Slashdot Mirror
Perl 5.8.0 Released
twoshortplanks writes "The latest version of Perl has been released, with new features such as better Unicode support, a new threads implementation, new IO layer support, and a whole plethora of bundled modules - plus a wonderful collection of regression tests and new documentation. The release notes and links to mirrors for download are on dev.perl.org." This is not a release candidate, it's the real thing, representing over two years of work by patch pumpkin holder Jarkko Hietaniemi and his merry band. Hugo van der Sanden is the new pumpking for perl 5.10.
Many of you have noticed that CmdrTaco has changed a few things in Slashcode this week. The three changes I've observed so far are:
Karma displayed as an adjective
Karma score determines posting limit
Client IP addresses placed in readonly mode more easily
None of these are earth-shattering, so I'm going to cover them as a group.
Karma score determines posting limit:
Taco reminds everyone in this (non-archived) post that:
"KARMA DOES NOT MATTER". He goes on to prove this by making karma determine how many times you can post a day. Remember, you shouldn't use all caps, because caps is like being wrong. Here's a summary of how important karma actually is now, and while some of these details may be off, this reflects my best knowledge from reading Slashcode:
Karma: (PPD is posts per day)
26_50 : Post at 2, 25 PPD, Karma = Excellent
12_25 : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Good
1_12 : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Positive
Zero : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Neutral
-9_-1 : Post at 0, 2 PPD, Karma = Bad
-24_-10: Post at -1, 2 PPD, Karma = Terrible
Note that (as Taco points out) these are the default values in Slashcode atm; Slashdot itself may at any time be running with different values. Each IPID/SubnetId is allowed 10 AC posts per day, unless an IP is being 'abused', at which point things get more complicated. So the land of -1 trolling should be moving to threshold Zero, AC. Taco stated on IRC that the rate limiting change was made to prevent scripted crapflooding from -1 Accounts. I'd love to see a link to this crapflooding (I've never seen it) so if any of you have seen it, email me at operation_mongoose 'at' ziplip.com.
Karma adjectives:
Here's CmdrTaco's journal on the subject, and here's the non-archived discussion on the topic. Read it while you can, it will be deleted in two weeks. Taco states that he didn't just enable comments in his journal because he "didn't want people trolling his journal". Additionally, all the comments he made WRT to changes in the Karma system will be deleted. Make of this what you will.
Client IP addresses placed in readonly mode more easily
My details on this aren't very good, but as many have pointed out, the "readonly" error message seems to be popping up more often. The message is "You can't post to this page." and it appears when your IP address has been marked readonly. Basically, readonly mode means you're banned from posting anything, but you can still read the site. I think the only modification was one to the criteria for being placed in readonly mode, but I don't know exactly what the change is, only that pudge mentioned in IRC that he turned it up too high, and that now everything should be "Ok". If you've been placed in readonly mode, feel free to leave a comment and tell us what you did to get there. AFAIK, you can be placed in readonly mode for posting Offtopic comments as AC, or for posting a lot of comments that receive negative moderation as AC (ex: Windows is a pretty good O/S). That's just my experience; fill me in on yours.
That's all for now,
-s.