Perl is *definitely* from the same stable of thought that brought you the UNIX environment...
I have to disagree with this (and IIRC, so does Mr Wall). Unix's philosophy is "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" -- use pipes and simple utilities that work better than one monstrous and utility to handle weird cases. If it's a trivial job, I can use sed, awk, grep, sh, cut, etc. and a couple pipes to do the job in one line. If it's not so trivial, I'll use C. Perl has its place & lots of people use it, but it's anti-unix.
But I think we can all agree that when Slashdot tosses journalistic integrity to the wind and prints sensationalistic stories like this that have not one single shred of evidence to back them up, it makes Slashdot look bad. Amateurish, you know?
This needs to be said (sorry if it's offensive)...
Slashdot is hardly a "news" site. Ignoring the book reviews, Ask Slashdot, Interviews and Jon Katz rants, you have a bunch of stories lifted from other sites, with (evidently) no verification whatsoever before the story is posted. How many stories are deleted, later updated with a note ("Oops, turns out this story is wrong."), or corrected with a new story (such as this one)? Quite a few.
In the past couple years, linux has become a buzz word, and although it hasn't yet replaced real unix (yet), companies like IBM, SGI, Compaq, and now SCO have embraced it at least to a degree. Is linux a superior unix, or are companies just jumping on the hype bandwagon?
The story text certainly impies that Bruce wrote in to Slashdot. Or perhaps Hemos like to make up quotes. No, a more likely answer is Bruce wrote in to Slashdot.
When looking at other people's code, there is almost always an adjustment curve to get used to the coding style and a learning curve to understand the flow enough to realize how functions are connected. Getting a 98% in a high school C++ class doesn't make you an expert programmer.
But, how many people have the time and initiative to read through poorly documented code looking for potential problems? Not a whole lot. And the fact that any 12-year-old can install an RPM with a graphical tool, and any 13-year-old can./configure; make; make install doesn't help any. Finding bugs means sticking your hands in the source code and compiling on some alternate and unsupported system (Win2000, Solaris, Darwin, Minix, etc) with a different compiler, different libraries, etc.
Well, in the United States, there are 3 kinds of laws...
Common Law, which is based on English customs from the last 1000 years or so
Statute Law, which is law passed by Congress, state legislatures, etc.
Judicial Law, which is where judges set precedents, interpret the meaning of laws and declare that they do or do not apply in a particular situation.
As far as jury nullification, it does exist, but isn't particularly common. OJ Simpson wasn't jury nullification, it was 12 stupid people, 4 high priced lawyers, a judge more interested in TV ratings than judging, and incompetent prosecutors.
Every once in a while, though, someone busted for marijuana possession tries to use a jury nullification defense to convince the jurors that it shouldn't be a crime. Usually without success.
Yeah, everybody's genes are "different." However, DNA is composed of "introns" (non-coding interening sequences, which make up a majority of genes and aren't don't code for anything) and exons - expressed sequences which do the coding.
Although DNA fingerprinting is mostly accurate, it is based on differences in the introns, which are highly variable. As far as exons are concerned... You've probably heard that chimps and humans are 98% or so genetically similar, and humans and hamsters are 95% genetically similar.
If you compared the genes (exons) of any 2 people, you'd find them to be 99.99999999% or more similar. The differences are very slight. What makes people unique is not the genes so much as which ones are expressed.
How do you forsee freenet being used? Reading over the FAQ, it does seem like an ideal method of trading warez, porn & mp3s (similar to Napster or Hotline), although your ideal seems reminiscent of Project Gutenberg or the FSF -- sharing information without fear of censorship. The anonymous information sharing for legitimate purposes could be very important in places where sharing of information is suppressed (China, for example). 10 years ago, no one could have predicted that the Internet would be used as it is today. In 10 years, how do you forsee freenet being used?
That's not entirely true; it was written in 6502 assembly language on paper (actually, I think it was a port of an Integer BASIC he had written for a different architecture, but never assembled or even tested...), but assembled by hand, since the only 6502 assembler Apple had access to at that time was an expensive cross-assembler they had to rent by the hour.
I forgot to mention... OpenStep/GNUStep. If you can get a hold of OpenStep for NT (Web Objects), you could develop under linux with GNUStep, or NeXT, or Mac OS X. Of course, GNUStep is still in development.
Have you considered developing natively? Visual Studio isn't all that bad. If you don't want to deal with MFC (who would?:-), GTK is available for windows now (so you could develop with linux that way). Also, QT, though the Windows version requires a license. Alternatively, for the cygwin tools bring GNU cli power to windows.
Well, Apple has released QT under a license (for Mac & Windows). Maybe you meant an open source license?:-). Anyway, Open Sourcing isn't a silver bullet that will increase marketshare against a free MS product (just ask the Mozilla/Netscape/AOL team).
Additionally, the interesting parts of QT (ie - the codecs) are generally licensed, copyrighted, patented (and thinking up a good video compression scheme requires a fair bit of math & work & imho should be patentable).
Furthermore, Apple isn't a charity. Last time I checked, the Windows version of QT was annoyingware - pay us to get rid of this annoying notice. I don't know how much money they get that way, but if it pays for development, it could be hard to justify the cash loss to satisfy a "fringe" OS.
It's not a way to lose marketshare either; the majority of the world uses Windows, where QT is available (and tries to sell you an enhanced version). What's the likelihood that the a Slashdot reader would pay money for an enhanced Linux QuickTime viewer?
Well, not in the current climate... Caldera doubled in value on opening day, but that was nothing compared to RHAT or LNUX (both of which have done little but drop since).
Tech/Net stocks haven't been riding so high lately.
Interesting (& true!) story... a few years ago, TicketMaster sued & had MS (MSN, maybe) remove a deep hyperlink. Paul Allen is a majority shareholder of TicketMaster. Yes, that Paul Allen.
Why bother running Linux when you can just install BSD? Why bother running BSD when you can just install Solaris? Why bother running Solaris when you can just install Windows? Why bother running Windows when you can just install HURD?
There is the appeal of running a non-mainstream, cutting edge OS. Linux, *BSD, HURD, Darwin... it's an OS, a tool, not a way of life.
Slashdot Mirror
According to an old book I saw in a library once, there is/was a programming language from the 60s/70s called "Pearl", which I assume predates perl :-)
I have to disagree with this (and IIRC, so does Mr Wall). Unix's philosophy is "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" -- use pipes and simple utilities that work better than one monstrous and utility to handle weird cases. If it's a trivial job, I can use sed, awk, grep, sh, cut, etc. and a couple pipes to do the job in one line. If it's not so trivial, I'll use C. Perl has its place & lots of people use it, but it's anti-unix.
This needs to be said (sorry if it's offensive)...
Slashdot is hardly a "news" site. Ignoring the book reviews, Ask Slashdot, Interviews and Jon Katz rants, you have a bunch of stories lifted from other sites, with (evidently) no verification whatsoever before the story is posted. How many stories are deleted, later updated with a note ("Oops, turns out this story is wrong."), or corrected with a new story (such as this one)? Quite a few.
In the past couple years, linux has become a buzz word, and although it hasn't yet replaced real unix (yet), companies like IBM, SGI, Compaq, and now SCO have embraced it at least to a degree. Is linux a superior unix, or are companies just jumping on the hype bandwagon?
The story text certainly impies that Bruce wrote in to Slashdot. Or perhaps Hemos like to make up quotes. No, a more likely answer is Bruce wrote in to Slashdot.
But, how many people have the time and initiative to read through poorly documented code looking for potential problems? Not a whole lot. And the fact that any 12-year-old can install an RPM with a graphical tool, and any 13-year-old can ./configure; make; make install doesn't help any. Finding bugs means sticking your hands in the source code and compiling on some alternate and unsupported system (Win2000, Solaris, Darwin, Minix, etc) with a different compiler, different libraries, etc.
As far as jury nullification, it does exist, but isn't particularly common. OJ Simpson wasn't jury nullification, it was 12 stupid people, 4 high priced lawyers, a judge more interested in TV ratings than judging, and incompetent prosecutors.
Every once in a while, though, someone busted for marijuana possession tries to use a jury nullification defense to convince the jurors that it shouldn't be a crime. Usually without success.
Sort of like a free d/l of Red Hat vs. paying $100 for Red Hat + MetroX & other proprietary stuff, only Netscape is free.
Although DNA fingerprinting is mostly accurate, it is based on differences in the introns, which are highly variable. As far as exons are concerned... You've probably heard that chimps and humans are 98% or so genetically similar, and humans and hamsters are 95% genetically similar.
If you compared the genes (exons) of any 2 people, you'd find them to be 99.99999999% or more similar. The differences are very slight. What makes people unique is not the genes so much as which ones are expressed.
Office 2000 for MacOS is worth more to Apple than whatever revenue they might get selling Mac OSX for intel.
How do you forsee freenet being used? Reading over the FAQ, it does seem like an ideal method of trading warez, porn & mp3s (similar to Napster or Hotline), although your ideal seems reminiscent of Project Gutenberg or the FSF -- sharing information without fear of censorship. The anonymous information sharing for legitimate purposes could be very important in places where sharing of information is suppressed (China, for example). 10 years ago, no one could have predicted that the Internet would be used as it is today. In 10 years, how do you forsee freenet being used?
That's not entirely true; it was written in 6502 assembly language on paper (actually, I think it was a port of an Integer BASIC he had written for a different architecture, but never assembled or even tested...), but assembled by hand, since the only 6502 assembler Apple had access to at that time was an expensive cross-assembler they had to rent by the hour.
Netscape 6.0 isn't the end of mozilla anymore than Red Hat 6.2 is the end of Linux. You know that :-)
I forgot to mention... OpenStep/GNUStep. If you can get a hold of OpenStep for NT (Web Objects), you could develop under linux with GNUStep, or NeXT, or Mac OS X. Of course, GNUStep is still in development.
Have you considered developing natively? Visual Studio isn't all that bad. If you don't want to deal with MFC (who would? :-), GTK is available for windows now (so you could develop with linux that way). Also, QT, though the Windows version requires a license. Alternatively, for the cygwin tools bring GNU cli power to windows.
So, what does he think about people pouring grits down their pants? :-)
Additionally, the interesting parts of QT (ie - the codecs) are generally licensed, copyrighted, patented (and thinking up a good video compression scheme requires a fair bit of math & work & imho should be patentable).
Furthermore, Apple isn't a charity. Last time I checked, the Windows version of QT was annoyingware - pay us to get rid of this annoying notice. I don't know how much money they get that way, but if it pays for development, it could be hard to justify the cash loss to satisfy a "fringe" OS.
It's not a way to lose marketshare either; the majority of the world uses Windows, where QT is available (and tries to sell you an enhanced version). What's the likelihood that the a Slashdot reader would pay money for an enhanced Linux QuickTime viewer?
A: Use a blender!
Sorry if it's a little, umm, inflamatory...
Tech/Net stocks haven't been riding so high lately.
Interesting (& true!) story... a few years ago, TicketMaster sued & had MS (MSN, maybe) remove a deep hyperlink. Paul Allen is a majority shareholder of TicketMaster. Yes, that Paul Allen.
There is the appeal of running a non-mainstream, cutting edge OS. Linux, *BSD, HURD, Darwin... it's an OS, a tool, not a way of life.
That's their bread & butter, dude. It's an advantage they have. There's no compelling reason for them to give it away... Apple isn't a charity.
Darwin is a unixy kernel. It won't spawn alternatives any more than linuxPPC or mkLinux (sponsored by apple) did.