For example, if a visually impaired user heard the fire alarm, and navigated to the Jlab web site in order to find their way out of the building, one can just imagine their screams of fright when they realize that their only resource is a JPEG
Well, we know we want to make the building layout accessible to all users and we know that plain text is accessible to all users (since blind users can use a screen reader). Therefore, the obvious solution is...
You are standing in the first floor hallway of the Applied Research Center. To your north is room L117. To your south is room L110. The hallway continues east and west.
> n
You are standing in room L117. On one side of the room is a fume hood made by Thin Films Technology. Standing here is Prof. Mool Gupta.
> say Natalie Portman rulez!!!
Prof. Gupta mutters something about idiot Slashdot trolls. He pushes a button on his desk. Moments later, security guards arrive and escort you out of the building.
You are standing outside the main entrance to the Applied Research Center. The lobby is to your southwest.
> sw
The security guard pulls out a gun and shoots you. Your body is never found. Your score is -1 out of 5. This gets you a rating of "Lame Troll". Play again? (y/n)
Watch out... you've just earned yourself a Useless Use of Cat Award.
I've heard first-hand accounts of people trashing Very Important Files because they accidentally used a '>' instead of a '<'. Piping from cat, while gratuitous, greatly reduces the chance of error. Personally, I'm not gonna lose sleep over the wasted CPU cycles.
Even perl programmers often miss the point, writing the heart and soul of the application as perl script without making use of the UNIX toolkit.
I'm not quite sure what to make of his quote above. On one hand, I freely admit that I tend to think in terms of globbing various UNIX commands together to produce some pretty decent results with the use of just a few pipe symbols as glue.
On the other hand, I feel that doing so in anything intended to be portable and/or robust is just asking for grief. When I stick to utilizing constructs that exist only within perl, I know I'm pretty safe. As soon as I start integrating external commands, I have to worry about checking return values, checking that the command even exists, escaping shell metacharacters, portability issues, and so forth. Some times, it just becomes simpler to "reinvent the wheel", so that I've got a nice, predictable function to deal with.
That being said, for quick hacks that are't mission critical, external UNIX commands are quite definitely the way to go. However, there often is a valid reason not to go that route.
I don't have to have ported a game to IPv6 to be unimpressed. [...] Until an ISP hands me an IPv6 addy, I'm not interested.
What part of "this is part of the process toward reaching the point where an ISP will hand you an IPv6 address" don't you understand? If you've got a legitimate reason why this isn't "news for nerds", I'm all ears. If, on the other hand, your reasoning is just "SuperRob ain't interested", then color me unimpressed. (And consider this my equally lame contribution of "Erasmus Darwin ain't interested in the fact that SuperRob ain't interested.")
Re:Quake on IPv6. So what?
on
Quake on IPv6
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· Score: 3
Give my IPv6 FIRST, then get me the games that can support it.
But getting you IPv6 is more likely to happen when more software supports it. And software is more likely to support it as it becomes more likely that IPv6 will be accepted. In short, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Anything people can do try drum up support, acceptance, and publicity for IPv6 is going to help. There's no magic switch that can be flipped to make everything IPv6 overnight.
Maybe when they get these slots in, I should take a road trip to Vegas with some various software "tools."
While it should be fairly obvious that the interface on these machines will be probably be locked down enough to make actually "fiddling" with them worthless, I have to wonder about the possibility of them using a less-than-secure random number algorithm. If, for example, the actual program was a quick-and-dirty hack using VB, it seems it might be possible for someone to find a pattern in the results.
I will admit, however, that this is idle speculation and may be totally off in left field. But it's at least more plausible than being able to load up and run various NT cracking utilites (which I suppose was intended as humor).
While I'm personally more of a "free speech" type and dislike the efforts being made to cut down on "violent" television, movies, games, etc., this research does provide ammunition for arguments that could be used as another link between media violence and real violence. Besides the traditional desensitization, this seems to indicate that stabbing someone and watching someone get stabbed would both trigger some common neurons.
I'm curious, however, if they are differences in the mirror neuron activation between a real-world event and an event watched on television. If there's a lesser mirroring effect with a two-dimensional image, that might serve to at least partially deflect the arguments against media violence that refer to mirror neurons.
Trade usually benefits both, if you don't trade, you won't win.
Ultimately, the trade only benefits the winner. As such, it's still a zero-sum game. However, it's still an interesting game and certainly qualifies in the category of "games where you scheme, trade, manipulate, negotiate, etc.", which (to me) are more interesting than something "straight-forward" like checkers. You really can't say, "If you don't jump me, I'll make it worth your while latter on."
Monopoly used to be my favorite of these games. It's popular enough that it's easier to find players, but to really do well, you need to cook up a series of trades that're superficially beneficial to your trading partners but ultimately much more beneficial to you.
Of course, after I repeatedly kicked ass and took names, all the other players wised up and started refusing to trade with me under any and all circumstances, which more or less made the game pointless.
The idea is to build something new, not defeat others.
...and in the process, you connect highways to the neighboring towns, so that you may suck them dry of their population. The people abandon their lesser boroughs in favor of your megalopolis, turning the surrounding area into wasteland of lost dreams and forgetten aspirations.
And just to throw my two-cents in on a possible non-zero-sum game: most MUDs. In general, cooperating on a mud results in increased efficiency and a net status gain for the cooperating players.
We already had the rediculous patent contest months ago. Didn't we all get it out of our systems then? [...] 'Oh, this place is a little more sophisticated and informed than I thought.'
While, it's sort of a catch-22. While people have theoretically gotten most of the patent jokes out of their system, they've also theoretically gotten most of the actual patent discussion out of their system, too. It's gotten to the point where there's really not much left to say, other than "Oh. _Another_ stupid patent." And while the announcement of a different stupid patent is worthy of a brief slashdot story and link for more information, there just isn't anything more to say. In fact, if I had to pick one cause to unite the Slashdot readership, it would be "Stupid patents are bad." There's some disagreement over where the "stupid" line should be placed, but I've yet to see someone seriously argue that these patents that've been issued regardless of copious prior art are a good thing.
As for the sophistication of Slashdot, it seems that every time I've decided there's worthwhile discussion on Slashdot, I'll come across something completely moronic. But on the other hand, every time I've decided that Slashdot is totally worthless and none of the comments are worth reading, I come across something that's amazingly insightful.
One thing that I haven't heard during all the recent bind hoopla is whether or not the security holes affect copies of bind that're running chrooted and under their own uid/gid. None of the security advisories seem to mention this issue. Anyone got any ideas?
(Not that I didn't upgrade, anyway. But it'd be nice to know that the extra effort of getting bind to run chrooted was worth it.)
I think he is refering to the fact that perl is a language commonly used for writing root exploit scripts
Not that I don't think he was trolling, but try a google search on 'suidperl' and 'bugtraq' and you'll get a number of results describing buffer overflows.
Star Control: TimeWarp, an unofficial, open-source game in the Star Control universe (caveat: Getting it to compile under Linux took a bit of effort when I tried, but it was doable)
That being said, I do agree that Direct3D support in Wine is A Good Thing (except for the possibility that it decreases the likelyhood of true Linux ports). But don't sell Linux short.
(Random "It probably won't work, but..." thought: Running a WinCE Dreamcast game under WINE running on Linux on a Dreamcast. That'd be cool. Useless and probably impossible, but cool none-the-less.)
Again, that's like saying anything compiled with gcc is a derived work of gcc.
However, it's work pointing out that the General GPL (as listed by doing 'info gcc' and selecting the 'Copying' link) specifically excludes the program output:
The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
That being said, it's worth pointing out that this whole line of reasoning is made somewhat moot by the issue that characters are stored exclusively on the EverQuest server and how they can be modified is governed by the EverQuest server code. If I suddenly have exclusive rights to my character, does that mean I can:
Force EverQuest to perform a roll-back on my character, restoring it to a previous state? (Suddenly, giving away money/items or dying becomes meaningless.)
Force EverQuest to change data on the character, outside the game mechanics? (Please set my "level" field to 500.)
Force EverQuest to remove data from the character? (I hearby revoke my license to allow you to store the "Poisoned" flag on my character.)
Of course what'd be really funny would be if EverQuest agreed that users do have the rights to their character data file: Anyone wishing to exercise this right will receive a copy of the character via email and infringing data will be removed from the servers.
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
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· Score: 5
I'm sure there'd be a lot of unhappy investors - but let me say it again, Linux is not about money.
Yes, but business is about the money. And with the exception of individuals who're independently wealthy or have someone paying all their expenses, most of us have to work in some sort of business.
As the viability of Linux in a business environment increases, so does my ability to deploy it where I work. The more Linux boxes and less Windows boxes I have to worry about supporting, the more my job becomes less "work" and more "fun". It's true that there'll always be a degree of work involved, but to get paid to do stuff you enjoy doing on your own time is a lot better than getting paid to do stuff you don't enjoy at all.
isn't up to the patenter (is that a word) to actively look for prior art?
Heavy duty disclaimers: IANAL, I have a bad memory, and this is based on things that I can't remember the sources on and might have been wrong to begin with.
As I understand it, the patenter is required to disclose any known prior art. As such, it's in the patenter's best interest not to look too deeply. One could argue that BountyQuest demonstrates that a thorough prior art search is outside the abilities of an individual or even a single organization. If I'm a patenter, I can't publically inquire, "Anyone have prior art on the concept of attaching a foo and bar together to form a reticulated baz?" without jeopardizing my ability to get a patent on that idea even if no prior art exists.
Similarly, I'd suspect that companies have done at least some preliminary prior art research before posting a $10k prior art bounty. If a single organization that was motivated to find prior art can't find it, what're the odds of someone who doesn't want to find the prior art finding it?
And adding a general "loser pays on a patent challenge" system would only serve to further shift patents into the domain of corporations, where a few broken patents would be considered acceptable losses in the context of a wide variety of patents that hold up.
Invent a filetype (.lnc) which contains informatian about a program to launch and then have a helper app that interprets the file and launches programs appropriately.
True, although the impression I got was that this framework would provide a nice helper app to do the magic for us. Furthermore, a CGI-based scheme would allow for easily porting apps from intranet use to local use and vice-versa. Finally, something that delves in to the realm of figuring out when to properly execute content that's trusted is something that I, personally, would feel less than comfortable writing. I would much prefer a system with some peer review.
More to the point seeing animation as being "kids" material is very much a western viewpoint in the first place.
First, I'd qualify that to say that it should be "seeing animation as only being [...]". The Japanese do have animated series aimed at children, just like we do.
Second, even the qualified version isn't true. For example, going back to the 70's, we have the X-rated satire Fritz the Cat, the early 80's gave us Heavy Metal, and going back to 1940 we have Fantasia (a whopping 120 minutes of classical music and accompanying imagery).
Even a number of cartoons aimed at children include adult references within them. The most obvious one is Animaniacs (which spoofed everything from David Bowie's "A Space Oddity" to Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rainman"). However, even "The Real Ghostbusters" (one of my favorites growing up) had an episode where they spoofed "Citizen Kane". Your average 10 year-old isn't going to realize that "San Simolian" is a spoof on "San Simeon", Heart's actual palace that was known as Kane's Xanadu in the film. Additionally, I managed to catch an episode of one of the recent animated Batman series that copied the final restaurant scene from "Misery" almost verbatim.
My guess is that these references are put in there partially to amuse the writers (I know I'd certainly feel a lot better about churning out kiddie cartoons if I could include lots of pop culture references) and partially to amuse the captive parental audience, who're watching the cartoons with their children. However, in some cases, the writers do such a good job that the older audience will watch the cartoon strictly for their own enjoyment (Animaniacs falls in to this category).
For those afraid of the security issues associated with running CGI scripts locally -- this is a development tool only.
Does it have to be only for development? Assuming it can be done safely, imagine using local CGI scripts as an alternative to local shell scripts. This becomes particularly relevant for your casual users, epsecially as a means of establishing Linux as an OS for the computer novice. Imagine J. Random User being able to use Mozilla as their program launcher -- everyone and their mothers've already learned how to more or less use web browsers.
And using the web browser as an interface is certainly not a new idea. Even before IE sprung up (and the infamous "The web browser is part of the OS" statement along with it), we had software packages like SATAN doing this back in early '95. And if we look at the web browser abstractly, as a mechanism that allows files to be selected, retrieved, and viewed, its origins can be traced back to products like Norton Commander.
Isn't it obvious that virtual item is only valuable because of the time/skill you put into getting it? I can't feel any compassion for a person who pays good money for it, when he could instead give this money to a charity or something..
It's simple: time == money. Let's say your character is almost ready to venture out into the land of nasty monsters that're challenging but fun. Now let's also say that, in order to do so and not wind up with your head on a pike, you need a sword of minor ass-kicking. Let's also say it'd take you a good 15-20 hours of game play in order to be able to afford it.
Now let's also say that there's a high level player who could get the item in just an hour of play. However, this person could care less about you and really doesn't wanna take time away from their busy schedule in order to get you this sword. On the other hand, let's assume that this person'd be more than happy to spend this hour if the reward was $50 in cash.
Now let's also say that our first person has a job in the Tech industry and makes $30/hour. So the first person can spend the time working (assuming, of course, that there's extra work to be done and also assuming that work isn't significantly less fun than the tedious 15-20 hours of gameplay -- I will admit that it's quite possible that neither of these assumptions is true in many cases), buy the sword for $50, and still come out ahead by at least $400. The second person winds up making $50/hour for a single hour of work. Everyone's happy.
As for the alternative of donating money to charity, maybe the first person spends some of that $400 on charity. Maybe the first person only worked for 5 of those 15 hours and spent those other 10 hours at a soup kitchen. The whole "that's time/money better spent on charity" argument seems to be applied indiscriminately to any recreational expenditure. Given that you admitted to playing Subspace in your post, I'll have to call foul, unless you promise that you were only doing it as part of an effort to introduce inner-city youths to computers.
This license is NEGOTIABLE, and they WONT contest PERSONAL use.
But where's the line drawn? Am I still in the clear if, say, I cook up a HOWTO that details how personal users can install the Czech SO for RedHat? What if I distribute a shell-script to do it automatically? What happens if RedHat ships a shell-script to automatically grab-and-install the Czech SO? It's really a murky area, given that you're allowed to use it for personal use, but distributions aren't allowed to ship it, but most distributions wind up being used for personal use.
But all that is more or less besides the point. I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers don't read Czech. It's not on practical grounds that we're objecting to it, but rather ideological ones. I fear that a license like this is the first step in would could become distribution-vs-distribution disputes. Some people get worked up enough as it is over advocacy issues and this is just pouring fuel on those flames.
I think regular expressions go back just a little bit further than Perl...
I took the comment to mean that they borrow Perl's version of regular expressions. As someone who played with grep and sed before getting into perl, while the regular expression theory was already around and in practice, perl managed to engineer it into something a little nicer.
On a related note, Philip Hazel's written the PCRE library, which stands for Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions. I know tin and Xnews both use it. So there are people out there borrowing from directly Larry Wall's ideas and using them outside of Perl.
how can you think of something finished when everything else is evolving ?
Yes, but we're talking about a programing language here. I can see the reasons why something like Mozilla or GNOME or mutt might grow and change over time. However, with a programing language, we're talking about the foundation that everything else is built on. If you're changing the foundation every 2 months, you're going to have a hard time keeping everything above it in one piece.
Now admittedly, this is partially negated by the Perl5->Perl6 autotranslation mentioned in the article and it's also partially negated by the issue of minor tweaks to the language that don't affect existing programs (in both instances, my analogy to a building's foundation fails). But in general, stability is a good thing. Each new tweak has a potential to break older stuff -- this is bad enough in the realm of system libraries; throwing the entire programing language into the mix is enough to give anyone who's studied software engineering nightmares.
Hell, even Debian appreciates the importance of stable software. As I understand the process, they perform a version freeze at some point and, rather than upgrading when bugs/security holes come out, instead backport the patch to work with the stable version.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we know we want to make the building layout accessible to all users and we know that plain text is accessible to all users (since blind users can use a screen reader). Therefore, the obvious solution is...
You are standing in the first floor hallway of the Applied Research Center. To your north is room L117. To your south is room L110. The hallway continues east and west.
> n
You are standing in room L117. On one side of the room is a fume hood made by Thin Films Technology. Standing here is Prof. Mool Gupta.
> say Natalie Portman rulez!!!
Prof. Gupta mutters something about idiot Slashdot trolls. He pushes a button on his desk. Moments later, security guards arrive and escort you out of the building.
You are standing outside the main entrance to the Applied Research Center. The lobby is to your southwest.
> sw
The security guard pulls out a gun and shoots you. Your body is never found. Your score is -1 out of 5. This gets you a rating of "Lame Troll". Play again? (y/n)
Not in lynx. My SOP for replying on Slashdot:
It's surprisingly painless and makes posting to Slashdot only mildly more work than posting to USENET.
I've heard first-hand accounts of people trashing Very Important Files because they accidentally used a '>' instead of a '<'. Piping from cat, while gratuitous, greatly reduces the chance of error. Personally, I'm not gonna lose sleep over the wasted CPU cycles.
I'm not quite sure what to make of his quote above. On one hand, I freely admit that I tend to think in terms of globbing various UNIX commands together to produce some pretty decent results with the use of just a few pipe symbols as glue.
On the other hand, I feel that doing so in anything intended to be portable and/or robust is just asking for grief. When I stick to utilizing constructs that exist only within perl, I know I'm pretty safe. As soon as I start integrating external commands, I have to worry about checking return values, checking that the command even exists, escaping shell metacharacters, portability issues, and so forth. Some times, it just becomes simpler to "reinvent the wheel", so that I've got a nice, predictable function to deal with.
That being said, for quick hacks that are't mission critical, external UNIX commands are quite definitely the way to go. However, there often is a valid reason not to go that route.
You mean fringe members like Yahoo, Amazon, most anyone else doing e-commerce on the web, and major financial institutions?
What part of "this is part of the process toward reaching the point where an ISP will hand you an IPv6 address" don't you understand? If you've got a legitimate reason why this isn't "news for nerds", I'm all ears. If, on the other hand, your reasoning is just "SuperRob ain't interested", then color me unimpressed. (And consider this my equally lame contribution of "Erasmus Darwin ain't interested in the fact that SuperRob ain't interested.")
But getting you IPv6 is more likely to happen when more software supports it. And software is more likely to support it as it becomes more likely that IPv6 will be accepted. In short, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Anything people can do try drum up support, acceptance, and publicity for IPv6 is going to help. There's no magic switch that can be flipped to make everything IPv6 overnight.
While it should be fairly obvious that the interface on these machines will be probably be locked down enough to make actually "fiddling" with them worthless, I have to wonder about the possibility of them using a less-than-secure random number algorithm. If, for example, the actual program was a quick-and-dirty hack using VB, it seems it might be possible for someone to find a pattern in the results.
I will admit, however, that this is idle speculation and may be totally off in left field. But it's at least more plausible than being able to load up and run various NT cracking utilites (which I suppose was intended as humor).
I'm curious, however, if they are differences in the mirror neuron activation between a real-world event and an event watched on television. If there's a lesser mirroring effect with a two-dimensional image, that might serve to at least partially deflect the arguments against media violence that refer to mirror neurons.
Ultimately, the trade only benefits the winner. As such, it's still a zero-sum game. However, it's still an interesting game and certainly qualifies in the category of "games where you scheme, trade, manipulate, negotiate, etc.", which (to me) are more interesting than something "straight-forward" like checkers. You really can't say, "If you don't jump me, I'll make it worth your while latter on."
Monopoly used to be my favorite of these games. It's popular enough that it's easier to find players, but to really do well, you need to cook up a series of trades that're superficially beneficial to your trading partners but ultimately much more beneficial to you.
Of course, after I repeatedly kicked ass and took names, all the other players wised up and started refusing to trade with me under any and all circumstances, which more or less made the game pointless.
And just to throw my two-cents in on a possible non-zero-sum game: most MUDs. In general, cooperating on a mud results in increased efficiency and a net status gain for the cooperating players.
While, it's sort of a catch-22. While people have theoretically gotten most of the patent jokes out of their system, they've also theoretically gotten most of the actual patent discussion out of their system, too. It's gotten to the point where there's really not much left to say, other than "Oh. _Another_ stupid patent." And while the announcement of a different stupid patent is worthy of a brief slashdot story and link for more information, there just isn't anything more to say. In fact, if I had to pick one cause to unite the Slashdot readership, it would be "Stupid patents are bad." There's some disagreement over where the "stupid" line should be placed, but I've yet to see someone seriously argue that these patents that've been issued regardless of copious prior art are a good thing.
As for the sophistication of Slashdot, it seems that every time I've decided there's worthwhile discussion on Slashdot, I'll come across something completely moronic. But on the other hand, every time I've decided that Slashdot is totally worthless and none of the comments are worth reading, I come across something that's amazingly insightful.
(Not that I didn't upgrade, anyway. But it'd be nice to know that the extra effort of getting bind to run chrooted was worth it.)
Not that I don't think he was trolling, but try a google search on 'suidperl' and 'bugtraq' and you'll get a number of results describing buffer overflows.
But... but... NetHack already works. Who needs anything else?
Seriously, though, Linux does have a number of games:
That being said, I do agree that Direct3D support in Wine is A Good Thing (except for the possibility that it decreases the likelyhood of true Linux ports). But don't sell Linux short.
(Random "It probably won't work, but..." thought: Running a WinCE Dreamcast game under WINE running on Linux on a Dreamcast. That'd be cool. Useless and probably impossible, but cool none-the-less.)
However, it's work pointing out that the General GPL (as listed by doing 'info gcc' and selecting the 'Copying' link) specifically excludes the program output:
That being said, it's worth pointing out that this whole line of reasoning is made somewhat moot by the issue that characters are stored exclusively on the EverQuest server and how they can be modified is governed by the EverQuest server code. If I suddenly have exclusive rights to my character, does that mean I can:
Of course what'd be really funny would be if EverQuest agreed that users do have the rights to their character data file: Anyone wishing to exercise this right will receive a copy of the character via email and infringing data will be removed from the servers.
Yes, but business is about the money. And with the exception of individuals who're independently wealthy or have someone paying all their expenses, most of us have to work in some sort of business.
As the viability of Linux in a business environment increases, so does my ability to deploy it where I work. The more Linux boxes and less Windows boxes I have to worry about supporting, the more my job becomes less "work" and more "fun". It's true that there'll always be a degree of work involved, but to get paid to do stuff you enjoy doing on your own time is a lot better than getting paid to do stuff you don't enjoy at all.
Heavy duty disclaimers: IANAL, I have a bad memory, and this is based on things that I can't remember the sources on and might have been wrong to begin with.
As I understand it, the patenter is required to disclose any known prior art. As such, it's in the patenter's best interest not to look too deeply. One could argue that BountyQuest demonstrates that a thorough prior art search is outside the abilities of an individual or even a single organization. If I'm a patenter, I can't publically inquire, "Anyone have prior art on the concept of attaching a foo and bar together to form a reticulated baz?" without jeopardizing my ability to get a patent on that idea even if no prior art exists.
Similarly, I'd suspect that companies have done at least some preliminary prior art research before posting a $10k prior art bounty. If a single organization that was motivated to find prior art can't find it, what're the odds of someone who doesn't want to find the prior art finding it?
And adding a general "loser pays on a patent challenge" system would only serve to further shift patents into the domain of corporations, where a few broken patents would be considered acceptable losses in the context of a wide variety of patents that hold up.
True, although the impression I got was that this framework would provide a nice helper app to do the magic for us. Furthermore, a CGI-based scheme would allow for easily porting apps from intranet use to local use and vice-versa. Finally, something that delves in to the realm of figuring out when to properly execute content that's trusted is something that I, personally, would feel less than comfortable writing. I would much prefer a system with some peer review.
First, I'd qualify that to say that it should be "seeing animation as only being [...]". The Japanese do have animated series aimed at children, just like we do.
Second, even the qualified version isn't true. For example, going back to the 70's, we have the X-rated satire Fritz the Cat, the early 80's gave us Heavy Metal, and going back to 1940 we have Fantasia (a whopping 120 minutes of classical music and accompanying imagery).
Even a number of cartoons aimed at children include adult references within them. The most obvious one is Animaniacs (which spoofed everything from David Bowie's "A Space Oddity" to Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rainman"). However, even "The Real Ghostbusters" (one of my favorites growing up) had an episode where they spoofed "Citizen Kane". Your average 10 year-old isn't going to realize that "San Simolian" is a spoof on "San Simeon", Heart's actual palace that was known as Kane's Xanadu in the film. Additionally, I managed to catch an episode of one of the recent animated Batman series that copied the final restaurant scene from "Misery" almost verbatim.
My guess is that these references are put in there partially to amuse the writers (I know I'd certainly feel a lot better about churning out kiddie cartoons if I could include lots of pop culture references) and partially to amuse the captive parental audience, who're watching the cartoons with their children. However, in some cases, the writers do such a good job that the older audience will watch the cartoon strictly for their own enjoyment (Animaniacs falls in to this category).
Does it have to be only for development? Assuming it can be done safely, imagine using local CGI scripts as an alternative to local shell scripts. This becomes particularly relevant for your casual users, epsecially as a means of establishing Linux as an OS for the computer novice. Imagine J. Random User being able to use Mozilla as their program launcher -- everyone and their mothers've already learned how to more or less use web browsers.
And using the web browser as an interface is certainly not a new idea. Even before IE sprung up (and the infamous "The web browser is part of the OS" statement along with it), we had software packages like SATAN doing this back in early '95. And if we look at the web browser abstractly, as a mechanism that allows files to be selected, retrieved, and viewed, its origins can be traced back to products like Norton Commander.
It's simple: time == money. Let's say your character is almost ready to venture out into the land of nasty monsters that're challenging but fun. Now let's also say that, in order to do so and not wind up with your head on a pike, you need a sword of minor ass-kicking. Let's also say it'd take you a good 15-20 hours of game play in order to be able to afford it.
Now let's also say that there's a high level player who could get the item in just an hour of play. However, this person could care less about you and really doesn't wanna take time away from their busy schedule in order to get you this sword. On the other hand, let's assume that this person'd be more than happy to spend this hour if the reward was $50 in cash.
Now let's also say that our first person has a job in the Tech industry and makes $30/hour. So the first person can spend the time working (assuming, of course, that there's extra work to be done and also assuming that work isn't significantly less fun than the tedious 15-20 hours of gameplay -- I will admit that it's quite possible that neither of these assumptions is true in many cases), buy the sword for $50, and still come out ahead by at least $400. The second person winds up making $50/hour for a single hour of work. Everyone's happy.
As for the alternative of donating money to charity, maybe the first person spends some of that $400 on charity. Maybe the first person only worked for 5 of those 15 hours and spent those other 10 hours at a soup kitchen. The whole "that's time/money better spent on charity" argument seems to be applied indiscriminately to any recreational expenditure. Given that you admitted to playing Subspace in your post, I'll have to call foul, unless you promise that you were only doing it as part of an effort to introduce inner-city youths to computers.
But where's the line drawn? Am I still in the clear if, say, I cook up a HOWTO that details how personal users can install the Czech SO for RedHat? What if I distribute a shell-script to do it automatically? What happens if RedHat ships a shell-script to automatically grab-and-install the Czech SO? It's really a murky area, given that you're allowed to use it for personal use, but distributions aren't allowed to ship it, but most distributions wind up being used for personal use.
But all that is more or less besides the point. I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers don't read Czech. It's not on practical grounds that we're objecting to it, but rather ideological ones. I fear that a license like this is the first step in would could become distribution-vs-distribution disputes. Some people get worked up enough as it is over advocacy issues and this is just pouring fuel on those flames.
I took the comment to mean that they borrow Perl's version of regular expressions. As someone who played with grep and sed before getting into perl, while the regular expression theory was already around and in practice, perl managed to engineer it into something a little nicer.
On a related note, Philip Hazel's written the PCRE library, which stands for Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions. I know tin and Xnews both use it. So there are people out there borrowing from directly Larry Wall's ideas and using them outside of Perl.
Yes, but we're talking about a programing language here. I can see the reasons why something like Mozilla or GNOME or mutt might grow and change over time. However, with a programing language, we're talking about the foundation that everything else is built on. If you're changing the foundation every 2 months, you're going to have a hard time keeping everything above it in one piece.
Now admittedly, this is partially negated by the Perl5->Perl6 autotranslation mentioned in the article and it's also partially negated by the issue of minor tweaks to the language that don't affect existing programs (in both instances, my analogy to a building's foundation fails). But in general, stability is a good thing. Each new tweak has a potential to break older stuff -- this is bad enough in the realm of system libraries; throwing the entire programing language into the mix is enough to give anyone who's studied software engineering nightmares.
Hell, even Debian appreciates the importance of stable software. As I understand the process, they perform a version freeze at some point and, rather than upgrading when bugs/security holes come out, instead backport the patch to work with the stable version.