In today's modern lifestyle, it's hard to find the time to do everything. But now with SweeperBot, there's no need to give up minesweeper!
SweeperBot plays mineseeper for you! It's free, it's efficient, and it's open source! Simply download and double-click, and then spend your time doing more productive things... like playing freecell.
...is backwards compatibility. In general, you can take some obscure piece of code that someone wrote almost a decade ago, and it will run on your modern Perl system. Unfortunately, people then take those obscure snippets of code, and try to learn from them. They may have been the best way to do things eight years ago, but they're certainly not now.
As such, one of the hardest problems with Perl is education of new techniques. Too many systems still use CGI.pm when they could use Catalyst. They use some home-grown system of objects, when they could be using Moose. They put up with outdated techniques when Perl::Critic would find them in a heartbeat.
So, if everyone learnt the new techniques, we'd be fine, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I teach Perl for a job, it's still an incredibly popular language here in Australia. But because that old code still works, I still need to teach people how to understand it, even if I then proceed to teach them better ways so they can avoid it. That increases cognitive workload, and there's only so much one can fit into a fresh brain during its first contact with a language.
Perl still remains the language of choice for writing minesweeper bots.
It's simple why businesses don't like Perl. Slashdot is written in Perl. Whenever a business is mentioned on slashdot, their website goes down. Ergo, Perl is bad for business.
Are you looking to start switch to another job, or start a business? If you're looking to switch, it's always good to have another offer on the table when you do. This not only gives you security when leaving your old job, but actually gives you bargaining power when negotiating your new one. You can demand much more from your new company if you're secure in your old job, compared to starving on the streets and wearing a Will code for food t-shirt.
Of course, another option is not to change jobs at all, but to instead make your own. I've started four businesses in my time, with varying degrees of success. My most successful and satisfying endeavour to date has been Perl Training Australia, which is now about three and a half years old, has fantasticpeople, an impressive list of clients, and is continuing to grow strongly. I love it, and would never go back.
Starting your own business is not for everyone, and certainly not something that should be done lightly. You shouldn't even think of starting a business unless you already have the three key ingredients: money, friends, and social skills.
Without enough money you'll get scared or go hungry during the start-up phase, and even if your business could have succeeded you'll find yourself endlessly worrying and looking for full-time work.
Without friends and contacts you'll have a hard time finding the work for your business to succeed. Word of mouth is the gold of advertising in small business, and when you're first starting up you'll need as much as you can get.
Social skills are key for any small business. More than getting the job done, customers and suppliers alike want to feel appreciated and understood and important. There's a reason why everyone in the sales department gets paid so much, it's because the customer-facing roles are so important.
If you've got all the above, then stay in your job and begin talking to other small business owners in the area. Find out what they do, what they want, what their experiences have been, and how you may be able to help. If truly think there's enough work there to keep you alive, then you may wish to consider starting your own business. If you do so, then keep in mind that most small businesses fail within the first year. So hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Oh, one final word of advice. The "be your own boss, set your own hours" dream isn't all what it's cracked up to be. When starting up you can expect to be working twice as hard for half as much. There's a lot more to business than just the hours you can log against a client's account.
CPU fans fail, combusting accumulated dust on/around CPU;
Power supplies fail gracefully.;
Power supplies burn their accumulated dust before failing gracefully;
Power supplies burn their accumulated dust, dump high voltages to the machine internals, destroy mainboard components, and sorch, burn, and blister a hard-drive controller.
These have always been old machines (classic pentium era), and without exception there has been audible signs of failure first, "moaning" fans being the most common. In the case of hard-drives, reset or recalibration noises are a good sign something is not right.
If your machine begins to make noises you've never heard before, it's time for an upgrade, clean, or making sure your back-ups really are up-to-date.
Re:on a related note: pgp/gpg+mutt possible?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 2
Mutt supports both PGP and GPG very nicely. I use GPG (1.0.2) and mutt (1.2.5i) on a daily basis to read and send encrypted/signed mail. It works flawlessly.
The more recent mutt distributions come with example.muttrc files to use both PGP and GPG. These make the task of configuring mutt to use encryption very easy. The debian package of mutt installs these into/usr/share/doc/mutt/examples/
If you're building from source, you should be able to find these example files in the contrib/ directory. They have intuitive names like "gpg.rc", "pgp2.rc" and "pgp5.rc"
People earn and burn large sums of money because there seems to be a prevailing belief that this is required to live. This is certainly in the interests of corporations, who gain the benefits of large spending and harder-working employees.
How much it costs to live entirely depends upon how you want to live. Here in Melbourne, Australia, the household is paying $200/week in rent (close to the Melbourne CBD), and about $150/week in bills and food. I share the house with my girlfriend and her sister, so $AU120/week tides us over very nicely. That's phone, permanent internet connection, electricity, gas, and so forth. Myself and my partner use bicycles to get around (free, except for the odd 20c patch to fix a puncture), and all other expenses are really recreational.
If you're in a badly paid $10/hr job, that's 12 hours a week. It's only 6 hours a week if you're a student tutoring computer science, and it's only about 3 hours a week or less if you're a reasonable IT professional. When you're talking about only $AU6240/yr to live, tax doesn't come into it -- incomes that low are almost entirely tax-free.
I work a lot more than the 3 hrs/week I need to in order to live because I have a few hobbies that require money to maintain. Indoor rockclimbing, the occasional good resturant, and a trip to the pub are the main money-burning pleasures. The extra money is being saved because I would like to retire to a farm and have my youth to enjoy while I'm at it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
...when your machine can play it for you?
In today's modern lifestyle, it's hard to find the time to do everything. But now with SweeperBot, there's no need to give up minesweeper!
SweeperBot plays mineseeper for you! It's free, it's efficient, and it's open source! Simply download and double-click, and then spend your time doing more productive things... like playing freecell.
As such, one of the hardest problems with Perl is education of new techniques. Too many systems still use CGI.pm when they could use Catalyst. They use some home-grown system of objects, when they could be using Moose. They put up with outdated techniques when Perl::Critic would find them in a heartbeat.
So, if everyone learnt the new techniques, we'd be fine, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I teach Perl for a job, it's still an incredibly popular language here in Australia. But because that old code still works, I still need to teach people how to understand it, even if I then proceed to teach them better ways so they can avoid it. That increases cognitive workload, and there's only so much one can fit into a fresh brain during its first contact with a language.
Perl still remains the language of choice for writing minesweeper bots.
It's simple why businesses don't like Perl. Slashdot is written in Perl. Whenever a business is mentioned on slashdot, their website goes down. Ergo, Perl is bad for business.
s/their/there/;
Are you looking to start switch to another job, or start a business? If you're looking to switch, it's always good to have another offer on the table when you do. This not only gives you security when leaving your old job, but actually gives you bargaining power when negotiating your new one. You can demand much more from your new company if you're secure in your old job, compared to starving on the streets and wearing a Will code for food t-shirt.
Of course, another option is not to change jobs at all, but to instead make your own. I've started four businesses in my time, with varying degrees of success. My most successful and satisfying endeavour to date has been Perl Training Australia, which is now about three and a half years old, has fantastic people, an impressive list of clients, and is continuing to grow strongly. I love it, and would never go back.
Starting your own business is not for everyone, and certainly not something that should be done lightly. You shouldn't even think of starting a business unless you already have the three key ingredients: money, friends, and social skills.
Without enough money you'll get scared or go hungry during the start-up phase, and even if your business could have succeeded you'll find yourself endlessly worrying and looking for full-time work.
Without friends and contacts you'll have a hard time finding the work for your business to succeed. Word of mouth is the gold of advertising in small business, and when you're first starting up you'll need as much as you can get.
Social skills are key for any small business. More than getting the job done, customers and suppliers alike want to feel appreciated and understood and important. There's a reason why everyone in the sales department gets paid so much, it's because the customer-facing roles are so important.
If you've got all the above, then stay in your job and begin talking to other small business owners in the area. Find out what they do, what they want, what their experiences have been, and how you may be able to help. If truly think there's enough work there to keep you alive, then you may wish to consider starting your own business. If you do so, then keep in mind that most small businesses fail within the first year. So hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Oh, one final word of advice. The "be your own boss, set your own hours" dream isn't all what it's cracked up to be. When starting up you can expect to be working twice as hard for half as much. There's a lot more to business than just the hours you can log against a client's account.
Good luck!
-- Paul
- Many hard-drives fail in a variety of ways;
- CPU fans fail, combusting accumulated dust on/around CPU;
- Power supplies fail gracefully.;
- Power supplies burn their accumulated dust before failing gracefully;
- Power supplies burn their accumulated dust, dump high voltages to the machine internals, destroy mainboard components, and sorch, burn, and blister a hard-drive controller.
These have always been old machines (classic pentium era), and without exception there has been audible signs of failure first, "moaning" fans being the most common. In the case of hard-drives, reset or recalibration noises are a good sign something is not right.If your machine begins to make noises you've never heard before, it's time for an upgrade, clean, or making sure your back-ups really are up-to-date.
The more recent mutt distributions come with example .muttrc files to use both PGP and GPG. These make the task of configuring mutt to use encryption very easy. The debian package of mutt installs these into /usr/share/doc/mutt/examples/
If you're building from source, you should be able to find these example files in the contrib/ directory. They have intuitive names like "gpg.rc", "pgp2.rc" and "pgp5.rc"
Mind you, I can imagine some sysadmin doing this in return for a three months subscription to livegoatporn.com.
How much it costs to live entirely depends upon how you want to live. Here in Melbourne, Australia, the household is paying $200/week in rent (close to the Melbourne CBD), and about $150/week in bills and food. I share the house with my girlfriend and her sister, so $AU120/week tides us over very nicely. That's phone, permanent internet connection, electricity, gas, and so forth. Myself and my partner use bicycles to get around (free, except for the odd 20c patch to fix a puncture), and all other expenses are really recreational.
If you're in a badly paid $10/hr job, that's 12 hours a week. It's only 6 hours a week if you're a student tutoring computer science, and it's only about 3 hours a week or less if you're a reasonable IT professional. When you're talking about only $AU6240/yr to live, tax doesn't come into it -- incomes that low are almost entirely tax-free.
I work a lot more than the 3 hrs/week I need to in order to live because I have a few hobbies that require money to maintain. Indoor rockclimbing, the occasional good resturant, and a trip to the pub are the main money-burning pleasures. The extra money is being saved because I would like to retire to a farm and have my youth to enjoy while I'm at it. :)