SuSE have changed their policy towards continuous updated during the last year or two. Nowadays the official updates for the rpms you bought on the CD are limited to serious bugfixes (if you're lucky) and security updates.
Version numbr upgrades for mozilla and the kernel itself are only available on an unofficial basis from the/pub/projects and/pub/people tress respectively. These are in a perpetual state of beta (but this is deliberate, that is why they are there). They place any major updates to XFree86, KDE and GNOME in a separate "supplementary" tree. The READMEs say all of these are not officially supported so you install them at your own risk. Moreover the quality of these RPMs, particularly as regards dependency resolution, is much lower than the older ones in the main distribution. i.e. there are almost always some fairly severe dependency issues. For example if you upgrade the mozilla version then many of the gnome apps stop working as they depend on the mozilla libs.
It might seem like a retrograde step from the good ole days when you had an unending supply of free upgrades but lets face it, everybody is hurtng these days and if SuSE didn't take a more balanced approach they would soon be out of business.
It particularly galls me to see so many people admitting that they won't pay SuSE a farthing and just prefer to leech ISO's off their ftp site. Keep this up people, and soon there'll be nothing left but debian and slackware. Yeah, just like the good old days.
It's not meant as a personal insult to the public but as a purely defensive measure. The industries lobbying for this tax are fighting for their very lives, as they see it.
The advent of digital reproduction and transmission technologies threatens the content industries with extinction in the long run, because they will be unable to maintain monopoly control of the particular content they sell. Once the first copy of something has been sold, it is effectively in the public domain and that's that, regardless of what the law says (because the public have basically demonstrated over and over again that they don't much care for IP protection laws and just don't obey them).
To restate this in more forward-looking terms: the public want a change in the law, and in a democracy a public that stubbornly resists re-education propaganda must eventually get its own way (even if it takes a long time).
But to repeal IP copy restriction laws would be inimical to the profitability, and therefore potentially to the bare existence, of the content industries.
In response those industries want to be partly state funded in order to support their continued existence. It's not possible to ask for this to come out of general taxation for several reasons including a worldwide political trend towards free market economics, and existing international agreements concerning fair trade.
But a tax on the computer hardware used to rip off their IP is more easily defended. It's really analogous in principle to the UK's TV and radio licencing schemes where a fee is payable by anybody in Britain who owns a radio or TV set, and which is used to fund public sector broadcasting. It's also reminiscent (in a reverse sense) of the "polluter pays" principle being used in some countries to fund environmental cleanup by charging the most tax to industries who make the most mess.
It's often said that the situation to be faced by the content industries in the near future is similar in some superficial respects to that faced by the buggy whip manufacturing industry which began to disappear early last century when people abandoned horse-drawn buggies for motor cars.
But it does differ in one very important respect which proponents of IP derestriction don't always appreciate: the world didn't really miss the buggy whip manufacturers because we all had cars. But we might miss a vanished content industry when we find that there is no more big-budget content being produced because it has become no longer possible to make big money doing so.
Whether you are prepared to buy that argument of course depends on where the best trade-off lies between freedom to copy on the one hand and a continuing supply of new hollywood blockbuster movies and/or expensively produced music recordings with which to feed this copying, on the other.
This argument says that if we can all get by on a diet of low budget college project/art house movies and raw, cheaply produced music that doesn't need much studio time production, then we can look forward to a future of free copying and no need for these industries to be supported by state-donated or -enforced subsidy. But, it concludes, there will be no more Schwarzenegger movies or Michael Jackson albums.
I personally think that argument is flawed and that there will still be big-budget content, however it will be funded differently - by embedded advertising and merchandising rather than retail sales. Unfortunately that means this type of mass-market content is doomed to become a caricature of what is now; overhyped, market saturated, blandly tailored for the average palate and merchandised to the point of nausea.
For those this doesn't suit, we will of course still have our new grassroots culture, word-of-mouth marketed and freely copyable. Quality for the discerning connoiseur!
Now... where's my pirated collection of local amateur drama group DVDs? And my bootlegged CD of water-filled soda bottle music recorded live in his kitchen by Fred from next door? Oh there they
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
Please read this comment which is an elaboration on this very question of identity and this response which really ought to settle the question for anybody, once and for all. I hope.
The split second after your brain was transferred to another entity it would stop being you. There are now 2 entities with the same intelligence and memories up to X time. At that point any new memory would be unique to either entity.
And hence you expose the fallacy of your own argument that there must be continuity and uniqueness for the self to remain the self.
What you failed to notice was that this vaunted "difference in experience" which separates the copy from the original after a few moments have elapsed - this is the very same difference which separates you as you are now, from you as you will be tomorrow.
It is logically necessary that mere experience either A:does or B:does not invalidate one's identity.
If (A) it does not, then you are you, your whole life long, and the copy *is* in all important respects as much the original as the original is itself.
But if (B) it does, then the future you is not you, and the organic survivor of a nondestructive upload is not the same person as he was before the upload any more than the emulation is.
In the latter case (which is the closest of these two propositions to what you are claiming in the above statement) there is really nothing to get upset about as far as uploading is concerned, because whether you participate or not, that "individual" you identify as yourself, housed in your natural body, will in just a few moments be utterly gone from the universe anyway and be replaced by somebody else whom you seem to regard as a relative stranger.
The continuity/identity fallacy you argued for is the same fundamental error that almost everybody makes when considering the question of whether uploading just creates a useless new copy or actually confers immortality (including, perhaps surprisingly William Gibson himself, as he once revealed during a TV interview).
I believe the error arises because of a class of category errors that (contemporary) humans intuitively make about the nature of the self. They treat the self logically as if it were a material thing and thus incapable of being duplicated while still retaining its basic individual properties. But the self is patently an immaterial thing: like a story, a song, an idea, a GPL'd linux kernel. All of these things can be copied indefinitely without altering their nature in the smallest degree. It's true that you can take a copy of any of these and modify both copies each in a different way, and then they are no longer the same. But it wasn't the duplication process that destroyed their identity with one another, it was what happened to each of them afterwards.
If you can grasp the significance of this point you will have made a huge leap forward in understanding both the nature of the self... and the contents of my sig:o)
The Perl 6 feature lineup even as it was two apoocalypses ago made it clear that the goal this time is a mature and fully-featured object oriented language that also retains all the neat high level features of perl-as-we-know-it.
This will make Perl an attractive contender for serious application development; something which it came reasonably close to in late Perl5 but didn't quite get there because while you could do most things in a consensually "proper" way, the roll-your-own methodology just wasn't convincing enough for pointy haired project managers.
The primary difference with Perl6 is that it will have full support for strict(ish) typing and object orientation which makes it suitable for large projects where it's impractical to expect programmer A to know anything about how programmer Z's module is implemented internally and vice versa.
The new feature set (together with Perl's availability on a wide range of platforms and the huge range of freely available interfaces on CPAN) means that Java and.NET will be facing some stiff competition in just about every conceivable application niche.
If the speed improvements are genuine then (assuming that one were in a position to choose) for probably the first time ever we will be in a position where there is hardly any real need to maintain skills in multiple languages as Perl will be at least adequate for the vast majority of implementations. It's not unreasonable to suppose the list of exclusions being limited to CPU bound code in high-performance content servers (eg RDBMS, HTTP) and real-time and embedded apps requiring hand-coded assembler or at least tightly optimised C.
Whether you agree with that or recoil in horror at the thought of your favourite language being marginalised, Perl is clearly not just a "glue" language any more. It's about to become a fully-fledged enterprise application development platform.
I'm sure you've already guessed, but for the record I am very much looking forward to this.
There is one fly in the ointment I guess. Perl, like C, is very free-form in terms of what it lets you do but the flip side of that coin is that such languages also let you write dangerously unstructured and unmaintainable code. They require good training and a degree of self discipline to use well. Self taught programmers who didn't have strict typing and nested scoping enforced on them at the beginning of their coding career almost inevitably tend to grow up writing code that is less secure and harder to read than do those who learned back in their college days to associate variable declaration at the wrong level of scope with lower assignment grades and some stern finger wagging from their tutor.
The new Perl will continue to make the impossible possible and the merely hard very easy, but for the first time it will provide support for a more formal structure where that is considered a good thing.
Remember though that Perl is still very much a grassroots phenomenon. Whether this hits anybody's radar screen out in the real world has to depend on how well and how rapidly it is taken up by the Perl community. i.e. upon the willingness of existing Perl code monkeys to grab the inevitable (presumably three-humped) Camel Book, learn the new features and use them deliberately to adopt a more structured and more scalable coding style.
It's on this point I think that Perl6 will succeed or fail. We will need plenty of real world examples out there so that new users have something from which to learn righteous coding principles, and so that sceptical project managers will see successful implentations from which to draw confidence and inspiration.
support for Israel is a matter of obedience to God.
In Genesis 12:1-3, God told Abram [...]
Now let's see... which bunch of people was it who wrote that book of Genesis? Was it, by any chance, the Hebrews? Could it be that they might possibly thenselves benefit from convincing the world of this?
I think we've fairly well established in the discussion below that everybody in the whole world hates info with a vengeance and would prefer to go back to using man(1).
IIRC this project sprang into being in order to solve one of Richard Stallman pet hates (figures...thats why the emacs interface).
Of course, the question now is...who's going to email him to tell him the results of our informal vote?
I think you have hit the nail on the head. The definition of "to google" must refer to searching with Google itself, and surely this is the context in which it is normally used in practice. Otherwise we'd be saying "to altavista" or something.
Why the hell would anybody want to use any other search engine than Google anyway? I used to use half a dozen different search engines, then relied heavily on Metacrawler for a while. But ever since Google arrived I've never found a need to go to any other search engine. There's nothing else out there anywhere near as good.
This idea to let ISPs charge for spam is preposterous. Shein is just looking to make money out of our discomfort. He argues that charging is a better solution because you can't stop spam - but if you can find a spammer to charge him then you can just as easily find him to stop him and make him pay a fine.
Red alert everybody, if he gets enough industry support behind this idea and throws enough money at Washington, we'll *never* see an end to the spam.
Even with ISP charging, spam will always be cheaper than traditional mail and most other forms of advertising, and if legalized in this way I strongly suspect that we'll see the quantity of spam increase rather than the opposite.
There is definitely something to that argument about scripting languages having an advantage where they require less code.
The "right" language to solve a particular language in is surely whichever one offers the best fit to the problem domain. That means availability of appropriate high-level constructs.
So for a problem in which most of the intelligence resides in the particular class structure employed, use a language which makes it easy to implement a class hierarchy like Smalltalk or Java or one of the object oriented C's (not necessarily C++).
For a problem in which the main meat is in processing or accessing poorly structured data (like text) or data in different formats from a variety of different sources, choose Perl.
Thats not to say that you can't do OO in Perl, I know that you can, and you can even get good at it, but if I suggest that everybody should just do everything in Perl I'm bound to get shot down in flames:o)
The point is just this: choose the language that does as much of the work for you as possible.
You had a rented van? and a hotel room? Bah! when I were a lad on tour, we all had to share a hoop and a stick between us! And after the show we had to sleep in it!
I remember after one particularly exhausting show, on the last night of that tour: we all trudged out to the parking lot only to discover that some thieving bastard had stolen our hoop and stick. Damn!
Poor Mick, our drummer, was rather tired and this was just the last straw for him. He just burst into tears and wailed "How the hell are we going to get home?".
If it weren't for the timely intervention of the French 300-odd years ago, the American freedom fighters would most likely have *lost* the War of Independence, and the USA wouldn't exist today. Don't forget, your own Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, symbolizing the two nations' common ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity.
It's rather disappointing to see Americans so ready to hate their friends just because those friends should be, on occasion, strong enough to take a moral stance against them. This is the behaviour one might expect of a maladjusted child, not that of a civilised adult.
Even the best of friends can't always be expected to agree. It's no basis for racial hatred, and to show such petulant disrespect for another civilised nation, even in jest, is not only infantile but dangerously arrogant.
All right, we'll just store all the nuclear waste at your house. Then there's no need for bickering at all.
Oh yeah and as regards "stored properly", we're depending on you to figure out how to ensure the stuff doesn't escape from your house by accident and also to ensure that no-one tampers with it. For the next 100,000 years or so.
Let's not lose sight of the significance of Richard Stallman's massive achievement, which was to kick start the entire free software movement that eventually led to the burgeoning world of open source we enjoy today. Back around 1990 before the web, before Linux even existed, it was already possible to get unixalike software tools from the FSF to run on non-Unix operating systems. Maybe you ought to consider just how far would linux have got without any software to run on it. An OS kernel on its own isn't a general purpose computing environment. You can use it for embedded applications but that's all unless you have a shell, command line tools, networking software etc.
As things are, the Linux kernel was mostly responsible for the sudden explosion of interest in free software but it really would have counted for very little if there hadn't already been a fertile free software environment ready and waiting for a handy free kernel to come along and complete the picture.
In my view we all owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Stallman and his zealous pursuit of an ideal. He was a driving force among the first few who helped to create something out of nothing, without him Microsoft might well have had the entire field all to themselves by now.
Actually Clarke's novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on the movie screenplay (which was in turn inspired by one of Clarke's short stories The Sentinel). It's the only example I can think of where a significant novel resulted from a film rather than the other way round.
Will some kind soul blessed with moderator privilege tonight please moderate up the above comment...
Thank you.
Re:Please don't give 'Funny' comments to interview
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 1
Yes - that's it, remove the moderation cap so that the score is basically a vote. Cripes, why didn't anybody think of that before? Mr Malda, please take note...
I read somewhere that teflon (PolyTetraFluoroEthylene?) is necessary in building spacecraft where it is used to lubricate bearing surfaces, because normal oil-based lubricants evaporate away too quickly in vacuum.
Also listed in the calculation are six flights a year for communications satellites, like those made famous by Comsat, Inc. Communications satellites fit Columbia just perfectly; NASA says three of them could go up on one shuttle ride.
How many communications satellites are now being launched? Two a year. Intelsat, the international consortium that is the largest private space user (Comsat is part of it), plans to send up two satellites in the next three years, a spokesman says. The satellite communications business is expanding, with RCA, Western Union, AT&T, and SBS (a venture of IBM, Aetna, and Comsat) planning to enter. But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
LOL! "Extraordinary breakthrough in technology" indeed! Like the spread of satellite tv, more intercontinental telephone calls, and large-scale domestic and commercial internet use maybe? Isn't it odd that hardly anybody back in those days saw the comms revolution coming...I don't know how many comsat launches there are per year now but I'm betting those figures no longer seem quite so far-fetched.
Slashdot Mirror
SuSE have changed their policy towards continuous updated during the last year or two. Nowadays the official updates for the rpms you bought on the CD are limited to serious bugfixes (if you're lucky) and security updates.
/pub/projects and /pub/people tress respectively. These are in a perpetual state of beta (but this is deliberate, that is why they are there). They place any major updates to XFree86, KDE and GNOME in a separate "supplementary" tree. The READMEs say all of these are not officially supported so you install them at your own risk. Moreover the quality of these RPMs, particularly as regards dependency resolution, is much lower than the older ones in the main distribution. i.e. there are almost always some fairly severe dependency issues. For example if you upgrade the mozilla version then many of the gnome apps stop working as they depend on the mozilla libs.
Version numbr upgrades for mozilla and the kernel itself are only available on an unofficial basis from the
It might seem like a retrograde step from the good ole days when you had an unending supply of free upgrades but lets face it, everybody is hurtng these days and if SuSE didn't take a more balanced approach they would soon be out of business.
It particularly galls me to see so many people admitting that they won't pay SuSE a farthing and just prefer to leech ISO's off their ftp site. Keep this up people, and soon there'll be nothing left but debian and slackware. Yeah, just like the good old days.
At last, someone who "gets it"!
The advent of digital reproduction and transmission technologies threatens the content industries with extinction in the long run, because they will be unable to maintain monopoly control of the particular content they sell. Once the first copy of something has been sold, it is effectively in the public domain and that's that, regardless of what the law says (because the public have basically demonstrated over and over again that they don't much care for IP protection laws and just don't obey them).
To restate this in more forward-looking terms: the public want a change in the law, and in a democracy a public that stubbornly resists re-education propaganda must eventually get its own way (even if it takes a long time).
But to repeal IP copy restriction laws would be inimical to the profitability, and therefore potentially to the bare existence, of the content industries.
In response those industries want to be partly state funded in order to support their continued existence. It's not possible to ask for this to come out of general taxation for several reasons including a worldwide political trend towards free market economics, and existing international agreements concerning fair trade.
But a tax on the computer hardware used to rip off their IP is more easily defended. It's really analogous in principle to the UK's TV and radio licencing schemes where a fee is payable by anybody in Britain who owns a radio or TV set, and which is used to fund public sector broadcasting. It's also reminiscent (in a reverse sense) of the "polluter pays" principle being used in some countries to fund environmental cleanup by charging the most tax to industries who make the most mess.
It's often said that the situation to be faced by the content industries in the near future is similar in some superficial respects to that faced by the buggy whip manufacturing industry which began to disappear early last century when people abandoned horse-drawn buggies for motor cars.
But it does differ in one very important respect which proponents of IP derestriction don't always appreciate: the world didn't really miss the buggy whip manufacturers because we all had cars. But we might miss a vanished content industry when we find that there is no more big-budget content being produced because it has become no longer possible to make big money doing so.
Whether you are prepared to buy that argument of course depends on where the best trade-off lies between freedom to copy on the one hand and a continuing supply of new hollywood blockbuster movies and/or expensively produced music recordings with which to feed this copying, on the other.
This argument says that if we can all get by on a diet of low budget college project/art house movies and raw, cheaply produced music that doesn't need much studio time production, then we can look forward to a future of free copying and no need for these industries to be supported by state-donated or -enforced subsidy. But, it concludes, there will be no more Schwarzenegger movies or Michael Jackson albums.
I personally think that argument is flawed and that there will still be big-budget content, however it will be funded differently - by embedded advertising and merchandising rather than retail sales. Unfortunately that means this type of mass-market content is doomed to become a caricature of what is now; overhyped, market saturated, blandly tailored for the average palate and merchandised to the point of nausea.
For those this doesn't suit, we will of course still have our new grassroots culture, word-of-mouth marketed and freely copyable. Quality for the discerning connoiseur! Now... where's my pirated collection of local amateur drama group DVDs? And my bootlegged CD of water-filled soda bottle music recorded live in his kitchen by Fred from next door? Oh there they
Please read this comment which is an elaboration on this very question of identity and
this response which really ought to settle the question for anybody, once and for all. I hope.
What you failed to notice was that this vaunted "difference in experience" which separates the copy from the original after a few moments have elapsed - this is the very same difference which separates you as you are now, from you as you will be tomorrow.
It is logically necessary that mere experience either A:does or B:does not invalidate one's identity.
If (A) it does not, then you are you, your whole life long, and the copy *is* in all important respects as much the original as the original is itself.
But if (B) it does, then the future you is not you, and the organic survivor of a nondestructive upload is not the same person as he was before the upload any more than the emulation is.
In the latter case (which is the closest of these two propositions to what you are claiming in the above statement) there is really nothing to get upset about as far as uploading is concerned, because whether you participate or not, that "individual" you identify as yourself, housed in your natural body, will in just a few moments be utterly gone from the universe anyway and be replaced by somebody else whom you seem to regard as a relative stranger.
The continuity/identity fallacy you argued for is the same fundamental error that almost everybody makes when considering the question of whether uploading just creates a useless new copy or actually confers immortality (including, perhaps surprisingly William Gibson himself, as he once revealed during a TV interview).
I believe the error arises because of a class of category errors that (contemporary) humans intuitively make about the nature of the self. They treat the self logically as if it were a material thing and thus incapable of being duplicated while still retaining its basic individual properties. But the self is patently an immaterial thing: like a story, a song, an idea, a GPL'd linux kernel. All of these things can be copied indefinitely without altering their nature in the smallest degree. It's true that you can take a copy of any of these and modify both copies each in a different way, and then they are no longer the same. But it wasn't the duplication process that destroyed their identity with one another, it was what happened to each of them afterwards.
If you can grasp the significance of this point you will have made a huge leap forward in understanding both the nature of the self... and the contents of my sig :o)
This will make Perl an attractive contender for serious application development; something which it came reasonably close to in late Perl5 but didn't quite get there because while you could do most things in a consensually "proper" way, the roll-your-own methodology just wasn't convincing enough for pointy haired project managers.
The primary difference with Perl6 is that it will have full support for strict(ish) typing and object orientation which makes it suitable for large projects where it's impractical to expect programmer A to know anything about how programmer Z's module is implemented internally and vice versa.
The new feature set (together with Perl's availability on a wide range of platforms and the huge range of freely available interfaces on CPAN) means that Java and .NET will be facing some stiff competition in just about every conceivable application niche.
If the speed improvements are genuine then (assuming that one were in a position to choose) for probably the first time ever we will be in a position where there is hardly any real need to maintain skills in multiple languages as Perl will be at least adequate for the vast majority of implementations. It's not unreasonable to suppose the list of exclusions being limited to CPU bound code in high-performance content servers (eg RDBMS, HTTP) and real-time and embedded apps requiring hand-coded assembler or at least tightly optimised C.
Whether you agree with that or recoil in horror at the thought of your favourite language being marginalised, Perl is clearly not just a "glue" language any more. It's about to become a fully-fledged enterprise application development platform.
I'm sure you've already guessed, but for the record I am very much looking forward to this.
There is one fly in the ointment I guess. Perl, like C, is very free-form in terms of what it lets you do but the flip side of that coin is that such languages also let you write dangerously unstructured and unmaintainable code. They require good training and a degree of self discipline to use well. Self taught programmers who didn't have strict typing and nested scoping enforced on them at the beginning of their coding career almost inevitably tend to grow up writing code that is less secure and harder to read than do those who learned back in their college days to associate variable declaration at the wrong level of scope with lower assignment grades and some stern finger wagging from their tutor.
The new Perl will continue to make the impossible possible and the merely hard very easy, but for the first time it will provide support for a more formal structure where that is considered a good thing.
Remember though that Perl is still very much a grassroots phenomenon. Whether this hits anybody's radar screen out in the real world has to depend on how well and how rapidly it is taken up by the Perl community. i.e. upon the willingness of existing Perl code monkeys to grab the inevitable (presumably three-humped) Camel Book, learn the new features and use them deliberately to adopt a more structured and more scalable coding style.
It's on this point I think that Perl6 will succeed or fail. We will need plenty of real world examples out there so that new users have something from which to learn righteous coding principles, and so that sceptical project managers will see successful implentations from which to draw confidence and inspiration.
Now let's see... which bunch of people was it who wrote that book of Genesis? Was it, by any chance, the Hebrews? Could it be that they might possibly thenselves benefit from convincing the world of this?
I think we've fairly well established in the discussion below that everybody in the whole world hates info with a vengeance and would prefer to go back to using man(1).
IIRC this project sprang into being in order to solve one of Richard Stallman pet hates (figures...thats why the emacs interface).
Of course, the question now is...who's going to email him to tell him the results of our informal vote?
Taco - why dont you read your own site any more? Do you surf somewhere else these days? Let us in on the secret and maybe we could come and join you.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. The definition of "to google" must refer to searching with Google itself, and surely this is the context in which it is normally used in practice. Otherwise we'd be saying "to altavista" or something.
Why the hell would anybody want to use any other search engine than Google anyway? I used to use half a dozen different search engines, then relied heavily on Metacrawler for a while. But ever since Google arrived I've never found a need to go to any other search engine. There's nothing else out there anywhere near as good.
This idea to let ISPs charge for spam is preposterous. Shein is just looking to make money out of our discomfort. He argues that charging is a better solution because you can't stop spam - but if you can find a spammer to charge him then you can just as easily find him to stop him and make him pay a fine.
Red alert everybody, if he gets enough industry support behind this idea and throws enough money at Washington, we'll *never* see an end to the spam.
Even with ISP charging, spam will always be cheaper than traditional mail and most other forms of advertising, and if legalized in this way I strongly suspect that we'll see the quantity of spam increase rather than the opposite.
There is definitely something to that argument about scripting languages having an advantage where they require less code.
:o)
The "right" language to solve a particular language in is surely whichever one offers the best fit to the problem domain. That means availability of appropriate high-level constructs.
So for a problem in which most of the intelligence resides in the particular class structure employed, use a language which makes it easy to implement a class hierarchy like Smalltalk or Java or one of the object oriented C's (not necessarily C++).
For a problem in which the main meat is in processing or accessing poorly structured data (like text) or data in different formats from a variety of different sources, choose Perl.
Thats not to say that you can't do OO in Perl, I know that you can, and you can even get good at it, but if I suggest that everybody should just do everything in Perl I'm bound to get shot down in flames
The point is just this: choose the language that does as much of the work for you as possible.
or me that's usually Perl. All praise CPAN!
You had a rented van? and a hotel room? Bah! when I were a lad on tour, we all had to share a hoop and a stick between us! And after the show we had to sleep in it!
I remember after one particularly exhausting show, on the last night of that tour: we all trudged out to the parking lot only to discover that some thieving bastard had stolen our hoop and stick. Damn!
Poor Mick, our drummer, was rather tired and this was just the last straw for him. He just burst into tears and wailed "How the hell are we going to get home?".
Because it *wasn't* funny.
If it weren't for the timely intervention of the French 300-odd years ago, the American freedom fighters would most likely have *lost* the War of Independence, and the USA wouldn't exist today. Don't forget, your own Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, symbolizing the two nations' common ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity.
It's rather disappointing to see Americans so ready to hate their friends just because those friends should be, on occasion, strong enough to take a moral stance against them. This is the behaviour one might expect of a maladjusted child, not that of a civilised adult.
Even the best of friends can't always be expected to agree. It's no basis for racial hatred, and to show such petulant disrespect for another civilised nation, even in jest, is not only infantile but dangerously arrogant.
All right, we'll just store all the nuclear waste at your house. Then there's no need for bickering at all.
Oh yeah and as regards "stored properly", we're depending on you to figure out how to ensure the stuff doesn't escape from your house by accident and also to ensure that no-one tampers with it. For the next 100,000 years or so.
Good luck?!?! You mean "QaPla'"
Except that some of us actually *prefer* Linux and won't switch to Windows no matter how cheap it gets.
Let's not lose sight of the significance of Richard Stallman's massive achievement, which was to kick start the entire free software movement that eventually led to the burgeoning world of open source we enjoy today. Back around 1990 before the web, before Linux even existed, it was already possible to get unixalike software tools from the FSF to run on non-Unix operating systems. Maybe you ought to consider just how far would linux have got without any software to run on it. An OS kernel on its own isn't a general purpose computing environment. You can use it for embedded applications but that's all unless you have a shell, command line tools, networking software etc.
As things are, the Linux kernel was mostly responsible for the sudden explosion of interest in free software but it really would have counted for very little if there hadn't already been a fertile free software environment ready and waiting for a handy free kernel to come along and complete the picture.
In my view we all owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Stallman and his zealous pursuit of an ideal. He was a driving force among the first few who helped to create something out of nothing, without him Microsoft might well have had the entire field all to themselves by now.
Actually Clarke's novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on the movie screenplay (which was in turn inspired by one of Clarke's short stories The Sentinel). It's the only example I can think of where a significant novel resulted from a film rather than the other way round.
Will some kind soul blessed with moderator privilege tonight please moderate up the above comment...
Thank you.
Yes - that's it, remove the moderation cap so that the score is basically a vote. Cripes, why didn't anybody think of that before? Mr Malda, please take note...
...and velcro.
I read somewhere that teflon (PolyTetraFluoroEthylene?) is necessary in building spacecraft where it is used to lubricate bearing surfaces, because normal oil-based lubricants evaporate away too quickly in vacuum.
Drat. I meant to post that reply under this comment, where there is a link to the extremely good 1980 Washington Monthly article I quoted from.
LOL! "Extraordinary breakthrough in technology" indeed! Like the spread of satellite tv, more intercontinental telephone calls, and large-scale domestic and commercial internet use maybe? Isn't it odd that hardly anybody back in those days saw the comms revolution coming ...I don't know how many comsat launches there are per year now but I'm betting those figures no longer seem quite so far-fetched.