Just thought I'd mention that the linux versions of freecell are all missing a key feature that the Windows version had: it told you the numeric seed used to generate the hand, and let you type it in again later if you wanted to play the same hand.
The linux versions I've seen will let you restart the game from the beginning, but don't let you save it, and sharing the game with someone else isn't as easy as just sending a number.
As much as I like guile, the whole point of an extension language is to encourage third-party additions, so you want a language that attracts as many potential developers as possible (including beginners), [...]
Yeah, but then back in 2000, John Tobey released an emacs with perl embedded. The FSF folks promptly talked him out of doing that work. If what they wanted was a large third-party developer base, they could've had it over ten years ago.
If you think Copyright terms being effectively unlimited is a problem, start trying to convince Congress to amend the Constitution.
I have an idea. Why don't we change the constitution so that it really spells out the purpose of copyrights, something like this:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Then if Congress passes laws that obviously go against this stated purpose, the supreme court will declare them unconstitutional.
So there isn't any need to spell out precisely how "limited" the time should be, right? if someone tried to argue otherwise, you could argue then that there's no purpose at all to having the intent spelled out like that.
Incidentally, Lawrence Lessig has concluded that you can't expect Congress to do their job unless we change their
incentive structure.
"However, that only requires that the worst bits be entombed in a protective concrete shell on site, meaning the land can't be re-used and has to be maintained indefinitely."
Yeah, actually I was going to mention that if all you care about is safety, you shut down the plant, pull the fuel, and put a lock on the gate. If you want to be *really* safe, you'd fill the containment with concrete, so even people who won't read the warning signs on the gate can't get near the hot stuff until it's not hot any more.
The nuclear decomissioning problem is really more psychological than anything else: it makes people feel better to cut them up and move them around.
I've become a steady browser at the library, where they have more DVD titles than any video store
For a few years there, I was having some fun with my local library's DVD collection, but I was using the Mission District branch of San Francisco. Worked my way through the new Doctor Whos, and discovered "The Melancoly of Haruhi Suzimiya" and "Ouran Host Club" that way...
"but for anything popular, put the disc on a hold and wait 3 months"
You mean, after they sell this crap to some clueless people with lame net connections, the format is going to die, and they get to sell something else?
On-line comment sections are clearly not regarded as useless by the political flacks that inhabit the boards at places like the New York Times. Clearly, they regard it as critically important to get their talking points in the first ten posted remarks, and they have people hired to post at midnight when the OpEds go live.
I submit that the lesson we are slowly learning everywhere is that anonymity is a losing proposition: we really need to know who we're talking to for any half-way serious purpose, and places that refuse to acknowledge this (slashdot, wikipedia) are gradually drifting toward irrelevance.
"What's your favorite low-profile way to contribute?" Well, since you're asking...
Something that's been on my "todo" list for ages is to volunteer to maintain some of the modules in the core perl library. That's something that any solid perl programmer ought to be able to help with (even if your C skills aren't well tuned-up at present), and I've been told that there's a shortage of people willing to do it.
Writing documentation is a great idea too, of course, but while the perl docs can always use some work, they're actually pretty good compared to some other projects. Perl programmers seem to like to write things down.
Andy Lester himself is famous for being willing to write test code. That's a good way to go, of course: there are still some big projects out there that barely have any tests.
I've just realized something remarkable: the slashdot comments are less stupid than those in the surrounding environment, where people are having trouble grasping that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the issue, not the 1st.
Now, if only we could harness this gradient of stupidity.
Why, you should just upgrade to the latest firefox! And now you can set it up to continuously slip in updates forever after, in the bold new world of permanent betas, you can enjoy all of your plugins spontaneously breaking (stable API? backwards compatibility? what's that?), you can enjoy learning new ways of working as your favorite features suddenly come and go ("Bookmark All Tabs"? Wasn't that here a minute ago?).
What are you, some kind of wimp that craves stability? I bet you don't even use Facebook.
Perl 6 is never going to make it (yes, I've looked at it recently)
It's understandable why you'd feel that way-- and I think even chromatic is getting exasperated with the project at this point-- but it's worth remembering that "never" is a long time. Open source projects are different from the usual proprietary ones... consider that there was a time when many people had given up on mozilla...
A few years back, Tim Bunce did some talks about:
Perl Myths. You might want to take a look at it... in summary: the idea that perl is "dead" (or inactive) is ridiculous by any objective measure: it's mentioned frequently in job ads, there's a lot of activity in CPAN module development, the perl5 developers are hard at work on getting new features working (and old features working better).
In general, I would say that the perl culture continues to be active in stealing ideas from anywhere it can (including perl 6).
You like Rails? Well here's Catalyst. You like Rack? Well here's Plack. You think perl objects need improvement? Try Moose. And so on...
You might mention that the 4th Edition of "Programming Perl" is due out this month:
Programming Perl.
Lately, Tom Christiansen and brian d foy have been doing quite a bit of work investigating perl's support for Unicode. I'm interested to see this book if only to see what they say about it.
Noe Valley is above the bum line. Bums don't like to walk uphill. Spend some time in SOMA or near the civic centre and you will see human excrement(ing).
That's right, it never would've occured to me to look around Civic Center. Meanwhile the bozo-from-socal who did a drive by once, that guys an expert.
People who haven't lived in Noe Valley often have an exaggerated idea of how slick it is, by the way. Really it's full of a bunch of people who wish it were slick, and are often surprised to learn they're not actually living in the 'burbs.
Actuallly, I call "crap" on this. Ranting SF-hating trolls are always going on about people defecating in public, but people like myself who've been around for ten-years plus have never seen it.
Walking isn't such a big deal because you don't have to go so far
True enough, but there's another effect you're missing, which is that you'd don't mind walking in SF because it's an interesting place to walk. You do a mile without thinking about it, because there's always something that keeps it from being boring.
In comparison, walking a mile when I was living in Pocatello, Idaho was something you'd think twice about it. Nothing much to look at, and kind of boring, except when there were drunken teenagers in cars throwing beer bottles at you, because there's nothing much for them to look at either.
Not to mention the scam of "street cleaning", which seems to require clearing the street of cars once a week yet somehow get cleaned at best twice a year.
In point of fact, every morning in Noe Valley, right after the traffic cops in golf carts writing tickets, you will see the gigantic street sweeping vehicles following along.
There might be some technical fix for this, like smaller robot smart-sweepers that can clean-up under and around parked cars. Myself, the technical fix I like is called "public transit".
My own complaint would be that the parking cops are way too lenient. They're happy if you've gotten your car out of the way of the street sweepers, and don't care at all if you've dumped it on the sidewalk.
That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats.
Ah. So they should re-implement it in perl.
Perl hackers live for problems like that.
So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly
I would've thought that was more of a problem for the browser developers. Getting the right UTF-8 output shouldn't be that difficult.
I never used Lycos, but as I understand it Alta Vista introduced automatic web spidering (which is how they beat the original version of Yahoo).
Saying "Alta Vista sucked" because it wasn't better than something that didn't exist yet is a throughly warped historical perspective.
No, you have content on your site that's relevant to searchers. If you don't have content, people won't go to your site.
Actually no, the "content" on your site doesn't much matter, what matters is whether you can include some key terms that don't exist on all the already higher ranked pages. If you do succeed in jumping on something fast, you have to climb PageRank mountain faster than the "journalists" at the various already-higher-ranked sites can spew "content" vaguely related to what you've been contenting about.
I'm glad to hear that the marketroids have all moved on to "social media", and that wikipedia is now safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Just thought I'd mention that the linux versions of freecell are all missing a key feature that the Windows version had: it told you the numeric seed used to generate the hand, and let you type it in again later if you wanted to play the same hand.
The linux versions I've seen will let you restart the game from the beginning, but don't let you save it, and sharing the game with someone else isn't as easy as just sending a number.
Yeah, but then back in 2000, John Tobey released an emacs with perl embedded. The FSF folks promptly talked him out of doing that work. If what they wanted was a large third-party developer base, they could've had it over ten years ago.
But don't let that discourage you too much, lisp might be worth learning in any case.
Your circle of acquaintances is not wide. When I was 16 ssh didn't exist yet.
Don't object to stating the obvious if it's correct and useful.
I have an idea. Why don't we change the constitution so that it really spells out the purpose of copyrights, something like this:
Then if Congress passes laws that obviously go against this stated purpose, the supreme court will declare them unconstitutional.
So there isn't any need to spell out precisely how "limited" the time should be, right? if someone tried to argue otherwise, you could argue then that there's no purpose at all to having the intent spelled out like that.
Incidentally, Lawrence Lessig has concluded that you can't expect Congress to do their job unless we change their incentive structure.
"However, that only requires that the worst bits be entombed in a protective concrete shell on site, meaning the land can't be re-used and has to be maintained indefinitely."
Yeah, actually I was going to mention that if all you care about is safety, you shut down the plant, pull the fuel, and put a lock on the gate. If you want to be *really* safe, you'd fill the containment with concrete, so even people who won't read the warning signs on the gate can't get near the hot stuff until it's not hot any more.
The nuclear decomissioning problem is really more psychological than anything else: it makes people feel better to cut them up and move them around.
I've become a steady browser at the library, where they have more DVD titles than any video store
For a few years there, I was having some fun with my local library's DVD collection, but I was using the Mission District branch of San Francisco. Worked my way through the new Doctor Whos, and discovered "The Melancoly of Haruhi Suzimiya" and "Ouran Host Club" that way...
"but for anything popular, put the disc on a hold and wait 3 months"
s/popular/bad and overhyped/
Until you learn how to capture the stream, and burn it in DVD-ROM format.
You mean, after they sell this crap to some clueless people with lame net connections, the format is going to die, and they get to sell something else?
And they're supposed to regard that as a problem?
On-line comment sections are clearly not regarded as useless by the political flacks that inhabit the boards at places like the New York Times. Clearly, they regard it as critically important to get their talking points in the first ten posted remarks, and they have people hired to post at midnight when the OpEds go live.
I submit that the lesson we are slowly learning everywhere is that anonymity is a losing proposition: we really need to know who we're talking to for any half-way serious purpose, and places that refuse to acknowledge this (slashdot, wikipedia) are gradually drifting toward irrelevance.
"What's your favorite low-profile way to contribute?" Well, since you're asking...
Something that's been on my "todo" list for ages is to volunteer to maintain some of the modules in the core perl library. That's something that any solid perl programmer ought to be able to help with (even if your C skills aren't well tuned-up at present), and I've been told that there's a shortage of people willing to do it.
Writing documentation is a great idea too, of course, but while the perl docs can always use some work, they're actually pretty good compared to some other projects. Perl programmers seem to like to write things down.
Andy Lester himself is famous for being willing to write test code. That's a good way to go, of course: there are still some big projects out there that barely have any tests.
I've just realized something remarkable: the slashdot comments are less stupid than those in the surrounding environment, where people are having trouble grasping that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the issue, not the 1st.
Now, if only we could harness this gradient of stupidity.
Why, you should just upgrade to the latest firefox! And now you can set it up to continuously slip in updates forever after, in the bold new world of permanent betas, you can enjoy all of your plugins spontaneously breaking (stable API? backwards compatibility? what's that?), you can enjoy learning new ways of working as your favorite features suddenly come and go ("Bookmark All Tabs"? Wasn't that here a minute ago?).
What are you, some kind of wimp that craves stability? I bet you don't even use Facebook.
It's understandable why you'd feel that way-- and I think even chromatic is getting exasperated with the project at this point-- but it's worth remembering that "never" is a long time. Open source projects are different from the usual proprietary ones... consider that there was a time when many people had given up on mozilla...
A few years back, Tim Bunce did some talks about: Perl Myths. You might want to take a look at it... in summary: the idea that perl is "dead" (or inactive) is ridiculous by any objective measure: it's mentioned frequently in job ads, there's a lot of activity in CPAN module development, the perl5 developers are hard at work on getting new features working (and old features working better).
In general, I would say that the perl culture continues to be active in stealing ideas from anywhere it can (including perl 6). You like Rails? Well here's Catalyst. You like Rack? Well here's Plack. You think perl objects need improvement? Try Moose. And so on...
You might mention that the 4th Edition of "Programming Perl" is due out this month: Programming Perl. Lately, Tom Christiansen and brian d foy have been doing quite a bit of work investigating perl's support for Unicode. I'm interested to see this book if only to see what they say about it.
Got it, you and I were just using different internets, that's all. Or maybe I knew how to do boolean searches.
It would be nice if the people who were doing it would come to that conclusion.
That's right, it never would've occured to me to look around Civic Center. Meanwhile the bozo-from-socal who did a drive by once, that guys an expert.
People who haven't lived in Noe Valley often have an exaggerated idea of how slick it is, by the way. Really it's full of a bunch of people who wish it were slick, and are often surprised to learn they're not actually living in the 'burbs.
Agreed... "Yeah. Who wants clean streets if it means people like you can't keep cars you never use?" But methinks you missed some sarcasm.
Actuallly, I call "crap" on this. Ranting SF-hating trolls are always going on about people defecating in public, but people like myself who've been around for ten-years plus have never seen it.
(We don't hate people, we just hate you.)
True enough, but there's another effect you're missing, which is that you'd don't mind walking in SF because it's an interesting place to walk. You do a mile without thinking about it, because there's always something that keeps it from being boring.
In comparison, walking a mile when I was living in Pocatello, Idaho was something you'd think twice about it. Nothing much to look at, and kind of boring, except when there were drunken teenagers in cars throwing beer bottles at you, because there's nothing much for them to look at either.
In point of fact, every morning in Noe Valley, right after the traffic cops in golf carts writing tickets, you will see the gigantic street sweeping vehicles following along.
There might be some technical fix for this, like smaller robot smart-sweepers that can clean-up under and around parked cars. Myself, the technical fix I like is called "public transit".
My own complaint would be that the parking cops are way too lenient. They're happy if you've gotten your car out of the way of the street sweepers, and don't care at all if you've dumped it on the sidewalk.
Ah. So they should re-implement it in perl.
Perl hackers live for problems like that.
I would've thought that was more of a problem for the browser developers. Getting the right UTF-8 output shouldn't be that difficult.
I never used Lycos, but as I understand it Alta Vista introduced automatic web spidering (which is how they beat the original version of Yahoo).
Saying "Alta Vista sucked" because it wasn't better than something that didn't exist yet is a throughly warped historical perspective.
Actually no, the "content" on your site doesn't much matter, what matters is whether you can include some key terms that don't exist on all the already higher ranked pages. If you do succeed in jumping on something fast, you have to climb PageRank mountain faster than the "journalists" at the various already-higher-ranked sites can spew "content" vaguely related to what you've been contenting about.
I'm glad to hear that the marketroids have all moved on to "social media", and that wikipedia is now safe.
"I think you've misunderstood me man" No, actually I just attached my comment in the wrong place. Sorry.