.

interesting article about cracking lottery scratcher tickets:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/

Nice read.

Here's something similar, with a bit more mystery: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...t-4-times.html

Nchabazam, appreciate the advice. Thanks!

Relevant to what? You claim that "it's not fair to say they are using php". This is a trivially false statement. DUCY?

edit: the whole article was about the PHP language...which most of(?) the code for Facebook is written in.

Cool. That article reminded me of the Wired article on Stuxnet that is worth a read also.

If you like stuxnet, you'll love conficker: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...y-within/8098/ . It's not as sophisticated, but it's got way more mystery surrounding it.

Spoiler alert: Stuxnet was the Israelis or the Americans, obv. Conficker is someone who's incredibly knowledgeable and even more crafty, but apparently all he wants to do is spam people or something?

Sweet. I have heard of conficker a couple times but didn't know how huge/advanced it was. This stuff is fascinating.

Yeah. I wonder how accurate the MD6 part is. It's hard for me to gauge just how few people knew about MD6 and its original flaw when Conficker's creator did.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'll be working with Yevgeniy Dodis next year, one of the designers of MD6. I should totally ask him about this and report back.

Also interesting: An article about how Google manages its network with a relatively new open-source piece of software http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...w-google/all/1

no.

so dumb question about google/oracle lawsuit, but i know one of you can answer easily. i'm confused because i thought java was and always had been open source -- were people building apps with java 10 years ago paying sun anything? but if it's open source, or was, and google started doing android like at least 5 years ago, i don't understand how oracle can now claim they are owed money. which of my assumptions is wrong?

I don't know the full answer to your question, but Java wasn't always open-source. I distinctly remember reading things like this when they were current and wikipedia says it happened in 2006

EDIT: This article makes a mention of patents...

I'm not sure, but I *think* that sun is accusing them of copying Java in its implementation of Android and Dalvik, both infringing on patents and copying code. That's different from using Java as an platform to run their operating system on, which is what I think Java's license allows.

Obviously, there's something weird about one company suing another for allegedly copying its free-to-use open-source software to create new free-to-use open-source software, but they're both presumably making money off of these things (Google certainly is, I have no idea if Sun/Oracle makes money off of Java somehow), so it's a legit accusation IMO.

Here's an article that discusses Oracle's opening statement, and links to the full slideshow, which Oracle made publicly available: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574...ith-91-slides/

That would make sense. The bolded captures my confusion exactly. Assuming your explanation is correct, is Google about to get pwned?

Google is unpwnable. They make over $10B/year. The lawsuit will probably cost them less than $100M if they lose. Whether they lose depends on the facts and software patent law, both of which are complicated as hell.

Some people seem to think that there's important precedent involved here. I'm not sure if that's true or just hype.

When you copy free-to-use open-source software dont you have to give credit?

not all "open source" software are created equal. depends on the license. GPL is usually considered most restrictive. i like the WTFPL:

Gullanian you could at least find a better comparison than 15" vs 17"

I admit there is a premium but if u actually did a fair comparison, then the difference isn't that great when you factor in build quality, esthetics, battery and OS X (W7 is a huge improvement over XP but out of the box it doesn't compare to OSX).