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Sec. 1 Ruby v Python

[ ] I am a Ruby/Python fanboy/fangirl
[ ] I already have a positive/negative entrenched opinion of Python or Ruby
[ ] I cannot tell the difference between the two languages

Sec. 2 Ruby on Rails

[ ] I assume Ruby == Ruby on Rails

Sec. 3 Other

[ ] I program in PHP for it's robust design, consistent syntax and architectural soundness
[ ] I do not understand sarcasm

Scoring: If you answered any of the above questions in the affirmative, your comments may be dismissed out of hand.

obligatory explanation:

In William Gibson's novel "Pattern Recognition", one of the incidental characters is an antique trader who specializes in famous technological pieces. At one point of the story he is in negotiation to buy the Wang word processor that Steven King used early in his career.

"Yes," says Ngemi, with quiet pride, "but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang."

Cayce stares at him.

"The provenance," Ngemi assures her, "is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing,
one of the early dedicated word processors. Shipping alone will require the funds I had earmarked for the
scaffolding, and more."

From a interview with Torvalds many years ago:

"I think a lot of the extreme people are much too extreme, like Richard Stallman; He's a very extreme person, and while I admire a lot of his ideals, I don't admire him because he is so extreme that he can't relate to other people; and that's a limitation."

No taking sides for me, just pointing out that RMS has his own issues.

This is not all that meaningful unless you also completely correlate the uptime info with the number of users/requests/whatnot the site does.

The report doesn't explore that sufficiently enough for me. I can make an app that has 100% uptime if it has one request an hour. Downtime is largely caused (directly or indirectly) by load, so in most cases downtime usually increases as user load (defined as user interaction and amounts of user data, and the actions of those users on that data) increases.

Painting with a broad brush you could say, yes, Xanga has the best uptime but they also probably have the lowest user load as well whereas twitter probably has one of the highest (current) user loads and thus lowest downtime.

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- kt

"the question is: why would anyone want to pay for proprietary hardware and a limited selection of a few hundred stations all controlled by one company?"

The answer is: because it works.

When I'm charging down an interstate at 65mph I don't need to dicking with a phone to figure out why my TCP connection is timing out.