Because the only possible explanation is that they will weaponize it.
If you'd bothered to read TFA, one of the uses they are attempting to create is a DNA 'saftey switch', an easily identifiable string of DNA which marks a DNA sample as sample donated in an investigation and not a forensic sample collected at a crime scene. Such a sample could not be mixed up in a labaratory accident, because no forensic sample could contain that particular DNA sequence.
Of course, they also mention injecting strings of amino acids into bacteria just to see what happens. Still, almost every technology has both good and bad uses.
I'm by no means for a bill this wide in scope, but I think that it's worth considering that in 10 years, it will be possible to generated images from scratch that are indistinguishable from the real thing. While those images in and of themselves are not necessarily unethical, it complicates the prosecution of real child porn producers immensely, and I believe that stands as a possible reason to allow a law along these lines, albiet a more limited one. Even allow cartoons to continue could allow for 'A Scanner Darkly' style re-animation of actual videos, and then a defense could be used that they are just cartoons and nothing really happened. Just something to consider.
Wouldn't this apply by default to absolutely everything in a 'game' in which people go to fake work, purchase fake goods, create fake sex toys, and have their little fake people watch fake little advertisements on the fake subway while wielding a fake gun or having fake sex with a fake person?
Anything to do with second life is 'overhyped' the instant anyone not in second life hears about it.
I never claimed it was easy to get to the US. I guess I should have made it clear that I'm all about FREE movement of labor--mexicans to the US, me to Thailand.
Thanks for the info on this program, though, I'm really going to look into it. It looks veeeeeery interesting.
Even the H1 visa procedure is a very bureaucratic process and is very similar to what you described. As an American you have no moral right to complain about draconic German rules/regulations.
Bullcrap I can't complain. I don't support american restrictions on labor imports, either.
I'm an american who would really like to go abroad, as it turns out. I have a wide variety of IT and programming skills, but no management experience. I'm very close to quitting IT and teaching english or something else to achieve this goal, but I'm pretty good at all this computer crap. I hate to ditch what I'm good at.
But guess what? Although I speak fluent german, I can't work in Germany or Austria. A company has to advertise for 3 months for an EU resident to fill a slot before they can sponsor a visa for me. And I'm not even picky--I can't find an IT/programming job for an american anywhere outside of the US from Cape Town to Kabul.
Want to bitch about globalization? Bitch about the last trade barrier: Labor. Globalization currently benefits CEO's because the resource they have to start the game, money, is now easily transfered. But labor isn't allowed to be transfered--labor might as well be opium for all the free trade associated with it, but with more positions available. I, for one, can't fucking wait until that shit ends, and I can whore myself out to whomever I please, wherever I please.
It seems these "guidelines" focus more on drawing attention to the user's choice of OS, rather than actually doing anything to productively assist the user in their work without becoming an annoyance in the process.
Compared to from TFA:
Use animations that improve usability, such as animations and transitions that show relationships, causes, and effects. Animations are best used to provide information that would require text to explain, or might otherwise be missed. The human eye is sensitive to motion, especially peripheral motion. If you use animation to draw attention to something, make sure that attention is deserved and worthy of interrupting the user.
That's not "Aero Aero Aero!" That's saying "Don't make your program fancier than it needs to be, jackass." It's good advice, and the file is full of usability guidelines that an awful lot of programmers would do well to read. Many of them are not Vista-specific, either:
Prefer determinate progress bars over indeterminate ones to provide better feedback.
Remove redundant text.
Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology.
The guidelines are actually quite good. Some are arbitrary, such as button text capitalization schemes, but they are almost assuredly the same schemes used by the windows developers, so that arbitrary decision can be made consistently and your program doesn't look like the Aero equivalent of a web page with 18 point yellow text on a teal background with a midi clip.
Note that this is federal spending. There are billions more collected at the state and local level. For example, the estimate in 2003 was nearly $450 billion nationwide. That's just for K-12. FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS.
Exactly how little is the world's richest economy supposed to spend on what approximately 12% of its population does for 8 hours a day? I mean seriously, why does this need to be in caps? What is the problem here?
History is such a fun thing to watch being repeated... Just sit back, read the news, and everytime there is the word Terrorist, replace it mentally with "communist" or "japaneese spy" or "Indian." Man, why don't we teach more history in the schools? Honestly...
This is actually a very important issue. Since "islamic fundamentalism" doesn't have the same ring to it as any of those dirty, dirty, people you might meet on the streets, and because "Terrorists" can be white, witness the recent creation of the word 'Islamofascist'.
What a great word, right? One word: it creates a vivid imagine in ones mind of a dirty arab with an AK-47 oppressing a woman, and how on earth can anyone be anything but against any sort of fascist? The perfect enemy.
Whatever speechwriter came up with that word has changed history.
This shows foresight, as WotC hasn't had to deal with piracy for as long as the music companies have. They must be aware just how freely their books are available on limewire, and as long as people want them digitally, they'll sell them instead of not even have a piece of the action. Good! I imagine we'll even be able to search the text, once the DRM is cracked--most excellent.
What they don't get is that I download copies to supplement the physical copies I own, so I can look up something on the road from a book I don't have as I prepare the next session for my group. They are seeing it as a replacement, as it costs as much as a book.
I'm not planning to pay as much as a book costs to get something that isn't as good as one. Back to limewire for me. But their quick acceptance of digital distribution, unlike that of most media companies, leaves me hope that they will get it before 4.0...
The article sounded good, so I went to the alloy site. Having just read through the tutorials, and some of the docs, I can't imagine what possible use this software could have in the majority of software development.
It's basically a nifty, graphical declarative programming language. Anyone familiar with Prolog and set theory will breeze through the docs, only to ask "Why?" at the end.
One of the tutorials, for example, is a way to get Alloy to create a set of actions for the river crossing problem, and list them. Thus, alloy has saved the poor farmer's chicken. It's actually quite a cool set of toys for set theory, and it generates all possible permutations of a system with rules and facts based on how many total entities there are in the system, and checks the system for consistency. There are doubtless uses for this, but software development is, at the moment, not one of them.
The other tutorial is about how to set up the concept of a file system. The tutorial sets up a false assertion (assertion = something for Alloy to test), which fails. Here is the reasoning, with summary to follow for disinterested:
Why can this happen? First, let's note that both delete functions cause the rows of the contents relation in the post-state to be a subset of the rows in the pre-state. And we know the FileSystem appended facts "objects = root.*contents" and "contents in objects->objects" constrains the root of the file system to be the root of the contents relation. So if the post-state has a non-empty contents relation, it will have the same root as the pre-state. However if delete function causes the post-state to have an empty contents relation, then the root is free to change arbitrarily, to any directory available. Bet you didn't see that coming. Good thing we wrote a model!
Basically this says that in a 2-node scenario, i.e. a root directory with one subdirectory, they delete the subdirectory with their delete function. The way they defined the delete function basically meant that the 'deleted' node could, in theory, be the root of the file system after the deletion operation occured, since there was no constraint on which node of the file system was root after the change. They basically said under these constraints, it was possible to define a 'delete' function that deletes the subdirectory in a 2-node filesystem and then makes that same subdirectory the root of the filesystem.
Good thing we built a model, indeed! A bug in the programming of your model is by no means a valid use for spending a significant amount of effort modeling a concept in set theory. The best part is that all of your effort amounts to mental masturbation--there are no tools for turning this into a programming contract, test cases, or anything. Some projects are in the works in the links area, but they aren't there yet, and only for Java. I don't see how the amount of effort that would be required to model a large scale, realistic project in this obtuse set notation would be worth it for absolutely no concrete programming payoff. Writing HR's latest payroll widget, or even their entire payroll system, is just not going to get any benefit from this.
All that aside, it's concievable that this sort of model programming could find use in complicated systems in which high reliability is paramount. The usual suspects, such as satellites, space, deep sea robots or whatever come to mind--this system could prove, for example, that a given system for firmware upgrades cannot leave a robot in mars in an inoperable state, unable to download new, non-buggy firmware.
But it still can't prove the implementation works. *slaps forehead*
Except for distributions for internal business and/or personal use to your employees or contractors in compliance with these Terms and Conditions, you may not distribute Google Web Toolkit Development Tools or any services or software associated with or derived from them, or modify, copy, license, or create derivative works from Google Web Toolkit Development Tools, unless you obtain Google's written permission in advance. If you wish to do any of the above, please contact us by emailing apis@google.com. You may not use the Google Web Toolkit Development Tools to develop or distribute products that violate the law or legal rights of third parties.
No, I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth and why does this matter? Because I happen to prefer PHP for web development (just a personal preference). It would be nice to be able to move the JavaScript components off from the Java framework into a PHP based framework. Well, apparantly you can't do that without special permission.
You're misunderstanding, although the legalize associated with the term 'derivative work' when talking about a development environment is aterribly obtuse. This says nothing about the generated code or anything you make with the tools, this is talking about the tools themselves. They are saying you can't redistribute the development environment itself, edit the DE and call it your own, edit the DE and sell it to someone, etc.
Based on this paragraph alone (I haven't read the rest) you can cut and paste into your php just fine.
Ahh, a common confusion. You have confused respect for the language with respect for the needs of a long-term, well-designed system. I'm responding to two posts at once here, which I think is fair since one wishes he had mod points for the first, so please bear with me.
The key ingredient is intelligent programmers. Sadly many companies do not realize that spending 150K per person on two programmers is more efficient than spending 85k per person on 10.
This is exactly why.NET is in demand and perl is not--the focus of the story. Note I never said I was going to stop using perl. Putting aside the problems of finding those two people to design an application, you then have to tell a client that 50% of your design team can be hit by a bus tomorrow, and it's just not what people want to hear. Enterprise projects are not about efficiency of development. Enterprise projects have completely different goals, and that's what most perl programmers fail to understand.
And I would rather work on a large Perl project built by a few smart people than a large java/.net project built by a tide of idiots.
This attitude is exactly why the perl culture is not going mainstream. This is the attitude of someone who refuses to work with a team that hasn't forced him to respect them. This is how primadonnas think, and not the way the people who have those.NET programming jobs at good salaries want programmers to think.
There is always a clue to such posts as your parent, things like, complaining about sending emails. So Net::SMTP was really hard to find? You have to know the modules and tools people write in Perl just like with anything else.
This misses the point of my original post. I never said I couldn't find a tool to send an email. I said that CPAN is a clearinghouse for unfinished, in development, and first-time libraries. Net::SMTP does in fact work rather well. I've used it. But, say I were showing up to CPAN the first time. A search for 'Send Email' (most people are thinking about emails, not SMTP), brings me to Email::Send, Email::Send::Sendmail, Email::Send::NNTP (this doesn't make much sense), Email::Send::Qmail, Log::Dispatch::Email, Test::Nightly::Email, Mail::Spool, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, Mail::Send, Mail::SendEasy, and there are even more. This is ridiculous; it would be impossible to make a business justification for choosing one over the other.
Compare this to the MFC, which, while not NEARLY as extensive as CPAN, is MUCH better documented, is standardized, and it's a safe bet.
When we found a bug, we worked around it and sent an email to the author.
Why not just use the MFC and write your own, if you have to pay attention to the guts of the library code? A business wants to be able to say: we can be SURE of our library code, and we wrote everything else ourselves.
I'm not trying to say it's better or worse, the whole perl culture thing. It can be quite good, actually, and I think other language communities should take a hint from perl in some areas, especially some of those libraries which arose out of the system I am so quick to disparage. There should be something as good as DateManip in every standard library, and Date::Simple lets one use dates almost as easily as a primitive, which makes life SO much goddamn easier, to be frank. I understand that perl has definite advantages.
But that is just not what a business is looking for. Both of the parent posts to this smack to me of elitism. That perl is better than some other language for some reason. It's not the language. It's the culture surrounding it. It is, no offense, people like yall who think that management is stupid for going with the trend. Software is a means to an and, and not a means unto itself. The tools for creating a tool, by and large, should not be out of the ordinary.
Why isn't something that's more portable (perl/python) in such demand? Really bakes my noodle.
Ever try and write an enterprise level application, even a web application, in perl? It's great for small internal applications; that CPAN doo-hickey works just great.
But CPAN bites you back when you hit the limits of what those modules can do in a large-scale application. When you hit the limit of what is the easiest and arguably the best (and arguably not) ORM out there, Class::DBI, there's 150 different, incompatible modules out there to do what you want. Which one will be maintained? Which one silently overwrites methods deep within more established modules and doesn't tell you? Want one that adds support for limit and sort by? One module gives you that easily, but not with the same interface as the other 10 that are more full featured. Which do you choose?
Don't even get me started on trying to send an email with Perl. CPAN seems to have a new module for sending email every other day. It's become less of a one-stop shop for the modules you need and more of the perl newbie ftp drop site for modules no one could possibly need or want.
As an example, check out what's been uploaded today. Version 0.02 of JavaScript::MochiKit, helpfully described as 'makes perl suck less', with 15 classes and less than a page of documentation. Great! Just what I was looking for!
There's also a module for interacting with MySpace, two versions in the same day of of an XML parser (writer? who knows, I didn't read it) for a data format used by the library of congress (from the same proud author of version 0.3 of Acme::Voodoo, described as 'Do bad stuff to your objects'), version 0.18 (version 0.17 was yesterday's) of DBIX::Class::Loader, a copycat of Class::DBI::Loader for this self-proclaimed CDBI replacement (which is probably needed, but god help a perl newbie who shows up on CPAN looking for ORM nowadays). It's 2pm my time (Austria), meaning it's 5:30 central time, and there are already 9 modules with version numbers less than 1.0 uploaded to CPAN.
Now don't get me wrong, this is fantastic for a small scale app. I'm sure someone will get some use out of a MySpace profile accessor in perl. But what makes CPAN, and perl, great for small-time stuff makes it just terrible for enterprise applications.
As for perl's portability...do you really expect to make an argument that a language that is, in quite official terms, defined by the official compiler is portable? Perl runs on windows, but since perl.exe IS the language, differences between it and the unix versions aren't even technically bugs...they just ARE! It's not a proper way to 'run a language', so to speak.
I've been programming in perl for years. I get paid well for it. I don't plan to stop using it for my insignificant applications. But I know damn well why it's not in demand.
I'm one of about 7000 students doing most of their coursework online at UNO this semester. Maybe they'll finally figure out it's how it can be done this way. Check back next semester.
I've run into a similar problem. I want to be able to back up my XP notebook quickly, XP, push button. I'd like to do it with imaging software, because the time to recovery is much less should i experience a failure, and I dont want the software asking me crap about 'what to back up'.
Is there such a thing? Am I doomed to have to boot into something else, or use a backup solution that requires me to re-install the OS upon failure?
There is an underlying moral to be gained from this as in Return of the King it is a female (one who was ordered to remain behind for her safety) who ends up slaying the King of the Nazgul
Some of us hadnt finished the books yet, you dirty, dirty whore.
The record industry is an endangered industry. They are big and powerful -- like a bronco. The MP3 format is an indestructable format that can crumble an empire -- like a shotgun. Musicians are beginning to realize that they don't need to be rodeo clowns, running with the bronco, fearing for their lives. They can just shoot the bronco.
There is no real need for the record industry anymore. Support good artists by going to concerts and buying tee-shirts and CDs
I thought slashdot had outgrown moderating weird metaphors for RIAA 5uX0R5!!! |\/|p3 RU13Z up
Ah hah! Having run KDE on a debian box for some time now, I didn't even think to check debians unstable tree, but I'm a dufus, since whats stable to KDE developers doesn't mean stable for debian.
Thanks to the both of you for satisfying my curiosity.
No, they're not laid next to each other. They follow quite different (and well seperated) routes. Also, there's not actually two cables. There's a whole bunch of them, criss-crossing in different places. It looks like a good plan to me.
See Map of network for details.
I dont understand why a huge company would go through such incredible effort and cost to set up a redundant fiber cable setup and only use 4 and 3 strands at a time. When the military base I work at was wired, they just ran 72 strands everywhere, since you just never know.
I'm voting for something. I'm voting for Harry Browne, so I can spend my money the way I want.
Your word in bold, the most important word to any libretarian, well-defines the problem with that political philosophy. To think you used this statement to counteract this by Katz:
It's hard to find a citizen who's voting for something.
It's kind of funny to see someone prove such trite and worthless fluff writing correct with such a narrow-minded statement. I dont know which statement is stupider.
Besides, isn't not voting a powerful political statement, sending a message to the politicians right where it hurts? Or something?
This threads hilarious. Full of useless babble, two dufuses inadvertently prove each other correct. Film at 11.
I've never seen anyone use so many 4-syllable words as an excuse to be lazy, stay home, then bitch when they don't like the winner.
I'm sure when mandatory library filters are voted into law in 2 years, your technocrat utopian anti-vote will be given it's due consideration by the president...the same, and appropriate, consideration with which you ponder helpful suggestions from spammers to stuff grits down your pants.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd bothered to read TFA, one of the uses they are attempting to create is a DNA 'saftey switch', an easily identifiable string of DNA which marks a DNA sample as sample donated in an investigation and not a forensic sample collected at a crime scene. Such a sample could not be mixed up in a labaratory accident, because no forensic sample could contain that particular DNA sequence.
Of course, they also mention injecting strings of amino acids into bacteria just to see what happens. Still, almost every technology has both good and bad uses.
nobody
I'm by no means for a bill this wide in scope, but I think that it's worth considering that in 10 years, it will be possible to generated images from scratch that are indistinguishable from the real thing. While those images in and of themselves are not necessarily unethical, it complicates the prosecution of real child porn producers immensely, and I believe that stands as a possible reason to allow a law along these lines, albiet a more limited one. Even allow cartoons to continue could allow for 'A Scanner Darkly' style re-animation of actual videos, and then a defense could be used that they are just cartoons and nothing really happened. Just something to consider.
nobody
Wouldn't this apply by default to absolutely everything in a 'game' in which people go to fake work, purchase fake goods, create fake sex toys, and have their little fake people watch fake little advertisements on the fake subway while wielding a fake gun or having fake sex with a fake person?
Anything to do with second life is 'overhyped' the instant anyone not in second life hears about it.
I never claimed it was easy to get to the US. I guess I should have made it clear that I'm all about FREE movement of labor--mexicans to the US, me to Thailand.
Thanks for the info on this program, though, I'm really going to look into it. It looks veeeeeery interesting.
What makes you think someone in the US can work in the UK?
Bullcrap I can't complain. I don't support american restrictions on labor imports, either.
I'm an american who would really like to go abroad, as it turns out. I have a wide variety of IT and programming skills, but no management experience. I'm very close to quitting IT and teaching english or something else to achieve this goal, but I'm pretty good at all this computer crap. I hate to ditch what I'm good at.
But guess what? Although I speak fluent german, I can't work in Germany or Austria. A company has to advertise for 3 months for an EU resident to fill a slot before they can sponsor a visa for me. And I'm not even picky--I can't find an IT/programming job for an american anywhere outside of the US from Cape Town to Kabul.
Want to bitch about globalization? Bitch about the last trade barrier: Labor. Globalization currently benefits CEO's because the resource they have to start the game, money, is now easily transfered. But labor isn't allowed to be transfered--labor might as well be opium for all the free trade associated with it, but with more positions available. I, for one, can't fucking wait until that shit ends, and I can whore myself out to whomever I please, wherever I please.
The guidelines are actually quite good. Some are arbitrary, such as button text capitalization schemes, but they are almost assuredly the same schemes used by the windows developers, so that arbitrary decision can be made consistently and your program doesn't look like the Aero equivalent of a web page with 18 point yellow text on a teal background with a midi clip.
nobody
12% taken without much thought from http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_age.html with a little averaging.
nobody
What a great word, right? One word: it creates a vivid imagine in ones mind of a dirty arab with an AK-47 oppressing a woman, and how on earth can anyone be anything but against any sort of fascist? The perfect enemy.
Whatever speechwriter came up with that word has changed history.
nobody
This shows foresight, as WotC hasn't had to deal with piracy for as long as the music companies have. They must be aware just how freely their books are available on limewire, and as long as people want them digitally, they'll sell them instead of not even have a piece of the action. Good! I imagine we'll even be able to search the text, once the DRM is cracked--most excellent.
What they don't get is that I download copies to supplement the physical copies I own, so I can look up something on the road from a book I don't have as I prepare the next session for my group. They are seeing it as a replacement, as it costs as much as a book.
I'm not planning to pay as much as a book costs to get something that isn't as good as one. Back to limewire for me. But their quick acceptance of digital distribution, unlike that of most media companies, leaves me hope that they will get it before 4.0...
nobody
It's basically a nifty, graphical declarative programming language. Anyone familiar with Prolog and set theory will breeze through the docs, only to ask "Why?" at the end.
One of the tutorials, for example, is a way to get Alloy to create a set of actions for the river crossing problem, and list them. Thus, alloy has saved the poor farmer's chicken. It's actually quite a cool set of toys for set theory, and it generates all possible permutations of a system with rules and facts based on how many total entities there are in the system, and checks the system for consistency. There are doubtless uses for this, but software development is, at the moment, not one of them.
The other tutorial is about how to set up the concept of a file system. The tutorial sets up a false assertion (assertion = something for Alloy to test), which fails. Here is the reasoning, with summary to follow for disinterested:
Basically this says that in a 2-node scenario, i.e. a root directory with one subdirectory, they delete the subdirectory with their delete function. The way they defined the delete function basically meant that the 'deleted' node could, in theory, be the root of the file system after the deletion operation occured, since there was no constraint on which node of the file system was root after the change. They basically said under these constraints, it was possible to define a 'delete' function that deletes the subdirectory in a 2-node filesystem and then makes that same subdirectory the root of the filesystem.
Good thing we built a model, indeed! A bug in the programming of your model is by no means a valid use for spending a significant amount of effort modeling a concept in set theory. The best part is that all of your effort amounts to mental masturbation--there are no tools for turning this into a programming contract, test cases, or anything. Some projects are in the works in the links area, but they aren't there yet, and only for Java. I don't see how the amount of effort that would be required to model a large scale, realistic project in this obtuse set notation would be worth it for absolutely no concrete programming payoff. Writing HR's latest payroll widget, or even their entire payroll system, is just not going to get any benefit from this.
All that aside, it's concievable that this sort of model programming could find use in complicated systems in which high reliability is paramount. The usual suspects, such as satellites, space, deep sea robots or whatever come to mind--this system could prove, for example, that a given system for firmware upgrades cannot leave a robot in mars in an inoperable state, unable to download new, non-buggy firmware.
But it still can't prove the implementation works. *slaps forehead*
nobody
You're misunderstanding, although the legalize associated with the term 'derivative work' when talking about a development environment is aterribly obtuse. This says nothing about the generated code or anything you make with the tools, this is talking about the tools themselves. They are saying you can't redistribute the development environment itself, edit the DE and call it your own, edit the DE and sell it to someone, etc.
Based on this paragraph alone (I haven't read the rest) you can cut and paste into your php just fine.
nobody
This is exactly why
This attitude is exactly why the perl culture is not going mainstream. This is the attitude of someone who refuses to work with a team that hasn't forced him to respect them. This is how primadonnas think, and not the way the people who have those
This misses the point of my original post. I never said I couldn't find a tool to send an email. I said that CPAN is a clearinghouse for unfinished, in development, and first-time libraries. Net::SMTP does in fact work rather well. I've used it. But, say I were showing up to CPAN the first time. A search for 'Send Email' (most people are thinking about emails, not SMTP), brings me to Email::Send, Email::Send::Sendmail, Email::Send::NNTP (this doesn't make much sense), Email::Send::Qmail, Log::Dispatch::Email, Test::Nightly::Email, Mail::Spool, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, Mail::Send, Mail::SendEasy, and there are even more. This is ridiculous; it would be impossible to make a business justification for choosing one over the other.
Compare this to the MFC, which, while not NEARLY as extensive as CPAN, is MUCH better documented, is standardized, and it's a safe bet.
Why not just use the MFC and write your own, if you have to pay attention to the guts of the library code? A business wants to be able to say: we can be SURE of our library code, and we wrote everything else ourselves.
I'm not trying to say it's better or worse, the whole perl culture thing. It can be quite good, actually, and I think other language communities should take a hint from perl in some areas, especially some of those libraries which arose out of the system I am so quick to disparage. There should be something as good as DateManip in every standard library, and Date::Simple lets one use dates almost as easily as a primitive, which makes life SO much goddamn easier, to be frank. I understand that perl has definite advantages.
But that is just not what a business is looking for. Both of the parent posts to this smack to me of elitism. That perl is better than some other language for some reason. It's not the language. It's the culture surrounding it. It is, no offense, people like yall who think that management is stupid for going with the trend. Software is a means to an and, and not a means unto itself. The tools for creating a tool, by and large, should not be out of the ordinary.
nobody
Ever try and write an enterprise level application, even a web application, in perl? It's great for small internal applications; that CPAN doo-hickey works just great.
But CPAN bites you back when you hit the limits of what those modules can do in a large-scale application. When you hit the limit of what is the easiest and arguably the best (and arguably not) ORM out there, Class::DBI, there's 150 different, incompatible modules out there to do what you want. Which one will be maintained? Which one silently overwrites methods deep within more established modules and doesn't tell you? Want one that adds support for limit and sort by? One module gives you that easily, but not with the same interface as the other 10 that are more full featured. Which do you choose?
Don't even get me started on trying to send an email with Perl. CPAN seems to have a new module for sending email every other day. It's become less of a one-stop shop for the modules you need and more of the perl newbie ftp drop site for modules no one could possibly need or want.
As an example, check out what's been uploaded today. Version 0.02 of JavaScript::MochiKit, helpfully described as 'makes perl suck less', with 15 classes and less than a page of documentation. Great! Just what I was looking for!
There's also a module for interacting with MySpace, two versions in the same day of of an XML parser (writer? who knows, I didn't read it) for a data format used by the library of congress (from the same proud author of version 0.3 of Acme::Voodoo, described as 'Do bad stuff to your objects'), version 0.18 (version 0.17 was yesterday's) of DBIX::Class::Loader, a copycat of Class::DBI::Loader for this self-proclaimed CDBI replacement (which is probably needed, but god help a perl newbie who shows up on CPAN looking for ORM nowadays). It's 2pm my time (Austria), meaning it's 5:30 central time, and there are already 9 modules with version numbers less than 1.0 uploaded to CPAN.
Now don't get me wrong, this is fantastic for a small scale app. I'm sure someone will get some use out of a MySpace profile accessor in perl. But what makes CPAN, and perl, great for small-time stuff makes it just terrible for enterprise applications.
As for perl's portability...do you really expect to make an argument that a language that is, in quite official terms, defined by the official compiler is portable? Perl runs on windows, but since perl.exe IS the language, differences between it and the unix versions aren't even technically bugs...they just ARE! It's not a proper way to 'run a language', so to speak.
I've been programming in perl for years. I get paid well for it. I don't plan to stop using it for my insignificant applications. But I know damn well why it's not in demand.
nobody
I'm one of about 7000 students doing most of their coursework online at UNO this semester. Maybe they'll finally figure out it's how it can be done this way. Check back next semester.
Is there such a thing? Am I doomed to have to boot into something else, or use a backup solution that requires me to re-install the OS upon failure?
thanks,
nobody
Some of us hadnt finished the books yet, you dirty, dirty whore.
There is no real need for the record industry anymore. Support good artists by going to concerts and buying tee-shirts and CDs
I thought slashdot had outgrown moderating weird metaphors for RIAA 5uX0R5!!! |\/|p3 RU13Z up
nobody
Ah hah! Having run KDE on a debian box for some time now, I didn't even think to check debians unstable tree, but I'm a dufus, since whats stable to KDE developers doesn't mean stable for debian.
Thanks to the both of you for satisfying my curiosity.
Why does debian not have kde on dselect, but it does have gnome?
seriously, I have been wondering this.
I dont understand why a huge company would go through such incredible effort and cost to set up a redundant fiber cable setup and only use 4 and 3 strands at a time. When the military base I work at was wired, they just ran 72 strands everywhere, since you just never know.
Is there something I'm missing?
lilnobody
nobody
Your word in bold, the most important word to any libretarian, well-defines the problem with that political philosophy. To think you used this statement to counteract this by Katz:
It's hard to find a citizen who's voting for something.
It's kind of funny to see someone prove such trite and worthless fluff writing correct with such a narrow-minded statement. I dont know which statement is stupider.
Besides, isn't not voting a powerful political statement, sending a message to the politicians right where it hurts? Or something?
This threads hilarious. Full of useless babble, two dufuses inadvertently prove each other correct. Film at 11.
nobody
I'm sure when mandatory library filters are voted into law in 2 years, your technocrat utopian anti-vote will be given it's due consideration by the president...the same, and appropriate, consideration with which you ponder helpful suggestions from spammers to stuff grits down your pants.
lilnobody