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... to the American Association Against Acronym Abuse (AAAAA)

Preface
The X-Windows Disaster
Some quotes
The Unix Hater's Mailinglist archive
Additional Unix-Hater's information

Likewise, black holes are just an educated guess at what might be at the centre of galaxies or left behind in the wake of supernovae. For all we know, the absence of light in these areas may well be merely extremely dense clouds of cosmic dust rather than pinpoints of near-infinite gravitational power.

The Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik has been tracking the star S2 near the center of our galaxy since 1992. After measuring 2/3 of the period, they are able to confirm:

1. Black holes exist.

2. There is one at the center of our galaxy.

See http://www.mpe.mpg.de/www_ir/GC/intro.html

Excellent work by a very dedicated group!

Regards,

Mike

This is a job for...

P R O C M A I L ! ! !

Really, this thing is amazing, and it's probably already installed by your distro on Linux. On BSD it's in ports - and you can build source for Solaris, etc. If procmail needs help, it comes with formail, and both play well with sed in a script.

BTW: an answer to a very similar question from the procmail list. YMMV.

Righto. According to information on the FDA web, the first bacteria resistant to Penicillin was found only 4 years after the drug went into mass production.

That was in the dark ages of molecular biology. We have a much learer understanding now of how drug resistance is shared between bacteria, but that doesn't mean that we can stop it. In fact, it's pretty clear that as soon as one wild population of bacteria develop a resistance, it's just a matter of time before they all have it.

And the trick is, it's an arms race, and patients are not passive objects to be disinfected. You can wipe a counter down with 100% ethanol, and then set the wet spot on fire, and that's good sterile procedure. You can't do that to someone's bloodstream. If I'm in the hospital with a systemic staph infection, and my doctor wants to start me on penicillin "Just in case your Staph isn't resistant," you can bet your ass that I'll have a new doctor pretty fast. I'm in the hospital, the guy next to me is dying, and I have to wear a dress with no back. I want the best bug-killer he's got, and I want it now!

and anyone who knows better is going to think just like me! How can you, a healthcare provider, reduce the frequency of behavior that encourages resistance, when your patients' most rational demand is for you to break out the big guns right away?

I know a lot of people have brought this up the issue of the HK bootleg. Yes, it is cheaper, yes, it does not support the original authors, but this is one case where you should go with the HK version (I know, I bought the R2 and got burned).

this and this

There is a *SEVERE* color problem with the R2 release. Yes, the Japanese NTSC and usa NTSC standards are slightly different in their white point, but this has nothing to do with that. They red has been cranked all the way up, so much that the white walls in the entrance to the park look like they are made of adobe, and what should be puffy white clouds look like they are stained with blood. Unfortunately, since they already pressed many millions of these DVD's, they decided to call this a Feature in the official press release (look around for it if you really want to read it). I hope that this color error doesn't make its ways to the US shores. If Buena Vista wouldn't take responsibility for their mistake (and it was certainly one, even Miyazaki has commented on it), I see no reason to give them my money. It is such a shame too, the DVD's are some of the best authored I have ever seen. I hope the R1 release is worthy of my money.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The HK bootleg I am referring to is not the one that is just a copy of the R2 dvd, which is the one out there now. Obviously that one will have the same color problem.

Actually, if the anti-hydrogen is cold enough, you can store it in a magnetic trap. I believe it has to be of a particular spin polarization to stay trapped, however. Check out this proposal.

Do you mean the HESS telescope or the nuclear photoelectric effect ?

Both are basic science - there is no immediate practical application (and usually you don't start basic science with practical applications in mind). That is also the reason why these projects are run by the Max-Planck Society, which is the German organization for cost-intensive basic research.

For the HESS, the goal is to understand the creation and origin of the very high energetic particles that are observed in cosmic radiation. You can get more detailed answers at the site linked in my previous post if you proceed to the section "Exploring the nonthermal universe" on the left sidebar.
For the nuclear photoelectric effect, I do not know much about that. I assume the goal was initially to verify theory and get some values for the "effectivity" of the process, which would e.g. be important for calculations concerning nuclear reactors, nuclear waste, or nuclear reactions in stars (like our sun). Also, the photoelectric effect is a very simple and basic phenomenon and quite important and useful in its "conventional" (=non nuclear) form (think solar cell, photodiode etc.) and therefore it is important to know more about it in its nuclear analogy, too.

These Telescopes measure gamma rays with energies above 40 GeV, far above enegies of nuclear decay (MeV range, a factor of 1000 less). The HESS project page contains more information, about the (cosmic) origin of these gamma rays.

One could measure the change in these isotopes when gamma rays hit them, thus measuring the gamma rays. Has anyone played with this?

You are talking about the nuclear "photoelectric" effect. It is in principle possible, but very inefficient (nuclei do not capture gamma rays very well). Actually this was initially researched by W. Gentner in the 1930ies in Heidelberg, where they now build the HESS telescope (among others).

(Which used to be a good, technical show but now is filled to the brim with unemployed dotcom kiddies)

Dot commies? What nonsense. It's more professional and academia oriented, that's 'coz most of the crowd there is professional graphics programmers.

And SIGGRAPH is supposed to be pretty cool these days, and now they've even started getting shows on DemoScene.

Check out the Demoscene Outreach Group which performed at this year's SIGGRAPH, cool stuff. If you hate SIGGRAPH so much, maybe you should try the GDC. In fact I'd say SIGGRAPH should become even more professional, they do not seem to be handling a lot of cool & new math stuff and techniques which a lot of European schools, like MPI for example, seem to be working on.

The researchers genetically altered the brain cells, but not bone growth - so I wonder whether the increased folding is a response to being crammed into a cranial cavity that is too small.

I can't speak for guitarists, but as someone who's also played keyboard instruments for over 20 years I can say that a good piano technique avoids CTS and RSI.

The closest I've really heard of was Robert Schumann who it was said rigged up a pulley and weights system to strengthen his 4th finger so he could trill faster, and knackered his tendons in the process. (the more likely reason was taking arsenic to cure syphillis)

Thanks for the clarification! I scoured the web for the real journal article but didn't find it. I did find an abstract for one of the 1993 papers you mentioned, so I wondered about the mass discrepancy. Better luck helping reporters get it straight in the future. Take their presence as a sign that your work is interesting to lay people.

Since I'm a little rusty, I dug up some articles about type I and II supernovae, and white dwarves and the Chandrasekhar limit. I also found a stellar who's who which says HR 8210 is IK Pegasi, at RA 21h26m Dec +19.3. My Sky Atlas 2000.0 shows a 6th-magnitude star there, but it's not marked.

"But Maiz-Appellanis and Benitez did some detective work and came up with the likely culprit -- a volatile star pack known as the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association, which passed relatively near the solar system several million years ago."

A google search turned up:
The association is embedded in a large roughly circular structure; this is a huge bubble of hot gas created by the stellar winds of the numerous massive stars in the association and by several super-nova explosions, which happened in the Scorpius Centaurus association during the last few million years.

So supernovas have happened in our local bubble, and evidently quite close.

The Galactic core is closer than that, the last I checked. Andromeda is about 2 million LY away, if I recall right. Let's see.

Antares = 520 light years

CNN cites the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association of stars which is actually about 470 light years away.

So CNN was off only by a factor of a thousand. Interesting theory, if they can get the facts right.

The Galactic core is closer than that, the last I checked. Andromeda is about 2 million LY away, if I recall right. Let's see.

Antares = 520 light years

CNN cites the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association of stars which is actually about 470 light years away.

So CNN was off only by a factor of a thousand. Interesting theory, if they can get the facts right.

you should read this. It explains what happened. It was not a pure calculation error - they had wrong experimental data to start their calculation with.

Two facts in this controversy are quite clear: first, although Bothe had used the purest form [of graphite] available to the Germans, the graphite he used contained minute traces of boron; second, it was this contamination that made the graphite ineffective as a moderator. It is commonly believed that Bothe made a crucial mistake in not noticing the presence of the contaminating Boron. Gentner, however, attempted to set the record straight in 1980 as he lay upon his deathbed. Writing the last letter of his life to respected colleagues, he claimed that Bothe knew full well of the trace boron, as well as its implications. According to Gentner, Bothe simply did not know where or how to obtain a more pure sample of graphite.

Reading the article and looking at the group's website, this doesn't seem all that special. In fact, unless I'm misinterpreting the result, it seems that you could build a Mott insulator with any kind of supercold gas. The real accomplishment was using a Bose-Einstein condensate to very easily construct an arrangement of atoms that would otherwise be technologically very hard. That they did it by means of a quantum phase transition (adjusting the parameters of the potential to produce a qualitative different wave function) is cool, but not exactly new.

It's a neat hack, and I can imagine uses for being able to turn a BEC on and off at will, as well as for atomic arrays, but it just doesn't grab me as being all that radical. I would question calling it a new state of matter. More like a unusual way to make a very special kind of gas. Of course, I might just be missing something.

1) the various quantum tunneling experiments, where the Mozart 40th Symphony was transmitted through solid metal at several times the speed of light. There is a good link here. There was even a NOVA special or something on that (see that transcript here, - info about 2/3rds into the material)

2) maybe something involving the research of Steven Wolfram (developer of Mathematica), as seen in his forth coming book A New Kind of Science, which is very geeky, very bizarre, and right up this alley, and is supposed to be a rethinking of the very fundamentals of how science works. My head hurts already. This book is due for publication in January 2002, and is well worth pre-ordering.

It does excellent job on its part. There is also some documentation on the site, including one of the creators' Ph. D. thesis that explains some of the theory behind the software. On Linux it requires gcc and GNU Fortran complier to compile (compilation is pretty straightforward).

I also found GNU awk extremely useful at numerical data analysis. You also would want to include Python and NumPy - python extension for numerical computations.

HTH

Alex

Because Perl threads are experimental until 5.8 is released?

Hi! I've just sent my baby for conformal coating today. It's the flight spare model of the power supply units to power the ccds of two cameras and it took me about 2 years to design completely (as a flight unit). The experiment is called Osiris, also here, the satellite is ESA's Rosetta and its target is some comet named Wirtanen. I'm quite happy to see my first piece of flight hardware already being integrated with the full satellite and hope the Osiris will give us some nice pictures one day.

Cheers,


Alejandro
Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial - INTA

Hi! I've just sent my baby for conformal coating today. It's the flight spare model of the power supply units to power the ccds of two cameras and it took me about 2 years to design completely (as a flight unit). The experiment is called Osiris, also here, the satellite is ESA's Rosetta and its target is some comet named Wirtanen. I'm quite happy to see my first piece of flight hardware already being integrated with the full satellite and hope the Osiris will give us some nice pictures one day.

Cheers,


Alejandro
Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial - INTA

Look, every emerging art or music form is first decried as an abominaiton, against god, trash, junk, etc. Look at Van Gogh (hell most impressionists), Picasso, Beethoven, Wagner, Miles, McCartney...

Your examples should be a little more accurate; Beethoven was quite well received during his time:

...Yet the Viennese were conscious of Beethoven's greatness: they applauded the Choral Symphony even though, understandably, they found it difficuit, and though baffled by the late quartets they sensed their extraordinary visionary qualities. His reputation went far beyond Vienna: the late Mass was first heard in St. Petersburg, and the initial commission that produced the Choral Symphony had come from the Philharmonic Society of London. When, early in 1827, he died, 10,000 are said to have attended the funeral. He had become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike composers of the preceding generation, he had never been a purveyor of music to the nobility he had lived into the age - indeed helped create it - of the artist as hero and the property of mankind at large.

I'm not sure whether "...Van Gogh (hell most impressionists)..." implies that Van Gogh was himself an impressionist, but in any case he certainly wasn't. As for central argument--some music and art forms are sneered at and some are not at their introduction. I hardly think that a cross in a jar of urine will be remembered as art years hence, and it certainly generated its share of sneers. I'm not sure where I fall on computer generated images--I'm mostly not sure how it adds anything that you can't do already.

It amazes me that you could write so innocently on this topic. You unknowingly gave a revelatory insight into the way MS programmers think, and how they are able to justify the work they do.

Before you can understand anything I will write in this short essay, you must realize that MS programmers think fundamentally differently than most free software/open source programmers. And that way of thinking is clipped by a desire for money which does not exist in the Open Source environment.

In essence, as you so eloquently made clear, we open sourcers do not work for money. We work primarily for passion, with money as a secondary issue. MS employees are the opposite, they tend to work for money first, and passion second. Thus 'they were continually amazed at the amount of work that is poured into free software,' as you said. To Open Sourcers, this is not a source of amazement. This is simply a moment of recognizing the fact that others enjoy programming as much as I do. Lots of others.

Work For Money vs. Work For No Money? It's not quite that simple, but you can understand a lot if you use that as a reference point in building principles to understand what is happening. Here is why I prefer this as a reference point:

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

If you stand back from the whole MS/Open Source debate from any distance, this kind of generalization becomes possible, and necessary if you want to comprehend it in a meaningful way. There are many complicated issues stemming from this single duality, none of which I want to address here.

My point is that MS employees work within the "old" American Dream, where all you need to do is get a decent job making money, work at it for a number of years, and voila! You're retired, driving your RV around the country, untrammeled by the daily woes of the great masses.

This doesn't work for the artist. The artist doesn't want to live a life dreaming of the future. The artist LIVES in the future, and makes his own life beautiful each day. Thus, you'll never find an artist in an RV. He can't afford one, and thus has no desire for one. Instead, he creates something beautiful each day, and sleeps well that night.

Sleeping that well at night is a mystery to the man who seeks money. Artists have all kinds of problems we don't need to get into, so I'm not glorifying the art of being an artist, I'm only presenting it side-by-side with the typical MS programmer, who works for money, not for passion. I work for passion. I create an entirely different kind of product than my co-worker, also a programmer, who works for money. Sure, he has passion, but it is sublimated beneath his desire to fulfill his portion of the "American Dream." I chuckle wrily at his earnest efforts to get something THAT ALWAYS MOVES AWAY FROM HIM.

I say, Major Burrito, latch on to the American Dream which is not an illusion. Let Nikola Tesla be your role model, not Thomas Edison. Both were phenomenal inventors. But a close study of their two lives reveals that one worked for money and the other worked for passion. (Both were money hungry, but one more than the other). Same with Salieri and Mozart, Plato and Aristotle, Freud and Jung, and so many other great dualities.

The point I want to make is that the MS perspective is only half the spectrum. The other half is populated by people who wonder what MS would be like if it were programmed by people with REAL passion, not one sublimated by other desires.

This is an easy thing to see for most Open Source programmers. As for whether Open Source programmers have talent or not... we do it the hard way. -Water Paradox

It amazes me that you could write so innocently on this topic. You unknowingly gave a revelatory insight into the way MS programmers think, and how they are able to justify the work they do.

Before you can understand anything I will write in this short essay, you must realize that MS programmers think fundamentally differently than most free software/open source programmers. And that way of thinking is clipped by a desire for money which does not exist in the Open Source environment.

In essence, as you so eloquently made clear, we open sourcers do not work for money. We work primarily for passion, with money as a secondary issue. MS employees are the opposite, they tend to work for money first, and passion second. Thus 'they were continually amazed at the amount of work that is poured into free software,' as you said. To Open Sourcers, this is not a source of amazement. This is simply a moment of recognizing the fact that others enjoy programming as much as I do. Lots of others.

Work For Money vs. Work For No Money? It's not quite that simple, but you can understand a lot if you use that as a reference point in building principles to understand what is happening. Here is why I prefer this as a reference point:

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

If you stand back from the whole MS/Open Source debate from any distance, this kind of generalization becomes possible, and necessary if you want to comprehend it in a meaningful way. There are many complicated issues stemming from this single duality, none of which I want to address here.

My point is that MS employees work within the "old" American Dream, where all you need to do is get a decent job making money, work at it for a number of years, and voila! You're retired, driving your RV around the country, untrammeled by the daily woes of the great masses.

This doesn't work for the artist. The artist doesn't want to live a life dreaming of the future. The artist LIVES in the future, and makes his own life beautiful each day. Thus, you'll never find an artist in an RV. He can't afford one, and thus has no desire for one. Instead, he creates something beautiful each day, and sleeps well that night.

Sleeping that well at night is a mystery to the man who seeks money. Artists have all kinds of problems we don't need to get into, so I'm not glorifying the art of being an artist, I'm only presenting it side-by-side with the typical MS programmer, who works for money, not for passion. I work for passion. I create an entirely different kind of product than my co-worker, also a programmer, who works for money. Sure, he has passion, but it is sublimated beneath his desire to fulfill his portion of the "American Dream." I chuckle wrily at his earnest efforts to get something THAT ALWAYS MOVES AWAY FROM HIM.

I say, Major Burrito, latch on to the American Dream which is not an illusion. Let Nikola Tesla be your role model, not Thomas Edison. Both were phenomenal inventors. But a close study of their two lives reveals that one worked for money and the other worked for passion. (Both were money hungry, but one more than the other). Same with Salieri and Mozart, Plato and Aristotle, Freud and Jung, and so many other great dualities.

The point I want to make is that the MS perspective is only half the spectrum. The other half is populated by people who wonder what MS would be like if it were programmed by people with REAL passion, not one sublimated by other desires.

This is an easy thing to see for most Open Source programmers. As for whether Open Source programmers have talent or not... we do it the hard way. -Water Paradox

The company in question, which is sampling epitaxy wafers to two "major" semiconductor manufacturers (according to the website) is Isonics, a company trading on the NASDAQ (Symbol ISON) and based in Colorado. All of their operations are based in the US, the USSR organization developed the technology, but that technology is now available through a US vendor.

So yes, it's true that the technology exists. The Max Planck Society has verified that the technology does indeed increase thermal conductivity as well. The Max Planck article here.

Beyond the fact that the technology works, Isonics seems to believe that it will scale... why would they be shipping wafers to large semiconductor vendors if they couldn't deliver?

As for the proliferation risk, that is entirely likely. Isonics already offers isotopically pure Oxygen 18, Carbon 12 and 13, and several other pure elements. As I understand it, they're also working to offer isotopically pure Germanium, so they're clearly going for products relevant to semiconductor manufacturers.

I would just like to note there are a number of cluster surveys going on out there. Including one, called the REFLEX survey, that uses the same data, the ROSAT All Sky Survey, as the MACS survey as a starting point.

What makes cluster surveys interesting is not just the scientific output but the various means of finding clusters people are trying. For example, the MACS survey mentioned above uses a Voronoi tesselation of the original X-ray data to detect and find sources. Other surveys use wavelet techniques, such as the SHARC survey (to pick one out of the air) or adaptive kernel smoothing, such as the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey.

Is it a bit odd to see what I do for a living on /.

[RANT] I become increasingly frustrated with the way science (especially astronomy) is portrayed on /. Although I'm happy that ppl take interest in this field, I feel that creating hypes or suggesting breakthroughs in every little article is just not the way to go. It may be the american way... I dunno. For NASA, pumped PR is essential for its survival. I'm also amazed that whereas /. readers are in general critical and sceptical, when the subjects changes to science they believe everything without actually trying to understand what is being said.[/RANT]

Finding clusters @ z = 0.3 is no big deal and wont challenge our current understanding of how quickly the Universe evolved into its current hierarchical structure of stars, galaxies and clusters. The current theoretical (numerical) view of the deep universe comes from the Virgo Consortium and predicts the existence of clusters on much higher redshifts. Wat is interesting is that it appears to be relatively easy to image large amounts of cluster. Clusters have been found out to a redshift of 1.2 (universe 40% of current age) and protoclusters at z = 2.2 (universe 25% of current age). CAVEAT: this MACS sample are selected on basis of their X-RAY properties; they were snatched from the ROSAT source list. Only heavy clusters with lots of infalling gas will produce much X-RAY emission, therefore biasing against smaller/less gass rich clusters. It is completely unclear if the study of high density regions (ie clusters) is representative of global picture galaxy and cluster evolution.

There is also a program underway called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; a huge project where they (amongst other things) try to find clusters by optical selection in an automated way.

Finally, the article states "The analysis is not yet complete, but it is already clear that our observations are in conflict with a high value of omega."

Translation: this does not mean that our current picture is challenged. To the contrary: this study very crudely confirms other analysis (spatial structure in cosmic microwave background) and arguments for low omega_matter. Low Omega_matter is the currently favoured model. Trying to present this study as a breakthrough in this respect is false.

But your telescope does not collect cosmic dust, or does it ?

Motif is a clone of Windows. Windows was a clone of the Mac. According to this Windows timeline, Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985 and even Windows 3.0 was released on May 22, 1990. According to the Motif FAQ, Motif 1.1.3 was released in August 1991. How then could Windows be a copy of Motif?

The "Unix Haters Handbook" claims that a "stated design goal" of Motic was to copy Windows. Look at the "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" section of "The X-Windows Disaster".

A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it "Motif."

If you're interested in learning more about the topic, a good place to start are the Classical Music Pages, light reading with the "layman" in mind. You can even try your hand at composition: here is a rather complete list of introductory sites on the topic.

Right here.

It really is a nice construct though. I am a big fan of anonymous functions. For instance you need to emit errors from a module that will be used various places for various things. Have a package variable with an error sub, by default "croak" but overrideable. That is fine for development and interactive scripts. Now if someone wants to use that in a cron, they can replace your croaks with a routine to page someone before dying...

Cheers,
Ben

His parting message.

Sad. But he and Tom C had one too many flamewars and he has left.

Incidentally Perl has a standard. It is the documentation. The cause of said flamewars is that Tom considers the documentation a standard and Ilya constantly wanted to play around with new features, add new constructs, etc.

Cheers,
Ben

PS Trivia. If $a is an anonymous subroutine then $a->(@args) calls the subroutine with those arguments. This is very useful because $handler{$foo}->($bar) is far cleaner and more understandable than &{$handler{$foo}}($bar). OTOH I am amused that such a nice feature got included in Perl on a bar bet...

for those not "up to speed' on this issue, here is a quick summarry:

A controversy is presently raging in certain physics journals and conferences over whether Einstein's speed of light barrier has been breached by light itself. In particular, Prof. Günther Nimtz and his group at the University of Cologne, Germany have published results showing that they used microwaves to transmit what might be interpreted as a signal, Mozart's 40th Symphony, over a path length of 11.4 centimeters at 4.7 times the speed of light.

The work of the Nimtz group raises the question of whether Einsteinian causality has in fact been violated and has spawned a controversy. The players in it, as is characteristic of careful scientists, have engaged in a careful tableau of discussion of various definitions of "velocity" and "causality" that skirt any claim of the fall of Einsteinian causality. One contingent has suggested that the FTL speed in the Nimtz experiment, like that of the Chiao group, might result from time-varying transmission probability in the barrier waveguide. The other argues that the filter advance of the Chiao group is peculiar to their filter type and does not apply to the Nimtz results.

What is meant by a signal has also been a matter of debate. For example, Mozart's 40th Symphony, while it is certainly a signal in some sense, does not contain modulation envelopes or switching edges that rise in 80 picoseconds and could thus place Einsteinian causality under stress by conspicuously arriving too early. Further, since any increase in barrier thickness brings with it a corresponding and exponentially increasing attenuation of any signal, it is not feasible to increase the barrier thickness to distances large enough that the causal implications of a constant barrier transit time become more apparent.

as a final note, there were those who also argued that Mozart's 40th Symphony was not information in the first place, and so relativity was not violated.

This brings a certain smile to the face, depending on you musical tastes.

It's not really hard to do shadow casting in hardware, in fact standard OpenGL can do it, with a bit of creative use. See Nvidia's ShadowMap demo for an example. The source for a lot of the latest effects is Wolfgang Heidrich's thesis. Lots of really cool ideas, needs a reasonable computer graphics background, though.

If you want to get higher precision and speed you'll need some extensions, but not a lot. Depth textures and copy from framebuffer are enough, and have been available on high-end sgis for years, so the design is sort of stable.

Moral: with a good API and some creative use you can get really cool effects. Hardware can make it fast, but we'll have to see if the ATI chip delivers on that part...

Funny, when I hear "Tom Christiansen" I think "hyperintelligent but self-righteous and totally insufferable zealot". But that's probably because I spend way too much time on perl5-porters.

I found an article on perl5porters that describes most of the current problems http:/ /www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2 000-03/msg00760.html

Its not quite a changelog, but the vast bulk of the info that people want is here .

You're thinking of quantum tunnelling and the Nimtz experiment.

This article is just in time to draw attention to the problems in Perl land.

... and a time to tear down what was built

will the last one leaving please turn the lights out, please?

This article is just in time to draw attention to the problems in Perl land.

... and a time to tear down what was built

will the last one leaving please turn the lights out, please?

If you read the whole original announcement, you find among other things, renaming "byte::" to "bytes::". Do you call this a bugfix? And what exactly is "default mkdir() mode argument to 0777"? Changing default mode arguments is definitely *NOT* a bugfix. Fixing a memory leak is a bugfix, but what about "generalize "%v" format into a flag for any integral format type: "%vd", "%v#o", "%*vX", etc are allowed"?

The reason I asked is because I have some doubts about the way Perl is evolving. When I used it first, about eight years ago, it seemed to me a pretty cool little language, but I never had the chance to use (and learn) it more extensively. A couple of months ago, I bought "The Perl CD Bookshelf" from O'Reilly and was surprised with all the features that had been added to Perl. Adding unneeded features is the quickest way to add bugs to a system. Look at the MS-Office or MS-Windows releases for the last ten years or so for further examples.

Seeing this announcement, if you only read the slashdot homepage, you think it's just bugfixes. If you go further and read the "announcement" itself, you see it labelled as a "development version", with "mostly bugfixes". Well, as I see it, if you are developing, you are not fixing bugs, you are adding new features. With new features come new bugs. Looking further, at the "original announcement", you need to be a Perl guru to understand all the notes.

I really like the Linux system, having a set of versions for adding features and a separate and parallel set of versions just for bugfixes. Although this system is sometimes not followed very religiously, it's an excellent basic principle. So, my original question still stands: is this version intended for fixing bugs or for adding new features or a little of each? Are they adding new bugs to Perl faster than they are debugging?

This rather long comment could have been avoided if you did what you preach and had actually read the whole original announcement. Clueless moderator, clueless AC, perhaps they are the same?

Moderators, take note:
1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything

If you read the whole original announcement, you find among other things, renaming "byte::" to "bytes::". Do you call this a bugfix? And what exactly is "default mkdir() mode argument to 0777"? Changing default mode arguments is definitely *NOT* a bugfix. Fixing a memory leak is a bugfix, but what about "generalize "%v" format into a flag for any integral format type: "%vd", "%v#o", "%*vX", etc are allowed"?

The reason I asked is because I have some doubts about the way Perl is evolving. When I used it first, about eight years ago, it seemed to me a pretty cool little language, but I never had the chance to use (and learn) it more extensively. A couple of months ago, I bought "The Perl CD Bookshelf" from O'Reilly and was surprised with all the features that had been added to Perl. Adding unneeded features is the quickest way to add bugs to a system. Look at the MS-Office or MS-Windows releases for the last ten years or so for further examples.

Seeing this announcement, if you only read the slashdot homepage, you think it's just bugfixes. If you go further and read the "announcement" itself, you see it labelled as a "development version", with "mostly bugfixes". Well, as I see it, if you are developing, you are not fixing bugs, you are adding new features. With new features come new bugs. Looking further, at the "original announcement", you need to be a Perl guru to understand all the notes.

I really like the Linux system, having a set of versions for adding features and a separate and parallel set of versions just for bugfixes. Although this system is sometimes not followed very religiously, it's an excellent basic principle. So, my original question still stands: is this version intended for fixing bugs or for adding new features or a little of each? Are they adding new bugs to Perl faster than they are debugging?

This rather long comment could have been avoided if you did what you preach and had actually read the whole original announcement. Clueless moderator, clueless AC, perhaps they are the same?

Moderators, take note:
1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything

I think we had this discussion before... In english its perfectly right to use viruses as plural, but in latin the plural would be vira, just take a look at Perseus.

I can`t go along with that. According to the Perseus Project the correct roman form for the plural would be vira. But for english use, you are perfectly right: viruses.

ok, I found the URL - well, not exactly, but try this linklist at the Albert-Einstein-Institut.

Ah yes; nothing like a good bit of linguistic autocracy. Language is a slippery beast; it doesn't have a spec. document and changes every time somebody uses it (actually, I think all European languages except English have some kind of official governing body to decide on `correctness', but for whom are they keeping their language `correct'?). Did you know that `gay' used to be a word without any connotations of homosexuality? No? Well, you do now. Why not start using it in its original sense more often? Because you don't care, because it's been absorbed into common usage now, because heck the word sounds better than homosexual and less offensive than so many other terms...

Or what about the word `album'; I mean, you only have to look here to see that rather than being anything to do with music it derives from the Latin word for white (at a guess because the tablets used for keeping Roman public records were white, which were engraved on, hence the word came to mean anything engraved upon, e.g. those funny vinyl discs on which the first `albums' were pressed).

So why not let the term `hacker' go rather than trying to `correct' the `ignorance' of the masses? You could say instead (with equal accuracy) that the term `cracker' was denoted nothing but a cheese-oriented biscuit until a computer programmer or two got tired of being associated with the wrong sort of people and agreed on a the clumsy term to denote them from The Other.

Try thinking about language as a tool of control and identification rather than communication next time you correct somebody else's use of it. You might end up noticing what you're really saying.

PS-- I sent a rant like this to Mr. Raymond after reading his definition of `hacker' in his jargon file. Got ignored, for one reason or another.

PPS-- Homework for next time: In light of the above, discuss the term `free software' (but not on Slashdot please :-) ).

At first sight the main reason they have for not using an OS license like GPL is that they care about the money they expect to get from commercial licensing... But I doubt it. It really seems to me that they ask companies to pay simply because they are stuck with the idea of "those who can should pay" and so for them OS doesn't seem fair enough. Sadly this seems to be a common critic to OS licenses, don't you agree?

For an interesting example of academic license see the ZIB Academic License which is applied to many mathematical programming software like SoPlex.