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Interesting that nobody has mentioned Pike. It's a very nice interpreted OO-language with C-like syntax. Here are some apps developed with Pike, including the Roxen WebServer.

Interesting that nobody has mentioned Pike. It's a very nice interpreted OO-language with C-like syntax. Here are some apps developed with Pike, including the Roxen WebServer.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goat.cx. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Stimpy's Invention
Stimpy invents lots of silly things and has Ren try them out. Ren is not happy with these inventions, so Stimpy makes a "Happy Helmet" to make sure Ren is never unhappy again. The result is even more psychotic than "Space Madness." Includes the now-famous "Happy Happy Joy Joy" song.

The Annotated ANSI C Standard. Any comments on this one from the comp.lang.c newsgoup yet?

Did you miss the part where I said "including being colonized"?

I don't doubt the Sami are people, but are they a distinct nation?

The Sami, in some places spelled "sammi" though with other variations of spelling, I wouldn't say are so much a distict nation as much as they are part of a group of interrelated peoples. They are related to the Lapps which is a derogitory term, Lapps call themselves Samek or Sambe, and range from northwestern Russia to Norway and Sweden. Also related are the Inuit of Iceland and northern Canada and Alaska. Because these people are spread over a broad area they have formed their own dialects and customs. Here's a link to a pdf on Artic languages from UNESCO, Artic Languages: An Awakening. It's quite large at 446 pages and more than 2MB. Here are more links:

• An introduction to the Sami people
• The Sami in Finland
• The Sami and Lapland
• The Kola Sami in Russia
• INUIT CIRCUMPOLAR CONFERENCE
• Eskimo (Yupik/Inupiat/Inuit)

Hmm, let's see - as pointed out, Belgium does have a particularly nasty colonial past in Africa. But the EU states that don't have any colonial nasties in their history include:

Finland

You might wat to ask the Sami, The Sámi people (not Lapps!) if they hadn't been colonized by Finns.

Ireland

What's this between Ireland and Northern Ireland?

There isn't one country that doesn't have a colonist past, including being colonized.

With the kamov helicopters, for example, the http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/misc/ram/ka-50.htmlHokum .

However, like the space race, we try to ignore what the russians managed to do first, eh? ;)

Google gives as its first result: http://www.cyd.liu.se/~bjoli035/botepidemic/neural bot/

No.

Real crypto (they type the government uses to protect top secret data) is free:

• Public domain C/C++ AES code
• DJB also has a public-domain C and assembly AES code
• Dr. Gladman has some simple BSD licensed (usable in any commerical closed-source program) C/C++ and assembly implementations of AES
• There are some GPL implementations of AES available, for people who can handle the GPL being in their code. (GPL forces the release of source code)
• This Javascript page will help people writing AES in other languages

Whay Pascal is not my Favorite Programming Language by Brian Kernighan.

Just wait till you see the one's that can swallow a man whole.

You mean like these?

I don't know about you but I have never meet an 11 year old that looked 18.

Ok, pop quiz. Two girls, one is 18. The other is 11.

Girl 1

Girl 2

The problem here is that one of them is 18, and perfectly legal for you to have sex with (assuming you, the reader are of age) and the other would land you in prison. The safe thing is of course to pick neither, but assume you had to pick one or the other.

ANSWER:
The girl in the first picture is eighteen. The girl in the second picture is eleven. If you couldn't tell the difference, welcome to prison.

He needs to do more things like the incredible Star Wars: Revelations

Great! Thanks -- downloading now: torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/day-1.m ov.torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/day-1.m ov.torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/day-1.m ov.torrent

jump straight to the download mirrors

Or better yet, jump straight to the torrents. I'm getting ~500KB on both of them. I'd probably get more but my cap is set at 4mb/sec.

Quicktime
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_QT_large.mov.torrent

Windows Media Player
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent

jump straight to the download mirrors

Or better yet, jump straight to the torrents. I'm getting ~500KB on both of them. I'd probably get more but my cap is set at 4mb/sec.

Quicktime
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_QT_large.mov.torrent

Windows Media Player
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent

Flashing your pinky is definitely more convenient than spelling your name or getting a card out of your wallet. But that's identification, not authentication.

And are you certain that nobody can pick up your hair from the pavement, clone it in their kitchen, then spray it at a crime scene ?

In related news, hand-transplant surgeons, fearing that their profession might become illegal under the proposed biometric ID plan, are protesting worldwide.

Use pike. Its a statically typed, object oriented scripting language with a curly brace syntax. So your example would be found at "compile time". If you have A declared as a string, then your second line of code will be a compile time error (bad type in assignment, expected string got function).

That's true, when I started using the pike scripting language, an OO language based on lpc. Each chapter on a subject was a reference with an example being expanded on with each of the referenced functions used. At the end of a chapter on say Stdio.FILE you would have a little network daemon.
I readlly liked the way the graphics chapter was set up too, each function started with a base graphic and showed what would happen if this function, with arguments, was applied to the graphic in question.

Sadly I don't use the language anymore. I quit around version 7 as it was getting overly complex to program with, and the documentation was no longer up to par with the language. And not to forget the menory leaks...

> Why can't someone reinvent C so that it sucks less?

They did, it's called Pike.

If you find that interesting you'll love seeing Duff's Device - a useful form of the switch statement with no breaks.

(Used for loop unrolling).

Oh great, so you mean PHP5 finally borrowed the method resolution behavior of Perl 5?

Fancy that!

There are a number of other languages which allow you to dereference return values and call member functions on them. One of them is (surprise surprise) ECMA, Also known as Java Script. Another one I fancy is Pike.

PHP5 Still hosts a large number of the PHP4 Flaws. And additionally, bench marks show that it is still very damn slow. Not to mention the scope behavior of PHP5 is hardly more advanced than that of awk. C'mon now.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. It's like Ada all over again! The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

(From http://www.lysator.liu.se/projects/about_psgml.htm l):

1999-10-10
Version 1.2.0 of PSGML with XML support is now released. Get psgml-1.2.0.tar.gz from lystor ftp.

That doesn't make Microsoft trying to patent this any less slimey, though...

--Troy

I agree this plan is bad but for a different reason. Testing on lots of architectures means the code didn't break the 10th commandment of C programming

Rebuild your box and put the fan inside the box like this guy did.

HCF /H-C-F/ n. Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up.

Ah, raising my/your own animals didn't really strike me as an alternative, but you're right of course, that could mean massive improvements for the animals. Even though I believe there is something objectionable of the taking of life in itself, I've had that discussion many times with others without ever finding any common grounds or being able to use reason to confirm or refute either position. I'm happy that we were able to find this much common ground, and will now leave the animals (unless you have something to add).

I almost regret to say that I agree almost fully with your analysis of what causes us to go on with our destructive lifestyles, because I know it would make an interesting discussion if I had opposing views :)

To "effectively package and propagate the ideas" is very important, and I try to do this in the best way I can. I and my brother did some fun and successful activism the day before christmas when we made gingerbread (most in the shape of pigs!) on which we wrote "vego" (roughly a swedish equivilant of "veggie"), "vegetarian christmas" and stuff like that with frosting (picture). We also handed out recipies. No one can get angry at someone giving them gingerbread, so I think this sort of campaigning with a distinct positive feeling is the most efficient. And great fun :) Using methods that will not scare, annoy or amuse people like yourself who may not agree with all of what the animal rights movement is pushing, but who can see the need for change in how we treat our animals is very, very important.

I'm not familiar with the concept of cultural evolution, but it does not feel very comforting to know that our way of life will have to change/fail sometime, because that may be way too late.

Anyway, the only way things ever seem to change is through hard work, so that's what I'll try.

For those, like me, who have no idea what this guy is talking about, see this.

the thumb scanner on the MS keyboard isn't marketed as a security product - actually it's for convenience only - rembering usernames and password which are retrieved on presentation of a thumb

it's trivial to defeat - see here

Thanks for the info. While you did qualify this with "the C standard", I was mostly thinking of obscure systems when I qualified this. For example, on a system that predates prototypes, the value will generally get pushed onto the argument stack as an integer 0, but read off as an all-bits-zero pointer, which isn't necessarily a null pointer (but you already knew that).

"((void *) 0)" is tempting, and does occur in some C header files, but it's wrong!

Actually, it is allowable under ANSI C; see the comp.lang.c FAQ, sec 5.6, or the Rationale, sec 4.1.5.

Of course, in this case whether or not printf sees a null pointer here is academic anyway; the actual behavior of printf under these circumstances is, I believe, undefined.

Indeed you do. Installing languages that don't need compiling. ;)

Why not just use something like cmod to handle all your PATH (MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, et. al.) related problems? I've been doing this on my home machines for years and _never_ had a problem. Any packages I build by hand go in /opt/packagename/version_number, and a module file gets created. The extra step saves headaches down the road, and allows me to have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time. Nothing could be simpler.

P.S. Don't let the fact that cmod hasn't been updated in 6 or so years throw you. It's like TeX....bugfree.

I've got an older Thinkpad I could see carving up to experiment a little - anybody know how the LCD interfaces work [...] is the signalling just VGA, or is some proprietary thing?

It's some proprietary thing. But you can try this if you're really motivated.

Some countries have had a powerful, constitutional freedom of information act since 1766.

Half-Life 2 Cookie Edition.

...The MIT Guide to Lock Picking

Don't leave home without it.

Happy GNU/Year!

Happy GNU/Year!

Did you forget about Skylab. Mir was a cramped hamster tube in comparision. Skylab was roomy enough for astronauts to run laps in zero g. And we deorbited it because we wouldn't pay for a lowcost launch of an Agena booster to keep it in an appropriate orbit. Skylab would have made a wonderful base for an international space station. Skylab had invaluable information on aging spacestations that because of Shuttle program delays (the primary re-boost support plan) and failure to spend minor amounts of money (the Agena booster plan) to save Skylab, we allowed it to deorbit and become a total loss after only three missions in 1973 to 1974. Oh, and STS-114 is already scheduled so why do folks think the Shuttle will be permanently grounded. Those how forget history are doomed to repeat it. At deorbit there was water for 180 plus days and oxygen for 420 days on board. NASA had plans for the required technology overhaul needed to bring Skylab back to operational condition. Scientists were eager to see what the result of multiple years of orbit and space exposure would have had. If you'd like a piece of Skylab travel to western Australia and onward out to sea. Big. Roomy. A complete waste to deorbit without seeing what was up or garnering the practice of working in space on a space station to repair and renovate it in the early shuttle flights. Sad.

I was always partial to SNES9X for some reason (perhaps it's the fact that they don't waste their time coding everything in assembly, as nobody should), and it's also open source. Whether it is GPL'd or not is just flamewar fodder -- most certainly the submitter's intention.

here

www.spreadfirefox.com

Or some community submission for that matter:
http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Artists/Wooly-Mittens /SpreadFirefox.jpg ;)

One of the original designers of Scheme?
Primary author of Common Lisp the Language?
Co-author of C: A Reference Manual, which was the bible on writing portable C?
Co-author of The Java Language Specification?

If contributing to the design of four major programming languages doesn't get you into the top twenty, how about designing the original EMACS command set? There may be people who are better known for contributions to one language or one toolset, but it's hard to beat him for sheer breadth.

The Internet Public Library has a catalog of over 20 000 online, publicly available books and has cataloged a comparable number of online, publicly available magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, that part of the database is down for a time while the back-end is moved to a new provider. (The old provider stopped on too short notice.)

If you feel you must spend money on e-books, then at least make that a good investment in the form of a donation to Gutenberg, Runeberg, etc. or to EFF or another group to make copyright laws more reasonable once again.

(After some searching i found a link to the description of a cource in 3D Laser Imaging Systems(in english) - held by the Swedish army. :) There they refer to it as "Gated viewing". Happy hunting. )

- jeps