I'm not so sure about the Lanier case. He denies he is a film director, yet there is an objective truth that he directed a film that was shown at a film festival, which seems notable enough to include in a biographical entry.
That's a ridiculously lax standard. One published story in a minor publication would not make you a professional writer. Real human beings do many different things, not all of them are notable in any sense.
His subjective opinion doesn't change this fact. It's quite clear he's not proud of it and wishes to distance himself from it, yet I don't think that's any reason to whitewash his past and rewrite history.
His problem isn't that they mentioned he made a lousy film once, his problem is that he is being described as a film director, despite the fact that he only dabbled in it, and it's hardly one of his main fields of endeavor.
I think the trouble with the Jaron Lanier example is that he had other recourse besides making an edit based on his private knowledge: he could have challenged the point with a "citation needed", hashed it out in the Talk page, preferably with lots of handwaving about "Notability" and links to pages in the "Style Guide", and eventually he would've prevailed.
But I think the trouble with that whole process is that it requires one to become a wikipedia-lawyer... it's a lot of work to go through to try to convince one stubborn pinhead to knock it off.
And any way, isn't the real objection in case like this the fear
that wikipedia will be used as a vanity web site? That's the real reason it's regarded it as poor form to edit articles about yourself.
So if we just create the right kind of system (no fiat money!) and stick to it, then we'll have no pesky problems with human corruption of our grand system ever again.
This would appear to be circular. Any way you look at it, you're stuck with "eternal vigilance".
(By the way, I think you exaggerate the role of fiat money in the present collapse, but they you would, being a gold bug.)
So is it safe to say that in most of the western world outside of the US there are no tidy rooms? Would I find myself struck with culture shock if I traveled north to Canada and witnessed the disarray of most the homes and the bright colors?
Actually, if you traveled to Canada you would be shocked to learn that they have some conservatives there.
You need to take it easy on those Republican speeches. The entire political spectrum has it's problems, of course, but Republican rhetoric has had very little contact with reality for a long time now. If you must be a xenophobe, try to avoid being an ignorant xenophobe:
Conservatives gain seats in Canadian election
Here's the trouble: can you come up with some system -- some set of corporate rules or whatever -- that you can let loose in the wilds and expect it to self-regulate? My contention (and it's hardly controversial) is that the economic incentive to subvert this system of rules is far stronger than the economic incentive to block the subversion. Entity A (a corporation, a rich guy, whatever) sees an opportunity to get richer if they get a certain rule changed: they're going to make millions by ripping off each citizen for half-a-cent each. There may be thousands of such entities, with thousands of schemes like that, but even taken all together, each citizen loses only a total of around five bucks, and they've got other things to worry about.
The only check on that kind of problem is a wise and informed leadership, and a committed, far-sighted electorate that cares about the health of the common weal many years hence.
Now: what's the difference between that situation and a Social Democracy.
Krugman is (or at least was) a very strong proponent of free trade. It's only in the past decade or so (since he became more of an op-ed writer) that he has shut up about it. It appears to many that he did so (shut up), only to avoid disagreements with the liberal intelligentsia, many of whom fawn over him, not knowing that he long espoused the economics of the right, and that he has never disavowed his positions on the subject.
It's an interesting theory. My theory is that since he's been forced into re-examining his beliefs (having been pushed hard left by the Bush administration) he's been avoiding looking too hard at globalization issues, because there's some cognitive dissonance awaiting him in there... (for example, could it be that the lefties have a point about "free trade" being a bad idea when the "comparative advantage" is in the realms of lax pollution regulations or labor laws?).
Much as I like Paul Krugman, I think he shows symptoms (like much of the rest of humanity) of having an awfully hard time admitting that he might've called something wrong. Most recently, he'd convinced himself that we were all supposed to be excited about Hillary because her health plan was more comprehensive than Obama's (myself I care a bit about other things, too, like, you know, that was in Iraq... but that's just crazy talk, when the great Krugman has spoken).
That's what's really at the core of the worldwide economic meltdown: the fraud is unravelling.
Yes, that would explain why the standard-of-living of someone in Sweden has been so much better than the United States in recent years:
For richer.
Do you think you "objectivist" types could actually try dealing with reality once in awhile? Theory is nice, freedom is cool, but at some point you've got to come to grips with the real problems... e.g. there's always an asymmetry of power between the democratic citizen and the corporation interested in rigging the system, so the system is always going to be rigged, ergo we can't get an actual "free market", so the theory is pretty close to useless.
This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science.
Question: do you know anything at all about Paul Krugman's research? Have you read anything at all of his popular writings?
And just for the hell of it, you might peek at the answer key, an article Krugman wrote about his own approach:
How I Work
Most young economists today enter the field from the technical end. Originally intending a career in hard science or engineering, they slip down the scale into the most rigorous of the social sciences. The advantages of entering economics from that direction are obvious: one arrives already well trained in mathematics, one finds the concept of formal modeling natural. It is not, however, where I come from. My first love was history; I studied little math, picking up what I needed as I went along.
[...]
I was, of course, only saying something that critics of conventional theory had been saying for decades. Yet my point was not part of the mainstream of international economics. Why? Because it had never been expressed in nice models. The new monopolistic competition models gave me a tool to open cleanly what had previously been regarded as a can of worms. More important, however, I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. We just don't see what we can't formalize. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time.
Well, I just read the article, and what I see is a couple of lines devoid of context that are being used to support a sweeping statement, and there you have the conservative-hit-piece MO in a nutshell.
Dismiss the remark "if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else" as over-simplified, if you like, but try reading the entire article and tell me that Krugman isn't talking about a real problem:
For richer
You might consider this point (which addresses your implicit "but the pie gets bigger!" argument):
"We pride ourselves, with considerable justification, on our record of economic growth. But over the last few decades it's remarkable how little of that growth has trickled down to ordinary families."
Or how about this point: "The reason conservatives engage in bouts of Sweden-bashing is that they want to convince us that there is no tradeoff between economic efficiency and equity -- that if you try to take from the rich and give to the poor, you actually make everyone worse off. But the comparison between the U.S. and other advanced countries doesn't support this conclusion at all."
But on the other hand, I have no doubt that you're correct that the award is "politically motivated", at least in part: it's much like the Dixie Chicks getting a Grammie... there are so many people so disgusted with the Bush regime at this point that the awards committees can't resist tweaking some Republican noses.
(And if anyone cares, this is my take on Krugman:
KRUGMAN_FUNNIES.)
But he seems to think that Globalization will fail.
You need to read a little bit more of Krugman's stuff before you spout off about it.
Hell, how about the wikipedia article: Paul Krugman:
"He was critical of industrial policy (an approach Clinton later dropped under the influence of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers) and argued in favor of free trade. (He writes on p. xxvi of his book The Great Unraveling that 'I still have the angry letter Ralph Nader sent me when I criticized his attacks on globalization.')"
The only thing that might change is that more and more programs that are not depending on performance, might be completely written in scripting languages. As far as my work is concerned, the factor 20 or more speedup I get by actually programming in C will always be of use
Are you sure about that factor of 20? Have you measured it in any real cases lately?
"C is always faster" is something of a myth. You need to be a pretty good C programmer to beat the perl-porters.
My Perl codebases got completely unmaintainable as they grew, but with Python I haven't had any problems scaling to thousands of lines of code. Partly I think I've gotten to be a more disciplined programmer, partly I think Python's a better language for scalability.
And Python also helped you get to thousands of lines of code so much faster!
The problem I've had with airlines is that the dynamic range of movie sound tracks is designed for quiet movie-theater environment, but on an aircraft there are loud humming noises at all times. You need to crank the volume up if you want to have a hope of hearing the dialog, then you get blown away by the thundering sound track, explosion effects, etc.
Compressing the sound is cheap and easy, but don't expect airlines to get around to it until you pass a law requiring it.
(What was someone saying about "free markets"? Whatever.)
Just because he's a founding father doesn't make him a visionary on everything. See also: slavery.
Jefferson was pushing for the abolition of slavery, he was just
looking for a way to do it gradually, without something as traumatic as a Civil War. He liked the idea that the children of slaves should become free citizens -- now there may indeed have been some personal interests that got him started thinking in that direction, but that's actually a fairly clever idea if you think about it. If you've got massive slave-owning businesses infesting the economy [1], they're going to fight you tooth and nail about reducing the value of their investment, but if you restrict the supply of new slaves the value of that investment will go up in the near term... And it also helps answer the objection that people who've been slaves all their lives just don't have the intellectual equipment to become citizens.
Now, as it happens, to the modern way of thinking, this kind of compromising with evil is unacceptable, and in retrospect we like the fanatic abolitionists like John Brown better, but at the time it was not looking like John Brown was going to get anywhere...
[1] If you'd like another example of something this, you might look at the way American oil-dependency has totally warped our sense of morality. Who are our present-day John Browns?
OK, Afghanistan is a difficult battlefield, with no real oil. I
The "it's all about oil" take on the Afghanistan invasion is that it had to do with building the Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline. It didn't work out that way, but it could be that that was one of the main ideas.
Does anyone remember the big news story about the Taliban six months before September 11th? World appeals to Taleban to stop destroying statues. Around that time, I remember thinking that this was getting an awfully big play in the US media, which normally can barely be bothered to pay any attention to anything that happens outside it's borders. My thought was "okay, so why are we being manipulated into hating yet another formerly US-backed group?".
We already have a means to achieve this separation for client-side code today: browser plug-ins. Of course, most Web developers will tell you that plug-ins are a Bad Thing. Every time you force the user to download and install a plug-in, says the popular wisdom, you throw a roadblock in front of your code. But is that really true?
Well, yes, it really is true. And further, plug-ins are apparently a severe pain to implement in a cross-platform way -- I use AMD64 boxes myself, and there's still no native flash plug-in, for example. And if firefox extensions are any guide, we can also look forward to plug-ins breaking when you do browser upgrades.
Further, the entire premise (what the web needs is more languages!) is fundamentally flawed, because it obsesses about the technical characteristics of languages, and ignores the social aspects -- as you get more languages in play, you sub-divide the community of developers and complicate the sharing of techniques and so on.
We already have a means to achieve this separation for client-side code today: browser plug-ins. Of course, most Web developers will tell you that plug-ins are a Bad Thing. Every time you force the user to download and install a plug-in, says the popular wisdom, you throw a roadblock in front of your code. But is that really true?
Well, yes, it really is true. And further, plug-ins are apparently a severe pain to implement in a cross-platform way -- I use AMD64 boxes myself, and there's still no native flash plug-in, for example. And if firefox extensions are any guide, we can also look forward to plug-ins breaking when you do browser upgrades.
Further, the entire premise (what the web needs is more languages!) is fundamentally flawed, because it obsesses about the technical characteristics of languages, and ignores the social aspects -- as you get more languages in play, you sub-divide the community of developers and complicate the sharing of techniques and so on.
For every methodical, disciplined Java programmer there's a Perl hacker who would much rather play everything by ear. Strong typing, packages, and namespaces may make it a lot easier to maintain large applications, but they're virtually useless to any Web coder who just wants to bash out a little bit of UI glitz.
Well, maybe I'm a little sensitive to the now standardized swipes at perl, but may I point out that perl does indeed have lexical namespaces? It could be the author was thinking of PHP (which if I understand correctly, also has namespaces now, though only in it's latest version).
In any case: does anyone have any real evidence that strong typing actually works? Java was sold to people on the basis of it's maintainability -- was that claim true? How would you know?
Myself, I've been primarily a perl programmer for a decade, and you can easily count the number of occasions I've had my fingers burned by type-confusion on one hand. There are CS geeks out there who are incredibly strong-typing fanatics, way out of proportion to how useful the feature is.
(Just a hint: if you want to attack perl intelligently, try "lack of standardization". For example, there are multiple ways of implementing perl objects, if you just pick one you'll probably get it to work well enough for you. But if you use someone else's modules, there's no way to know in advance what kind of objects they're using -- you've got to inspect the code before you can even think about sub-classing it.)
Okay the trouble here is that you guys keep thinking this is a technical issue, but it just isn't
First of all, it's debatable whether "corporate" types in general "hate perl" -- no doubt
some of them do, but you can also find many companies with successful perl-based businesses
who aren't going to switch to the language-of-the-month just to keep up with the Joneses.
If there's been a shift away from perl (and I have my doubts there really has been), it's almost solely because a lot of people who like to pose as uber-geeks have been talking trash about it, and the reason they've been talking trash about it is almost solely because they feel insulted by Larry Wall.
Over the years Larry Wall hasn't been shy about explaining his design philosophy, which is essentially that computer science nerds have an irrational addiction to ideas like "mathematical elegance", when computer languages are tools for human beings to use -- so he looked to linguistics for inspiration.
Now, if you want proof that this is essentially just talking-trash and not anything like a reasoned debate, consider the situation with PHP. Until recently it didn't even have namespaces. By any objective standard, you would expect a CS geek to regard PHP as a piece of garbage compared to perl -- and yet, the uber-geek hit squad is rather silent on the subject, no?
On the plus side: I find it somewhat encouraging that if you look at the actual market penetration of things like Ruby on Rails, essentially no one is using it, despite years of intense hype from many quarters -- it could be that the suits are finally making technical decisions based on something besides nerd-chatter.
This not only
means that any vulnerability in Flash affects the security of the entire browser, but also that a
missing protection mechanism in a third-party DLL can enable the exploitation of vulnerabilities
in all other browser components.
If all it takes is a bad plug-in, then what's the defense against a malicious site using a "You must upgrade to the latest version of Flash!" with a button that installs a hacked version?
This is sounding like the problem with Word autoexecute macros again -- good luck explaining
to lusers what they're allowed to click on.
You know, back in the golden ages of radio and television, the feature and the ads were the same beast. You see, before there were commercial breaks, companies would actually buy airtime and provide the content. The content would have the company or product name everywhere and they spent just as much time pimping product as entertaining, but you only had to deal with the advertisements from that one company and the company actually had a big investment in the show so they had to ensure quality to keep their image good.
This is all a bit of an exaggeration. There are some old radio shows where the main characters make a point of plugging the sponsors products, but that's more of an exception than the rule, I can only think of a handful of such cases.
More to the point, in the "golden age", no one really knew what the right way was to do things, so they kept experimenting, they kept changing the formula... much like today's web.
Actually, it's an interesting question -- or as interesting as a style
guide question ever gets. Myself, replying to people on usenet I long ago
adopted to policy of correcting other people's spelling, and not inserting
a "[sic]" (which seems kind of rude and pedantic). The one exception would be if
I supsect that the person I'm replying to is such a jerk they might actually
complain about not being quoted verbatim. And anyway, I don't
often take the trouble to reply to someone who can't be bothered to use a spell checker...
As far as print media is concerned, I would say it's required to quote them as is,
though why I think different standards apply in either case, I couldn't tell you.
One difference would be that if you're on-line it's usually relatively easy to thread
your way back to the original if you really care.
or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones.
And it's already illegal to do that while driving in California.
I
By the way:
To install the market-priced parking system, San Francisco has used a system devised by Streetline, a small technology company that has adapted a wireless sensor technology known as âoesmart dustâ that was pioneered by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Good luck getting paid, Steetline. San Francisco stiffed the company that installed the excellent nextmuni system (which by the way, is far more practical than encouraging people to drive to downtown San Francisco... it's not just the parking that's maxed out).
Slashdot Mirror
Except for that tendency toward proprietary forks... like the way OSX forked off from FreeBSD>
That's a ridiculously lax standard. One published story in a minor publication would not make you a professional writer. Real human beings do many different things, not all of them are notable in any sense.
His problem isn't that they mentioned he made a lousy film once, his problem is that he is being described as a film director, despite the fact that he only dabbled in it, and it's hardly one of his main fields of endeavor.
I think the trouble with the Jaron Lanier example is that he had other recourse besides making an edit based on his private knowledge: he could have challenged the point with a "citation needed", hashed it out in the Talk page, preferably with lots of handwaving about "Notability" and links to pages in the "Style Guide", and eventually he would've prevailed.
But I think the trouble with that whole process is that it requires one to become a wikipedia-lawyer... it's a lot of work to go through to try to convince one stubborn pinhead to knock it off.
And any way, isn't the real objection in case like this the fear that wikipedia will be used as a vanity web site? That's the real reason it's regarded it as poor form to edit articles about yourself.
So if we just create the right kind of system (no fiat money!) and stick to it, then we'll have no pesky problems with human corruption of our grand system ever again.
This would appear to be circular. Any way you look at it, you're stuck with "eternal vigilance".
(By the way, I think you exaggerate the role of fiat money in the present collapse, but they you would, being a gold bug.)
Actually, if you traveled to Canada you would be shocked to learn that they have some conservatives there.
You need to take it easy on those Republican speeches. The entire political spectrum has it's problems, of course, but Republican rhetoric has had very little contact with reality for a long time now. If you must be a xenophobe, try to avoid being an ignorant xenophobe: Conservatives gain seats in Canadian election
Here's the trouble: can you come up with some system -- some set of corporate rules or whatever -- that you can let loose in the wilds and expect it to self-regulate? My contention (and it's hardly controversial) is that the economic incentive to subvert this system of rules is far stronger than the economic incentive to block the subversion. Entity A (a corporation, a rich guy, whatever) sees an opportunity to get richer if they get a certain rule changed: they're going to make millions by ripping off each citizen for half-a-cent each. There may be thousands of such entities, with thousands of schemes like that, but even taken all together, each citizen loses only a total of around five bucks, and they've got other things to worry about.
The only check on that kind of problem is a wise and informed leadership, and a committed, far-sighted electorate that cares about the health of the common weal many years hence.
Now: what's the difference between that situation and a Social Democracy.
It's an interesting theory. My theory is that since he's been forced into re-examining his beliefs (having been pushed hard left by the Bush administration) he's been avoiding looking too hard at globalization issues, because there's some cognitive dissonance awaiting him in there... (for example, could it be that the lefties have a point about "free trade" being a bad idea when the "comparative advantage" is in the realms of lax pollution regulations or labor laws?).
Much as I like Paul Krugman, I think he shows symptoms (like much of the rest of humanity) of having an awfully hard time admitting that he might've called something wrong. Most recently, he'd convinced himself that we were all supposed to be excited about Hillary because her health plan was more comprehensive than Obama's (myself I care a bit about other things, too, like, you know, that was in Iraq... but that's just crazy talk, when the great Krugman has spoken).
Yes, that would explain why the standard-of-living of someone in Sweden has been so much better than the United States in recent years: For richer.
Do you think you "objectivist" types could actually try dealing with reality once in awhile? Theory is nice, freedom is cool, but at some point you've got to come to grips with the real problems... e.g. there's always an asymmetry of power between the democratic citizen and the corporation interested in rigging the system, so the system is always going to be rigged, ergo we can't get an actual "free market", so the theory is pretty close to useless.
Question: do you know anything at all about Paul Krugman's research? Have you read anything at all of his popular writings?
Here, let me help you out a little:
And just for the hell of it, you might peek at the answer key, an article Krugman wrote about his own approach: How I Work
[...]
Well, I just read the article, and what I see is a couple of lines devoid of context that are being used to support a sweeping statement, and there you have the conservative-hit-piece MO in a nutshell.
Dismiss the remark "if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else" as over-simplified, if you like, but try reading the entire article and tell me that Krugman isn't talking about a real problem: For richer
You might consider this point (which addresses your implicit "but the pie gets bigger!" argument): "We pride ourselves, with considerable justification, on our record of economic growth. But over the last few decades it's remarkable how little of that growth has trickled down to ordinary families." Or how about this point: "The reason conservatives engage in bouts of Sweden-bashing is that they want to convince us that there is no tradeoff between economic efficiency and equity -- that if you try to take from the rich and give to the poor, you actually make everyone worse off. But the comparison between the U.S. and other advanced countries doesn't support this conclusion at all."
But on the other hand, I have no doubt that you're correct that the award is "politically motivated", at least in part: it's much like the Dixie Chicks getting a Grammie... there are so many people so disgusted with the Bush regime at this point that the awards committees can't resist tweaking some Republican noses.
(And if anyone cares, this is my take on Krugman: KRUGMAN_FUNNIES.)
You need to read a little bit more of Krugman's stuff before you spout off about it.
Hell, how about the wikipedia article: Paul Krugman: "He was critical of industrial policy (an approach Clinton later dropped under the influence of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers) and argued in favor of free trade. (He writes on p. xxvi of his book The Great Unraveling that 'I still have the angry letter Ralph Nader sent me when I criticized his attacks on globalization.')"
Are you sure about that factor of 20? Have you measured it in any real cases lately?
"C is always faster" is something of a myth. You need to be a pretty good C programmer to beat the perl-porters.
And Python also helped you get to thousands of lines of code so much faster!
What's missing is compression: Dynamic range compression
The problem I've had with airlines is that the dynamic range of movie sound tracks is designed for quiet movie-theater environment, but on an aircraft there are loud humming noises at all times. You need to crank the volume up if you want to have a hope of hearing the dialog, then you get blown away by the thundering sound track, explosion effects, etc.
Compressing the sound is cheap and easy, but don't expect airlines to get around to it until you pass a law requiring it. (What was someone saying about "free markets"? Whatever.)
Jefferson was pushing for the abolition of slavery, he was just looking for a way to do it gradually, without something as traumatic as a Civil War. He liked the idea that the children of slaves should become free citizens -- now there may indeed have been some personal interests that got him started thinking in that direction, but that's actually a fairly clever idea if you think about it. If you've got massive slave-owning businesses infesting the economy [1], they're going to fight you tooth and nail about reducing the value of their investment, but if you restrict the supply of new slaves the value of that investment will go up in the near term... And it also helps answer the objection that people who've been slaves all their lives just don't have the intellectual equipment to become citizens.
Now, as it happens, to the modern way of thinking, this kind of compromising with evil is unacceptable, and in retrospect we like the fanatic abolitionists like John Brown better, but at the time it was not looking like John Brown was going to get anywhere...
[1] If you'd like another example of something this, you might look at the way American oil-dependency has totally warped our sense of morality. Who are our present-day John Browns?
The "it's all about oil" take on the Afghanistan invasion is that it had to do with building the Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline. It didn't work out that way, but it could be that that was one of the main ideas.
Does anyone remember the big news story about the Taliban six months before September 11th? World appeals to Taleban to stop destroying statues. Around that time, I remember thinking that this was getting an awfully big play in the US media, which normally can barely be bothered to pay any attention to anything that happens outside it's borders. My thought was "okay, so why are we being manipulated into hating yet another formerly US-backed group?".
Well, yes, it really is true. And further, plug-ins are apparently a severe pain to implement in a cross-platform way -- I use AMD64 boxes myself, and there's still no native flash plug-in, for example. And if firefox extensions are any guide, we can also look forward to plug-ins breaking when you do browser upgrades.
Further, the entire premise (what the web needs is more languages!) is fundamentally flawed, because it obsesses about the technical characteristics of languages, and ignores the social aspects -- as you get more languages in play, you sub-divide the community of developers and complicate the sharing of techniques and so on.
Oops. Replied in the wrong discussion. Sorry about that.
Well, yes, it really is true. And further, plug-ins are apparently a severe pain to implement in a cross-platform way -- I use AMD64 boxes myself, and there's still no native flash plug-in, for example. And if firefox extensions are any guide, we can also look forward to plug-ins breaking when you do browser upgrades.
Further, the entire premise (what the web needs is more languages!) is fundamentally flawed, because it obsesses about the technical characteristics of languages, and ignores the social aspects -- as you get more languages in play, you sub-divide the community of developers and complicate the sharing of techniques and so on.
Well, maybe I'm a little sensitive to the now standardized swipes at perl, but may I point out that perl does indeed have lexical namespaces? It could be the author was thinking of PHP (which if I understand correctly, also has namespaces now, though only in it's latest version).
In any case: does anyone have any real evidence that strong typing actually works? Java was sold to people on the basis of it's maintainability -- was that claim true? How would you know?
Myself, I've been primarily a perl programmer for a decade, and you can easily count the number of occasions I've had my fingers burned by type-confusion on one hand. There are CS geeks out there who are incredibly strong-typing fanatics, way out of proportion to how useful the feature is.
(Just a hint: if you want to attack perl intelligently, try "lack of standardization". For example, there are multiple ways of implementing perl objects, if you just pick one you'll probably get it to work well enough for you. But if you use someone else's modules, there's no way to know in advance what kind of objects they're using -- you've got to inspect the code before you can even think about sub-classing it.)
Okay the trouble here is that you guys keep thinking this is a technical issue, but it just isn't
First of all, it's debatable whether "corporate" types in general "hate perl" -- no doubt some of them do, but you can also find many companies with successful perl-based businesses who aren't going to switch to the language-of-the-month just to keep up with the Joneses.
If there's been a shift away from perl (and I have my doubts there really has been), it's almost solely because a lot of people who like to pose as uber-geeks have been talking trash about it, and the reason they've been talking trash about it is almost solely because they feel insulted by Larry Wall. Over the years Larry Wall hasn't been shy about explaining his design philosophy, which is essentially that computer science nerds have an irrational addiction to ideas like "mathematical elegance", when computer languages are tools for human beings to use -- so he looked to linguistics for inspiration.
Now, if you want proof that this is essentially just talking-trash and not anything like a reasoned debate, consider the situation with PHP. Until recently it didn't even have namespaces. By any objective standard, you would expect a CS geek to regard PHP as a piece of garbage compared to perl -- and yet, the uber-geek hit squad is rather silent on the subject, no?
On the plus side: I find it somewhat encouraging that if you look at the actual market penetration of things like Ruby on Rails, essentially no one is using it, despite years of intense hype from many quarters -- it could be that the suits are finally making technical decisions based on something besides nerd-chatter.
If all it takes is a bad plug-in, then what's the defense against a malicious site using a "You must upgrade to the latest version of Flash!" with a button that installs a hacked version? This is sounding like the problem with Word autoexecute macros again -- good luck explaining to lusers what they're allowed to click on.
DamienNightbane wrote:
This is all a bit of an exaggeration. There are some old radio shows where the main characters make a point of plugging the sponsors products, but that's more of an exception than the rule, I can only think of a handful of such cases.
More to the point, in the "golden age", no one really knew what the right way was to do things, so they kept experimenting, they kept changing the formula... much like today's web.
As far as print media is concerned, I would say it's required to quote them as is, though why I think different standards apply in either case, I couldn't tell you. One difference would be that if you're on-line it's usually relatively easy to thread your way back to the original if you really care.
And it's already illegal to do that while driving in California.
I By the way:
Good luck getting paid, Steetline. San Francisco stiffed the company that installed the excellent nextmuni system (which by the way, is far more practical than encouraging people to drive to downtown San Francisco... it's not just the parking that's maxed out).
Shouldn't it be named Module::Build?