I never noticed - I found Andromeda as gripping as the handshakes at a gay bar (it's a euphemism, get over it) so quickly lost interest.
This is a pretty classic example of how bad writing
can be really difficult to follow. The idea
seems to be that this "handshakes in a gay bar" phrase is an "expression" or a
"figure of speech". Instead I was left trying
to figure out what it
might be a euphemism for... does
Creepy prefers tight little boys to the more
experienced crowd at the gay bar?
But then, once I understood he meant "expression",
then I was left trying to comprehend the figure
of speech. In my experience, gay men shake hands
like insurance salesmen. Took me a moment to
remember the limp-wrist sterotype.
dude, I agree with you. My point is: The long rant about
"tin-pot dictators" and an oppressive United States,
continuing to go about things the wrong way, is THE WAY THE
WORLD ACTUALLY WORKS.
I'm confused here, is your point that you *are* in favor of
bombing the hell out of anyone with a nuclear power program?
This strikes you as hard-headed, pragmatic realpolitik?
Or is your point that you don't *really* like it, but
there's nothing you can do about it? (I don't know how much
I care myself, it's something of a side-issue to what I'm
talking about.)
(And... "long rant"? Three short paragraphs? You need to
look at usenet someday...)
You're not going to get nuclear to replace coal and oil, at
least not in the next fifty years.
Fifty years is an insanely long time-span to make technical
predictions. I would offer to bet you, but in 50 years
nukes may be regarded as irrelvant because of solar power
satellites.
There will always be the
example of Israel blowing up Iran's nuclear program in the
80s for fear of getting nuked by crazy towel-heads. That
fear is as strong now as ever.
The actual point that I made, is that the US decisions about
how the US generates it's own power internally, has
*nothing* to do with how some other country does it.
Do you think it's impossible for the US to be pro-nuke
internally and anti-nuke externally? That hardly exhausts
the range of our hypocrisy -- excuse me, pragmatic realpolitik.
Have we ever thought about just reducing our energy
consumption? No. Because that, as well, is NOT how the world
works. (And it's definitely not how America works.)
Some people think about it. I'm willing to listen.
There's a lot of room for efficiency improvements, e.g.
in transportation; communications; computers, etc.
The hard part is pumping heat around.
It's not clear to me why we need to think about it as a
whole... this is the kind of technical improvements you're
supposed to expect from the free market if you charge what
the energy costs.
Note, now *that* was a remark that could be construed as "libertarian".
I have no clue what you're going on about here:
Sorry but you sound like one of those libertarians who knows
the world would be great, if we could just roll back the
past 150 years of history and get America back to what the
Founders had in mind. Guess what. That option isn't available, sorry.
Libertarian? I'm speaking in favor of the highly regulated
nuclear industry.
Fact is, Japan and France are already pretty amped up on
nuclear power. So they've proven they can manage it
responsibly, we hope.
No shit. Notably we're not planning on bombing them for it.
Or China. Or even Pakistan. If we can explain away this
inconsistency, I imagine we could explain away a new
American commitment to nuclear power at home.
Do you get it yet? I'll try and repeat the point, very,
very, simply: There is no connection between American
nuclear power and "nuclear proliferation" abroad. That
argument does not work, even from the point of view of
public relations, or maintaining a consistent policy or
something, because we don't bother with consistency.
I don't know, maybe it's not feasible to be consistent,
whatever: that's a different subject.
The thing about the waste, it's the same sort of psychology
that makes a plane crash news, but a car crash just an
everyday event. People fixate on spectacular failures. When
you just spew the junk into the air, slowly killing us all,
that might be a spectacular public health failure but
there's no "money shot" for the evening news. The details
will be buried in some 500-page bueraucratic report. And
that's a failure of management and politicians.
Yes, exactly. And your point is that we just have to live
with the fact that the American de
I know it's geek chic to assume everyone against increased nuclear use is against it "just because they see the word nuclear", but it's just not true.
Thank you! I'm also on the fence when it comes to nuclear power; even though it may be "cleaner" it's not like we're going to allow Afghanistan and what not to start using it, so let's stick with coal/oil until the nuclear genie is fully out of the bottle, and mabye by then we can figure out, realistically, what to do with the waste. Just my 2 cents.
And that's about what it's worth.
On the one hand, we have the coal industry, which spews
large quantities of toxic crap into the air, and on the
other hand, we have the nuclear industry, which produces a
much smaller quantity of highly concentrated waste.
But you don't want to go with nukes, because you're afraid
the holes in the ground might leak. It's obviously much
better to keep spewing the toxic crap into the air, and
continue killing thousands of people a year in the US
alone... Not to mention the global warming issue.
Oops, sorry, I missed that remark about "Afghanastan":
you're one of the guys who likes the "nuclear proliferation" argument.
Your point is that the US should keep killing it's own
citizens with coal power, in order to convince Afghanistan
to kill it's citizen's in the same way. Unfortunately, if
we're trying to "set a good example", there's the slight
problem that we're not about to give up our own nuclear
weapons, and this point is not exactly lost on the
Afghanastans of the world: it isn't going to convince them
to stop buying nuclear material from Pakistan.
So what I'm trying to get at here is that while I sympathize
with your worries about nuclear armed tin-pot dictators,
killing American citizens with coal effluvia doesn't strike
me as an effective means of supressing the problem.
(By the way... are you in favor of bombing the shit out of
any country that announces it has plans for nuclear power
generation? Interesting ethical stance, that...)
And stop picking on SUVs. They may be the vehicle of choice of Yuppie Scum, but modern examples get decent gas milage and thanks to the latest generation cat converters and emissions hardware/software, produce tiny fractions of the noxious crap that used to come out of cars.
I was going to point out that getting 25mpg when
you could get 40mpg hardly counts as decent gas
mileage.
It's also interesting that SUVs don't appear to
actually be any safer for the driver, despite being more dangerous for everyone else, not to mention polluting at about double the state-of-the-art.
But then I realized that you're a total nut-job:
In some places, the tailpipe emissions from an SUV is cleaner than the ambiant air.
However, a reasonable person might make the point that SUVs are probably not the biggest problem we've got as far as pollution goes. How about coal power, which still produces about half of the US electrical supply? Electric vehicles will never really be "zero emissions" until we do something about the coal problem.
Before I get modded as a troll, please think about this for a minute.
Is a 60 year old white female EXACTLY AS LIKELY to be a suicide bomber
looking to blow up a few American White Devils as a 24 year old Saudi
Arabian of Palistinean lineage? Do you really think so?
And now you think about it for a minute:
Do you think that those damn terrorists are too stupid to
realize that you're doing skin-color profiling? How would
*you* react? That's right, you send in the palest faces on
your team to do the hijacking.
Oh, and is a young black male more likely to commit a
mugging? Well then, why don't we just lock up all of them,
on balance we'll be better off, wouldn't we?
I use postgresql as well. It was a pain to find an isp that used that rather then mysql which is why Mysql is popular.
You've got a cause-and-effect problem going here.
MySQL became popular at a critical time, hence it
became ubiquitous. It's not particularly
*difficult* for an ISP to provide Postgresql support, but it would be just one more thing to hassle about, and the market is relatively small...
I think part of the trouble there is that if you're half-way serious you want to set up your own boxes anyway... the small fry that want to run
web apps on someone else's box are either (a)
unlikely to need a real RDBMS like postgresql
or (b) unlikely to know why they need it, take your pick.
And just for the record, where I work, I have seen Oracle
servers fall over and die. Not due to connection limits, but
due to plain and simple errors inside the code.
Acutally, I've worked places where this was happening with
Oracle now and then for reasons that were hard to determine.
There was some sort of load-related "spiral-of-death"
happening. A shutdown and restart would "fix" everything,
until the next time... (the solution they came up with was
to just reduce the query load on the Oracle database by using
distributed Postgresql databases with copies of read-mostly data).
Actually, I'd tend to call MySQL a tool. One that's has been
vastly different from Postgresql and Oracle in the past (3.x
versions), and one that served the target market much better
than either Postgresql or Oracle could - there is simply no
way to build shared hosting for
webshop/weblog/guestbook/cms/ad-hoc type applications based
on Oracle for a competitive price.
But suddenly you're not talking about Postgresql anymore...
Most of the stuff people do with MySQL you could easily
do with Postgresql instead (hell, *most* of it you could
just use BDB).
This seems a little confused:
Similar situation with Postgresql: At the time the LAMP
hosting market was created, the Postgresql team did not
offer their product in a packaging that was usable for the
job - no neat distribution, no documentation that a hoster
could have handed to the end user, no proper support for
shared hosting environments.
I can't imagine what you're talking about, really.
When web apps were adopting MySQL Postgresql had a number of
genuine technical problems that turned people off, but these don't
sound like them. For example, there was an 18K limit on row size.
(And also during that period, MySQL had the market cornered
on bullshit. Like "Transactions??? Aww, you don't need that
shit." And MySQL boosters than -- and now -- seem to regard
mysql.org as the fountain of truth... for example, "MySQL is
*fast*" appears to be an article of faith, but the people
who say that rarely do their own benchmarks, never worry
about what happens under heavy load, etc.)
Any yeah: Linux was not "enterprise level" in 1994 as well
and got badmouthed by the established Unix vendors.
And they all laughed at Christopher Columbus, but many
people who seem crazy genuinely are crazy, and some things
that experts sneer at as toys may in fact really be toys.
Chances are that they fuck it up. There is to much venture
capital involved - these people want to see 3-5 year returns
on their money, but we are talking a 10-15 year development
here.
Yup. Usually venture capital is the death of anything
worthwhile (it's amazing google has held on for so long).
Anyway, I should explain that I don't keep up with the
state of MySQL's code. For all I know the MySQL defenders
are right when they say they're got all the features you
could want now... I gave up on following MySQL a long time
ago, but I did it as much for social reasons as for
technical ones.
MySQL has always been a little too cute in the way they pose
like one of the guys to keep their mindshare in the
free/open world. Remember the old not-exactly-free license
that penalized people for running on Microsoft? It's sounds
like they're trying to play the same kind of games with
their sort-of-GPL'ed libraries.
I'm no Perl golfer, but I'd suggest that the obvious Perlish way of doing it looks more like this:
$lines{$_} = 1 while(<>);
print for sort keys %lines;
Well, I suggest that you're being too modest. The method
that I came up with off of the top of my head is certainly
too verbose (for some reason I spaced on the fact that you
don't need to explicitly iterate over the arguments), but
what you're showing here displays a pretty good grasp of
some of the odder constructs that perl allows.
If I'd been writing stuff like this a lot, maybe I would've
called this the "obvious" solution:
But in any case, iterating over
@ARGV the way I did it the first time made it easy to modify it to record the
context that each line was found in.
(As an aside: perl's detractors claim that the differences
between your style and mine should be an impediment to us
understanding each other's code. But in fact, I have no
trouble reading your solution... my reaction isn't "My god,
what is he doing", it's more like "Oh yeah, I forgot you
could do that.")
Oh, by the way: if I remember correctly there's
a memory advantage to using "undef" as the hash value in this case over the integer "1"... though
using "1" would certainly score you points in
golf.
<Jon^D> I had to cat 8-9 seperate quote files, compare each line in each of them to make sure there weren't any duplicates then sort
<Jon^D> I wrote a nasty perl script to get it donw
<Jon^D> and it didn't work very well
<skank> cat quote*.txt |sort |uniq
My first stab at doing this in perl is admittedly not as
simple as the shell method, but not particularly hairy,
either:
(I don't doubt that a perl-golf expert could find something
shorter, but I think it's fairer to compare the
obvious shell method to an obvious perl method.)
I think that shell command line methods tend to be very
convenient for jobs like this where you don't mind throwing
away context information. If, on the other hand, you wanted
to get a sorted listing of all quotes, along with the
name(s) of the files they came from, then a stack of pipes
won't do the job quite as easily.
You can extend my perl version to do this without much
trouble:
You could say exactly the same thing about fine wine, and if you say it loud enough and often enough, you might eventually convince yourself that you're right.
Funny, I do say that about wine, which smells like rotten grapes to me (strangely enough), and I continually need to convince people not to put in my food (uh, please sir, I know it's hard to believe, but I actually don't like the flavor of rotten grapes... and is their anything on the dessert menu that doesn't have disinfectant in it?).
The original poster may have a point about the virtues of staying away from an addictive drug like coffee. There's something to be said about not scrambling to get your fix every morning (like I do).
Java is highly maintainable precisely because it doesn't employ a "there's more than one right way to do it" approach. That is why it is so suitable to distributed projects, multi-programmer projects, and in fact, why it is used in a lot of large open-source projects.
So, I'm just curious here... do you know for yourself that this is true, e.g. you've been handed off a Java project written by someone else and you've had no trouble dealing with it?
(Note that this hypothetical presumes that someone
is capable of finishing a project written in Java,
and that's not so clear to me either, but I'll grant it as a premise.)
(I hear things like this repeated a lot, it would be nice if someone would prove it. Would it be
too much to ask for a "computer scientist" to study the issue, and present some data that shows their claims are correct?)
That's one thing that's always intrigued me about perl, the $_, particularly in the case where it's assumed to be the variable you're acting upon.
It's common when speaking to make certain assumptions, like when someone says "Get me that screwdriver", then you assume that he means for you to get the screwdriver. I don't see it as inherently bad when communicating with computers.
Is there some unwritten law among perl writers now not to use those semantics?
No, not that I've ever run into. Using $_ as the
default variable to operate on doesn't cause problems as often as you might think. I was stung by that just once, about ten years ago -- I went back to something I'd written and inserted some lines of code, forgetting that I'd decided to pass
some information from one chunk to the other by just leaving it in $_.
Mostly the solution is you just don't do it that way: you use $_
to hold information locally, within a small chunk of code, to keep from repeating yourself a lot ("do this to *that*, do this other thing to *that*, now do *this* to *that* again).
The linguistic analogy you bring up still holds...
you use pronouns only when it's clear what you're
referring to. You don't come back a day later and
say "How's it going with that?" and expect to be understood.
How many coders will follow the new syntax and features?
I already do follow Perl6 syntax, sometimes.
They keep back-porting Perl6 ideas to perl5:
Bundle-Perl6-0-0.05
And when "Perl 6" is finally released, I expect to continue mixing and matching perl5 and perl6 constructs, gradually shifting over to 6, without
throwing away any existing libraries written for
perl 5.
I expect that this process is going to be a hell of a lot easier than switching to any other language would be...
Practicle sense though says nothing about the underlying mechanics. Yes I will agree that we will never be able to sample alpha particle emissions in such a way that we can predict future events in that system. However, they still are not "random".
You conceede that human beings (nor any other hypothetical intelligent observer) have no way to predict alpha decay, and yet deny that alpha decay is "random".
You're in effect claiming that something exists
in spite of the fact that there is no way to observe it (in this case, the hidden wheels that
determine this apparently random phenomena).
This entire attitude runs against current understanding of what the scientific method is about, and the weird thing is that you don't
seem to know that that's what you're doing.
I think that's what's giving rise to name-calling:
"idiot" or not, you're way off in left-field, out on a limb, marching to a beat of the different
drummer, however you want to put it. These are
discredited ideas, and if you want to argue for
them, you should know why they've been discredited.
(1) My understanding is that the energy you need to
expend to reach earth orbit is not much different
from, say, flying across the United States. While
new propulsion systems are certainly helpful, lack
of them are not really the reason space flight is
so expensive.
(2) This is pretty much a lost cause, but are you
*sure* that Orion is "too dirty"? Consider the
sheer quantity of mass you can boost into orbit
with an Orion launch, and compare it to the amount
of damage resulting from the fall-out. Suppose someone proposed a scheme
whereby a single Orion launch would put enough
solar power satellites in orbit to completely
replace coal burning. The number of deaths likely
to result from the Orion fall-out would pale in
significance compared to numbers you would save
by dumping coal burning.
...Red Hat has been a decent company. They usually make their stance clear and try to be honest at all times.
Yes, exactly. It's very cool that Red Hat walks-the-walk, and releases software under the GPL. But...
They have burned customers time and time again by distributing pre-release software that lacked polish.
Yeah, right again. Red Hat at least used to seem
to feel they needed to include alpha-quality junk
in their distribution in order to "stay ahead of the pack" or some such. Foisting things like "linuxconf" on newbies was just incredible. Enlightment (when they were pushing it, at least)
wasn't much better.
Red Hat announcing that Linux isn't ready for the
desktop was grimly amusing in a way... it's more
like Red Hat isn't ready for it...
It's too often global warming comes up, things are getting bad, but really whats a few species becoming extinct? at the same time many more will come about due to evolution. If anything I think the earth needs a good worldwide devestation caused by humans, all these reports mean nothing, we'll still build nukes, we'll still drive our cars
It's a little difficult to decipher the syntax here, but are you under the delusion that nuclear
power plants contribute to global warming? You
have it completely backwards, coal power is one of the worst offenders, and switching to nuclear power is an obvious thing to do if you're worried about carbon emissions.
I keep reading Sterling hoping to see what all the rest of
you are apparently seeing, but all I get it someone deeply,
deeply in love with hearing his own clever ideas, usually
couched in some nebulously sardonic comment that makes it
oh-so-hip.
Look, the thing you need to get here is it is not
particularly Sterling's job to get everything right, because
the people who *are* in positions like that get frozen by
the need to be responsible. When Sterling is at his best,
what you get is a pyrotechnic spew of ideas and insights
some of which you might not have heard before, and some of
which you might even find useful.
Sterling is really good at this kind of thing, compared to
much of the other people out there, e.g. Howard Reingold who
appears to be making a living with a throwaway idea from
Sterling's novel "Distraction".
I'm a big fan of the novel "Holy Fire", myself, which just
might have something important to say about human identity
and the best achieveable human society, though I would
predict that you won't like it for cultural reasons. To
enjoy this book you need to feel that there's something
significant about young hipster artists spazzing around
trying to get a grip on life, and you appear to be coming
from what you might call a more culturally conservative
position.
Anyway, things that are good about Sterling: he ranges
pretty widely in what he pays attention to in technical and
social trends, and unlike many an American thinks about
things that go on outside the US. Things that are maybe not
so good: part of his self-image is that he's good at
cultural manipulation, e.g. he was the man who managed to
put "cyberpunk" over. Note that he often uses
huckster/diplomat figures as main characters in his novels.
My impression is that he's turned his sights on using these
skills for a more Important Purpose of late: getting the
word out on Global Warming, which he's attempting to do with
his Viridian
Design Movement. On the plus side, it really probably would
not be such a bad idea to ease off on the
carbon-emissions, irrespective of you're opinion about
anthropogenic global warming... but in a way I've always
found the Viridian movement to be a bit disappointingly
conventional for someone like Sterling to get involved
with. All of a sudden, he's being Responsible.
No, nothing from Xanadu will be added to the web. Nothing but ActiveX extensions will be added to the web.
All right, that's it. You don't get away with speaking of Xanadu and ActiveX in the same breath.
Here we go.
First of all, the Xanadu project, despite being a
"failure", has been enormously influential. You may not know much about it, but just about every
single person who's messed around with creating
a hypertext system does, certainly Tim-Berners Lee
did (and not incidentally, the original Netscape
programming team certainly did also).
Try doing some google
searches, try understanding what Xanadu was about,
then pick a feature from it and see if you can
figure out a way to kludge it into the web.
If you pull it off, you'll have achieved something
worthwhile. Off the top of my head: transclusion,
back-links, micropayments, versioning, fine-grained linking...
By the way, the Xanadu code was open-sourced
some years ago: xanadu source code
Thanks for the detailed description, in particular for your clear description for what you might want
to do with a distributed version control... I've read
a number of pro and anti bitkeeper flames, but none of them have made that clear.
Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
By who, the Iraqi Information Minister? I used to live in the house my father grew up in, which is downwind from a paper mill. When he was growing up, the rain would literally peel away the paint on my grandparents' house and car over a few months, and the grass and trees were always sickly. In the wake of clean air legislation, I've never had to see acid rain, and my yard was always green. I don't even smell the stink that used to occasionally come from the plant when I was a kid anymore.
Are you sure it was from the rain, or was it just from being down wind from the paper mill? No one would tell you that industrial pollution doesn't exist, and no one in their right mind thinks that coal is a clean power source, but myself I would be reluctant to casually talk about "acid rain from coal power" without looking into it a lot more.
Articles like this are the reason why:
Summary: respected government scientist concludes that acid rain isn't a big factor effecting the acidity of lakes and streams, and gets fired for
coming to a literally politically incorrect conclusion.
As a chemist you have alreadly brainwashed yourself to ignore a lot of the problems with chemicals, just as most people who work in the nuclear industry can't see the problems even though they stare everyone in the face.
So what you're saying is that anyone who knows what they're talking about must have been corrupted by their exposure to the community of people who know what they're talking about... you've decided that untrained amateurs are the only people worth listening to.
The chemist here is overstating the case, but essentially he's just making the what should be obvious point that a detectable level isn't necessarily something to worry about, because the detectable level may be far below the dangerous level. Our ability to detect things is very good these days.
From what I can tell, though, it appears to have peaked and is now in relative decline. Python is gaining rapidly on Perl in the "scripting language" space.
Hey everyone! He said perl! We have to say Python! Python Python Python!
Everyone knows that Python has vastly outstriped
perl in inane slashdot comments, and we can expect
more to come in the future.
Java, and now PHP, have eroded Perl's popularity in an area it once almost monopolized: Web apps.
Yeah, and does anyone have some recommendations
for a real web hosting company that can deal with
mod_perl? If they provide webmail that actually
works (as opposed to that pile of PHP, Horde) that
would be a plus.
PostgreSQL has more enterprise features, but it's not used as much as MySQL. It seems pretty solid, though. We toyed with a bit, but my boss decided to go with MySQL mainly because he had heard of it before.
Slashdot Mirror
But then, once I understood he meant "expression", then I was left trying to comprehend the figure of speech. In my experience, gay men shake hands like insurance salesmen. Took me a moment to remember the limp-wrist sterotype.
I'm confused here, is your point that you *are* in favor of bombing the hell out of anyone with a nuclear power program? This strikes you as hard-headed, pragmatic realpolitik? Or is your point that you don't *really* like it, but there's nothing you can do about it? (I don't know how much I care myself, it's something of a side-issue to what I'm talking about.)
(And... "long rant"? Three short paragraphs? You need to look at usenet someday...)
Fifty years is an insanely long time-span to make technical predictions. I would offer to bet you, but in 50 years nukes may be regarded as irrelvant because of solar power satellites.
The actual point that I made, is that the US decisions about how the US generates it's own power internally, has *nothing* to do with how some other country does it. Do you think it's impossible for the US to be pro-nuke internally and anti-nuke externally? That hardly exhausts the range of our hypocrisy -- excuse me, pragmatic realpolitik.
Some people think about it. I'm willing to listen. There's a lot of room for efficiency improvements, e.g. in transportation; communications; computers, etc. The hard part is pumping heat around.
It's not clear to me why we need to think about it as a whole... this is the kind of technical improvements you're supposed to expect from the free market if you charge what the energy costs.
Note, now *that* was a remark that could be construed as "libertarian". I have no clue what you're going on about here:
Libertarian? I'm speaking in favor of the highly regulated nuclear industry.
No shit. Notably we're not planning on bombing them for it. Or China. Or even Pakistan. If we can explain away this inconsistency, I imagine we could explain away a new American commitment to nuclear power at home.
Do you get it yet? I'll try and repeat the point, very, very, simply: There is no connection between American nuclear power and "nuclear proliferation" abroad. That argument does not work, even from the point of view of public relations, or maintaining a consistent policy or something, because we don't bother with consistency. I don't know, maybe it's not feasible to be consistent, whatever: that's a different subject.
Yes, exactly. And your point is that we just have to live with the fact that the American de
On the one hand, we have the coal industry, which spews large quantities of toxic crap into the air, and on the other hand, we have the nuclear industry, which produces a much smaller quantity of highly concentrated waste. But you don't want to go with nukes, because you're afraid the holes in the ground might leak. It's obviously much better to keep spewing the toxic crap into the air, and continue killing thousands of people a year in the US alone... Not to mention the global warming issue.
Oops, sorry, I missed that remark about "Afghanastan": you're one of the guys who likes the "nuclear proliferation" argument. Your point is that the US should keep killing it's own citizens with coal power, in order to convince Afghanistan to kill it's citizen's in the same way. Unfortunately, if we're trying to "set a good example", there's the slight problem that we're not about to give up our own nuclear weapons, and this point is not exactly lost on the Afghanastans of the world: it isn't going to convince them to stop buying nuclear material from Pakistan.
So what I'm trying to get at here is that while I sympathize with your worries about nuclear armed tin-pot dictators, killing American citizens with coal effluvia doesn't strike me as an effective means of supressing the problem.
(By the way... are you in favor of bombing the shit out of any country that announces it has plans for nuclear power generation? Interesting ethical stance, that...)
It's also interesting that SUVs don't appear to actually be any safer for the driver, despite being more dangerous for everyone else, not to mention polluting at about double the state-of-the-art.
But then I realized that you're a total nut-job:
However, a reasonable person might make the point that SUVs are probably not the biggest problem we've got as far as pollution goes. How about coal power, which still produces about half of the US electrical supply? Electric vehicles will never really be "zero emissions" until we do something about the coal problem.Oh, and is a young black male more likely to commit a mugging? Well then, why don't we just lock up all of them, on balance we'll be better off, wouldn't we?
I think part of the trouble there is that if you're half-way serious you want to set up your own boxes anyway... the small fry that want to run web apps on someone else's box are either (a) unlikely to need a real RDBMS like postgresql or (b) unlikely to know why they need it, take your pick.
This seems a little confused:
I can't imagine what you're talking about, really. When web apps were adopting MySQL Postgresql had a number of genuine technical problems that turned people off, but these don't sound like them. For example, there was an 18K limit on row size.(And also during that period, MySQL had the market cornered on bullshit. Like "Transactions??? Aww, you don't need that shit." And MySQL boosters than -- and now -- seem to regard mysql.org as the fountain of truth... for example, "MySQL is *fast*" appears to be an article of faith, but the people who say that rarely do their own benchmarks, never worry about what happens under heavy load, etc.)
And they all laughed at Christopher Columbus, but many people who seem crazy genuinely are crazy, and some things that experts sneer at as toys may in fact really be toys. Yup. Usually venture capital is the death of anything worthwhile (it's amazing google has held on for so long).Anyway, I should explain that I don't keep up with the state of MySQL's code. For all I know the MySQL defenders are right when they say they're got all the features you could want now... I gave up on following MySQL a long time ago, but I did it as much for social reasons as for technical ones.
MySQL has always been a little too cute in the way they pose like one of the guys to keep their mindshare in the free/open world. Remember the old not-exactly-free license that penalized people for running on Microsoft? It's sounds like they're trying to play the same kind of games with their sort-of-GPL'ed libraries.
If I'd been writing stuff like this a lot, maybe I would've called this the "obvious" solution:
But in any case, iterating over @ARGV the way I did it the first time made it easy to modify it to record the context that each line was found in.(As an aside: perl's detractors claim that the differences between your style and mine should be an impediment to us understanding each other's code. But in fact, I have no trouble reading your solution... my reaction isn't "My god, what is he doing", it's more like "Oh yeah, I forgot you could do that.")
Oh, by the way: if I remember correctly there's a memory advantage to using "undef" as the hash value in this case over the integer "1"... though using "1" would certainly score you points in golf.
I think that shell command line methods tend to be very convenient for jobs like this where you don't mind throwing away context information. If, on the other hand, you wanted to get a sorted listing of all quotes, along with the name(s) of the files they came from, then a stack of pipes won't do the job quite as easily.
You can extend my perl version to do this without much trouble:
(slashdot's ECODE tags don't preserve indentation, and they don't let you use PRE either... I wonder about them sometimes...)
The original poster may have a point about the virtues of staying away from an addictive drug like coffee. There's something to be said about not scrambling to get your fix every morning (like I do).
(I hear things like this repeated a lot, it would be nice if someone would prove it. Would it be too much to ask for a "computer scientist" to study the issue, and present some data that shows their claims are correct?)
Mostly the solution is you just don't do it that way: you use $_ to hold information locally, within a small chunk of code, to keep from repeating yourself a lot ("do this to *that*, do this other thing to *that*, now do *this* to *that* again).
The linguistic analogy you bring up still holds... you use pronouns only when it's clear what you're referring to. You don't come back a day later and say "How's it going with that?" and expect to be understood.
And when "Perl 6" is finally released, I expect to continue mixing and matching perl5 and perl6 constructs, gradually shifting over to 6, without throwing away any existing libraries written for perl 5.
I expect that this process is going to be a hell of a lot easier than switching to any other language would be...
You're in effect claiming that something exists in spite of the fact that there is no way to observe it (in this case, the hidden wheels that determine this apparently random phenomena). This entire attitude runs against current understanding of what the scientific method is about, and the weird thing is that you don't seem to know that that's what you're doing.
I think that's what's giving rise to name-calling: "idiot" or not, you're way off in left-field, out on a limb, marching to a beat of the different drummer, however you want to put it. These are discredited ideas, and if you want to argue for them, you should know why they've been discredited.
Heh... note the email address Annalee Newitz is using here... she evidentally creates a new mail alias for every column: sugarpill@techsploitation.com
Ah, slash ids pushing a billion and whining about what a sewer it's become...
(2) This is pretty much a lost cause, but are you *sure* that Orion is "too dirty"? Consider the sheer quantity of mass you can boost into orbit with an Orion launch, and compare it to the amount of damage resulting from the fall-out. Suppose someone proposed a scheme whereby a single Orion launch would put enough solar power satellites in orbit to completely replace coal burning. The number of deaths likely to result from the Orion fall-out would pale in significance compared to numbers you would save by dumping coal burning.
Red Hat announcing that Linux isn't ready for the desktop was grimly amusing in a way... it's more like Red Hat isn't ready for it...
("Informative"???)
Sterling is really good at this kind of thing, compared to much of the other people out there, e.g. Howard Reingold who appears to be making a living with a throwaway idea from Sterling's novel "Distraction".
I'm a big fan of the novel "Holy Fire", myself, which just might have something important to say about human identity and the best achieveable human society, though I would predict that you won't like it for cultural reasons. To enjoy this book you need to feel that there's something significant about young hipster artists spazzing around trying to get a grip on life, and you appear to be coming from what you might call a more culturally conservative position.
Anyway, things that are good about Sterling: he ranges pretty widely in what he pays attention to in technical and social trends, and unlike many an American thinks about things that go on outside the US. Things that are maybe not so good: part of his self-image is that he's good at cultural manipulation, e.g. he was the man who managed to put "cyberpunk" over. Note that he often uses huckster/diplomat figures as main characters in his novels.
My impression is that he's turned his sights on using these skills for a more Important Purpose of late: getting the word out on Global Warming, which he's attempting to do with his Viridian Design Movement. On the plus side, it really probably would not be such a bad idea to ease off on the carbon-emissions, irrespective of you're opinion about anthropogenic global warming... but in a way I've always found the Viridian movement to be a bit disappointingly conventional for someone like Sterling to get involved with. All of a sudden, he's being Responsible.
First of all, the Xanadu project, despite being a "failure", has been enormously influential. You may not know much about it, but just about every single person who's messed around with creating a hypertext system does, certainly Tim-Berners Lee did (and not incidentally, the original Netscape programming team certainly did also).
Try doing some google searches, try understanding what Xanadu was about, then pick a feature from it and see if you can figure out a way to kludge it into the web. If you pull it off, you'll have achieved something worthwhile. Off the top of my head: transclusion, back-links, micropayments, versioning, fine-grained linking...
By the way, the Xanadu code was open-sourced some years ago: xanadu source code
Thanks for the detailed description, in particular for your clear description for what you might want to do with a distributed version control... I've read a number of pro and anti bitkeeper flames, but none of them have made that clear.
From 'Reason' Magazine, January 1992: Acid Test: Edward Krug Flunks Political Science by William Anderson
Summary: respected government scientist concludes that acid rain isn't a big factor effecting the acidity of lakes and streams, and gets fired for coming to a literally politically incorrect conclusion.
The chemist here is overstating the case, but essentially he's just making the what should be obvious point that a detectable level isn't necessarily something to worry about, because the detectable level may be far below the dangerous level. Our ability to detect things is very good these days.
Everyone knows that Python has vastly outstriped perl in inane slashdot comments, and we can expect more to come in the future.
Yeah, and does anyone have some recommendations for a real web hosting company that can deal with mod_perl? If they provide webmail that actually works (as opposed to that pile of PHP, Horde) that would be a plus.