I couldn't have said it better, man. The stuff like the USA PATRIOT Act (which I got to hear a real live G-man talk about; go here for more details if interested), people being detained without reason/cause/notice, secret hearings, 6% of the population in prisons, etc just makes my head spin. Worse, my head has stopped spinning. I'm becoming immune to all this. The Federal Government is basically operating as if the Constitution no longer applies, and we are all supposed to feel safer? It like they snuck a state martial law on us and nobody noticed.
I plan on doing two things today:
1. Not turning on the TV for any reason whatsoever
2. Giving some cash to the EFF
I may make those actions my annual observance of "Patriot Day". Someone's got to look out for the public -- they don't even know they are under attack by their own government.
You're not the only one sick of the knee-jerk, draconian jingoism which is destroying our liberties. It's just an unpopular thing to say. The worst part? Last night it dawned on me that the terrorists have already won: we're a scared nation, attacking our own citizenry by way of "defense".
Anyway, I'm sad about what happened but enough is enough. I'm as proud as anyone to be American, and I love my country dearly, but something actually constructive needs to be done. And if I hear the word "Homeland" one more goddam time...
I suspect that his artsy pretension was a display for his fans, and that he assumed the rest of us would have communication skills sufficient to see through the unnecessary shorthand.
Judging by the brouhaha criticizing the form rather than analyzing the content, I sadly conclude that he was wrong.
That was precisely my point. It was hard to see past the format of the medium to get at the intent of the message. He reduced the effectiveness of his communication by adopting the writing style he chose.
Are you actually saying that the phraseology of 'b4' is more complicated to you than a 'mostly valid' rule of placing the letters i and e in a word, or adding letters that dont even exist in the word as it is spoken? 'rendezvous. only 4 letters out of 26 are not used as silent letters in various words
What I'm saying is that the goal of communication is served by commonalities: two entities need to establish something between them which allows information to pass. Humans have languages, be it French or Swahili. That those two don't share anything in common is irrelevant. Saying that one is "more complicated" than another is equally irrelevant. Neither is in line with each language's separate purpose, and neither must be considered when assessing a language's effectiveness.
For example, if I try to speak to an African, the closer I can come to matching his grasp of Swahili, the more effectively I can communicate with him. If I insisted that French is simpler, easier, more economical, whatever than Swahili and that I should use it to speak with that African, then I may be right but I'm probably not communicating. If I take a less drastic route and decide to invent contractions and reduce redundancies in his language ("The Bushmen don't need 9 phrases for hunting any more than the Inuit need 13 words for snow! I'll just use the simplest one...") then I hamper my ability to communicate with him. Complexity of a language is completely orthogonal to its effectiveness.
Imagine you're attempting to write a college entrance essay. Why not get rid of all silent or redundant words in your essay? It'd be less typing, and much simpler writing, right?. But would it be communicating? Not really. The board would have to decipher your essay. That wouldn't help your cause. Now imagine you're a record company executive reading Prince's essays. Did Prince make it easy for you to understand what he was trying to say? No. You probably couldn't get past the babytalk-like contractions. It's probably hard for you get at his meaning because your mind is being constantly assualted by his new and clever use of English.
My point remains: No matter what else Prince is or how much you may like his music, Prince's writing looks and reads like something written by a semi-literate child and not only does nothing to further his aims, it serves to actively hinder them. He would do better to simply use the same language as everyone else, even if it is more complicated.
Sure why not, at one point the earth was flat because the king and queen told you so in order to control your movements...I suppose this could be seen as true to those same kinds of personalities...enjoy
I don't know what you're trying to say. What I'm saying is: If you wanna fight City Hall, you'd better put on a suit.
I too am not a hardware person but it seems to me that the query is exactly what powered the bit and applied whatever bias was needed to have a state.
It's still pretty fishy in my book. I just can't get past it having three states. I mean, when it wasn't responding it wasn't inanimate -- it was moving around and pulsing and such. Although maybe it had some other deal which moved it about and the "bitness" was only that part which responded to a query (ie, unpowered until queried)? But that moves away from it being a "fundamental" particle.
Prince has been using that style for decades. It's been his trademark since the beginning of pop music.
Probably that was before you opened your eyes to the world.
You assume that because Prince's trademark is indecipherable that I'm young? That doesn't follow. I'm 35 years old and I remember Prince just fine. His style was as annoying then as it is now. My points stand that he's not helping his cause with his "style" and that it virtually guarantees that he'll continue to do nothing but preach to the choir.
That's a huge question. And a good one. It often is, but not this time; my opinion remains that Prince is more than a little unintelligeable and because of this he is not that bright. As I said previously, Prince's actively trying to make communication more difficult while simultaneously trying use that communication to further his aims should bear this opnion out as being more fact than fiction.
However, the answer in this case should be obvious; this is, after all, Slashdot. It's groupthink truth that counts here, not real truth. Prince says <insert media conglomerate name here> is bad, music from/for the masses is good. I say he's not helping anyone's cause by adopting (purely for the sake of being artsy, IMO) the writing style of a horny 14 year-old IM freak. Because Prince == freedom and goodness (for the moment) and my post was critical of Prince, I'm therefore being critical of (against) free music, which is never good (even when true). My post, by that reasoning, was meant to do nothing but be critically inflammatory of anyone advocating free music and so should have been moderated as such (I'd have been happier if it was modded as "inciteful").
At least I think that's what "they" think. The moderator, god help them, could have simply been a Prince fan and I was dissing his boy (far too easy a target). It's hard to say sometimes. Not that I care, especially. Slashdot lost it's audience three years ago or so and is now not much more than an amusement. There's the occasional good bit, though, and sometimes "lightweight" banter is what a mind needs.
Overall, I'd say moderation does an OK job, but it's never something to worry about. Remember that even guys like Galileo and Vesalius and Copernicus were once modded down as flamebait too. (By which I am merely illustrating a point, not comparing anything I've ever uttered to anything any of them have done or written...)
Well, that's about 10 minutes more thought than I wanted to give to Prince. The short answer is "Don't swim upstream."
Check out the artist's commentary A Nation of Thieves wherein Prince wonders, "How long, however, b4 a critical... 2 leave the system 4 good... 2gether 2... "
How could we possibly "check that out"? How can anyone read and comprehend that sort of crap? I guess people no longer need IM to prove they are idiots; now they can write whole manifestoes and remove all doubt. Or maybe Prince is trying to be artsy, I dunno. He just comes off as unintelligible, which flies in the face of communication's goals just a bit if he's trying to accomplish something with his writing.
"The technology and entertainment industries r simply 2 big 4 us 2 xpect any overnight changes." And they probably took at least one English class, too, so you probably aren't going to convince anyone to do anything that you want them to do if you attempt to use the written word, Prince...
Actually, at a hardware level, this is an accurate depiction of a "bit." If a logic gate is not powered, it can't be said to have either a low or high state since it can't be measured.
Well, I'm not much of a hardware engineer, but how could the bit respond unless it was powered? If it could respond to inquiry (i.e., be measured as to which state it happens to be in) then that means it was in fact powered. Yet it had three states while powered, and so therefore it was not a bit at all.
But since we are talking about what essentially amounts to a cartoon, I'm willing to end the debate in a draw.:-)
Now for Tron 2.0, I'd buy a group of eight bits, all in a row, "doing the binary wave", in answer to Flynn's questions:
"Hey byte, how many Recognizers are after us?"
"<nothing> <nothing> <nothing> yes yes no yes yes"
Remind me. What was the Bit?
It was just a bit - the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.
The computer's equivalent to an atom?
Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
NO! The bit in Tron wasn't a bit at all! It didn't have two states, on and off, yes and no, zero and 1... it had three states: 'yes', 'no', and 'stateless'. It would sit there until Flynn asked it a question and then it would answer yes or no. That's not two states. I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it isn't.
Now, if they would have had the bit only say 'yes' when the answer to a question was yes (or vice versa: say nothing until the answer is no), then it would have been a bit. Nothing or yes, nothing or no: they should have picked one of those.
This is just something that's been bugging me since I was like 15 or so is all. Nothing to see, move along...
Who's the genious who thought up displaying the connection string to end users, including the password??? Sure it makes it easier for the developer to debug, but displaying your db password to the entrire Slashdot community isn't the smartest thing to do.
Happily, the actual password is not passed by the error message. The string 'PASSWORD' is merely a placeholder.
Sadly, this can be turned off by prepending a '@' to the function call, like so:
I suspect that poor web server will have more than a couple nmap scans and connection attempts on port 3306. I hope that the admin blocked traffic from anywhere but localhost from within mysql's grant tables, although if he has the mysql port accessible to the world, then there's probably (hopefully) a reason for it.
Does anyone know if there's planned AudioTron support for Vorbis? I spent a long time looking through their site, the discussion boards, etc this weekend and found nothing. I don't even know that it's possible via a firmware upgrade.
I don't care about portables, it's my home system I'm curious about. XMMS I don't so much worry about, but I'm not going to replace hardware. What I have works for me, and if I have to use.mp3 with it, then I will, no matter what license the format has. I suspect a lot of people that have bought and are using MP3-only hardware feel and will act the same way, at least until that hardware gets replaced. mayeb what we need is for new hardware to decode both formats? I could see phasing in Vorbis decoders as being easily doable.
I really wish OGG would have been around (read: taken off) like in 1997...
My favorite road name is near my wife's office. The only address on it is the Waxie people's headquaters at One Waxie Way. It's just so alliterative... I dunno. Then again, I'm easily amused.
It uses microdrives (near as I can tell; the free advertsing from/. killed their server). That's not too swell a choice for a server that needs to do any significant amount of I/O. The RLX blades use similarly slow drives, but at least with those you can easliy cluster or load balance. They can even use two drives, so striping might be a solution (as long as you didn't care about the data all that much).
Having said that, if you used the Mocha with some sort of NAS device like a NetApp then you might have something. IMO, the RLX stuff is still a better solution, though. At least with those you can mirror the boot drive.
Of course, I'm just pulling all this outta the air, so take as many grains of salt as needed.
I've never had to compile a driver for a Soundblaster Live. Red Hat has always detected the card and installed the driver. RH also took care of all the hardware on the laptop I'm using now (an IBM A20m). Everything but the winmodem works fine and I didn't have to tweak anything. Heh heh... I didn't even know I was using the emu10k1 driver until I saw your post. I just don't think about it, I guess, since the card works fine.
I've not used a Logitech webcam in a while, but I remember it being easy. I even had some perl stuff grabbing images, putting text on them, etc.
As far as rebooting, I hate it. Though I might be alone in that feeling. And it's worth noting that MS doesn't eat their own dog food in that regard: to get the "designed for Windows" logo cert, your installer/app can't cause a reboot. I've never seen anything patch/update-like from MS that didn't require at least one reboot. Then again, I've never seen a "Designed for Windows XP" logo on a boxed copy of XP.
Having said all that, there's really no reason to begrudge people's use of Windows. It's the right tool for the job for some people. It can't be everything to everyone, just as Linux (or Mac OS X, or *BSD, or VMS, or...) can't. Sometimes I don't understand why the desktop OS choice is a zero-sum game. There's room for more than one OS.
Currently, I use a combination of AuthUserFile/deny/allow in.htaccess to limit who can make changes. I need to implement a better system, but can't decide the best way to go about doing this.
If you are into rolling your own, then take a look at the Look at mod_auth_mysql Apache module. It's basically.htaccess file kind of access control except the user info is in a MySQL DB. So you can do updates/inerts/whatever on the database via your perl and get close to what you need as far as access control without having to write files in the docroot.
You might not be able to make it fine-grained enough, but if you have a thing where each user (for instance) gets their own directory or something then it might work pretty well for you.
And if you are not into rolling your own anymore, check out Moveable Type.
So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!
For some reason, your post was one of the most informative and insightful yet lowest-rated posts I've seen in a long time. I'd give you double mod points if I could. Know why? Because you invented a new "law" which compares (and predicts, one would hope) hard drive density to CPU capacity as pertains to PC usability. This could be an issue before to long. When does it start to hurt, though? I have no clue, so maybe we should figure it out now?
I'm serious, write it up. Get figures, plots, innuendo, meaning and reason in it. Make it Muerte's Law, and then cash in.
I'm totally serious. And you owe me a kickback if you do. Just a little taste is all...
It didn't help because anything that is a windows emulator is destined to break because you-know-who controls the windows API and the windows gaming API. If you start to be successful in writing something that doesn't actually require windows to run windows apps, then you-know-who will BREAK the API and you will forever be playing catch-up.
Sounds like what will happen with MONO. Since it's not a game, however (unless you consider that some people are trying to beat MS at their own game, perhaps) I don't think people see the correlation between OS/2 and MONO and.Net. There's a very good reason that MS hangs on to even "simple" things like file formats. Being able to break alternate implementations in order to maintain monopoly status (what the marketeers call "market share") at will is probably chief among them. It'll kill MONO just like it killed Linux gaming just like it killed OS/2 (although there were other factors involved as well). It might kill WineX, although they seem to be happy in the play catch-up role. They certainly fill a niche.
I tried really hard to give Linux gaming a shot. I bought every single Loki game made, and a couple Hyperion ones as well. I happily lived without a windows partition for about a year and a half. But the game, pun intended, is over. MS won when it was "shown" that Linux gaming is not a viable market. Game companies think that all Linux users want things for free, and won't pay (I was probably among a small minority of peopel that bought Linux and Windows copies fo Tribes2, for example). Quake3 had dismal Linux sales, but a lot of Linux binary downloads. People won't wait for a Linux port -- they'll buy the Windows version and dual boot if they have to.
It would have been nice, but a Windows partition is in the future for anyone interested in playing games.
Sure glad we don't have to worry about you designing a language for sysadmins around the world to use. I'll bet you've got some second-guessing for Linus too.
I'd think part of having an open source implementation of something invites a certain amount of commentary and/or criticism. You don't seem to share that philosophy.
It's my opinion that Perl is getting away from its roots. I think it's becoming bloated and overly complex. If the price of admission for learning Perl by new sysadmins becomes too high, then what? Do you think Perl 6 will be harder or easier than Perl 4 for a neophyte to learn? I'm saying that if Wall could do it all over again, Perl wouldn't be as popular as it is now, for certain reasons. Those reasons boil down to failing to K.I.S.S., as with Perl 6. But like you say, it's his language and he can do what he wants with it.
BTW, I have no "second-guessing" for Linus. I may very well have an opinion about some work he produces, and until he decides to keep the kernel all to himself and not show it to anyone, I might very well state that opinion. Making it available for public use implies making it open to public scrutiny. And if you don't like that then you might try getting therapy or something.
Why is it that, in the OSS community, some of the loudest bitching about those who do comes from those who can't or won't?
Nice. So you're saying that unless one cares to re-invent the wheel one can't state an opinion about locomotion? Unless I make a new kind of watch I can't talk about time? Unless I haul off and make another Ruby or Python I should keep my opinion about Perl to myself? Any sort of naysaying is "bitching"? Bullshit. I'm wondering what happened to you that you should be so negative.
BTW, not that you care or anything, I'm a huge fan of both Larry (whom I've met on several occasions and had interesting conversations with) and of Perl. I'm lucky that I've had the occasion to personally thank him for creating Perl and unknowingly giving me all that he has through his creation. I use Perl nearly every day and I'm hoping that a couple years from now people will discover it to be easy and fun, like I did. I don't believe that they will, however, because of an unnecessarily steep learning curve. But that's just me bitching, right?
Healthy debate... gotta love it. Or maybe not.
-B
He'd screw it up
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If he could go back, he'd make Perl incomprehensibly arcane and overly complicated, instead of creating an easy-to-learn, general purpose glue/scripting language (which looked a lot like languages that we already knew, but were more powerful than them). The "revisionist history" version of Perl would probably look a look a lot like Perl 6, with even more desire for Perl to be something it's not and be the answer to everyone's problems.
I don't know why Perl wants to be a kitchen-sink language designed to fill any programming role. It is ignoring Perl's strengths to try to do and be everything to everyone. What struck me about the parent post was that just last night I was trying to decide whether Perl would have taken off like it did if it had looked like what Perl 6 will look like. I don't think it would have.
how do you find out if someone is a good programmer?
This may sound trite, but I've seen it happen successfully over and over in the past three years the tech world has been languishing: Hire people you've known professionally. There are a lot of folks that got tech jobs due to the dotcom expansion who would have otherwise not had that exposure. The VC money was just phosphorus for the tech algae bloom, though. Now the colony if is dying off, and the strongest ones survive. Trouble is, some of the weaker ones can fool you into think that they are really strong ones. The only good way past this is first- (or even second-) hand knowledge about the person you're hiring.
It's common knowledge that the the job boards (Monster, Dice, et al.) are completely useless and that the only way to get a tech job is to get a referral/offer from someone you already know. So it stands to reason that the people who are looking for work either don't know anyone else professionally (not a good sign) or they know people professionally, but those people either can't or won't hire them. You can't tell the difference between them all from one interview/phone screen.
Interviews are like references: they can be as useful as the interviewee is honest. But the best way to hire good people is to hire people whom you know are good. Failing that, hire someone as a temp, on spec, for a probationary period, etc. If they work out, then hire them full time. There are a lot of very talented people out of work, and it's something of a buyer's market. If you have a decent position open, then many people will put up with being a temp in order to secure the permanent job.
So, Perl is optimized for quick and dirty problems. The kind in which you know in advance you won't be maintaining it, and don't need a solid, easily-maintained language.
When did I ever say that? Perl is "optimized" to give you enough rope to hang yourself. Or climb. Or whatever you want. If you want to use it for one-off glue scripts, more power to you. You want to write something big and complicated with a definite maintainance path? Go right ahead. And if you don't like/know/use Perl, then that's fine too. Use Tcl or shell or Ruby or expect or Python or DOS Batch or even Brainfuck if you want. But don't begrudge another's use of Perl. They may have a very good reason to use it.
And XML is a sophisticated mechanism for describing data for when a simple pipe-delimited file format won't achieve a sufficient buzzword high.
That's bullshit, and you know it. You can't always use CSV/pipes. Yeah, you can very often just use simple name/value pairs (for example), but XML fills a very crucial role when data storage needs become more complicated or have to grow beyond original design specs. I'd give you examples from stuff I've personally encountered, but you probably wouldn't care so I won't bother to go dig stuff up. You sound like someone that likes to roll their own parsers anyway...
It's so powerful that this book doesn't even go into detail on learning XML - the reviewer recommends additional books for really getting to understand XML, should you desire to replac the fast & easy delimited format.
Your argument is specious.
I have an older book on XML by Charles Goldfarb (of SGML fame) which is 1100+ pages. In it, he admits that even with that much paper, the book can't fully impart knowledge of XML to the reader. The nature of XML defies that sort of easy classification and it's just too big a concept.
I'm going to write a book called "Oil-based Paints and Art" and it'll be around 216 pages long. In it, I'm going to claim to fully describe not just painting with oils, but also completely describe "art", and everything you can do with it. Then, in the face of both ludicrous claims, I'm going to ask that you trust me and my knowledge of the subject enough that you'll purchase my book.
Oh yeah, sounds like a match made in heaven.
To some, it is. And they probably don't get on your case for your using your delimited format for everything. They probably don't have the slightest clue what your design goals are, and so couldn't possibly understand why you choose the tech you choose. Likely they figure that you've weighed your options and made the best choice, from a technological standpoint -- that you've chosen the right tool for the job at hand, whatever it may be. Since you know best what you need for your job.
I will never understand why people will constantly engage in techno-snobbery. If someone wants to use Perl and XML, what the hell should you care?
-B
Re:This book is destined
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The author correctly points out that Perl is best suited for quick, unmaintainable hacks and not serious, large-scale engineering.
The same argument best used in favor of MySQL applies here as well: not everything has to be a super scalable, completely buzzword compliant, ninth-wonder-of-the-world engineering project. In fact, I'd wager that if you counted up all "developer time" spent in the US every day, you'd find that a large percentage of it is done on "throwaway" projects.
Lots of people just need to regex through logs and make a simple database and draw quick-and-dirty graphs and walk a MIB on a router and automate a build process and probe a firewall and so on and so on. They use perl, shell, whatever. And that's completely fine. Whatever works, works.
And XML, as he notes, it bloated by ivory-tower academic requirements and has made (and will make) zero headway in the Real World.
You couldn't be more wrong. XML couldn't be more real world. SOAP, office doc file formats, database output, jabber, web services, config files, the list goes on. Even nmap spits out XML if you want it to. Hell, we've been fighting to get it used at the university where I work because we've used it in the "real world" and know and like it...
Slashdot Mirror
I plan on doing two things today:
1. Not turning on the TV for any reason whatsoever
2. Giving some cash to the EFF
I may make those actions my annual observance of "Patriot Day". Someone's got to look out for the public -- they don't even know they are under attack by their own government.
You're not the only one sick of the knee-jerk, draconian jingoism which is destroying our liberties. It's just an unpopular thing to say. The worst part? Last night it dawned on me that the terrorists have already won: we're a scared nation, attacking our own citizenry by way of "defense".
Anyway, I'm sad about what happened but enough is enough. I'm as proud as anyone to be American, and I love my country dearly, but something actually constructive needs to be done. And if I hear the word "Homeland" one more goddam time...
-B
Judging by the brouhaha criticizing the form rather than analyzing the content, I sadly conclude that he was wrong.
That was precisely my point. It was hard to see past the format of the medium to get at the intent of the message. He reduced the effectiveness of his communication by adopting the writing style he chose.
-B
What I'm saying is that the goal of communication is served by commonalities: two entities need to establish something between them which allows information to pass. Humans have languages, be it French or Swahili. That those two don't share anything in common is irrelevant. Saying that one is "more complicated" than another is equally irrelevant. Neither is in line with each language's separate purpose, and neither must be considered when assessing a language's effectiveness.
For example, if I try to speak to an African, the closer I can come to matching his grasp of Swahili, the more effectively I can communicate with him. If I insisted that French is simpler, easier, more economical, whatever than Swahili and that I should use it to speak with that African, then I may be right but I'm probably not communicating. If I take a less drastic route and decide to invent contractions and reduce redundancies in his language ("The Bushmen don't need 9 phrases for hunting any more than the Inuit need 13 words for snow! I'll just use the simplest one...") then I hamper my ability to communicate with him. Complexity of a language is completely orthogonal to its effectiveness.
Imagine you're attempting to write a college entrance essay. Why not get rid of all silent or redundant words in your essay? It'd be less typing, and much simpler writing, right?. But would it be communicating? Not really. The board would have to decipher your essay. That wouldn't help your cause. Now imagine you're a record company executive reading Prince's essays. Did Prince make it easy for you to understand what he was trying to say? No. You probably couldn't get past the babytalk-like contractions. It's probably hard for you get at his meaning because your mind is being constantly assualted by his new and clever use of English.
My point remains: No matter what else Prince is or how much you may like his music, Prince's writing looks and reads like something written by a semi-literate child and not only does nothing to further his aims, it serves to actively hinder them. He would do better to simply use the same language as everyone else, even if it is more complicated.
Sure why not, at one point the earth was flat because the king and queen told you so in order to control your movements...I suppose this could be seen as true to those same kinds of personalities...enjoy
I don't know what you're trying to say. What I'm saying is: If you wanna fight City Hall, you'd better put on a suit.
-B
It's still pretty fishy in my book. I just can't get past it having three states. I mean, when it wasn't responding it wasn't inanimate -- it was moving around and pulsing and such. Although maybe it had some other deal which moved it about and the "bitness" was only that part which responded to a query (ie, unpowered until queried)? But that moves away from it being a "fundamental" particle.
I think Tron fudged the whol "bit" thing.
-B
Probably that was before you opened your eyes to the world.
You assume that because Prince's trademark is indecipherable that I'm young? That doesn't follow. I'm 35 years old and I remember Prince just fine. His style was as annoying then as it is now. My points stand that he's not helping his cause with his "style" and that it virtually guarantees that he'll continue to do nothing but preach to the choir.
-B
That's a huge question. And a good one. It often is, but not this time; my opinion remains that Prince is more than a little unintelligeable and because of this he is not that bright. As I said previously, Prince's actively trying to make communication more difficult while simultaneously trying use that communication to further his aims should bear this opnion out as being more fact than fiction.
However, the answer in this case should be obvious; this is, after all, Slashdot. It's groupthink truth that counts here, not real truth. Prince says <insert media conglomerate name here> is bad, music from/for the masses is good. I say he's not helping anyone's cause by adopting (purely for the sake of being artsy, IMO) the writing style of a horny 14 year-old IM freak. Because Prince == freedom and goodness (for the moment) and my post was critical of Prince, I'm therefore being critical of (against) free music, which is never good (even when true). My post, by that reasoning, was meant to do nothing but be critically inflammatory of anyone advocating free music and so should have been moderated as such (I'd have been happier if it was modded as "inciteful").
At least I think that's what "they" think. The moderator, god help them, could have simply been a Prince fan and I was dissing his boy (far too easy a target). It's hard to say sometimes. Not that I care, especially. Slashdot lost it's audience three years ago or so and is now not much more than an amusement. There's the occasional good bit, though, and sometimes "lightweight" banter is what a mind needs.
Overall, I'd say moderation does an OK job, but it's never something to worry about. Remember that even guys like Galileo and Vesalius and Copernicus were once modded down as flamebait too. (By which I am merely illustrating a point, not comparing anything I've ever uttered to anything any of them have done or written...)
Well, that's about 10 minutes more thought than I wanted to give to Prince. The short answer is "Don't swim upstream."
-B
How could we possibly "check that out"? How can anyone read and comprehend that sort of crap? I guess people no longer need IM to prove they are idiots; now they can write whole manifestoes and remove all doubt. Or maybe Prince is trying to be artsy, I dunno. He just comes off as unintelligible, which flies in the face of communication's goals just a bit if he's trying to accomplish something with his writing.
"The technology and entertainment industries r simply 2 big 4 us 2 xpect any overnight changes." And they probably took at least one English class, too, so you probably aren't going to convince anyone to do anything that you want them to do if you attempt to use the written word, Prince...
-B
-B
Well, I'm not much of a hardware engineer, but how could the bit respond unless it was powered? If it could respond to inquiry (i.e., be measured as to which state it happens to be in) then that means it was in fact powered. Yet it had three states while powered, and so therefore it was not a bit at all.
But since we are talking about what essentially amounts to a cartoon, I'm willing to end the debate in a draw. :-)
Now for Tron 2.0, I'd buy a group of eight bits, all in a row, "doing the binary wave", in answer to Flynn's questions:
That I could see.-B
It was just a bit - the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.
The computer's equivalent to an atom?
Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
NO! The bit in Tron wasn't a bit at all! It didn't have two states, on and off, yes and no, zero and 1... it had three states: 'yes', 'no', and 'stateless'. It would sit there until Flynn asked it a question and then it would answer yes or no. That's not two states. I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it isn't.
Now, if they would have had the bit only say 'yes' when the answer to a question was yes (or vice versa: say nothing until the answer is no), then it would have been a bit. Nothing or yes, nothing or no: they should have picked one of those.
This is just something that's been bugging me since I was like 15 or so is all. Nothing to see, move along...
-B
Happily, the actual password is not passed by the error message. The string 'PASSWORD' is merely a placeholder.
Sadly, this can be turned off by prepending a '@' to the function call, like so:
I suspect that poor web server will have more than a couple nmap scans and connection attempts on port 3306. I hope that the admin blocked traffic from anywhere but localhost from within mysql's grant tables, although if he has the mysql port accessible to the world, then there's probably (hopefully) a reason for it.-B
I don't care about portables, it's my home system I'm curious about. XMMS I don't so much worry about, but I'm not going to replace hardware. What I have works for me, and if I have to use .mp3 with it, then I will, no matter what license the format has. I suspect a lot of people that have bought and are using MP3-only hardware feel and will act the same way, at least until that hardware gets replaced. mayeb what we need is for new hardware to decode both formats? I could see phasing in Vorbis decoders as being easily doable.
I really wish OGG would have been around (read: taken off) like in 1997...
-B
-B
Do the people on that channel just repeat other people's jokes or do they make up their own? No wonder I never watch Comedy Central...
-B
Having said that, if you used the Mocha with some sort of NAS device like a NetApp then you might have something. IMO, the RLX stuff is still a better solution, though. At least with those you can mirror the boot drive.
Of course, I'm just pulling all this outta the air, so take as many grains of salt as needed.
-B
I've not used a Logitech webcam in a while, but I remember it being easy. I even had some perl stuff grabbing images, putting text on them, etc.
As far as rebooting, I hate it. Though I might be alone in that feeling. And it's worth noting that MS doesn't eat their own dog food in that regard: to get the "designed for Windows" logo cert, your installer/app can't cause a reboot. I've never seen anything patch/update-like from MS that didn't require at least one reboot. Then again, I've never seen a "Designed for Windows XP" logo on a boxed copy of XP.
Having said all that, there's really no reason to begrudge people's use of Windows. It's the right tool for the job for some people. It can't be everything to everyone, just as Linux (or Mac OS X, or *BSD, or VMS, or ...) can't. Sometimes I don't understand why the desktop OS choice is a zero-sum game. There's room for more than one OS.
-B
If you are into rolling your own, then take a look at the Look at mod_auth_mysql Apache module. It's basically .htaccess file kind of access control except the user info is in a MySQL DB. So you can do updates/inerts/whatever on the database via your perl and get close to what you need as far as access control without having to write files in the docroot.
You might not be able to make it fine-grained enough, but if you have a thing where each user (for instance) gets their own directory or something then it might work pretty well for you.
And if you are not into rolling your own anymore, check out Moveable Type.
-B
For some reason, your post was one of the most informative and insightful yet lowest-rated posts I've seen in a long time. I'd give you double mod points if I could. Know why? Because you invented a new "law" which compares (and predicts, one would hope) hard drive density to CPU capacity as pertains to PC usability. This could be an issue before to long. When does it start to hurt, though? I have no clue, so maybe we should figure it out now?
I'm serious, write it up. Get figures, plots, innuendo, meaning and reason in it. Make it Muerte's Law, and then cash in.
I'm totally serious. And you owe me a kickback if you do. Just a little taste is all...
-B
Sounds like what will happen with MONO. Since it's not a game, however (unless you consider that some people are trying to beat MS at their own game, perhaps) I don't think people see the correlation between OS/2 and MONO and .Net. There's a very good reason that MS hangs on to even "simple" things like file formats. Being able to break alternate implementations in order to maintain monopoly status (what the marketeers call "market share") at will is probably chief among them. It'll kill MONO just like it killed Linux gaming just like it killed OS/2 (although there were other factors involved as well). It might kill WineX, although they seem to be happy in the play catch-up role. They certainly fill a niche.
I tried really hard to give Linux gaming a shot. I bought every single Loki game made, and a couple Hyperion ones as well. I happily lived without a windows partition for about a year and a half. But the game, pun intended, is over. MS won when it was "shown" that Linux gaming is not a viable market. Game companies think that all Linux users want things for free, and won't pay (I was probably among a small minority of peopel that bought Linux and Windows copies fo Tribes2, for example). Quake3 had dismal Linux sales, but a lot of Linux binary downloads. People won't wait for a Linux port -- they'll buy the Windows version and dual boot if they have to.
It would have been nice, but a Windows partition is in the future for anyone interested in playing games.
-B
10 PRINT "It ain't really mine to give, but you can have it nonetheless..."
END
20 PRINT "Find alternate here: http://quotes.prolix.nu/Technology/Computers/"
END
-B
I'd think part of having an open source implementation of something invites a certain amount of commentary and/or criticism. You don't seem to share that philosophy.
It's my opinion that Perl is getting away from its roots. I think it's becoming bloated and overly complex. If the price of admission for learning Perl by new sysadmins becomes too high, then what? Do you think Perl 6 will be harder or easier than Perl 4 for a neophyte to learn? I'm saying that if Wall could do it all over again, Perl wouldn't be as popular as it is now, for certain reasons. Those reasons boil down to failing to K.I.S.S., as with Perl 6. But like you say, it's his language and he can do what he wants with it.
BTW, I have no "second-guessing" for Linus. I may very well have an opinion about some work he produces, and until he decides to keep the kernel all to himself and not show it to anyone, I might very well state that opinion. Making it available for public use implies making it open to public scrutiny. And if you don't like that then you might try getting therapy or something.
Why is it that, in the OSS community, some of the loudest bitching about those who do comes from those who can't or won't?
Nice. So you're saying that unless one cares to re-invent the wheel one can't state an opinion about locomotion? Unless I make a new kind of watch I can't talk about time? Unless I haul off and make another Ruby or Python I should keep my opinion about Perl to myself? Any sort of naysaying is "bitching"? Bullshit. I'm wondering what happened to you that you should be so negative.
BTW, not that you care or anything, I'm a huge fan of both Larry (whom I've met on several occasions and had interesting conversations with) and of Perl. I'm lucky that I've had the occasion to personally thank him for creating Perl and unknowingly giving me all that he has through his creation. I use Perl nearly every day and I'm hoping that a couple years from now people will discover it to be easy and fun, like I did. I don't believe that they will, however, because of an unnecessarily steep learning curve. But that's just me bitching, right?
Healthy debate... gotta love it. Or maybe not.
-B
I don't know why Perl wants to be a kitchen-sink language designed to fill any programming role. It is ignoring Perl's strengths to try to do and be everything to everyone. What struck me about the parent post was that just last night I was trying to decide whether Perl would have taken off like it did if it had looked like what Perl 6 will look like. I don't think it would have.
Perl is The Clampetts of programming languages.
-B
This may sound trite, but I've seen it happen successfully over and over in the past three years the tech world has been languishing: Hire people you've known professionally. There are a lot of folks that got tech jobs due to the dotcom expansion who would have otherwise not had that exposure. The VC money was just phosphorus for the tech algae bloom, though. Now the colony if is dying off, and the strongest ones survive. Trouble is, some of the weaker ones can fool you into think that they are really strong ones. The only good way past this is first- (or even second-) hand knowledge about the person you're hiring.
It's common knowledge that the the job boards (Monster, Dice, et al.) are completely useless and that the only way to get a tech job is to get a referral/offer from someone you already know. So it stands to reason that the people who are looking for work either don't know anyone else professionally (not a good sign) or they know people professionally, but those people either can't or won't hire them. You can't tell the difference between them all from one interview/phone screen.
Interviews are like references: they can be as useful as the interviewee is honest. But the best way to hire good people is to hire people whom you know are good. Failing that, hire someone as a temp, on spec, for a probationary period, etc. If they work out, then hire them full time. There are a lot of very talented people out of work, and it's something of a buyer's market. If you have a decent position open, then many people will put up with being a temp in order to secure the permanent job.
-B
When did I ever say that? Perl is "optimized" to give you enough rope to hang yourself. Or climb. Or whatever you want. If you want to use it for one-off glue scripts, more power to you. You want to write something big and complicated with a definite maintainance path? Go right ahead. And if you don't like/know/use Perl, then that's fine too. Use Tcl or shell or Ruby or expect or Python or DOS Batch or even Brainfuck if you want. But don't begrudge another's use of Perl. They may have a very good reason to use it.
And XML is a sophisticated mechanism for describing data for when a simple pipe-delimited file format won't achieve a sufficient buzzword high.
That's bullshit, and you know it. You can't always use CSV/pipes. Yeah, you can very often just use simple name/value pairs (for example), but XML fills a very crucial role when data storage needs become more complicated or have to grow beyond original design specs. I'd give you examples from stuff I've personally encountered, but you probably wouldn't care so I won't bother to go dig stuff up. You sound like someone that likes to roll their own parsers anyway...
It's so powerful that this book doesn't even go into detail on learning XML - the reviewer recommends additional books for really getting to understand XML, should you desire to replac the fast & easy delimited format.
Your argument is specious.
I have an older book on XML by Charles Goldfarb (of SGML fame) which is 1100+ pages. In it, he admits that even with that much paper, the book can't fully impart knowledge of XML to the reader. The nature of XML defies that sort of easy classification and it's just too big a concept.
I'm going to write a book called "Oil-based Paints and Art" and it'll be around 216 pages long. In it, I'm going to claim to fully describe not just painting with oils, but also completely describe "art", and everything you can do with it. Then, in the face of both ludicrous claims, I'm going to ask that you trust me and my knowledge of the subject enough that you'll purchase my book.
Oh yeah, sounds like a match made in heaven.
To some, it is. And they probably don't get on your case for your using your delimited format for everything. They probably don't have the slightest clue what your design goals are, and so couldn't possibly understand why you choose the tech you choose. Likely they figure that you've weighed your options and made the best choice, from a technological standpoint -- that you've chosen the right tool for the job at hand, whatever it may be. Since you know best what you need for your job.
I will never understand why people will constantly engage in techno-snobbery. If someone wants to use Perl and XML, what the hell should you care?
-B
The same argument best used in favor of MySQL applies here as well: not everything has to be a super scalable, completely buzzword compliant, ninth-wonder-of-the-world engineering project. In fact, I'd wager that if you counted up all "developer time" spent in the US every day, you'd find that a large percentage of it is done on "throwaway" projects.
Lots of people just need to regex through logs and make a simple database and draw quick-and-dirty graphs and walk a MIB on a router and automate a build process and probe a firewall and so on and so on. They use perl, shell, whatever. And that's completely fine. Whatever works, works.
And XML, as he notes, it bloated by ivory-tower academic requirements and has made (and will make) zero headway in the Real World.
You couldn't be more wrong. XML couldn't be more real world. SOAP, office doc file formats, database output, jabber, web services, config files, the list goes on. Even nmap spits out XML if you want it to. Hell, we've been fighting to get it used at the university where I work because we've used it in the "real world" and know and like it...
-B