None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.
5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne
The absurdity of the situation, when put in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around the world, the public opinion in the US focused on a single case of prolonging the run of a naked life, of a persistent vegetative state deprived of all specifically human characteristics. These are the two extremes we find ourselves today with regard to human rights: on the one hand those "missed by the bombs" (mentally and physically full human beings, but deprived of rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to bare vegetative life, but this bare life protected by the entire state apparatus.
Slavoj Zizek about "Children of Men"
If the old hierarchic societies oppressed vital forces through their rigid ideological systems and the state apparatuses that enforced them, today’s societies are losing their vitality through their very permissive hedonism: everything is allowed, but decaffeinated, deprived of its substance.
Slavoj Zizek about "Children of Men"
