I think he's suggesting that *some* people like the *option* of fixing the software they use themselves. It's always nicer to get a fix for something from "upstream" somewhere, but that's not always possible. It's nice (a GPL-cheerleader might say "essential") to be able to fall back on your own elbow grease.
The relative quality of the code in question doesn't enter in to it. After all, what good is beautifully written and documented code if you'll never see it?
From m-w.com, the first definition of "State" that's at all relevant. We could argue semantics of a state, but I don't think it's necessary:
5a : a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially : one that is sovereign
Certainly "Government" != "State" -- They are two quite distinct concepts. A Government is at least a property of, and at best is a tool of a State.
Based on the definition above, you need at least two things to be a state:
1) A body of people, and 2) A government (the property of political organization).
The government is the political organization of those people.
The plain text of the Law (the Second Amendment) reserves the right to bear arms specifically to the People, and not to the State, or the Congress, or anyone else (including "the Militia").
I believe that, regardless of whether it's more trouble than it's worth in today's civilization, the *intent* of the Second Amendment was to provide the possibility of organizing a Militia. The Militia is needed to protect the Freedom of the State (which is primarily comprised of people, not a government). The thing that the Freedom of the State needs protection from is The Government.
I think it's a poor comparison. I can get a car without power windows. When I buy a car, the dealership doesn't force me to take a boat and stack of girlie magazines, either. I can go to the parts store and buy a new starter for my truck without buying the rest of the truck.
Your car analogy would be more apt if I only wanted to buy broadcasts of "The Simpsons" from fox, but explicitly didn't want any other fox programs. I'm fine with taking the whole fox program schedule, just like I'm fine with buying the whole quart of milk.
If the supermarket won't let me have the milk unless I also buy eggs, bacon, and coffee, I'll be pissed
That's nice and all, but you're still paying for what you're not using. Maybe you want to boycott, I dunno, Fox. Ideally, you could drop them from your cable.
Sure, the cable channels will not allow this to happen without a bloody fight, but maybe this push to start regulating (and fining) them will soften their opposition.
I mean, if you send me email at work, my employer can read it, because it's on a system they own.
Doesn't hotmail claim copyright on everything that passes through it?
If you don't want google to read your mail, don't sign up, and don't send messages to @gmail.com, or to anyone you don't trust not to forward it there.
References work well enough. Show me where you've been constrained.
magic_quotes - you're totally right. Teh are the SuX. But it's not hard to work around. You just have some low-level test that checks the mq setting, and then conditionally addslashes() or not. It's not *that* hard. It's just one of those things you figure out when you realize that, for example, you're writing code that you're going to publish.
Re:Perl's grammar is too big
on
PHP 5 RC 1 released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Most of your criticisms of PHP are totally on the money.
But come on. Once a programmer really gets into perl, only another hard-core perl person can read their scrawl. Don't get me wrong, I love perl. But it's a horrible choice for a large project with many developers.
I've not dug into perl documentation for a while (has it been years?), but last time I checked, it was about 100 man pages. With php, if I think there's a function called split, I type http://www.php.net/split and there's the docs.
Re: perldoc, c'mon! I get the impression you've never had to maintain code written by a hard-core perl programmer (or maybe you are one). For hobby stuff, use any language you want, but for business purposes, I don't want to have to search for developers who are so fucking specialized in perl. With PHP, I can make anybody who learned the basics fo C and make them productive in about 48 hours, working on someone else's code. With a big perl codebase, that same person is going to have to be twice as expensive if they're going to jump in head-first.
Re: too many overlapping core functions - I don't know what you're talking about. There are a few aliases in there (ie: chop or rtrim (which actually is annoying, since chop() should work like it does in perl, IMO)), but I don't see a lot of overlap.
I think perl is really neat, but it's overkill. I know that's the tried and true criticism, but I really think it's true. I don't want to give a group of 4-12 developers of varying cluefulness that sort of capacity to create havoc for each other.
I started coding apps for the web in CF back around v4, when I was still a student. I've been primarily developing in PHP (with Perl, ASP, and C) for a few years now, and rarely touch CF code (I have two fairly inactive clients that have CF-based apps that I support).
I prefer PHP because it's C-like (which was used in most of my college coursework), and because it's Free.
CF is interesting, as the syntax and structure make you think in a non-c-like sort of fashion. I'm too drunk to think of an example, but I developed some very strange patterns in CF, which was fun. Not nearly as different as functional programming in Lisp, mind you, but "different"
In the end, I'd start playing with PHP. There are several good reasons:
It's Free.
It's free (as in beer). You can get pretty cheap hosting
PHP has a smaller syntactical (is that a word?) footprint. As you said that you manage a development team, this is important. The Perl motto of "There's more than one way to do it" becomes an issue when you've got multiple developers working on the same codebase. You can write and (attempt to) enforce code style rules in your organization, which mitigates this a little bit, but it takes time to write those guidelines, get buy-in, and enforce.
I use perl often, but I consider it a "fire and forget" language. I use it for sysAdmin type work often, when I'm doing something once, and want to write a quick script that nobody (including me) will ever lay eyes on again. For real development, where I'm trying to create a maintainable piece of software, with input from other developers, I stick to PHP.
As I'm way too lazy to try to find some data that will support me, I'll just take the cheap shot:
What I described are based on pretty widely accepted models of the way markets work under capitalism. That prices are determined by what the market will bear is next to gospel.
I would submit that the claim that Wal-Mart doesn't follow this rule is the affirmative claim here, and the onus is on you to provide data to show that Wal-Mart doesn't conform to the model.
You're right, but in fact that's what I meant, even though it's not what I said.:-) I have no data points to support this, but it seems pretty reasonable considering that the cost of production is not the driver for price - market conditions are. If the market will bear a mark up, you can be pretty sure you'll see that markup. Wal-Mart is not in the business of taking less-than-optimal profit. They're not a charity.
As Keynes (I think) said: something about stickiness. Goods, labor and capital don't just magically move around and reorganize without friction.
Wal-Mart is a big employer, sure. But they're profitable. Where do those profits go? They go into the corporate accounts. Then they get spent building new stores N miles away (usually for N = Big).
Those profits also go towards covering losses while the new store undercuts the (locally owned) competition.
Now, the clincher is that the cost of production doesn't determine the price. The price is determined by what the market will bear. When all the (local) competition is gone, and the goods are still essential, Wal-Mart will raise their prices to maximize profits.
Now you've got profit that would be going to the local entreprenuers and small businesspeople getting siphoned out of the local economy, and after a few years of "Rollback"ed prices, the consumers are paying the same.
Whatever, Beavis. I've only tried to make one, simple point all evening, and you've evaded it nearly completely. My prose has been lucid and well focused throughout. I never should've taken your bait in the first place.
Now, show me where I "absolved foreign gov'ts of any responsibility".
Then, show me where I laid it *all* at the feet of western companies.
You can't, because I didn't.
I particularly took issue with your implication that because a government exists, and is failing in it's job, western companies are absolved of all responsibility.
When you say that companies are free to do business with any country that is not banned by law or policy. You're right. Likewise, I'm free to sue your sorry ass for the emotional distress this exchange has caused me, purely out of malice. I'm free to waste your time and money and tie you up in court. I'm totally free to do that. That doesn't remove my moral obligation to you, and to the taxpayers who fun the court system, to refrain from such action.
US Companies used to be far less encumbered here. Because our government has juristiction here, and because the people recognized the moral travesty that were working conditions a century or two ago, laws were enacted. The laws follow from the moral principles, not the other way around. That's the way it works in "the real world".
In your backwards-probably-rand-inspired-world, it seems like morality is defined by and only defined by "following the law"
Well, MIDI is nice, but it's just instructions for an instrument. MusicML is desireable because the other formats are either proprietary (and tied to particular composition/editing program like VST), or are weak like MIDI or scanning-handwritten-pages.
MIDI is bad because it doesn't really tell you anything about how the notation should appear. You could write a pretty smart interpreter that would produce some readable score, but the author loses a lot of control.
Scanned Scores suck, because they're generally pretty large, may not print cleanly, etc. Also, good luck writing an application that will do the musical equivalent of OCR and get you something you can play back on a digital instrument.
MusicML should be trivial to convert to MIDI for having a digital robot (PC+MIDI capable instrument) play, and also easy to convert to a score for an organic robot (Musician) to play.
You don't need to learn anything. Just use your composition GUI/environemnt of choice (Cubase, Digital PErformer, whater) to put together the score, and then save in MusicXML. Now everyone who has an application that can read the format can use it.
So it actually sounds pretty nice, based on my cursory look at it.
The moral obligations of a foreign government is irrelevant.
I know, because they don't have any obligation to protect their own citizens. Why should they when you can leave the dirty work to Big Foreign Business?
I didn't say that foreign governments don't have a moral obligation to their citizens. What I said is that their failing to live up to it doesn't provide an excuse for someone to capitalize on that situation.
You're basically saying it's OK to screw the prostitute because the pimp is the one who'll beat her if she doesn't go for it. Just because you don't have to slap her around, you're in the clear. Keep telling yourself that.
A word of advice...don't ever contemplate a writing career. If that's what constitutes an analogy in your mind, stick to programming or whatever it is you do.
Huh? I don't really see what's wrong with my analogy. I can see how it didn't make sense to you, since you didn't understand how someone else failing in their moral obligation doesn't release you from yours.
Would you, personally, buy a product that was produced with slave labor?
Depends on how you define "slave labor". I've bought Nike sneakers. Is it slave labor for Big Business to engage in global trade? If so, let's just end global trade right now. That way, no one gets taken advantage of by foreign companies.
Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not talking about Nike. I was responding to a poor argument by the author of the parent of my comment (you, maybe?). Specifically, to the implication that because the local government doesn't protect its citizens, any other actor is acting within the bounds of morality to capitalize on the situation.
I used slave labor to mean slave labor. The reason I chose that is that it's pretty black and white. I don't care to discuss what a "fair wage" is, because it's a tough question that I can't answer. It's irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which I've already re-stated several times in this post.
If the gov'ts don't protect their own people, why should I care?
So if rape were legal, you'd have no qualms about forcing yourself on a woman? If the government doesn't protect her, why should you care?
If people are willing to work for wages, who am I to overrule them and their gov't and tell them they can't do it?
As you well know, the issue is more complex than that. These are people who live in generally less-free societies, where corruption is rampant. By playing ball with such an economy, American companies are complicit in the abuse. I have a hard time believing that you're seriously arguing otherwise. Your argument seems to take as an assumption that these are places with a strong history of civil rights, and non-oppressive and non-corrupt governements are running the show. The only difference is that that the people are really poor and are happy to work for peanuts. Maybe you should try going down to the passport office, getting your picture taken, and go travel a bit.
The moral obligations of a foreign government is irrelevant.
You're basically saying it's OK to screw the prostitute because the pimp is the one who'll beat her if she doesn't go for it. Just because you don't have to slap her around, you're in the clear. Keep telling yourself that.
Would you, personally, buy a product that was produced with slave labor? If so, would you actually be able to delude yourself into believing that doing so didn't force you to share in responsibility for the suffering of the slaves?
If the expert is providing advice related to terrorist activities, then they're party to a criminal conspiracy. If you'd bother to RTFA, you'd see that this is related to the overbreadth of the language in the law. It covers someone giving advice on how to persue peaceful means to acheive their goals -- obliterating the impeteus to commit atrocities.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he's suggesting that *some* people like the *option* of fixing the software they use themselves. It's always nicer to get a fix for something from "upstream" somewhere, but that's not always possible. It's nice (a GPL-cheerleader might say "essential") to be able to fall back on your own elbow grease.
The relative quality of the code in question doesn't enter in to it. After all, what good is beautifully written and documented code if you'll never see it?
The emphasis is more on "Free" than on "State".
From m-w.com, the first definition of "State" that's at all relevant. We could argue semantics of a state, but I don't think it's necessary:
5a : a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially : one that is sovereign
Certainly "Government" != "State" -- They are two quite distinct concepts. A Government is at least a property of, and at best is a tool of a State.
Based on the definition above, you need at least two things to be a state:
1) A body of people, and
2) A government (the property of political organization).
The government is the political organization of those people.
The plain text of the Law (the Second Amendment) reserves the right to bear arms specifically to the People, and not to the State, or the Congress, or anyone else (including "the Militia").
I believe that, regardless of whether it's more trouble than it's worth in today's civilization, the *intent* of the Second Amendment was to provide the possibility of organizing a Militia. The Militia is needed to protect the Freedom of the State (which is primarily comprised of people, not a government). The thing that the Freedom of the State needs protection from is The Government.
She ate the spider to catch the fly...
I think it's a poor comparison. I can get a car without power windows. When I buy a car, the dealership doesn't force me to take a boat and stack of girlie magazines, either. I can go to the parts store and buy a new starter for my truck without buying the rest of the truck.
Your car analogy would be more apt if I only wanted to buy broadcasts of "The Simpsons" from fox, but explicitly didn't want any other fox programs. I'm fine with taking the whole fox program schedule, just like I'm fine with buying the whole quart of milk.
If the supermarket won't let me have the milk unless I also buy eggs, bacon, and coffee, I'll be pissed
That's nice and all, but you're still paying for what you're not using. Maybe you want to boycott, I dunno, Fox. Ideally, you could drop them from your cable.
Sure, the cable channels will not allow this to happen without a bloody fight, but maybe this push to start regulating (and fining) them will soften their opposition.
A more effective solution would be to force cable and sattelite providers to offer a-la-carte content channels.
You only want the discovery and history channels, but you can't get them without "indecent" material being piped into your home?
This would solve that. The current system in the US requires you to take a set of channels as part of basic service.
I mean, if you send me email at work, my employer can read it, because it's on a system they own.
Doesn't hotmail claim copyright on everything that passes through it?
If you don't want google to read your mail, don't sign up, and don't send messages to @gmail.com, or to anyone you don't trust not to forward it there.
References work well enough. Show me where you've been constrained.
magic_quotes - you're totally right. Teh are the SuX. But it's not hard to work around. You just have some low-level test that checks the mq setting, and then conditionally addslashes() or not. It's not *that* hard. It's just one of those things you figure out when you realize that, for example, you're writing code that you're going to publish.
Most of your criticisms of PHP are totally on the money.
But come on. Once a programmer really gets into perl, only another hard-core perl person can read their scrawl. Don't get me wrong, I love perl. But it's a horrible choice for a large project with many developers.
I've not dug into perl documentation for a while (has it been years?), but last time I checked, it was about 100 man pages. With php, if I think there's a function called split, I type http://www.php.net/split and there's the docs.
Re: perldoc, c'mon! I get the impression you've never had to maintain code written by a hard-core perl programmer (or maybe you are one). For hobby stuff, use any language you want, but for business purposes, I don't want to have to search for developers who are so fucking specialized in perl. With PHP, I can make anybody who learned the basics fo C and make them productive in about 48 hours, working on someone else's code. With a big perl codebase, that same person is going to have to be twice as expensive if they're going to jump in head-first.
Re: too many overlapping core functions - I don't know what you're talking about. There are a few aliases in there (ie: chop or rtrim (which actually is annoying, since chop() should work like it does in perl, IMO)), but I don't see a lot of overlap.
I think perl is really neat, but it's overkill. I know that's the tried and true criticism, but I really think it's true. I don't want to give a group of 4-12 developers of varying cluefulness that sort of capacity to create havoc for each other.
I prefer PHP because it's C-like (which was used in most of my college coursework), and because it's Free.
CF is interesting, as the syntax and structure make you think in a non-c-like sort of fashion. I'm too drunk to think of an example, but I developed some very strange patterns in CF, which was fun. Not nearly as different as functional programming in Lisp, mind you, but "different"
In the end, I'd start playing with PHP. There are several good reasons:
It's Free.
It's free (as in beer). You can get pretty cheap hosting
There are a ton of really useful libraries to play with.
You can (half-assedly) write handy scripts with it, even though everybody uses Perl for that. (PHP scripts can be executed from the command line).
It resembles other languages, which means that when you decide to learn Perl or C or Java, the syntax won't be so foreign.
Some other reasons I can't remember, I just finished off a bottle of wine (damned puritanical co-workers!)
Oh Really?
Perl is a general purpose progamming language not a simpleton web language such as PHP.
Evidently, you've had no trouble making a comparison... do you need a special badge or licence to make such comparisons?
PHP has a smaller syntactical (is that a word?) footprint. As you said that you manage a development team, this is important. The Perl motto of "There's more than one way to do it" becomes an issue when you've got multiple developers working on the same codebase. You can write and (attempt to) enforce code style rules in your organization, which mitigates this a little bit, but it takes time to write those guidelines, get buy-in, and enforce.
I use perl often, but I consider it a "fire and forget" language. I use it for sysAdmin type work often, when I'm doing something once, and want to write a quick script that nobody (including me) will ever lay eyes on again. For real development, where I'm trying to create a maintainable piece of software, with input from other developers, I stick to PHP.
As I'm way too lazy to try to find some data that will support me, I'll just take the cheap shot:
What I described are based on pretty widely accepted models of the way markets work under capitalism. That prices are determined by what the market will bear is next to gospel.
I would submit that the claim that Wal-Mart doesn't follow this rule is the affirmative claim here, and the onus is on you to provide data to show that Wal-Mart doesn't conform to the model.
You're right, but in fact that's what I meant, even though it's not what I said. :-) I have no data points to support this, but it seems pretty reasonable considering that the cost of production is not the driver for price - market conditions are. If the market will bear a mark up, you can be pretty sure you'll see that markup. Wal-Mart is not in the business of taking less-than-optimal profit. They're not a charity.
Why is it confidential? If you're convicted, it's public record. I'd guess the fact of your arrest is also public record...
Why are the finger prints necessary?
Another big box, sure. But anybody local and they'll just move the prices down till ma & pa close up shop and apply for jobs as greeters.
As Keynes (I think) said: something about stickiness. Goods, labor and capital don't just magically move around and reorganize without friction.
Wal-Mart is a big employer, sure. But they're profitable. Where do those profits go? They go into the corporate accounts. Then they get spent building new stores N miles away (usually for N = Big).
Those profits also go towards covering losses while the new store undercuts the (locally owned) competition.
Now, the clincher is that the cost of production doesn't determine the price. The price is determined by what the market will bear. When all the (local) competition is gone, and the goods are still essential, Wal-Mart will raise their prices to maximize profits.
Now you've got profit that would be going to the local entreprenuers and small businesspeople getting siphoned out of the local economy, and after a few years of "Rollback"ed prices, the consumers are paying the same.
That's a Bad Thing.
http://www.kgnu.org
Whatever, Beavis. I've only tried to make one, simple point all evening, and you've evaded it nearly completely. My prose has been lucid and well focused throughout. I never should've taken your bait in the first place.
OK. Take a deep breath.
Now, show me where I "absolved foreign gov'ts of any responsibility".
Then, show me where I laid it *all* at the feet of western companies.
You can't, because I didn't.
I particularly took issue with your implication that because a government exists, and is failing in it's job, western companies are absolved of all responsibility.
When you say that companies are free to do business with any country that is not banned by law or policy. You're right. Likewise, I'm free to sue your sorry ass for the emotional distress this exchange has caused me, purely out of malice. I'm free to waste your time and money and tie you up in court. I'm totally free to do that. That doesn't remove my moral obligation to you, and to the taxpayers who fun the court system, to refrain from such action.
US Companies used to be far less encumbered here. Because our government has juristiction here, and because the people recognized the moral travesty that were working conditions a century or two ago, laws were enacted. The laws follow from the moral principles, not the other way around. That's the way it works in "the real world".
In your backwards-probably-rand-inspired-world, it seems like morality is defined by and only defined by "following the law"
Well, MIDI is nice, but it's just instructions for an instrument. MusicML is desireable because the other formats are either proprietary (and tied to particular composition/editing program like VST), or are weak like MIDI or scanning-handwritten-pages.
MIDI is bad because it doesn't really tell you anything about how the notation should appear. You could write a pretty smart interpreter that would produce some readable score, but the author loses a lot of control.
Scanned Scores suck, because they're generally pretty large, may not print cleanly, etc. Also, good luck writing an application that will do the musical equivalent of OCR and get you something you can play back on a digital instrument.
MusicML should be trivial to convert to MIDI for having a digital robot (PC+MIDI capable instrument) play, and also easy to convert to a score for an organic robot (Musician) to play.
You don't need to learn anything. Just use your composition GUI/environemnt of choice (Cubase, Digital PErformer, whater) to put together the score, and then save in MusicXML. Now everyone who has an application that can read the format can use it.
So it actually sounds pretty nice, based on my cursory look at it.
I know, because they don't have any obligation to protect their own citizens. Why should they when you can leave the dirty work to Big Foreign Business?
I didn't say that foreign governments don't have a moral obligation to their citizens. What I said is that their failing to live up to it doesn't provide an excuse for someone to capitalize on that situation.
You're basically saying it's OK to screw the prostitute because the pimp is the one who'll beat her if she doesn't go for it. Just because you don't have to slap her around, you're in the clear. Keep telling yourself that.
A word of advice...don't ever contemplate a writing career. If that's what constitutes an analogy in your mind, stick to programming or whatever it is you do.
Huh? I don't really see what's wrong with my analogy. I can see how it didn't make sense to you, since you didn't understand how someone else failing in their moral obligation doesn't release you from yours.
Would you, personally, buy a product that was produced with slave labor?
Depends on how you define "slave labor". I've bought Nike sneakers. Is it slave labor for Big Business to engage in global trade? If so, let's just end global trade right now. That way, no one gets taken advantage of by foreign companies.
Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not talking about Nike. I was responding to a poor argument by the author of the parent of my comment (you, maybe?). Specifically, to the implication that because the local government doesn't protect its citizens, any other actor is acting within the bounds of morality to capitalize on the situation. I used slave labor to mean slave labor. The reason I chose that is that it's pretty black and white. I don't care to discuss what a "fair wage" is, because it's a tough question that I can't answer. It's irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which I've already re-stated several times in this post.
If the gov'ts don't protect their own people, why should I care?
So if rape were legal, you'd have no qualms about forcing yourself on a woman? If the government doesn't protect her, why should you care?
If people are willing to work for wages, who am I to overrule them and their gov't and tell them they can't do it?
As you well know, the issue is more complex than that. These are people who live in generally less-free societies, where corruption is rampant. By playing ball with such an economy, American companies are complicit in the abuse. I have a hard time believing that you're seriously arguing otherwise. Your argument seems to take as an assumption that these are places with a strong history of civil rights, and non-oppressive and non-corrupt governements are running the show. The only difference is that that the people are really poor and are happy to work for peanuts. Maybe you should try going down to the passport office, getting your picture taken, and go travel a bit.
Geeez... Some people don't get it.
The moral obligations of a foreign government is irrelevant.
You're basically saying it's OK to screw the prostitute because the pimp is the one who'll beat her if she doesn't go for it. Just because you don't have to slap her around, you're in the clear. Keep telling yourself that.
Would you, personally, buy a product that was produced with slave labor? If so, would you actually be able to delude yourself into believing that doing so didn't force you to share in responsibility for the suffering of the slaves?
If the expert is providing advice related to terrorist activities, then they're party to a criminal conspiracy. If you'd bother to RTFA, you'd see that this is related to the overbreadth of the language in the law. It covers someone giving advice on how to persue peaceful means to acheive their goals -- obliterating the impeteus to commit atrocities.
nt