I think the majority of problems people have with Perl is when they want to learn Perl but have no interest in regular expressions. A 30 line program with a few non-trivial regular expressions looks deceptively simple, but is performing the job of a program that would be several thousand lines of code without the regular expressions.
Based on my own experience, I think management frequently drives the impression that perl code is unmanageable. I have had several occurrences where proof of concept code (like used in the "so is this the kind of thing you're trying to do?" requirement development phase) is rolled out straight into production with known bugs, no documentation, and since the project is "done", there will never be any effort put into cleaning up the code, documenting anything, or letting anyone know what does and doesn't work. I'd like to work in an environment where projects are taken more than 10% towards completion and management delegates technical decisions to competant, technical people. However, in the really real world, things don't always work that way. And when some new manager saves several thousand dollars by firing the expensive programmer and replacing him with a college student who wrote "programer" on a resume, the student and everyone else gets the impression that the code is unmanageable because it was never left in a state where it was intended to be maintained. Of course, no one will point out the root cause of bad management, so blaming Perl sounds good, since everyone "knows" that perl code is cryptic and convoluted. =)
There are a lot of people who are a net drain to our society and need to be removed. Please shoot someone who has it coming. If you're in an area with a corrupt law enforcement organization, they can probably provide you with a list of people who "attacked you and forced you to defend yourself using the minimum amount of force needed to stop the attack, in full compliance with the law." =)
But privatization would be a boon to law enforcement!
Imagine how productive they could be if they didn't have to spend a disproportionate amount of time on rare cases like murder, and could focus on traffic enforcement and copyright violations. Those are the kinds of activities that are pure profit centers. A well run government should be profitable.
Only whack jobs would think that a government should be of the people, by the people and for the people. Sensible people know that the role of government is to increase shareholder value at any cost to civil liberties. After all, the US Dollars that many of us know and love are just shares in the government. That should be obvious, seeing how many shares you need to fork over to buy enough politicians to get anything done. =)
A review board sounds good unless you understand how governments or any large organization works. In order to be "fair", they need to establish metrics that are used to gauge the people. Otherwise, they will not be able to improve their behavior. Once those metrics are determined, people will work towards the metrics. You can't reward people for serving the best interests of justice because that requires more information than anyone has. Whatever metrics you define, people will maximize those particular parts of their job to the exclusion of serving justice. It's called playing the system, and most people are going to do it.
Whether you focus on rewards or punishment, it doesn't matter. You're treating everyone like a bunch of children who need to be told exactly what to do. They will respond in kind. While it would be nice to believe people will be altruistic, serving the public good, that's not supported by the data.
Do you have a better idea to keep the utterly incompetant from turning to a life of crime? I thought the whole point of these projects was to keep those people away from projects that could work if they didn't get involved.
I see a more fundamental problem with the idea of proving innocence - if I were put into a position where I was forced to prove my innocence, I would perceive that as someone intending grievous harm to me and respond in kind. This would be a great boon for prosecutors since it would show that everyone is guilty after repeated measurements.
Spam is communication in the same way that hate speech is communication. It fits a strict legal definition, but that's the only way it qualifies communication. It's undesireable to all but a statistically irrelevant group and it's offensive to a large portion of its audience.
I'm all for prosecuting people who sell personal information. I do system architecture design for a marketing organization in a large bank. I've seen the kind of companies and people who are in the business of selling information "legitimately". They will do pretty much anything to get information, including buying it on the black market. They will even tell you that they do this if they think it will help them make a sale. This is normal for companies who sell name and address databases legally. People who sell email addresses are much seedier types. Good luck getting a real name from one of them.
The difference between spam and other forms of advertisement is who pays for the spam. I have to pay for enough bandwidth to handle the 10k+ pieces of spam sent to me every day if I want to be able to get the valid emails that are mixed in with those. The spammer doesn't pay for the spam. They pay for the botnets that are used to send their spam, but that's a stolen resource, so the price is pretty low and negotiable. What would you think if you had to pay postage and printing costs for every piece of junk mail you received? Spam is popular because it puts the cost of advertising on the victim and other unknowing third parties.
Last I checked, email was a form of communication. When I first got my email address, there was no such thing as spam. In the old days, we used to communicate with other people. Sure, some of them were stupid and annoying, but it was easy to filter them out.
Is there a legitimate use for providing the email addresses to others in bulk? When people ask me for an email address, it's usually for a mutual acquaintance. I've never had any reason to provide every email address of everyone I've ever seen, plus several million that I made up that are plausable based on common names and known valid domain names.
There's no difference between the people selling email lists and the spammers. They're both engaged in a for-profit business of making offers to people that are so bad that it only takes a small handful of morons out of every million people to have a profitable business model.
When it comes to spammers, I can think of many other places where I'd prefer they get thrown and forgotten. Active volcanoes spring to mind.
Fines don't work if the benefit of breaking the law exceeds the possible fine. Probation is the threat of being thrown in jail for getting caught again, which is slightly more legally binding than "don't do it again or I'll tell you not to do it again in a more stern voice". I get the impression that the kind of people that sell email adresses would consider the publishing of their crime and email address to be free advertising.
If there's not going to be any punishment, it shouldn't be a crime. If it's a crime, there should be a penalty for getting caught. Relatively few people are going to be caught, so the ones that are need to serve as an example to others.
As a sysadmin who has had to deal with spammers, summary execution is the only punishment I consider reasonable. Everything else is a compromise.
Cube farms are a secondary location where many of these attacks can be perpetrated. The only solution is to make each person work in a separate office. For added security, it would be best if each person connected to the network from a different location, unknown to most of the other people. Mandatory full time telecommuting is the only viable solution to combat these security risks.
I'd mod you insightful if I had points. However, you are being a bit mean to all of the people who will never actually become people themselves. The best they have to hope for is to follow directions and become the kind of automaton that others want them to be. And you want to take that away. Thank you for taking the time to make them feed bad - I hate them too. =)
Haven't you considered the possibility that a large number of people can really relate to corporate shill sellouts because they would like to one day be a corporate shill sellout themselves? American Idol shows us how many people there are who are completely out of touch with reality and would give anything for the dream of one day being a sellout.
Look at all the free advertising that they're getting out of a hostile response to one freeloader. Notice, this isn't a freeloader-turned-customer, this is a freeloader. I'm with a lot of other people here who said "Lycos is still around?"
This is a tremendous amount of free advertising that cost them NOTHING. Good will is touchy feely crap that the suits don't care about, but free advertising is like hitting the lottery. This guy will get a promotion for stirring up the pot. Yeah, it would be nice if the world weren't that callous, but it is.
I really doubt that the lack of Exchange support is what's stopping people from switching. I find it far more likely that the organization isn't committed to making the switch and will use that as a reason if pushed. Nobody is going to come out and admit that the plan they were promoting was half baked to begin with. Most people who think of switching to Linux want to do so because they heard it's the new in thing. If someone really knows the strengths and weaknesses and still wants to migrate, they're going to make it happen.
It sounds like Exchange or AD support for Linux may be a viable commercial product. The vast majority of users are businesses who would pay for the supported capability (after all, their fallback plan is to pay Microsoft). Instead of expecting someone to put forth the effort to pad their resume, make a strong case for someone to either pay people to do it or for someone to do it as their business. That's more likely to pay off than hoping someone will take on a lot of work for the good of the community.
The strength of OSS is that it exists. OSS is based on the idea that if I solve a problem for myself and share it with others, I lose nothing by making it available and stand to gain from contributions from others who have similar needs. The weakness is that the first person has to do a lot of work, so the justification needs to be good. The strength is that others with the same need do not need to reinvent the wheel.
Nobody is going to solve your problems for you. If you have a problem that isn't solved with OSS already, you have to decide if you're going to put in the effort to do it. If you do, it's up to you to decide if you're going to share it with others or keep it to yourself.
The most important userbase is the group of people who contribute to the project. The rest of the people who just use it are the cherry on top. It's silly to expect people to put a lot of effort into serving a community that has already decided not to help themselves.
Often times, the reason Linux is the wrong tool for the job because the job has the unstated requirement of being doable by people who only have experience with Windows.
He's definitely into young boys. When I met him, it was pretty obvious that he was a big pervert.
Even worse, he seemed like a total fake. He could take credit for things he picked up from other people, but didn't seem to be able to do himself the kinds of things he talked about. The thing that struck me as odd is how he didn't get how I was bouncing between machines at Netcom without using a password since they deleted any.rhosts files they found. I would think the mythical Crunch would realize that a script could create the file and.login could erase it a fraction of a second later.
That's why we have NTP. You set up a pool of time servers and have it set the clock on boot and keep it synchronized. If your internet connection is down, not knowing what time it is shouldn't be the biggest problem.
Realistically, anything important should be in a will to ensure that people know about it. Trusting a computer with anything important is a bad idea. Hard drives and power supplies fail all the time (in the sense of a service that you'd expect to keep available for several years).
It's much more likely that someone will discover a way to wipe out humanity than save it. In that case, do you really want someone to continue the work?
Anyway, with such an elaborate conspiracy theory, I'm disappointed that you haven't considered that the person was deliberately whacked. Anyone who finds an end to war, famine, etc would put millions of people out of work. Of course, there are the evil overlords who would like to see the guy whacked to maintain the status quo, but there are many more people who would do it because they don't want to see their entire town go through the loss of a major industry, like happened with Detroit. There's nothing more dangerous than people who have nothing to lose.
If the person who settles your estate doesn't recognize the value of your work and you haven't bothered to share it with those who do, then you're planning for the information to be lost at some point. A plan has to have more than one good idea - it has to have momentum to get going, and someone who keeps it all to themselves lacks that.
Each of the details in the bridge project have obvious consequences, so bridges have large budgets. A catastrophic failure in a bridge means people may die. A catastrophic failure in a software project usually results in more meetings.
If you tried to build bridges like companies try to build software, you'd end up with something that can handle 10% of the expected load, assumes that the bridge will not have to sustain hurricane force winds or any amount of moisture, and can be built in 6 months by 3 people, the leader being the guy who once saw a movie with a bridge in it. And by the way, the bridge must be built from the pile of styrofoam that doesn't fit in the dumpster. The saving grace for the 3 people with no budget or time is that the end users will be responsible for 100% of the testing.
That reminds me, I need to check on my current project which involves rewriting significant chunks of functionality that I've never seen before in the middle of our production cycle. Strangely, I don't remember ever seeing anyone replace major structural members on a bridge while it's being used.
Is it really that unreasonable to lock your workstation when you leave? The people who answer a phone call and have to keep hitting their computer to keep it from autolocking have a legitimate gripe, but when you leave, is it really that bad to lock your workstation? I lock mine every time I leave and unlock it every time I come back and find it's not that big of a deal. Does it really take more than 3-5 seconds to lock or unlock the machine?
Do most people have such limited access that there really is no reason to follow simple security measures? I may be biased since I'm likely to have open root shells at any point in time. With the power to do anything with machines comes the responsibility to not let any passerby do the same.
I'm glad you don't design server rooms I use. You've solved one problem while introducing various others based on a single superstitious belief.
Air conditioners are a common feature in server rooms. The ones used in this context maintain a certain humidity level. If the humidity is too high, there's risk of damage to the hardware, if it's too low it's easier for static to build up, which is bad for the hardware. When the humidity is too high, the air conditioners remove water from the air. This water needs to go somewhere, so a drain is a good choice. If the humidity is too low, they need a supply of water, for which tap water is sufficient.
Drains are also a common feature in server rooms because if water does get in there, they do not want to have the room flooded.
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I think the majority of problems people have with Perl is when they want to learn Perl but have no interest in regular expressions. A 30 line program with a few non-trivial regular expressions looks deceptively simple, but is performing the job of a program that would be several thousand lines of code without the regular expressions.
Based on my own experience, I think management frequently drives the impression that perl code is unmanageable. I have had several occurrences where proof of concept code (like used in the "so is this the kind of thing you're trying to do?" requirement development phase) is rolled out straight into production with known bugs, no documentation, and since the project is "done", there will never be any effort put into cleaning up the code, documenting anything, or letting anyone know what does and doesn't work. I'd like to work in an environment where projects are taken more than 10% towards completion and management delegates technical decisions to competant, technical people. However, in the really real world, things don't always work that way. And when some new manager saves several thousand dollars by firing the expensive programmer and replacing him with a college student who wrote "programer" on a resume, the student and everyone else gets the impression that the code is unmanageable because it was never left in a state where it was intended to be maintained. Of course, no one will point out the root cause of bad management, so blaming Perl sounds good, since everyone "knows" that perl code is cryptic and convoluted. =)
So word's already gotten out that you've implemented that plan. Good job. More communities need to be so fortunate. =)
I do it all the time. I get cash kickbacks from the cards I use, so I'd be crazy not to use a credit card instead of cash.
I have a problem with that.
There are a lot of people who are a net drain to our society and need to be removed. Please shoot someone who has it coming. If you're in an area with a corrupt law enforcement organization, they can probably provide you with a list of people who "attacked you and forced you to defend yourself using the minimum amount of force needed to stop the attack, in full compliance with the law." =)
But privatization would be a boon to law enforcement!
Imagine how productive they could be if they didn't have to spend a disproportionate amount of time on rare cases like murder, and could focus on traffic enforcement and copyright violations. Those are the kinds of activities that are pure profit centers. A well run government should be profitable.
Only whack jobs would think that a government should be of the people, by the people and for the people. Sensible people know that the role of government is to increase shareholder value at any cost to civil liberties. After all, the US Dollars that many of us know and love are just shares in the government. That should be obvious, seeing how many shares you need to fork over to buy enough politicians to get anything done. =)
A review board sounds good unless you understand how governments or any large organization works. In order to be "fair", they need to establish metrics that are used to gauge the people. Otherwise, they will not be able to improve their behavior. Once those metrics are determined, people will work towards the metrics. You can't reward people for serving the best interests of justice because that requires more information than anyone has. Whatever metrics you define, people will maximize those particular parts of their job to the exclusion of serving justice. It's called playing the system, and most people are going to do it.
Whether you focus on rewards or punishment, it doesn't matter. You're treating everyone like a bunch of children who need to be told exactly what to do. They will respond in kind. While it would be nice to believe people will be altruistic, serving the public good, that's not supported by the data.
Having files deleted is a minor inconvenience. Norton broke my arm when I plugged my USB drive in. Talk about a false positive hurting someone. =)
Do you have a better idea to keep the utterly incompetant from turning to a life of crime? I thought the whole point of these projects was to keep those people away from projects that could work if they didn't get involved.
I see a more fundamental problem with the idea of proving innocence - if I were put into a position where I was forced to prove my innocence, I would perceive that as someone intending grievous harm to me and respond in kind. This would be a great boon for prosecutors since it would show that everyone is guilty after repeated measurements.
Spam is communication in the same way that hate speech is communication. It fits a strict legal definition, but that's the only way it qualifies communication. It's undesireable to all but a statistically irrelevant group and it's offensive to a large portion of its audience.
I'm all for prosecuting people who sell personal information. I do system architecture design for a marketing organization in a large bank. I've seen the kind of companies and people who are in the business of selling information "legitimately". They will do pretty much anything to get information, including buying it on the black market. They will even tell you that they do this if they think it will help them make a sale. This is normal for companies who sell name and address databases legally. People who sell email addresses are much seedier types. Good luck getting a real name from one of them.
The difference between spam and other forms of advertisement is who pays for the spam. I have to pay for enough bandwidth to handle the 10k+ pieces of spam sent to me every day if I want to be able to get the valid emails that are mixed in with those. The spammer doesn't pay for the spam. They pay for the botnets that are used to send their spam, but that's a stolen resource, so the price is pretty low and negotiable. What would you think if you had to pay postage and printing costs for every piece of junk mail you received? Spam is popular because it puts the cost of advertising on the victim and other unknowing third parties.
Last I checked, email was a form of communication. When I first got my email address, there was no such thing as spam. In the old days, we used to communicate with other people. Sure, some of them were stupid and annoying, but it was easy to filter them out.
Is there a legitimate use for providing the email addresses to others in bulk? When people ask me for an email address, it's usually for a mutual acquaintance. I've never had any reason to provide every email address of everyone I've ever seen, plus several million that I made up that are plausable based on common names and known valid domain names.
There's no difference between the people selling email lists and the spammers. They're both engaged in a for-profit business of making offers to people that are so bad that it only takes a small handful of morons out of every million people to have a profitable business model.
When it comes to spammers, I can think of many other places where I'd prefer they get thrown and forgotten. Active volcanoes spring to mind.
Fines don't work if the benefit of breaking the law exceeds the possible fine. Probation is the threat of being thrown in jail for getting caught again, which is slightly more legally binding than "don't do it again or I'll tell you not to do it again in a more stern voice". I get the impression that the kind of people that sell email adresses would consider the publishing of their crime and email address to be free advertising.
If there's not going to be any punishment, it shouldn't be a crime. If it's a crime, there should be a penalty for getting caught. Relatively few people are going to be caught, so the ones that are need to serve as an example to others.
As a sysadmin who has had to deal with spammers, summary execution is the only punishment I consider reasonable. Everything else is a compromise.
Cube farms are a secondary location where many of these attacks can be perpetrated. The only solution is to make each person work in a separate office. For added security, it would be best if each person connected to the network from a different location, unknown to most of the other people. Mandatory full time telecommuting is the only viable solution to combat these security risks.
I'd mod you insightful if I had points. However, you are being a bit mean to all of the people who will never actually become people themselves. The best they have to hope for is to follow directions and become the kind of automaton that others want them to be. And you want to take that away. Thank you for taking the time to make them feed bad - I hate them too. =)
Haven't you considered the possibility that a large number of people can really relate to corporate shill sellouts because they would like to one day be a corporate shill sellout themselves? American Idol shows us how many people there are who are completely out of touch with reality and would give anything for the dream of one day being a sellout.
Look at all the free advertising that they're getting out of a hostile response to one freeloader. Notice, this isn't a freeloader-turned-customer, this is a freeloader. I'm with a lot of other people here who said "Lycos is still around?"
This is a tremendous amount of free advertising that cost them NOTHING. Good will is touchy feely crap that the suits don't care about, but free advertising is like hitting the lottery. This guy will get a promotion for stirring up the pot. Yeah, it would be nice if the world weren't that callous, but it is.
I really doubt that the lack of Exchange support is what's stopping people from switching. I find it far more likely that the organization isn't committed to making the switch and will use that as a reason if pushed. Nobody is going to come out and admit that the plan they were promoting was half baked to begin with. Most people who think of switching to Linux want to do so because they heard it's the new in thing. If someone really knows the strengths and weaknesses and still wants to migrate, they're going to make it happen.
It sounds like Exchange or AD support for Linux may be a viable commercial product. The vast majority of users are businesses who would pay for the supported capability (after all, their fallback plan is to pay Microsoft). Instead of expecting someone to put forth the effort to pad their resume, make a strong case for someone to either pay people to do it or for someone to do it as their business. That's more likely to pay off than hoping someone will take on a lot of work for the good of the community.
The strength of OSS is that it exists. OSS is based on the idea that if I solve a problem for myself and share it with others, I lose nothing by making it available and stand to gain from contributions from others who have similar needs. The weakness is that the first person has to do a lot of work, so the justification needs to be good. The strength is that others with the same need do not need to reinvent the wheel.
Nobody is going to solve your problems for you. If you have a problem that isn't solved with OSS already, you have to decide if you're going to put in the effort to do it. If you do, it's up to you to decide if you're going to share it with others or keep it to yourself.
The most important userbase is the group of people who contribute to the project. The rest of the people who just use it are the cherry on top. It's silly to expect people to put a lot of effort into serving a community that has already decided not to help themselves.
That's a good summary of the problem.
Often times, the reason Linux is the wrong tool for the job because the job has the unstated requirement of being doable by people who only have experience with Windows.
He's definitely into young boys. When I met him, it was pretty obvious that he was a big pervert.
.rhosts files they found. I would think the mythical Crunch would realize that a script could create the file and .login could erase it a fraction of a second later.
Even worse, he seemed like a total fake. He could take credit for things he picked up from other people, but didn't seem to be able to do himself the kinds of things he talked about. The thing that struck me as odd is how he didn't get how I was bouncing between machines at Netcom without using a password since they deleted any
That's why we have NTP. You set up a pool of time servers and have it set the clock on boot and keep it synchronized. If your internet connection is down, not knowing what time it is shouldn't be the biggest problem.
Realistically, anything important should be in a will to ensure that people know about it. Trusting a computer with anything important is a bad idea. Hard drives and power supplies fail all the time (in the sense of a service that you'd expect to keep available for several years).
It's much more likely that someone will discover a way to wipe out humanity than save it. In that case, do you really want someone to continue the work?
Anyway, with such an elaborate conspiracy theory, I'm disappointed that you haven't considered that the person was deliberately whacked. Anyone who finds an end to war, famine, etc would put millions of people out of work. Of course, there are the evil overlords who would like to see the guy whacked to maintain the status quo, but there are many more people who would do it because they don't want to see their entire town go through the loss of a major industry, like happened with Detroit. There's nothing more dangerous than people who have nothing to lose.
If the person who settles your estate doesn't recognize the value of your work and you haven't bothered to share it with those who do, then you're planning for the information to be lost at some point. A plan has to have more than one good idea - it has to have momentum to get going, and someone who keeps it all to themselves lacks that.
Each of the details in the bridge project have obvious consequences, so bridges have large budgets. A catastrophic failure in a bridge means people may die. A catastrophic failure in a software project usually results in more meetings.
If you tried to build bridges like companies try to build software, you'd end up with something that can handle 10% of the expected load, assumes that the bridge will not have to sustain hurricane force winds or any amount of moisture, and can be built in 6 months by 3 people, the leader being the guy who once saw a movie with a bridge in it. And by the way, the bridge must be built from the pile of styrofoam that doesn't fit in the dumpster. The saving grace for the 3 people with no budget or time is that the end users will be responsible for 100% of the testing.
That reminds me, I need to check on my current project which involves rewriting significant chunks of functionality that I've never seen before in the middle of our production cycle. Strangely, I don't remember ever seeing anyone replace major structural members on a bridge while it's being used.
Is it really that unreasonable to lock your workstation when you leave? The people who answer a phone call and have to keep hitting their computer to keep it from autolocking have a legitimate gripe, but when you leave, is it really that bad to lock your workstation? I lock mine every time I leave and unlock it every time I come back and find it's not that big of a deal. Does it really take more than 3-5 seconds to lock or unlock the machine?
Do most people have such limited access that there really is no reason to follow simple security measures? I may be biased since I'm likely to have open root shells at any point in time. With the power to do anything with machines comes the responsibility to not let any passerby do the same.
I'm glad you don't design server rooms I use. You've solved one problem while introducing various others based on a single superstitious belief.
Air conditioners are a common feature in server rooms. The ones used in this context maintain a certain humidity level. If the humidity is too high, there's risk of damage to the hardware, if it's too low it's easier for static to build up, which is bad for the hardware. When the humidity is too high, the air conditioners remove water from the air. This water needs to go somewhere, so a drain is a good choice. If the humidity is too low, they need a supply of water, for which tap water is sufficient.
Drains are also a common feature in server rooms because if water does get in there, they do not want to have the room flooded.