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Why don't you try AmiWM

It's about as ugly as FVWM, but it has an American-sounding name and features Warner Brothers cartoons on the screenshot.

It is also inspired by a long-forgotten Conputer OS built by those effing Pearl-Harbor bombing Japanese, but the went out of Business (Ha) because of their bad Marketing Dept.

But come on.

Python is "some obscure scripting language"?

Python's not some obscure scripting language. Lua might qualify as "some obscure scripting language". Maybe you could also qualify pike as "some obscure scripting language".

But in any case, the BitTorrent developers completely document their protocol at the network level; for example, nothing depends on how Python serializes or deserializes a certain structure - it's all specified in terms of bytes carried in standard IP packets.

That'd get you halfway there! Then you just need the fur and tail!!!

Gee, really going way out of your way to change the subject, huh? Wonder why that is? Got something to defend there? Chatting, irc, etc are way close enough to be referred to as a sort of P2P.

Change what subject? I'm responding to what you said.

I can discuss with people, just don't "do" insults, which I certainbly didn't start,so if you or anyone else want to talk to me, do it without insults or get ignored from here on out.

The original poster who corrected you didn't insult you at all. Go back and read it, I'll wait.

I just don't like picky crap like this, it's a waste of time. If you can't figure out what my basic thoughts were,

Lets just stick to the language we've all (except you) have agreed upon, ok? Stop inventing words, or misusing them and we'll be fine.

And last I knew, there isn't any official P2P overlord who has got the one and true legal definition of P2P

Well, I'll inform you that

there is.

BUT, we'll let uyou "win" that one, only the way you describe it is the one true "official" definition. All hail the official P2P uberdictator!

You are just making an ass out of yourself. Don't worry, I'm not going to stop you.

Because BWK already said everything that needed to be said: Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

-TL

Bah, neither holds a candle to LiTH

I just did a quick web search and found a page about it here. The publisher claims that it was the first computer game novelization ever.

The Free Software Foundation is the Roman Catholic Church, and Richard Stallman is the Pope!

The article should have said "false prophets" because "Open Source Software" (and it's various denominations) is a religion with its zealots and believers, preaching (aka advocacy) its moral message (aka licenses) on others. The theological connection is unmistakeable, e.g., "The Ten Commandments for C" and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

The first time that I (unexpectedly) entered the " twisty little maze with passages all alike", it was like getting sucker punched. I had to get up and walk around to collect my thoughts before continuing. Fortunately, moving the opposite direction let me get back out before I had a chance to get lost.

I also still remember the first time I found the volcano view. It was visually (and yes, I know it's a TEXT adventure!) stunning, more so than anything I've seen in the years since. Years before Infocom, it proved that your imagination is better than any graphics hardware.

And yes, like so many others have posted, I did have dreams about the game.

I used to have an Apple ][+, and I can tell you I played this games for hours, day after day, until I finished it -- " Below the Root", by Windham Classics (based on The Green Sky Triology by Zilpha K. Snyder).
It was simply fascinating! Even now, almost 20 years later, I still feel like reading the books (I never did) -- just because of the game.

Another one was the first "Castle Wolfenstein" (2D, also for the Apple ][). There was also the second version, "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein", which was also great. Both of them used to scare me to death!

And the last one: Swiss Family Robinson (sorry, couldn't find a link).

Anyway -- I can say several of the Apple ][ games were important to me. One of them was called "Adventure", and it was sort of console-imteractive, but with some graphics. It was wonderful. I don't remember much more about it.

Anyone else remember these?

I can strongly suggest using Dia in conjunction with tedia2sql. You can do the graphical design in Dia and then convert the result to SQL for various databases (Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL/...).
It is really fast and stable, it supports tables with indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, ...

Dia and Umbrello are the two I found to be some use. ArgoUML, a java program, was really unwieldy, and I don't recommend it. If you're just looking to draw a nice diagram (for presentation purposes), rather than use it in the design process, I found that actually OpenOffice's Drawing program was excellent for the purpose, with lots of arrow/line types (curved, straight, etc).

Daniel

Yes:
Green Machine
Coldstone Game Engine

Or, if you are a programmer, check out these libraries:
Cocoa Sprite Kit (Cocoa, Obj-C, C++)
Sprite World (Carbon and Classic, C, C++, Pascal)
Sprite Animation Toolkit (Classic and Carbon, Pascal, C++)

Is there a Dia plugin for RHEA applications called 'Dia-rhea'?

Before god created google, there was Yahoo!, and that wasn't too bad. Man was able to find interesting pages by drilling down through skillfully maintained categorical organization. Than Man created the computer and said, screw this, I can write a program that can do all this for me, leaving more time for Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. Man said, I shall call my invention Google. In most portions of the Galaxy, Google has largely supplainted the more pedestrian Encyclopedia Yahoo!. In cases where there is a descrincy between the real world and Google, the fault lies in the real world.

I thought the 'trollish' intro would indicate to people I was asking a real question. In fact it's just waving a flag in front of bulls. Oh well..
I'd never heard of pike. I'm not sure if it's resemblance to C would be comfortable or confusing. The claim as to speed is interesting. The website is being very slow, though, so I haven't seen much.
And what's with the 4 letter 'P' words for languages these days? Back in my day, we had 'B', which begat 'C', and that was good enough for us!

Yes you have.

A couple of projects worth a quick plug here are GNUnet and Spana/Panorama , both of which have the aim of allowing anonymous peer-to-peer transfers.

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 Goatse. 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^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

The original used to be at hastur.rlyeh.net. Quite likely that someone set one up somewhere else, though - it's just data.

Background at http://www.fataldimensions.org/links/dns-mud.php
and http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Various_compan ies.html.

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 Goatse. 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^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Tom Duff once came up with this very useful yet ugly piece of C code for high-speed blitter routines, or any other instance where data must be moved as quickly as possible.

I'd post it but the Slashdot lameness filter is just that: It makes posting code like this impossible, therefore making Slashdot lame. :-/

There is a link to a full explaination here. Damn, if only we could all be this good.
PS: Yea, I do believe it beats the living crap out of memcpy() or BlockMove() or whatever other routine your using ;-)

And specifically read section 9.10 about Master Keys. This stuff is pretty old and well circulated. The entire guide makes for a great read if you're bored. If you're interested in mind teasers, puzzles, and such, you'll appreciate what the guide talks about, even if you never attempt to pick a lock.

It's the way master-keys systems works, you take of pieces until you have the most generic key, the most generic keys needs inherently to be the smallest and thus the least safe.

The master key is usually the largest, not the smallest, so that people cannot file down their keys to master keys.

I think you mean the term is blind, not deaf.

Otherwise I agree. Visually Handicapped means nothing until I think about it, and then I'm not sure. Blind means something to everyone. Almost blind means something. Colour Blind means something. Blind in one eye (but other eye is fine) means something. There are many other things that can make something visually handicapped. All of the above qualify for Visually handicapped, but only a few of them will make it impossible to read a comptuer screen, though many more make it difficult.

Words mean things, when you use the wrong word you confuse everyone. Politicaly correct terms often (but not always) just make it difficult to figgure out what you are taking about, and in the end nothing is added.

As the C ten commandments points out: for they [Those who shout political correct language] believe that great efforts and loud shouting devoted to the ritual purification of the language will somehow redound to the benefit of the downtrodden (whose real and grievous woes tendeth to get lost amidst all that thunder and fury.

The blind have pleny of problems. Being refered to as blind isn't one.

Nowadays that's about as useful as Duff's Device and doubly-linked lists with a single pointer. With the register renaming in modern processors, swaps are effortless.

Yes you can. It's called a master key. You have to be a locksmith, or be really good at social engineering to get one. And it only works for a subset of models of a specific brand of lock.

No, there's no such thing as a master key for a model of lock. Check out a simple guide to lockpicking such as the MIT Lockpicking guide. Master keys are keyed to a set of locks by the installing locksmith, and involve installing split pins on all the locks you want to share a master. They're never keyed to a model of lock unless some spectacularly cheap rubbish lock manufacturers do this. There's certainly no Yale master keys about, as you claim.

Pascal n.

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

9. There is no escape

This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.

People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.

I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

Pike 7.4 seems to compile and link fine on Darwin 6.3 according to Pikefarm.
It also almost passes the testsuite, except for a 2 second sleep that slept 2.12 seconds (which may be due to load on the test machine).
I don't know of any reason why it wouldn't work fine on Darwin 1.4.

Building Pike on Cygwin is not (yet) supported as can be seen in Pikefarm.

Currently the only supported way of building Pike on WIN32/WIN64 systems is through rntcl.
Hmm... It does however seem like nobody has released such a binary yet.

Yeah, but check out the University's webpage! Maybe it's just my browser (Chimera), but the text is so small, it's unreadable!

I use Sourceforge for CVS, file releases and mailing lists. Recently we decided (at the project I run) to turn off forums altogether, they were just too damn annoying. The bug tracker might be useful, I suppose, but nobody seems to use it, they prefer to post to mailing lists and I can't really blame them. (IMHO a decent bug tracker needs to have a mail interface of some kind - but then no banner ads, urk...)

(My suggestion for the single best improvement to Sourceforge: add fsh support to the CVS servers so you can do CVS operations without making and tearing down a new ssh connection each time. (Fsh makes a single ssh connection and then keeps it open for subsequent commands). That would really speed up development over a modem, at least if like me you have an obsession with typing 'cvs -q update -Pd' every few minutes.)

Kirin: A mythological beast from China and Japan similar to a Dragon (sort of a cross between a unicorn and a dragon). This is the only decent reference I could find. Fits in with the theme (grand mythical beasts with supernatural powers) of Mozilla and Phoenix. One legend has it that a Kirin was the father of Confucious ...

(It's also a beer from Japan - but presumably they can't claim copyright since it's a common word and there isn't too much link between software and beer ...)

The problem is, decent-sized particle simulations require lots of memory, something that can often lead to slowdowns on x86-clusters. Thanks to some friends at NSC(National Supercomputer Centre) in Sweden, I had the opportunity to try out some particle and airflow simulations on some of their computers during a calm period with low usage. I got to use 16 CPU's and 16GB RAM on the Origin 3800, and it was about twice as fast on my problem as the 32-node Beowulf, with each node a Thunderbird 900MHz and 512MB RAM/CPU, SCI interconnects. If it was just the CPU crunching power that mattered, the Beowulf cluster should have left the Origin nodes I could use in the dust.

On the desktop, I've used a dual Xeon box, with 2GB RAM, and I constantly max out the memory. =(

Oh well, both the Origin and the Beowulf cluster finished in less than an hour what takes my home box over a week to do... =(

*heh*

Read (or re-read, given where I'm posting) Mostly Harmless . This sounds alot like the interaction between the future Guide and the "Whole Sort of General Mish Mash" described in that book. I believe chapter 17 has a good description.

I take it that you don't use amiwm. I actually used this windows manager a few years back (before KDE and Gnome). It has a great retro feel!

DIA. Its quirky but so is Visio. I like DIAs quirks better.

While it doesn't have some of the features and templates that Visio does, Dia is a free (GPL) alternative.

When I first saw it, I was amazed that it worked, but I would say it pushed the limits

Code example and discussion in the Jargon File

For a more detailed explation see here.

Can't post the code, due to Lameness filter.

However they all could learn a lot from countries like Sweden which has had a much stronger version integrated into their country's constitution for over 336 years. Basically, the only exceptions are individual privacy, protection of plant and animal species, national defence, national economy, and prevention of crime. Every thing else is there for the asking.

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 Goatse. 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.

Bruce describes the problem thusly: "Within the C software was a long "do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break" was supposed to "break" the "if" clause. Instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement."

The upshot was this: the new System 7 software provided a safety net in case a switch had issues. It would rid itself of all calls, then reboot itself, and when it came back online, it would send out an "OK" signal. The problem was, the "OK" signal would cause all the switches on the net to bookkeep the fact that the other switch was back online. While bookkeeping, the flaw arose: If two calls came in at almost exactly the same time while in bookkeeping mode, the data would get garbled due to the glitch. Then the switch would drop all calls, reboot itself, and then send out an "OK" signal to all the other switches. See the problem forming? A cascade of ups, downs, and "OK" signals floods within ten minutes, and nightmare scenario occurs.

Remember this, it was not a hack. It was simply poor programming.

These users is the reason to why Apple has been able to survive the late 80s and early 90s when the x86 ran away from then performance wise.

It is fun to notice all these little fanatic communities for all old computers: Atari, Amiga, ABC80, Spectrum, C64...

It is nice to see that some of us aren't here just for performance and the latest games!

Disney had a rich culture of stories to draw from and reinterpret. They are trying to prevent the next generation of storytellers and media producers from doing to them what they did to earlier content creators.

What stops you from making your own interpretation of any Grimm, Andersen, Carrol or even Disney story? Want to interpret the interpretation of the interpretation of Snowwhite? Please go ahead, but please draw your own fucking 24 pictures per second of animation. The idea of Snowwhite, and any interpretation thereof, is forever free as long as you put your own labor into the presentation, and as long as it isn't a genuine ripoff.

Arne Anka (Arne Duck) [http://www.lysator.liu.se/~mosh/arne_eng.html] is an interpretation of Donald Duck as a Slashdot geek or something, and it is a perfectly legal interpretation, despite the resemblance with the real duck. It so happened [http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/comics/arneAnka.h tml] that when Disney complained, Arne was supplied with another bill, but later attached a loose bill to regain his initial Donald-like features... Disney gave up.

Well, lets look at Kazaa.

It's website is in English. It's software is in English, and it does not have a Norwegian version of the software and probably never will. Take a look at their Languages page. It doesn't even have plans to open a Norweigan version of their software, but yet they want to release it in Spanish, French and German? Spanish is basically the second most spoken language in the United States, not Norway. Now, if we take a look at the most common languages in Norway, we can see here and here that hardly anyone speaks English in Norway. Most speak, um, Norwegian (most common dialect is Bokmål).

So, as we can plainly see, Kazaa is targeting the US demographic, not Norway/Denmark/Estonia. Yet their servers and establishments are in Denmark? Why? It's to gain marketshare and profit from the American people, yet not contribute the US. In fact, they're taking money away from the American government. There are no US taxes on the products, so your basically throwing your money away. (Yes, Money, there is now "Kazaa Plus" which costs $$$). Kazaa's advertisments target US customers, it's product is made for US customers and it's only intrest is in the US customer base.

Kazaa is obviously not interested in P2P technology or it's future. It stole Gntuella's technology spec and re-wrote it. Kazaa also has Network Supernodes (dedicated nodes, always on) and other centralized components. So if you took those away, expect drastic changes in performance. The RIAA has pretty much presumed Kazaa was built just like that for a while. Kazaa is all about money. Take away the money, watch the developers flee. The "developers" of Kazaa have already started up similar companies. They know Kazaa will be shut down eventually, and of course they need to keep making their un-deserved millions.

Kazaa will eventually be shut down, even if it means Jennifer Gardner running out of an exploding building in the Netherlands.

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 Goatse. 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.

There are, however, irrevocable internet currencies out there (I sell one, actually)

Imagine a digital rights management infrastructure that requires you to pay per view using a metal as currency. Not just any metal, a precious metal.

That's e-Palladium.

Here are two examples:

• Project Runeberg at Linköping University.

• The project in Sweden, SAFARI, allowed relatively high precision retrieval of research information to the general public. The National Research council seems to have taken it offline, but you can still see local implementations like the one at Örebro.
  

The home page is at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/