Exactly, this is the typical sort of fluff that Digg seems to love. As far as I know, Slashdot had avoided this particular type of adword blog post crap until now.
I believe the main problem with that is that there could be more than 1,000 of them in the solar system. Not so useful for popular use then anymore, and that's the main use of the word.
They really have cool properties - you can tile an infinite plane with just two different tiles, in such a way that the pattern never repeats; the ratio of the frequencies of both types is exactly the golden ratio. There's a lot more, see the article.
Apparently they found actual Penrose tiles, hundreds of years old.
Last week there was a video in the news, it was discovered that giant squid uses flashes of light. That probably gives them a huge advantage, in an area where few of their prey will be used to light, they can see. See e.g. http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9855&fo rmato=HTML.
The idea of blessing a scalar as an index is new to me, an interesting concept. It's going to be hard to use that in any short time frame, but who knows, we might be able to refactor it in over time:-) I actually ordered the book recently, it hasn't arrived yet. I wasn't expecting anything special, but apparently I'm underestimating it.
As for Perl::Critic, I think I'm going to play with that tomorrow, sounds fun, never thought to look for something like it! Thanks!
I was a Python afficionado, although most of my professional experience was with Java. Then I joined a Perl project. I was open minded, any language can be good in the right hands. Now, two and a half years later, I'm pretty good at it.
As the team grows, we find ourselves relying more and more on standard techniques. They're not your standard techniques, they're just what we came up with as our standard way. They work well. We have a beautiful object oriented mod_perl/Template Toolkit system, unit tests, RoboDoc, the works. We know how to do this.
But, exactly as you say, we need coding standards. Lots. Just to make code more comprehensible, it needs to look pretty uniform. We can do that.
But then, note that objects are just hashes. Sometimes, you get odd data in them, due to some bug. Where did that happen? Of course you use grep, but there are so many ways to put something into a hash, that you run into problems. So you use getters and setters and make sure that all the code everywhere uses them.
But even things like renaming functions... different calling syntax can make it hard to grep for uses of a function, even. It's getting too ridiculous. Our book of coding standards is getting so thick that we could be coding fucking Java instead, and feel liberated. It's madness.
So, yes, you can do Perl for larger projects. It's possible. But you have to tie yourself down so badly, most of Perl's strengths as a language can't be used.
I don't think that is so strange; it's a deprecated element, for backwards compatibility, not meant to be used anymore.
What's bizarre is that a new standard, that Word95 cannot read at all, is encumbered by deprecated backwards compatibility elements at all! They should just be left out.
Remember we're talking about the EU, where consumer protection laws are pretty strong.
I don't know if it's based on a EU directive, but in the Netherlands, you can return any online purchase within 7 working days, no need to give a reason, and get your money back. Shipping costs are yours, but that's all. There are exceptions to this rule (like things made to order on your specs, or opened CD cases).
Or to put it into slashdot terms, Time Warner put up unwanted popups all over the city. I know slashdot has been losing some of its geek status recently but surely even here popups have not become a good thing have they?
No, they're not a good thing. But being liable because some idiot thought the popup was a bomb for some unknown reason, that's just surreal.
Do you have a car? If I suspect your car is a bomb, can I call the police and will you be liable?
This whole discussion is wrong. Instead of talking how badly Linux integrates with a single non-Linux application called Exchange, we should be discussing the scandal that a corporate giant like Microsoft still can't make their mail/calendar server function in a hybrid environment. That would be rather easier to fix, for instance by releasing specs.
That would make sense. But the original argument also starts talking about solar activity in part 3 even though he didn't mention it in part 1 or 2. It really is like 1. I like turkeys 2. There is no turkey on Mars 3. Therefore it's solar activity!.
Firstly of course, we have several satellites monitoring the Sun constantly, and its activity has been declining in recent years, as it goes towards the minimum of its well-known 11-year cycle (the article is from 2005, I guess it's probably reached by now).
As for the Mars ice cap, see the article; it gives many reasons why it is wrong to consider this 3-year regional change to be an indication of global warming on Mars. It's not special. The article concludes:
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth...
When I put advertisements in my signature line, I try not to be invasive, fraudulent or deceptive.
Good for you. However, unrequested advertisements sent to my email address are invasive, period. And calling your advertisements a "news letter" is (mildly) deceptive. If you do neither, then, again, good for you. But I will call those who do spammers.
For those who are wondering, there are only 8 words that end in 'su'
... in English. I think it's more common in French and Italian, and probably in loads of other languages I don't know anything about. And other languages do matter somewhat for this sort of thing (see Wikipedia)
As a European, you've probably grown up under an oppressive nanny-type government
Legal drugs, legal prostitution, legal abortion, legal porn, legal drinking age of 16 (and not much policing below it)... real oppressive and nanny-like, yeah. Fix yourselves first.
Make a device that allows limitless wireless sharing, plays every format it possibly can, with a rocking interface.
That is, how about making a product that's actually better than what the competition offers. It's just a small percentage that uses iTunes anyway, people rip from CDs, copy from friends or download.
Well, if the ratio of men-women is something like 100-1, you can bet that the top women not currently working in IT are a lot better than the top men not currently working in IT.
I happen to believe that an office environment where the ratio of men/women is a little closer to 1 is a good environment. It improves the atmosphere, that improves morale and as a result most people become more productive. Therefore, a woman whose individual IT skills are slightly worse than a male candidate can still be the best person for the job.
But we just don't see your argument. These models have a lot of forcings that make the temperature go up, or go down. The sun's activity and atmosphere CO2 levels are obvious examples, but there are many more.
Now on some spot of the planet, ice melting is faster than predicted by these models.
What makes you say that it is the sun activity forcing that needs to be made more important?
Either way, I think we need to start putting less thought into "how are we going to slow down our greenhouse gas emissions" and more thought into "what steps are we going to need to take to deal with the inevitable consequences of the current warming trend."
Why would we do that? A report by the UK government said that preventing extreme climate change is much cheaper than dealing with its consequences (see e.g. a BBC news article).
You know, egoism isn't any more "logical" than any random other goal.
You can pick living a life with as small an impact on the rest of the world's well being as possible as your goal, and then it is perfectly logical to care about waste still being dangerous 1400 years from now. Logic has nothing to recommend one goal over the other.
Is this finally the crack in the dam we've all been waiting for to wash away the entrenched monopolies of 20th century music production? Or just a sell-out waiting to happen?
Before you mod this guy down note that he isn't being a tool. He is just parsing the GP's comment using boolean logic, and is therefore correct.
No he isn't, at least he's not correct just by the fact that he's using boolean logic. After all, "this is finally the crack in the dam" and "this is just a sell-out waiting to happen" are not each other's negatives. They could both be false. The answer is only Yes if one of them is true. It's "A | B", not "A | !A".
(I find myself breathing deeply, and glancing at the "...for Nerds" at the top of the page, several times, before I dare post this)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, this is the typical sort of fluff that Digg seems to love. As far as I know, Slashdot had avoided this particular type of adword blog post crap until now.
I believe the main problem with that is that there could be more than 1,000 of them in the solar system. Not so useful for popular use then anymore, and that's the main use of the word.
Why is this unfortunate? Evolution is a theory.
Gravity is a theory. Are you saying physicists discussing rocks falling to the floor should avoid mentioning it?
It happens that science is the process of systematically improving theories. You're telling swimmers to avoid water.
See Penrose tiling on Wikipedia.
They really have cool properties - you can tile an infinite plane with just two different tiles, in such a way that the pattern never repeats; the ratio of the frequencies of both types is exactly the golden ratio. There's a lot more, see the article.
Apparently they found actual Penrose tiles, hundreds of years old.
Last week there was a video in the news, it was discovered that giant squid uses flashes of light. That probably gives them a huge advantage, in an area where few of their prey will be used to light, they can see. See e.g. http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9855&fo rmato=HTML.
Thanks for the comments!
The idea of blessing a scalar as an index is new to me, an interesting concept. It's going to be hard to use that in any short time frame, but who knows, we might be able to refactor it in over time :-) I actually ordered the book recently, it hasn't arrived yet. I wasn't expecting anything special, but apparently I'm underestimating it.
As for Perl::Critic, I think I'm going to play with that tomorrow, sounds fun, never thought to look for something like it! Thanks!
I was a Python afficionado, although most of my professional experience was with Java. Then I joined a Perl project. I was open minded, any language can be good in the right hands. Now, two and a half years later, I'm pretty good at it.
As the team grows, we find ourselves relying more and more on standard techniques. They're not your standard techniques, they're just what we came up with as our standard way. They work well. We have a beautiful object oriented mod_perl/Template Toolkit system, unit tests, RoboDoc, the works. We know how to do this.
But, exactly as you say, we need coding standards. Lots. Just to make code more comprehensible, it needs to look pretty uniform. We can do that.
But then, note that objects are just hashes. Sometimes, you get odd data in them, due to some bug. Where did that happen? Of course you use grep, but there are so many ways to put something into a hash, that you run into problems. So you use getters and setters and make sure that all the code everywhere uses them.
But even things like renaming functions... different calling syntax can make it hard to grep for uses of a function, even. It's getting too ridiculous. Our book of coding standards is getting so thick that we could be coding fucking Java instead, and feel liberated. It's madness.
So, yes, you can do Perl for larger projects. It's possible. But you have to tie yourself down so badly, most of Perl's strengths as a language can't be used.
Now I want to get back to Python or Java...
I don't think that is so strange; it's a deprecated element, for backwards compatibility, not meant to be used anymore.
What's bizarre is that a new standard, that Word95 cannot read at all, is encumbered by deprecated backwards compatibility elements at all! They should just be left out.
Remember we're talking about the EU, where consumer protection laws are pretty strong.
I don't know if it's based on a EU directive, but in the Netherlands, you can return any online purchase within 7 working days, no need to give a reason, and get your money back. Shipping costs are yours, but that's all. There are exceptions to this rule (like things made to order on your specs, or opened CD cases).
Recent BBC article about jay-walking: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/625143 1.stm.
It's not legal in the UK, or in most of the European mainland. That article was the first time I learned that it was illegal anywhere.
Or to put it into slashdot terms, Time Warner put up unwanted popups all over the city. I know slashdot has been losing some of its geek status recently but surely even here popups have not become a good thing have they?
No, they're not a good thing. But being liable because some idiot thought the popup was a bomb for some unknown reason, that's just surreal.
Do you have a car? If I suspect your car is a bomb, can I call the police and will you be liable?
This whole discussion is wrong. Instead of talking how badly Linux integrates with a single non-Linux application called Exchange, we should be discussing the scandal that a corporate giant like Microsoft still can't make their mail/calendar server function in a hybrid environment. That would be rather easier to fix, for instance by releasing specs.
That would make sense. But the original argument also starts talking about solar activity in part 3 even though he didn't mention it in part 1 or 2. It really is like 1. I like turkeys 2. There is no turkey on Mars 3. Therefore it's solar activity!.
That's been debunked pretty thoroughly, see e.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192.
Firstly of course, we have several satellites monitoring the Sun constantly, and its activity has been declining in recent years, as it goes towards the minimum of its well-known 11-year cycle (the article is from 2005, I guess it's probably reached by now).
As for the Mars ice cap, see the article; it gives many reasons why it is wrong to consider this 3-year regional change to be an indication of global warming on Mars. It's not special. The article concludes:
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth...
When I put advertisements in my signature line, I try not to be invasive, fraudulent or deceptive.
Good for you. However, unrequested advertisements sent to my email address are invasive, period. And calling your advertisements a "news letter" is (mildly) deceptive. If you do neither, then, again, good for you. But I will call those who do spammers.
For those who are wondering, there are only 8 words that end in 'su'
As a European, you've probably grown up under an oppressive nanny-type government
Legal drugs, legal prostitution, legal abortion, legal porn, legal drinking age of 16 (and not much policing below it)... real oppressive and nanny-like, yeah. Fix yourselves first.
Make a device that allows limitless wireless sharing, plays every format it possibly can, with a rocking interface.
That is, how about making a product that's actually better than what the competition offers. It's just a small percentage that uses iTunes anyway, people rip from CDs, copy from friends or download.
Well, if the ratio of men-women is something like 100-1, you can bet that the top women not currently working in IT are a lot better than the top men not currently working in IT.
I happen to believe that an office environment where the ratio of men/women is a little closer to 1 is a good environment. It improves the atmosphere, that improves morale and as a result most people become more productive. Therefore, a woman whose individual IT skills are slightly worse than a male candidate can still be the best person for the job.
But we just don't see your argument. These models have a lot of forcings that make the temperature go up, or go down. The sun's activity and atmosphere CO2 levels are obvious examples, but there are many more.
Now on some spot of the planet, ice melting is faster than predicted by these models.
What makes you say that it is the sun activity forcing that needs to be made more important?
Either way, I think we need to start putting less thought into "how are we going to slow down our greenhouse gas emissions" and more thought into "what steps are we going to need to take to deal with the inevitable consequences of the current warming trend."
Why would we do that? A report by the UK government said that preventing extreme climate change is much cheaper than dealing with its consequences (see e.g. a BBC news article).
You know, egoism isn't any more "logical" than any random other goal.
You can pick living a life with as small an impact on the rest of the world's well being as possible as your goal, and then it is perfectly logical to care about waste still being dangerous 1400 years from now. Logic has nothing to recommend one goal over the other.
If I'm not doing anything wrong, why do you need to look!?
Before you mod this guy down note that he isn't being a tool. He is just parsing the GP's comment using boolean logic, and is therefore correct.
No he isn't, at least he's not correct just by the fact that he's using boolean logic. After all, "this is finally the crack in the dam" and "this is just a sell-out waiting to happen" are not each other's negatives. They could both be false. The answer is only Yes if one of them is true. It's "A | B", not "A | !A".
(I find myself breathing deeply, and glancing at the "...for Nerds" at the top of the page, several times, before I dare post this)