Ha. You speak as if there were only one. (I wish).
Multiple different ways of implementing Objects exist in the perl 5 world, and there are many, many new attempts at fixing perceived limitations of the earlier styles. You've got your choice of Moose, Object::InsideOut, Class::InsideOut, and so on.
Whether this is a symptom of perl's glorious diversity or a lack of sane standardization, is of course open to question.
It's not that Perl 5 is broken, it's that other languages are evolving to a new level (in many cases a new level of LISPness:)).
If you were starting a new project would you base it on Perl5 when you aren't sure Perl6 is just around the corner?
You would if you knew anything about perl. In fact you probably would if you knew anything about software -- betting the farm on something that's barely out the door isn't a very bright move.
As for the second system effect, you're probably correct to some extent, but the solution to that isn't "ship perl 6", the solution is to point out that it's silly FUD -- the perl 5 project is going strong, the perl 5.10 release had quite a few interesting new features, and if anything perl 5 development has improved since the perl 6 project started (certainly CPAN activity is way up).
So thank you for the opportunity to once again state the obvious: perl is not dead.
Implementation languages seldom affect what can be developed.
Until recently, at least, PHP didn't even have any implementation of namespaces -- it was (is?) genuinely a crippled language, whose main technical advantage was a small memory footprint. It was adopted largely because ISPs perceived -- rightly or wrongly -- that it was easier/safer to give PHP to newbies to mess with rather than something like perl.
Embracing PHP was a really remarkable turn of events -- it's the "worse is better" philosophy gone wild.
Myself, I have experience with using only one Drupal installation. The guy who volunteered to set it up did it because it was "so easy" (and then spent several days screwing around with it to get it to "work"). The main thing we need it for is events scheduling and events announcements, and neither of these two apps are connected to each other (you can't just press a "publish" button to move an event from the planning calender to the announcements). Further, both apps are grossly buggy -- the planning calendar reports conflicts that aren't there, and on the announcements side you need to lie to it about when the event starts (shifting it back an hour) in order to get the right time to appear on the announcement.
But on the other hand, it's way better than nothing, I haven't been motivated to replace it with something that works...
Unfortunately we just elected a strong leader who is anti-nuclear.
More accurately, Obama is not pro-nuclear. In my opinion he vacillates on this: sometimes "nuclear" appears in his list of solutions, sometimes not.
But remember that today's bold new Democratic party can be stampeded into doing anything for the sake of convincing everyone they're just as tough as those Republican bastards. Start talking about "anti-nuclear liberal wimps" and we'll have a new US commitment to nuclear power in no time.
Police officers, unlike cab drivers, are lionized on television every night, and they frequently get to hear people go on about how they "put their life on the line every day".
Police officers certainly have my sympathies, but if you want to see a difficult job, take a look at the life of a San Francisco MUNI driver sometime.
Amazingly, while many were quick to denigrate Palin over perceived slights or shortcomings, EVEN to the point of suggesting that because she was a WOMAN and a mother she "wasn't qualified" or shouldn't run for VP (with nary an outcry from extreme "feminists"), they continued on, insisting that two years a governor of a state
Funny. I never heard anyone object that Palin was a "WOMAN". On the other hand,
I did hear many objections that she's an obvious idiot. It couldn't be that you're
just, like, making shit up, eh?
Rhetorical exuberance aside, "this Simonetta creature" lives in a city that has no leper beggars selling their babies. We got vanilla people, we got Neo-Nazis, we got Indophobes, we got racialists, we got obsessives, we have beggars, we even have a few Daughters of the American Revolution, which is about as close to British-colonial propaganda as we're likely to ever get,...
Glad to hear you have "beggars", because if you don't have them it probably
means the authorities are doing something quietly to make them disappear.
This is generally what "doing something about the homeless" translates into.
(On the general subject of sleepwalking to totalitarianism.)
Yeah, I don't like moving my hand to the mouse. However, since the Kinesis doesn't have a numeric keypad, the mouse is very close to the keyboard. I really don't see much solution to that problem, though, without putting the keyboard on rollers (yikes!), having a thumb-mouse mounted to the keyboard (which I find very uncomfortable), or using some head-mounted apparatus (cumbersome, and I don't know how accurate those are for quick things).
I used to use a touch pad duct taped to the keyboard, between the thumb keys (just above or just below both worked, as I remember it). This was much better than fumbling for the mouse, but touch pads seem to be only suitable for smaller screens -- when I got a larger monitor, the "rowing" problem was getting to me, and I'm making to with a logitech marble.
(By the way, did you know that the original scheme Englebart and co. had in mind for the mouse was that you would have a second one-handed keyboard on the other side that you would use while on the mouse? It certainly would be nice if someone would do some serious thinking about computer interfaces for experts... as time goes on, we're all going to turn into experts.)
An odd thought. Myself I settled on mapping the (rather useless) "Caps Lock" key to Esc.
2. Foot pedal.
Ever actually tried one of the foot pedals? It's an incredibly slow, awkward way of doing things, if you ask me. They're so light, they won't say still, so you need to figure out how to pin it down, and then unless your posture is rigidly unchanging your relative position with the foot pedal will keep changing.
3. Emacs. Sorry, mention it is obligatory.
Particularly when discussing the kinesis keyboards, which is the best I've
found for the emacs abuser.
Not entirely perceived -- after all, sheer size counts for a lot in a crash. Of course, the net result has been that the roads are less safe for everyone, and there are still better options if you want a big car.
No: the increased safety of SUVs for the people driving them is essentially a myth, it's never shown up in the collision statistics. Among other things, SUVs apparently have a tendency toward roll-over (the higher CG plus exposed wheels are good at snagging exposed fence posts). No doubt the mental attitude of people driving them ("I am an invulnerable road-warrior!") has something to do with it as well.
10% my ass, more around 20-30% and that's still more than enough for our entire planet PLUS.
Great, let's use your figures (which are double anything I've seen elsewhere, but what the fuck). For you to win this point, you need microwave transmission loses on the same order, and they're just not there.
The energy expenditure is CONSIDERABLY different. Flying across the USA is NOWHERE comparable to the energy expended just getting to speed to break free from the majority of gravity's pull.
And if you SAY IT IN CAPITALS it HAS TO BE TRUE.
Also, if you're gonna need fuel to get to the moon, you're gonna need fuel to move stuff from the moon, granted not as much,
Yes indeed. Not as much. Thank you, that's the point. If you were building a lot of this stuff, you'd want to look into doing it this way. Of course, the pilot projects would be done with earth based materials.
but what're you going to do, extract it from the lunar soil? Riiiiiight. We don't have that tech.
We might if we'd started working on this forty years ago, but unfortunately there were a bunch of people like you around back then too.
(Lunar soil has a fair amount of aluminum, iron, silicon and so on. Unlocking it all from the oxides takes some energy, but it isn't exactly, uh, rocket science.)
The entire state of AZ covered in PV would power the entire North American continent, the only problem there is storage and transmission.
Oh is that all. (Wouldn't you have objections from residents about blotting out the sun for an entire state?)
I'm still wondering how you're going to send the energy to the earth from space.
I have an idea: why don't you read something about it. That makes it a lot easier to pretend you know what you're talking about.
Hell, the inefficiencies alone in just converting the gathered power is going to be nuts.
"Nuts", yes, a technical term at last.
Good luck putting it where ANY debris is relatively low - The Perseids should be a good enough example.
You know, you seriously seem like someone trying hard to sound like you know something, but I'm afraid...
I haven't seen one post here about Blogjevich's attempts to sell a Senate seat and having discussions with Obama's administration about it.
Why should there be? What does that have to do with anything... oh wait, you're just a smear-bot attempting to claim that Obama had something to do with that bozo. Sorry, doesn't work -- the only Obama connection is that he pushed for an ethics bill that helped trip up the dude.
It's a funny thing, whenever you try to discuss how dirty American politics has gotten, you get these rover boys coming out of the woodwork with the "Democrats do it too!" line. Even if that's correct, is that supposed to make us feel better?
Oh wait, I guess because it didn't involve a "IT" guy, KDawson didn't think it was tech worthy.
Nerds are us, jack, what do you want?
Screw slashdot, I'm done. I can find this kind of information on Digg, faster and with a more fairer moderation system.
Hm... Do the smear-bots feel like they've got Digg gamed, but they're having trouble with slashdot?
Yes, according the anonymous "tipsters" claimed by a guy selling books called "Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008" and "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too".
The tipsters he's talking about aren't claimed by him, he was quoting someone else's claims. And the reports of these "tipsters" are not the only grounds for concern.
Recent US federal elections have indeed been pretty dubious, whether or not you're convinced they were "stolen", there is clearly, shall we say, room for improvement. The investigation under discussion is part of the process, and we just lost a key witness.
All that said, Mark Crispin Miller isn't the most impressive member of the proud fraternity of election integrity freaks. He has a tendency to start ranting about "theocrats" -- even if he's right, he always sounds like he's going off the rails. Not a great spokesperson for The Movement.
... I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we're obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone's plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We're told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at--and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.
The size of the array isn't so much of a problem... you can build
pretty light-weight structures in microgravity. However,
boosting anything up from earth is a problem, if you've got NASA
running the show. Some commercial start-up might crack the
launch cost problem at some point, however -- as I under stand
it, as far as energy expenditure is concerned, it isn't much
different from flying across the Unites States.
Also, of course, space industrialization freaks such as myself
really want to raid the moon and/or the asteroids for raw materials
to avoid boosting it all out of the earth's gravity well.
B. Inefficiencies in power transmission (how're you going to beam
it to the surface? Microwaves? Why not just harness it at ground
level and store it in batteries, and cut out several points where
conversion losses would be found?)
Do you have any idea how much sunlight is filtered out by the
earth's atmosphere? You only have around 10% of it available
down at the ground. Think of a solar power sat as a fancy
"concentrator" solar system.
C. Maintenance costs/damage protection/prevention - just how do you plan on keeping these things safe from random space debris flying at ultrasonic speeds?
Well, most likely you'd need put them where the amount of debris
is relatively low, and you'd need to think about redundant
hardware that can deal with some damage.
D. energy costs to build/deploy - these things would have to be MASSIVE with current solar technologies to get usable power after factoring in loss for transmission and conversion.
Need more?
Yeah, I need more numbers, preferably from someone who's spent a
few minutes reading about the subject. This idea is a solid four
decades old, it's not like people haven't been trying to think it through.
I'm not so sure bias is such a terrible thing. "Objective news" is somewhat of a recent phenomenon, historically speaking, and one I've been thinking is not such a great proposition. The simple fact of the matter is that *no one* is truly objective.
Well duh. The trouble, of course, is not advocacy -- one of my favorite news sources is the blatantly left-wing SF Bay Guardian, and the similarly left-wing Democracy Now -- but disguised advocacy, advocacy making a pretense of objectivity.
I'd much rather have clear, disclosed biases.
Yes, exactly. But then, wouldn't it also be nice to have some informations sources that you could trust to seperate out the editorializing from the news, and some neutral presentation of facts at least as well as a half-dozen volunteers messing around with a wikipedia page?
The kind of press we have now can't even be bothered to call bullshit when Bush tries to spin the Iraq was as the result of faulty intelligence, and skips over the fact that the UN weapon inspections were in-fact interrupted by the invasion that he now claims was intended to enable them...
Wasn't this sort of thing the idea behind the original "plug-in" mechanism planned for Reiser 4? I remember being intrigued by the idea of writing file-system customizations in perl, and I was looking forward to playing around with it to see what could be done with it.
Unfortunately, it appears that the kernel devs don't want to hear about any functionality that doesn't fit in the box of their VFS layer.
Re-usable code ? modules are easy to write, easy to understand and object oriented is only more practical when writing GUI apps.
Obviously, one can code in OO perl if one wants, and it's actually useful for other things besides GUI... myself I just think of it as a scoping compromise between global variables and the pure-functional style.
But yeah, I tend to agree that the main drive that pushes some people to switch away from perl has more to do with snob appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
What's supposed to be missing? There's around 300 hits on CPAN if you search for DBD.
Ha. You speak as if there were only one. (I wish). Multiple different ways of implementing Objects exist in the perl 5 world, and there are many, many new attempts at fixing perceived limitations of the earlier styles. You've got your choice of Moose, Object::InsideOut, Class::InsideOut, and so on.
Whether this is a symptom of perl's glorious diversity or a lack of sane standardization, is of course open to question.
Perl 5 is already pretty-lispy: Higher-Order Perl.
You would if you knew anything about perl. In fact you probably would if you knew anything about software -- betting the farm on something that's barely out the door isn't a very bright move.
As for the second system effect, you're probably correct to some extent, but the solution to that isn't "ship perl 6", the solution is to point out that it's silly FUD -- the perl 5 project is going strong, the perl 5.10 release had quite a few interesting new features, and if anything perl 5 development has improved since the perl 6 project started (certainly CPAN activity is way up).
So thank you for the opportunity to once again state the obvious: perl is not dead.
Perl has a very throughly set of regression tests. That's better than a spec.
And one more time: even better, try this list of Open Source CMSs.
And even better, try this list of Open Source CMSs.
Until recently, at least, PHP didn't even have any implementation of namespaces -- it was (is?) genuinely a crippled language, whose main technical advantage was a small memory footprint. It was adopted largely because ISPs perceived -- rightly or wrongly -- that it was easier/safer to give PHP to newbies to mess with rather than something like perl.
Embracing PHP was a really remarkable turn of events -- it's the "worse is better" philosophy gone wild.
Myself, I have experience with using only one Drupal installation. The guy who volunteered to set it up did it because it was "so easy" (and then spent several days screwing around with it to get it to "work"). The main thing we need it for is events scheduling and events announcements, and neither of these two apps are connected to each other (you can't just press a "publish" button to move an event from the planning calender to the announcements). Further, both apps are grossly buggy -- the planning calendar reports conflicts that aren't there, and on the announcements side you need to lie to it about when the event starts (shifting it back an hour) in order to get the right time to appear on the announcement.
But on the other hand, it's way better than nothing, I haven't been motivated to replace it with something that works...
That's a gross insult to RCS -- it does a very simple job, but does it very well.
More accurately, Obama is not pro-nuclear. In my opinion he vacillates on this: sometimes "nuclear" appears in his list of solutions, sometimes not.
But remember that today's bold new Democratic party can be stampeded into doing anything for the sake of convincing everyone they're just as tough as those Republican bastards. Start talking about "anti-nuclear liberal wimps" and we'll have a new US commitment to nuclear power in no time.
Better still is to stash it somewhere you can get it again later if you think of a use for it.
Monotone is built around that idea, and existed before git.
The real reason we're all migrating to using git is that it was endorsed by a celebrity.
It may seem like a silly reason, but it beats wading through the hand-waving and screaming surrounding yet another technical religious war.
According to the US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor being a cab driver is nearly twice as risky as being a police officer: CF AR 06/01/95 FATL-RELATIVE RISK, 1993 (pdf)
Police officers, unlike cab drivers, are lionized on television every night, and they frequently get to hear people go on about how they "put their life on the line every day".
Police officers certainly have my sympathies, but if you want to see a difficult job, take a look at the life of a San Francisco MUNI driver sometime.
Funny. I never heard anyone object that Palin was a "WOMAN". On the other hand, I did hear many objections that she's an obvious idiot. It couldn't be that you're just, like, making shit up, eh?
Glad to hear you have "beggars", because if you don't have them it probably means the authorities are doing something quietly to make them disappear. This is generally what "doing something about the homeless" translates into.
(On the general subject of sleepwalking to totalitarianism.)
I used to use a touch pad duct taped to the keyboard, between the thumb keys (just above or just below both worked, as I remember it). This was much better than fumbling for the mouse, but touch pads seem to be only suitable for smaller screens -- when I got a larger monitor, the "rowing" problem was getting to me, and I'm making to with a logitech marble.
(By the way, did you know that the original scheme Englebart and co. had in mind for the mouse was that you would have a second one-handed keyboard on the other side that you would use while on the mouse? It certainly would be nice if someone would do some serious thinking about computer interfaces for experts... as time goes on, we're all going to turn into experts.)
An odd thought. Myself I settled on mapping the (rather useless) "Caps Lock" key to Esc.
Ever actually tried one of the foot pedals? It's an incredibly slow, awkward way of doing things, if you ask me. They're so light, they won't say still, so you need to figure out how to pin it down, and then unless your posture is rigidly unchanging your relative position with the foot pedal will keep changing.
Particularly when discussing the kinesis keyboards, which is the best I've found for the emacs abuser.
No: the increased safety of SUVs for the people driving them is essentially a myth, it's never shown up in the collision statistics. Among other things, SUVs apparently have a tendency toward roll-over (the higher CG plus exposed wheels are good at snagging exposed fence posts). No doubt the mental attitude of people driving them ("I am an invulnerable road-warrior!") has something to do with it as well.
Why should there be? What does that have to do with anything... oh wait, you're just a smear-bot attempting to claim that Obama had something to do with that bozo. Sorry, doesn't work -- the only Obama connection is that he pushed for an ethics bill that helped trip up the dude.
It's a funny thing, whenever you try to discuss how dirty American politics has gotten, you get these rover boys coming out of the woodwork with the "Democrats do it too!" line. Even if that's correct, is that supposed to make us feel better?
Nerds are us, jack, what do you want?
Hm... Do the smear-bots feel like they've got Digg gamed, but they're having trouble with slashdot?
All that said, Mark Crispin Miller isn't the most impressive member of the proud fraternity of election integrity freaks. He has a tendency to start ranting about "theocrats" -- even if he's right, he always sounds like he's going off the rails. Not a great spokesperson for The Movement.
Sure. But if you start with the premise that nothing is ever a conspiracy, then you're unlikely to ever uncover one, eh?
This is what Mark Crispin Miller had to say:
The size of the array isn't so much of a problem... you can build pretty light-weight structures in microgravity. However, boosting anything up from earth is a problem, if you've got NASA running the show. Some commercial start-up might crack the launch cost problem at some point, however -- as I under stand it, as far as energy expenditure is concerned, it isn't much different from flying across the Unites States.
Also, of course, space industrialization freaks such as myself really want to raid the moon and/or the asteroids for raw materials to avoid boosting it all out of the earth's gravity well.
Do you have any idea how much sunlight is filtered out by the earth's atmosphere? You only have around 10% of it available down at the ground. Think of a solar power sat as a fancy "concentrator" solar system.
Well, most likely you'd need put them where the amount of debris is relatively low, and you'd need to think about redundant hardware that can deal with some damage.
Yeah, I need more numbers, preferably from someone who's spent a few minutes reading about the subject. This idea is a solid four decades old, it's not like people haven't been trying to think it through.
Here, try this: space solar power
Well duh. The trouble, of course, is not advocacy -- one of my favorite news sources is the blatantly left-wing SF Bay Guardian, and the similarly left-wing Democracy Now -- but disguised advocacy, advocacy making a pretense of objectivity.
Yes, exactly. But then, wouldn't it also be nice to have some informations sources that you could trust to seperate out the editorializing from the news, and some neutral presentation of facts at least as well as a half-dozen volunteers messing around with a wikipedia page?
The kind of press we have now can't even be bothered to call bullshit when Bush tries to spin the Iraq was as the result of faulty intelligence, and skips over the fact that the UN weapon inspections were in-fact interrupted by the invasion that he now claims was intended to enable them...
Wasn't this sort of thing the idea behind the original "plug-in" mechanism planned for Reiser 4? I remember being intrigued by the idea of writing file-system customizations in perl, and I was looking forward to playing around with it to see what could be done with it.
Unfortunately, it appears that the kernel devs don't want to hear about any functionality that doesn't fit in the box of their VFS layer.
Obviously, one can code in OO perl if one wants, and it's actually useful for other things besides GUI... myself I just think of it as a scoping compromise between global variables and the pure-functional style.
But yeah, I tend to agree that the main drive that pushes some people to switch away from perl has more to do with snob appeal.