Yeah, I've had about five similar message such as from "Flirt Love Box". "Tried to call you but you were out", "Tried to send an SMS", etc.. messages, all with 0909 premium rate numbers.
At the bottom, it adds "The call is charged as a long distance call - For UK the charge is 2.5 Pence/sec" which is £1.50 per minute. Even then, I don't think that's enough to cover them legally, as I beleive they have to state the cost as a per-minute rate.
Fortunately, I'm not stupid enough to believe that these messages are for me. No-one I know sends messages in bright yellow with red and blue headings.
Just remember how UK phone charges work:
01/02 - standard long distance geographic number. Basically cheap.
05 - I don't think this is used, except 0500 which is free
07 - mobile, going to be quite expensive
08 - information. Generally increasing in cost as number increases, except for 0845 charged as local
09 - premium rate. Cost determined by operator, without limit.
00 - international. Again expensive.
Then reading the body:
[...] The kit is not OS-dependent. [...]
Still, it's definitely good news. With Apple providing royalty free licensing of the trademark, and free SDKs, they have substantially reduced the barriers to other people developing FireWire devices.
but isn't a non-prime that passes the 99.99999999999% check just as good as a prime in encryption? I mean, seriously, is anyone really going to notice it's not prime? No, most messages will decode incorrectly.
So, if the key obviously doesn't work, then you can assume that the modulus isn't prime and try another.
In fact, following that argument through, you could have a test suite of various messages to encode. If they work, you can be reasonably sure the number is prime. Obviously, with this approach you'd need to be reasonably sure you had a prime, otherwise you'd waste a lot of time.
Disclaimer: I dropped out of Uni level Maths before I got to anything particularly hard, so most of this is over my head.
Sorry, but law has always often been and *should* be in my opinion to punish the responsible, not only the slave-worker hired to do so.
Sure, but how do you go about proving who gave the order to do it? This article suggests that the bill doesn't care who was responsible, instead just arbitrarily assigning guilt to any exec who works for the company.
For instance the fact that the architecture is stack-based makes bytecode very difficult to optimze on machines with a large number of registers
This is just plain wrong, I'm afraid. It just requires that you don't take a simplistic approach converting bytecode to native code.
If you're converting a function from byte-code to native code, you can easily look at a stack based bytecode and build up a full parse tree for each statement and optimise that for the target platform.
Besides, how many registers would your ideal JVM have? 4? 8? 32? 256? What if it's run on a machine with more registers? It just won't use them. What if it's run on a machine with less? Well, it'll have to start swapping registers to memory back and forth, and become very inefficient. Using a JIT and a stack based approach, the target code is optimised for the host machine and the JIT doesn't have to worry about what "registers" the code is using for what.
Perhaps Donald Knuth sums it up better: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
If you weren't talking about a JIT but a byte-code interpreter, then you'd probably be implementing registers in an array anyway, so your comment doesn't make too much sense.
You seem to have missed the biggest C++ related ommission from Java - templates. The ability to create typed arrays using a single line is something that Java would really benefit from.
I like templates, but in this specific instance, part of the idea is that Java storage containers (arrays, lists, etc.) can hold any object. You want just arrays of X? Well, just unconditionally cast to X when you retrieve the elment.
Although the excessive casts in Java do annoy me a bit. Do we really ugly code like this:
Vector v = new Vector(); Integer x = new Integer(42); Integer y = (Integer) v.elementAt(0);
there's far too much redundancy in all these declarations. The compiler should accept implied casting from Object to any type of object if the L-type of an assignment is already known. Admittedly, you'd still need a cast for things like:
int x=((Integer)v.nextElement()).parseInt();
But templates are extremely flexible, for instance allowing you to have an array indexed by some arbitrary object, etc.
Also, templates mean that you end up without the need to check object type at run-time and reduce the requirement to have an anonymous Object type.
I think... I read the article and it's not particularly clear. But,
American movie, recording and software executives could be prohibited from entering Australia or extradited to face criminal charges if a copyright protection bill before the US Congress passes into law.
The difference is that this bill allows the executives to face charges for acts made by anonymous employees at their companies. I really don't see that this has any prior legal precedent in any country and strikes me that it's unlikely to be passed as it would mean that people would be charged for crimes they themselves didn't commit. Ozzie law already allows for the companies themselves to be tried, although as they are US based in this case and you can't actually extradite a company, the law is effectively useless as it stands only allows daughter companies that are based in.au to be tried.
I think.
But whatever, I think charging someone who you know did not personally perform the crime, simply because you don't know who did, is wrong.
I would expect that when a customer error like the encryption/key issue forced a re-rev, the customer (in this case, Microsoft) would have been stuck with the inventory
Unless nVidia had already produced more inventory than had been sold at that point. It's common for things like this to be sold as x thousand units per day for y days. If they had excess capacity at the plant, they would have used it rather than turning the fab process on and off (it's usually easier to leave a factory running producing excess products than repeatedly stop-starting).
Usually, this is good for them as they can than have the factory producing something else until the surplus has been nearly exhausted before changing back.
I guess MS had a clause where they had to give a week or whatever notice of a chip rev, but by that point nVidia may have already massively overproduced the obsolete chips.
I think Microsoft got it right, actually. One of the Windows time formats is a floating-point value, the number of days since Jan. 1, 1900 if I recall correctly.
Yeah, that's a stunningly good idea. Make every date manipulation have to rely on floating point arithmetic, making things far slower than they need to be. How much did Intel pay them for that?
Are you sure you don't mean fixed point? Even that would be over the top... If you're going to be using 8 or 10 bytes to store the date (as floating point uses on Intel),
then you could store microseconds with 12 bits, milliseconds with 12 bits, seconds with 6 bits, days with 5, months with 4. That's only 27 bits, leaving 25 or 41 bits for the year - slightly more than we'll ever need (even if they're signed dates with -2^79 representing millions of years BC to microsecond resolution!)
But generally, most people want the difference in dates/times, so subtracting them is usually best, so I'd say that just using a 64 bit integer is more than adequate.
I think the worst example of using bitfields are Microsoft's date formats in MS-DOS. The bitfield format makes doing any calculation far more complicated than is really necessary, and only provide 2 second resolution. It does allow dates up to 2107, though fortunately I'm going to live safe in the knowledge that no-one in the civilised world will still be using DOS then (unless 640k really is enough for someone.
So yes I am restricting you, but no, I don't feel bad about it. [...] You make it sound unreasonable.
They're unreasonable to me. Not as in me wanting to deny you the right to use whatever license you want. However, consider this:
Personally, I code because I enjoy coding. If I release something and expect no financial gain for it, I release it as truly free software, without any strings attached. If I want to gain financially, I don't release it for free (or more usually, I do the work for an employer, who usually demands it's kept in-house).
If I write free stuff, I expect you to do so to if you use my work.
That's your choice, and if so GPL's good for you. But, how does restricting how the things you've given away for free are used help you? I personally, haven't found it helps me, so I don't use the GPL to release my stuff.
However, as the GPL is so restrictive, I'd urge people considering how to licence something to think carefully before they do so. GPL is like a virus. If you release something as GPL for a while and people add stuff to it, you can't even release your own project as truly free software (such as BSD) without removing all other contributions or contacting all contributors (hard if they are anonymous or addresses no longer work, etc). In fact, in 6 months time, are you even going to remember exactly who provided a 1 line patch?
Maybe a GPL like licence that gives the original author the right to additionally relicense the software and any other derivative works under any licence would be good. But that only protects the original author, not any major contributors down the line. I think the only truly fair way is to say, "Do what the hell you like with this."
This article really does show the attitude RMS has towards everyone else. His aims aren't to make life easy for developers, it's to make life as hard as possible for people who don't want to choose GPL:
Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.
And that's the bottom line. GPL may give users freedom, but it's certainly restrictive for other developers.
If you really want your code to be free, and let people do what they want with it, (though remember that includes selling it) choose something like the new BSD licence or X11 licence.
They talked to the Microsoft engineers, but they had no better documents Do you think any company would send their real engineers out to tell a competitor how their closed protocol works?
SMB is neither closed protocol or Microsoft's. Is was, in fact, originally in the PC-LAN package developed by IBM and adopted by Microsoft in the early 80s. That's why there was so much public information about how it worked.
FWIW, NetBIOS was another IBM innovation and that too was well documented publically.
it's sad that the name of my (and ~30 million other Canadians') great country has been made synonymous with what is in essence bottled piss
Sad, but fair.
Why most of your data isn't really important
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
thousands upon thousands of images... And then the hard drive crashes And then it's gone.
You know, I think in many ways it's good to loose stuff like this. Sure, it's upsetting for a while, but you get over it.
Memories are just that - in your memory, and whilst photos are good for jogging memories, that's all they do. For anyone who's not actually in the picture, they mean nothing. And really, it's far healthier to look to the future than reminiscing about past events. This might seem heartless, but how often do you actually look at 10-20 year old photos? Maybe with dead family members it's another matter, but if they were really close, you should be able to remember them without a photo.
And it's amazing how much crap you can assimilate over time. After I went travelling for a year with just a rucksack (two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, etc...) I was horrified when I returned to realise how much junk I had in my parent's house that I'd previously considered important. Most of it went straight in the bin, as I sure as hell wasn't carting it to my next house.
Bringing it slightly back on topic. Yes, I've had hard disk failures. In one case, I even lost about a years worth of mail. But after being initially cross about my mail, I realised that I didn't actually need it anyway. The rest of the stuff I never even missed, as I'd backup up about the 5% that was useful.
For actual important stuff, like source code or documents, you just need to be disciplined enough to copy them somewhere reasonably regularly. I use local CVS for all my own source and just back up the whole tree every couple of days. I download stuff into a folder like '2002-07' for this month, and every month I backup anything to CD that is likely to be useful. Everything else can just be downloaded again, re-MP3'd, etc...
I'm just worried about how long my CD-R's will last...
Complete build of win2k time is 8hrs on 4way PIII and requires 50GB of hard drive space
So, the first day after checking out the source for the first time will be completely unproductive... Let me see, 1440 man days is about 7 man years which is about $210,000 in salary alone. Disk would be at least $144,000. Hmmmm.
And 1440 is a hell of a lot of people to be working on one project. I know there'll be a lot of smaller sub-projects, but trying to co-ordinate anything would be a managerial nightmare!
and big ones at that, I'd have thought. The articles says a green laser is used to "illuminate" the mine. If you're looking at it from 250 yards away, I'd imagine that the mine would have to be pretty damn big to see. The articles claims, "Although the weapon does not work on buried mines, it could be effective against surface-laid devices and munitions such as unexploded shells and cluster bombs." I'd counter that unexploded shells wouldn't be visible from that range.
the distiction between "server uptime" and "service uptime" With proper hardware (redundancy etc..)
The article doesn't even touch on these issues. In fact, from the situations described in the article, it's clear that they are considering a single box and discussing how unsuitable 99.999% availability is. If you did have redundancy, then yes, I agree you are far less likely to have two catastrophic failures at once (especially if you have machines at different locations and DNS assisted failover, etc).
However, the article paints the picture of a mad scramble to bring the machine up within a matter of minutes of failure. If you do have proper redundancy, let's say 1 of your 3 machines in different locations fails, then you don't have a mad scramble to get things working. Sure, it helps if you have fixed things quickly in case another machine fails and it will ease the load on the remaining servers, but it's not amazingly pressing.
Now, I've worked in places where everything's done on one server, and it is a big deal when the machine goes down. It is a big deal when it needs a reboot. It's even a big deal just restarting the web server, as in many cases clients loose their session context.
Ah, yes. I'd almost forgotten session context. This is not the kind of thing that is trivially easy to share between redundant servers, unless it is considered from the start. Typically, this is possible for sites with static data, but anything that attempts to keep track of the user's data and/or preferences will start having a big issues trying to keep things up-to-date.
I'd also say impractical. 5 nines is 99.999% availability, i.e. can be down for 1 second every 100000 seconds, or 27.77 hours. That gives approximately 6 seconds of downtime per week.
Even if all that weeks downtime came at once, six seconds is little enough that most users would just hit refresh and never even notice. Besides which, most web servers are taken down for maintenance tasks, upgrading software or disk, etc... Chances are even restarting the web server would take up more time than your maximum weekly downtime.
Given that over the course of a month (which is the billing period on most ISP lines), you only have 24 seconds of possible downtime, it's very unlikely that the ISP will be able to meet that target. Pretty much *any* fault would take longer than that to fix, so any company offering a refund if the SLA isn't met is just asking for trouble.
3. Don't Waste Time! [...] just knock something up in VI [...]
s/vi/notepad/
Other than that, a very accurate portrayal of 90% of sourceforge projects. Don't get me wrong, it's a great resource, but far too many people embark on stuff far beyond their ability and expect others to flock to their project to finish it off...
"The time to leave is now; there is no work left to do"
I take it you've not had a look at the Perl 6 spec. There's a lot of radical new development underfoot.
Whether perl needs more features now, given that it is fairly mature is another matter.
It seems to do almost everything that people want it to do.
Although, "
version 2.0, and I can honestly say that the features added since that time have not made my life any easier. "
How about adding OO? How about special variables gaining names? etc...
It's clear that every time perl has been upgraded, it has been of benefit to quite a large chunk of users.
Slashdot Mirror
At the bottom, it adds "The call is charged as a long distance call - For UK the charge is 2.5 Pence/sec" which is £1.50 per minute. Even then, I don't think that's enough to cover them legally, as I beleive they have to state the cost as a per-minute rate.
Fortunately, I'm not stupid enough to believe that these messages are for me. No-one I know sends messages in bright yellow with red and blue headings.
Just remember how UK phone charges work:
01/02 - standard long distance geographic number. Basically cheap.
05 - I don't think this is used, except 0500 which is free
07 - mobile, going to be quite expensive
08 - information. Generally increasing in cost as number increases, except for 0845 charged as local
09 - premium rate. Cost determined by operator, without limit.
00 - international. Again expensive.
If you don't know what the number is, don't dial!
Doh! It looks like I've not woken up yet this morning. Shame you can't moderate down your own posts... :-(
Then reading the body: [...] The kit is not OS-dependent. [...]
Still, it's definitely good news. With Apple providing royalty free licensing of the trademark, and free SDKs, they have substantially reduced the barriers to other people developing FireWire devices.
No, most messages will decode incorrectly.
So, if the key obviously doesn't work, then you can assume that the modulus isn't prime and try another.
In fact, following that argument through, you could have a test suite of various messages to encode. If they work, you can be reasonably sure the number is prime. Obviously, with this approach you'd need to be reasonably sure you had a prime, otherwise you'd waste a lot of time.
Disclaimer: I dropped out of Uni level Maths before I got to anything particularly hard, so most of this is over my head.
Sure, but how do you go about proving who gave the order to do it? This article suggests that the bill doesn't care who was responsible, instead just arbitrarily assigning guilt to any exec who works for the company.
This is just plain wrong, I'm afraid. It just requires that you don't take a simplistic approach converting bytecode to native code.
If you're converting a function from byte-code to native code, you can easily look at a stack based bytecode and build up a full parse tree for each statement and optimise that for the target platform.
Besides, how many registers would your ideal JVM have? 4? 8? 32? 256? What if it's run on a machine with more registers? It just won't use them. What if it's run on a machine with less? Well, it'll have to start swapping registers to memory back and forth, and become very inefficient. Using a JIT and a stack based approach, the target code is optimised for the host machine and the JIT doesn't have to worry about what "registers" the code is using for what.
Perhaps Donald Knuth sums it up better: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
If you weren't talking about a JIT but a byte-code interpreter, then you'd probably be implementing registers in an array anyway, so your comment doesn't make too much sense.
I like templates, but in this specific instance, part of the idea is that Java storage containers (arrays, lists, etc.) can hold any object. You want just arrays of X? Well, just unconditionally cast to X when you retrieve the elment.
Although the excessive casts in Java do annoy me a bit. Do we really ugly code like this:
Vector v = new Vector();
Integer x = new Integer(42);
Integer y = (Integer) v.elementAt(0);
there's far too much redundancy in all these declarations. The compiler should accept implied casting from Object to any type of object if the L-type of an assignment is already known. Admittedly, you'd still need a cast for things like:
int x=((Integer)v.nextElement()).parseInt();
But templates are extremely flexible, for instance allowing you to have an array indexed by some arbitrary object, etc. Also, templates mean that you end up without the need to check object type at run-time and reduce the requirement to have an anonymous Object type.American movie, recording and software executives could be prohibited from entering Australia or extradited to face criminal charges if a copyright protection bill before the US Congress passes into law.
The difference is that this bill allows the executives to face charges for acts made by anonymous employees at their companies. I really don't see that this has any prior legal precedent in any country and strikes me that it's unlikely to be passed as it would mean that people would be charged for crimes they themselves didn't commit. Ozzie law already allows for the companies themselves to be tried, although as they are US based in this case and you can't actually extradite a company, the law is effectively useless as it stands only allows daughter companies that are based in .au to be tried.
I think.
But whatever, I think charging someone who you know did not personally perform the crime, simply because you don't know who did, is wrong.
Unless nVidia had already produced more inventory than had been sold at that point. It's common for things like this to be sold as x thousand units per day for y days. If they had excess capacity at the plant, they would have used it rather than turning the fab process on and off (it's usually easier to leave a factory running producing excess products than repeatedly stop-starting).
Usually, this is good for them as they can than have the factory producing something else until the surplus has been nearly exhausted before changing back.
I guess MS had a clause where they had to give a week or whatever notice of a chip rev, but by that point nVidia may have already massively overproduced the obsolete chips.
Yeah, that's a stunningly good idea. Make every date manipulation have to rely on floating point arithmetic, making things far slower than they need to be. How much did Intel pay them for that?
Are you sure you don't mean fixed point? Even that would be over the top... If you're going to be using 8 or 10 bytes to store the date (as floating point uses on Intel), then you could store microseconds with 12 bits, milliseconds with 12 bits, seconds with 6 bits, days with 5, months with 4. That's only 27 bits, leaving 25 or 41 bits for the year - slightly more than we'll ever need (even if they're signed dates with -2^79 representing millions of years BC to microsecond resolution!)
But generally, most people want the difference in dates/times, so subtracting them is usually best, so I'd say that just using a 64 bit integer is more than adequate.
I think the worst example of using bitfields are Microsoft's date formats in MS-DOS. The bitfield format makes doing any calculation far more complicated than is really necessary, and only provide 2 second resolution. It does allow dates up to 2107, though fortunately I'm going to live safe in the knowledge that no-one in the civilised world will still be using DOS then (unless 640k really is enough for someone.
You clearly haven't understood what I've written. My argument is precisely that all developers should be able to beneift from my code if they want to.
GPL is designed to restrict who can benefit from what you're releasing. BSD doesn't.
They're unreasonable to me. Not as in me wanting to deny you the right to use whatever license you want. However, consider this:
Personally, I code because I enjoy coding.
If I release something and expect no financial gain for it, I release it as truly free software, without any strings attached.
If I want to gain financially, I don't release it for free (or more usually, I do the work for an employer, who usually demands it's kept in-house).
If I write free stuff, I expect you to do so to if you use my work.
That's your choice, and if so GPL's good for you. But, how does restricting how the things you've given away for free are used help you?
I personally, haven't found it helps me, so I don't use the GPL to release my stuff.
However, as the GPL is so restrictive, I'd urge people considering how to licence something to think carefully before they do so. GPL is like a virus. If you release something as GPL for a while and people add stuff to it, you can't even release your own project as truly free software (such as BSD) without removing all other contributions or contacting all contributors (hard if they are anonymous or addresses no longer work, etc). In fact, in 6 months time, are you even going to remember exactly who provided a 1 line patch?
Maybe a GPL like licence that gives the original author the right to additionally relicense the software and any other derivative works under any licence would be good. But that only protects the original author, not any major contributors down the line. I think the only truly fair way is to say, "Do what the hell you like with this."
This article really does show the attitude RMS has towards everyone else. His aims aren't to make life easy for developers, it's to make life as hard as possible for people who don't want to choose GPL:
And that's the bottom line. GPL may give users freedom, but it's certainly restrictive for other developers. If you really want your code to be free, and let people do what they want with it, (though remember that includes selling it) choose something like the new BSD licence or X11 licence.
Do you think any company would send their real engineers out to tell a competitor how their closed protocol works?
SMB is neither closed protocol or Microsoft's. Is was, in fact, originally in the PC-LAN package developed by IBM and adopted by Microsoft in the early 80s. That's why there was so much public information about how it worked.
FWIW, NetBIOS was another IBM innovation and that too was well documented publically.
Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
-- Linus Torvalds
Sad, but fair.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
You know, I think in many ways it's good to loose stuff like this. Sure, it's upsetting for a while, but you get over it.
Memories are just that - in your memory, and whilst photos are good for jogging memories, that's all they do. For anyone who's not actually in the picture, they mean nothing. And really, it's far healthier to look to the future than reminiscing about past events. This might seem heartless, but how often do you actually look at 10-20 year old photos? Maybe with dead family members it's another matter, but if they were really close, you should be able to remember them without a photo.
And it's amazing how much crap you can assimilate over time. After I went travelling for a year with just a rucksack (two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, etc...) I was horrified when I returned to realise how much junk I had in my parent's house that I'd previously considered important. Most of it went straight in the bin, as I sure as hell wasn't carting it to my next house.
Bringing it slightly back on topic. Yes, I've had hard disk failures. In one case, I even lost about a years worth of mail. But after being initially cross about my mail, I realised that I didn't actually need it anyway. The rest of the stuff I never even missed, as I'd backup up about the 5% that was useful.
For actual important stuff, like source code or documents, you just need to be disciplined enough to copy them somewhere reasonably regularly. I use local CVS for all my own source and just back up the whole tree every couple of days. I download stuff into a folder like '2002-07' for this month, and every month I backup anything to CD that is likely to be useful. Everything else can just be downloaded again, re-MP3'd, etc...
I'm just worried about how long my CD-R's will last...
So, the first day after checking out the source for the first time will be completely unproductive... Let me see, 1440 man days is about 7 man years which is about $210,000 in salary alone. Disk would be at least $144,000. Hmmmm.
And 1440 is a hell of a lot of people to be working on one project. I know there'll be a lot of smaller sub-projects, but trying to co-ordinate anything would be a managerial nightmare!
and big ones at that, I'd have thought. The articles says a green laser is used to "illuminate" the mine. If you're looking at it from 250 yards away, I'd imagine that the mine would have to be pretty damn big to see. The articles claims, "Although the weapon does not work on buried mines, it could be effective against surface-laid devices and munitions such as unexploded shells and cluster bombs." I'd counter that unexploded shells wouldn't be visible from that range.
With proper hardware (redundancy etc
The article doesn't even touch on these issues. In fact, from the situations described in the article, it's clear that they are considering a single box and discussing how unsuitable 99.999% availability is. If you did have redundancy, then yes, I agree you are far less likely to have two catastrophic failures at once (especially if you have machines at different locations and DNS assisted failover, etc).
However, the article paints the picture of a mad scramble to bring the machine up within a matter of minutes of failure. If you do have proper redundancy, let's say 1 of your 3 machines in different locations fails, then you don't have a mad scramble to get things working. Sure, it helps if you have fixed things quickly in case another machine fails and it will ease the load on the remaining servers, but it's not amazingly pressing.
Now, I've worked in places where everything's done on one server, and it is a big deal when the machine goes down. It is a big deal when it needs a reboot. It's even a big deal just restarting the web server, as in many cases clients loose their session context.
Ah, yes. I'd almost forgotten session context. This is not the kind of thing that is trivially easy to share between redundant servers, unless it is considered from the start. Typically, this is possible for sites with static data, but anything that attempts to keep track of the user's data and/or preferences will start having a big issues trying to keep things up-to-date.
I'd also say impractical. 5 nines is 99.999% availability, i.e. can be down for 1 second every 100000 seconds, or 27.77 hours. That gives approximately 6 seconds of downtime per week.
Even if all that weeks downtime came at once, six seconds is little enough that most users would just hit refresh and never even notice. Besides which, most web servers are taken down for maintenance tasks, upgrading software or disk, etc... Chances are even restarting the web server would take up more time than your maximum weekly downtime.
Given that over the course of a month (which is the billing period on most ISP lines), you only have 24 seconds of possible downtime, it's very unlikely that the ISP will be able to meet that target. Pretty much *any* fault would take longer than that to fix, so any company offering a refund if the SLA isn't met is just asking for trouble.
3. Don't Waste Time!
[...] just knock something up in VI [...]
s/vi/notepad/
Other than that, a very accurate portrayal of 90% of sourceforge projects. Don't get me wrong, it's a great resource, but far too many people embark on stuff far beyond their ability and expect others to flock to their project to finish it off...
I don't remember that line. I think I must have been too busy looking at Natalie Portman to pay attention.
I take it you've not had a look at the Perl 6 spec. There's a lot of radical new development underfoot. Whether perl needs more features now, given that it is fairly mature is another matter. It seems to do almost everything that people want it to do.
Although, " version 2.0, and I can honestly say that the features added since that time have not made my life any easier. "
How about adding OO? How about special variables gaining names? etc... It's clear that every time perl has been upgraded, it has been of benefit to quite a large chunk of users.
Oooh! Really?
I always wanted little shaded area of grass all to myself.