And the reason I hate Perl, more than the fact that the language makes it *possible* to have monstrosities like that one-liner, is that the community which surrounds the language actively encourages them.
Not all of us encourage this.
Its considered *clever* and a mark of great skill that you can strip out all the code that actually explains WTF your code is doing and be left with the perfectly compressed version.
They call this Perl Golf (shaving strokes of your game. Get it?) Many of us do not consider it clever. Rather, we consider it stupid and counter-productive.
On the other hand, all of the sample answers posted at the Python Challenge are all golf style, and the Python Challenge is supposed to be a learning tool.
This is modeled as good Perl style to folks just starting with the language, People who do this should be tied up with string and left in small dark rooms. For a month.
the Llama book has lots of code which looks like that, and code samples you find will look like it too. This just isn't the case. The code samples in the Llama are no more or less obtuse the code samples in my Pragmatic Ruby book.
It appears that the community largely does not teach perl like it is a language that needs to be read. I wish I could argue more strongly with you here, other than to assert that I come across code in many languages (Perl, Ruby, Java, C, Lisp), on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis, at work and at home, in books, magazines, and online that appear written to not be read.
Your complaint of bad coding practices is endemic to the industry, and should not be used to condemn a language because it allows the freedom to code poorly.
In your case, simply linking to a page available on a public webpage should not warrant a lawsuit - and if a lawsuit is bought, the plaintiff should be laughed out of court and properly fined for wasting everybody elses time and also jailed for the civil version of entrapment.
But YOU still have to PAY your lawyer and waste a whole bunch of your time. It costs too much money to go to court with idiots, and while idiotic, that is what they're counting on.
Part of why there is a nursing shortage is that is sucks to be a nurse. The doctors treat you like crap, they blame *you* when *they* screw up and nearly kill a patient, the hours are long, and the pay is bad for the work environment.
Now if you make the pay better, and shorten the hours, you might attract more nurses, but then then there's still the position at the bottom of the health care provider food chain. Most nurses don't enter the field for the money. There's usually a more personal reason, and if the work environment is still sucky, then the money won't attract the staff.
The only people treated worse than nurses, in hospitals, are the hospital IT staff, because they have no medical training. Many nurses are abandoning clinical nursing for careers in healthcare IT. You get reasonable hours, decent pay, and you can crap on the IT staff, the way the doctors used to crap on you.
The nursing shortage is because the dynamics of healthcare drove the nurses away. On average, the cons far outweigh the pros.
The IT worker shortage is entirely about wage demands, coupled with managerial models that have not changed much since the industrial revolution, that have not adapted to managing an office, where work can't always be measured in discrete pieces (no matter how hard the try...and brother do they try), as opposed to a room full of sewing machines or milling machines. Also, in my opion, the majority of IT managers would not know talent if they saw it, don't know how to utilize it when they have it, and like allthe average people in the world, seek mediocrity, and because excellence eludes them personally, it frightens them whenthey do accidentaly find it.
In theory, yes, but no corporation with that much money will ever be held accountable to the laws of our country unless they kill the citizenry, and even then, only after many, many years, and especially not when they're Thinking of the Children
Maine changed all the exits on 95 recently, and had to go back and put up a bunch of little "Old Exit ##" tags under the new ones, presumably because of complaints. So, it just creates confusion where there was none before.
I think there was confusion, because whoever decided that the exist should be marked by mile, also apparently decided that they no longer needed the old numbers. That's a whole other thread on poor gov't decision making.
But you make a good point nonetheless, and it has been my experiance that the exits along most roads where the switch has happened have dual numbering. The number have to work for the drivers who drive the road every day, and those who drive it once, or once in a while.
I like to keep an atlas in the car. I also like to have my GPSr with me. Between the two, I can usually tell where abouts I am, and how far to the next exit or rest stop. But when I don't, It is nice for the exit signs to tell me how far to the next exit. My personal experience was driving across Penn. on 80. There are long stretches where it is 30 or 40 miles between exits. Even with an atlas, it is much easier for me with the exits numbered by mile.
We can put all of that info on the great big exit signs, and each of us can get the information in the way that we like to receive it.
Back home, on a major highway, they switched exits from numbers to mile markers a couple years ago and that's what they did. Old exit numbers were small, new ones were big. It made it easier for people who knew "To get to the park, get off on exit 21."
The best part of making exit numbers reflect the mile markers that they're near is that folks who can do simple math can figure out how far it is to the next exit.
If I just passed exit 125 and I know the next exit is at 142, I can ask my kid if their bladder is going to explode right now, or can they hold it in for another 7 miles. If we just passed exit 5, I more than likely have no idea how far it is to exit 6. Better pull off to the right and send them behind a tree. No fun.
You can put distances in km on the road signs as long as you put km markers along the road to go with the mile markers. You better make the km markers a different color too, so they don't blend in with the mile markers.
The Senate, due to their responsibility to confirm officials such as Supreme Court Justices should be the one that goes Democrat, simply to avoid the High Court being too heavily stacked to the right, enabling an undoing of all (not just Row v. Wade) of the social justice that has been ruled in tha last 60 years.
I do agree that the legislature should be split, however that will probably mean that very little will ever get done, because nothing (except for "protecting the children" and "congress needs a raise") ever has broad support.
The party without power waits to simply derail the plans of the party woth power, in order to prevent them from being seen as effective leaders, and therefore garnering any support from the people in the next election cycle. Its all about power and money. Money and power.
Also, if the house goes Dem, they will spend the next 30 years burying the memebers of the current adminstration in subpoenas. Which may or may not be deserved, entertaining, justified, necessary, or even reasonable. But it will probably happen in retaliation to the whole Clinton impeachment mess, which itself was a retalliation for the whole Nixon impeachment mess.
I predict (and I'm certainly not going out on any limbs here) that either way, our politics will continue to become considerably more ugly and devisive.
Do you hover every time you visit a cemetary? My hovercraft is full of eels.
I suppose you would like us to also hover over any grave that's ever been made (which would mean hovering for all eternity unless we visit another planet), so as not to (potentially) damage it? That's quite a logical leap you've made from my assertion that digging around in graves, for the purpose of removing stuff, whether for study or profit, is grave robbery.
How, exactly, do you propose to stop other people grave robbing, Liberal application of venomous snakes.
those who wreck the tombs, the history, all evidence and the artifacts, FOR THE GOLD AND THE MONEY before "real" scientists (who quite often go out of their way to make sure that virtually every body that can be is preserved and respected to the utmost degree and then usually re-buried in a ceremony as close to traditional as possible, as close to their original burial place as possible?) come along and carefully preserve every bit they can. Like Tut?
Look at the photos in the article - the BODYGUARD guarding the tomb now that it's been discovered - think he'd be there if there were no scientists around to fight for the rights of the dead? Think he'd be needed if they kept people out of there in the first place?
Maybe we shouldn't sell people's houses when they die? We used to have an estate tax, so the gov't could seize it.
Maybe all their possessions should stay in the same place for ever and ever? Ever been to the Biltmore Estate?
Maybe we should forget every bit of history we've ever learned from about 200 years ago previously, if we can't find documentary evidence of it? Let's forget all we know about the Romans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, pre-historic people, dinosaurs... Sounds liek a plan...
After all none of them were a civilisation worth researching, remembering or revering? And none of them can help us answer questions such as evolution, or the ice ages, or the sudden dying-out of millions of species, or the natural cycles of the planet's ice ages, or global warming?
Global warming is caused by a decrease in pirates. If you aren't going to be armed with basic facts, I'm not going to argue with you. It would be pointless.
Go find out how they bury bodies in cemetaries in smaller (developed) countries - Every twenty or so years, parts of the existing cemeteries are covered in twenty feet of soil and new bodies are buried atop the older ones. Is that desecration to you?
Composting is good for the soil.
*Of course* human graves should be respected at all times. "Real" grave robbers lack this respect. Archaeologists do not EVER lack respect for the bodies, civilisations or artefacts they find. That's WHY they fight to study them, preserve them, store them (in a safer place than an unguarded tomb that will be robbed within MINUTES), allow people to marvel at them BEFORE some git comes along and steals it (whether from a dig site, an undiscovered site or a museum itself) to sell to the highest bidder who only wants them as something "nice" to put on their mantlepiece.
Archeologit is a description. They have the same financial imperatives as everybody else. I will opine that given the fact that archeologist don't get rich, the temptation to sell a few pieces for some rich fukc's mantlepiece collection can be quite great. Food and shelter will always trump the sancitity of some civilisations artifacts. Do you think the museum in Iraq was looted by rich collectors? I don't. I think it was looted by poor, poeple who saw an opportunity to feed themselves for a while by stealing some rocks and selling them to people who have more money than sense.
We know that there are mummies in the valley. We've seen them. Leave them alone before they come back to life and raise a zombie horde to eat our brains.
I have a simple, foolproof idea to help eliminate spam.
Email certification.
I don't think so.
Why?
Volume, that's why.
You used to have to actully prove, with documentation, that you were entitled to the domain name for which you were seeking an SSL cert. Prove, as in, here are the legal documents incorporating "example corporation", here is the registrar record showing example corporation as the registrant of example.com. Here's the documentation that I'm John Q. Example, Jr., CIO of example.com.
Then the CA would presumably vet you. It was how the perception of trust was established for SSL in the early days.
Now, the demand for SSL certs is too high to make it cost effective or timely to vet everybody. All you need is a pulse and a credit card, and a pulse is usually optional.
It's just my opinion, but I'd reckon that there are more email users than web servers, maybe even by an order of magnitude.
They present the homeowners association documents at your closing, by which time, you aren't going to back out of the deal, because you stand to lose a bunch of money, and probably have nowhere to live if you do.
You didn't put "the homeowners association rules being agreeable to me" as a contract contingency, did you?
The seller agreed to that?
Even so, you shouldn't schedule the closing if you haven't satisfied all of the contract contingencies.
Right. Because nothing ever goes wrong on the internet.
So the merchant calls you to tell you that something went squirrely, and even though they know you purchased a pallet of adult diapers, an "I'm with stupid ^" t-shirt and three year subscription to "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, and know the exact time you did your transaction, and ask you whether you want them to run the tx for you, or if you want to redo your order, you're going to decide it's phishing?
It's called customer service. You're just not used to it. Much like hearing somebody in Westchester say "please" and "thank you".
There is no reason I can think of for a mechant to store CC data in their e-commerce application's database. All they need is to go to their CC gateway's console, and they can deal with all of their transactions.
Need to reprocess the card due to a glitch? Pick up the phone, your customers will appreciate the personal touch.
Storing card numbers is like stockpiling nukes. A bad accident waiting to happen.
No thanks. I have enough worries having to maintain a password file for customers who want to have "accounts".
With big competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask, and little competitors all up and down the web, and telecomm companies threatening to charge them more because they have huge piles of cash, Google needs to fight as dirty as those who would do them in.
You don't bring a knife to a gun fight, and you don't hire "Up With People" to combat vampires.
3. That you can set long term goals and meet them. That you have the temprament to undertake something that lasts many years (like a career) and see it through.
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason I hate Perl, more than the fact that the language makes it *possible* to have monstrosities like that one-liner, is that the community which surrounds the language actively encourages them.
Not all of us encourage this.
Its considered *clever* and a mark of great skill that you can strip out all the code that actually explains WTF your code is doing and be left with the perfectly compressed version.
They call this Perl Golf (shaving strokes of your game. Get it?)
Many of us do not consider it clever. Rather, we consider it stupid and counter-productive.
On the other hand, all of the sample answers posted at the Python Challenge are all golf style, and the Python Challenge is supposed to be a learning tool.
This is modeled as good Perl style to folks just starting with the language,
People who do this should be tied up with string and left in small dark rooms. For a month.
the Llama book has lots of code which looks like that, and code samples you find will look like it too.
This just isn't the case. The code samples in the Llama are no more or less obtuse the code samples in my Pragmatic Ruby book.
It appears that the community largely does not teach perl like it is a language that needs to be read.
I wish I could argue more strongly with you here, other than to assert that I come across code in many languages (Perl, Ruby, Java, C, Lisp), on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis, at work and at home, in books, magazines, and online that appear written to not be read.
Your complaint of bad coding practices is endemic to the industry, and should not be used to condemn a language because it allows the freedom to code poorly.
It's not so secret anymore, is it?
Why? Do you know where the lab is?
Those poor Americans have to get their literature from somewhere.
That's why we grew Christopher Paolini [Eragon] in vat in a secret laboratory.
In your case, simply linking to a page available on a public webpage should not warrant a lawsuit - and if a lawsuit is bought, the plaintiff should be laughed out of court and properly fined for wasting everybody elses time and also jailed for the civil version of entrapment.
But YOU still have to PAY your lawyer and waste a whole bunch of your time.
It costs too much money to go to court with idiots, and while idiotic, that is what they're counting on.
Part of why there is a nursing shortage is that is sucks to be a nurse. The doctors treat you like crap, they blame *you* when *they* screw up and nearly kill a patient, the hours are long, and the pay is bad for the work environment.
Now if you make the pay better, and shorten the hours, you might attract more nurses, but then then there's still the position at the bottom of the health care provider food chain.
Most nurses don't enter the field for the money. There's usually a more personal reason, and if the work environment is still sucky, then the money won't attract the staff.
The only people treated worse than nurses, in hospitals, are the hospital IT staff, because they have no medical training. Many nurses are abandoning clinical nursing for careers in healthcare IT. You get reasonable hours, decent pay, and you can crap on the IT staff, the way the doctors used to crap on you.
The nursing shortage is because the dynamics of healthcare drove the nurses away. On average, the cons far outweigh the pros.
The IT worker shortage is entirely about wage demands, coupled with managerial models that have not changed much since the industrial revolution, that have not adapted to managing an office, where work can't always be measured in discrete pieces (no matter how hard the try...and brother do they try), as opposed to a room full of sewing machines or milling machines. Also, in my opion, the majority of IT managers would not know talent if they saw it, don't know how to utilize it when they have it, and like allthe average people in the world, seek mediocrity, and because excellence eludes them personally, it frightens them whenthey do accidentaly find it.
Why, for the love of democracy, could we not have created machines that would accurately punch the holes in the cards?
Viola. Electronic voting "accuracy", with punch card audit trails.
Hmm. Good point.
It is my opinion that if you tried it, they'd just have you disappeared.
In theory, yes, but no corporation with that much money will ever be held accountable to the laws of our country unless they kill the citizenry, and even then, only after many, many years, and especially not when they're Thinking of the Children
Do better next time.
Maine changed all the exits on 95 recently, and had to go back and put up a bunch of little "Old Exit ##" tags under the new ones, presumably because of complaints. So, it just creates confusion where there was none before.
I think there was confusion, because whoever decided that the
exist should be marked by mile, also apparently decided that
they no longer needed the old numbers. That's a whole other
thread on poor gov't decision making.
But you make a good point nonetheless, and it has been my
experiance that the exits along most roads where the switch
has happened have dual numbering. The number have to work for
the drivers who drive the road every day, and those who drive
it once, or once in a while.
I like to keep an atlas in the car. I also like to have
my GPSr with me. Between the two, I can
usually tell where abouts I am, and how far to the next
exit or rest stop. But when I don't, It is nice for the
exit signs to tell me how far to the next exit. My personal
experience was driving across Penn. on 80. There are long
stretches where it is 30 or 40 miles between exits. Even with
an atlas, it is much easier for me with the exits numbered by
mile.
We can put all of that info on the great big exit signs,
and each of us can get the information in the way that we
like to receive it.
Or Dad made a typo that he didn't catch in preview.
Back home, on a major highway, they switched exits from numbers to mile markers a couple years ago and that's what they did. Old exit numbers were small, new ones were big. It made it easier for people who knew "To get to the park, get off on exit 21."
The best part of making exit numbers reflect the mile markers that they're near is that
folks who can do simple math can figure out how far it is to the next exit.
If I just passed exit 125 and I know the next exit is at 142, I can ask my kid if their
bladder is going to explode right now, or can they hold it in for another 7 miles. If we
just passed exit 5, I more than likely have no idea how far it is to exit 6. Better pull
off to the right and send them behind a tree. No fun.
You can put distances in km on the road signs as long as you put km markers along
the road to go with the mile markers. You better make the km markers a different color too, so they don't blend in with the mile markers.
Europe understands something we (Americans) are still struggling with.
Nah. It's just that the Dutch actually value their democracy.
The Senate, due to their responsibility to confirm officials such as Supreme Court Justices should be the one that goes Democrat, simply to avoid the High Court being too heavily stacked to the right, enabling an undoing of all (not just Row v. Wade) of the social justice that has been ruled in tha last 60 years.
I do agree that the legislature should be split, however that will probably mean that very little will ever get done, because nothing (except for "protecting the children" and "congress needs a raise") ever has broad support.
The party without power waits to simply derail the plans of the party woth power, in order to prevent them from being seen as effective leaders, and therefore garnering any support from the people in the next election cycle. Its all about power and money. Money and power.
Also, if the house goes Dem, they will spend the next 30 years burying the memebers of the current adminstration in subpoenas. Which may or may not be deserved, entertaining, justified, necessary, or even reasonable. But it will probably happen in retaliation to the whole Clinton impeachment mess, which itself was a retalliation for the whole Nixon impeachment mess.
I predict (and I'm certainly not going out on any limbs here) that either way, our politics will continue to become considerably more ugly and devisive.
Pro is to Con as Progress is to Congress.
Do you hover every time you visit a cemetary?
My hovercraft is full of eels.
I suppose you would like us to also hover over any grave that's ever been made (which would mean hovering for all eternity unless we visit another planet), so as not to (potentially) damage it?
That's quite a logical leap you've made from my assertion that digging around in graves,
for the purpose of removing stuff, whether for study or profit, is grave robbery.
How, exactly, do you propose to stop other people grave robbing,
Liberal application of venomous snakes.
those who wreck the tombs, the history, all evidence and the artifacts, FOR THE GOLD AND THE MONEY before "real" scientists (who quite often go out of their way to make sure that virtually every body that can be is preserved and respected to the utmost degree and then usually re-buried in a ceremony as close to traditional as possible, as close to their original burial place as possible?) come along and carefully preserve every bit they can.
Like Tut?
Look at the photos in the article - the BODYGUARD guarding the tomb now that it's been discovered - think he'd be there if there were no scientists around to fight for the rights of the dead?
Think he'd be needed if they kept people out of there in the first place?
Maybe we shouldn't sell people's houses when they die?
We used to have an estate tax, so the gov't could seize it.
Maybe all their possessions should stay in the same place for ever and ever?
Ever been to the Biltmore Estate?
Maybe we should forget every bit of history we've ever learned from about 200 years ago previously, if we can't find documentary evidence of it? Let's forget all we know about the Romans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, pre-historic people, dinosaurs...
Sounds liek a plan...
After all none of them were a civilisation worth researching, remembering or revering? And none of them can help us answer questions such as evolution, or the ice ages, or the sudden dying-out of millions of species, or the natural cycles of the planet's ice ages, or global warming?
Global warming is caused by a decrease in pirates. If you aren't going to be armed with basic facts, I'm not going to argue with you. It would be pointless.
Go find out how they bury bodies in cemetaries in smaller (developed) countries - Every twenty or so years, parts of the existing cemeteries are covered in twenty feet of soil and new bodies are buried atop the older ones. Is that desecration to you?
Composting is good for the soil.
*Of course* human graves should be respected at all times. "Real" grave robbers lack this respect. Archaeologists do not EVER lack respect for the bodies, civilisations or artefacts they find. That's WHY they fight to study them, preserve them, store them (in a safer place than an unguarded tomb that will be robbed within MINUTES), allow people to marvel at them BEFORE some git comes along and steals it (whether from a dig site, an undiscovered site or a museum itself) to sell to the highest bidder who only wants them as something "nice" to put on their mantlepiece.
Archeologit is a description. They have the same financial imperatives as everybody else.
I will opine that given the fact that archeologist don't get rich, the temptation to sell
a few pieces for some rich fukc's mantlepiece collection can be quite great. Food and shelter will always trump the sancitity of some civilisations artifacts. Do you think the
museum in Iraq was looted by rich collectors? I don't. I think it was looted by poor, poeple who saw an opportunity to feed themselves for a while by stealing some rocks and selling them to people who have more money than sense.
We know that there are mummies in the valley. We've seen them. Leave them alone before they come back to life and raise a zombie horde to eat our brains.
OK, look. We (humans) started bury
If you take something out of a tomb, whether to
sell it, or display it in a museum, it's still
grave robbery.
I have a simple, foolproof idea to help eliminate spam.
Email certification.
I don't think so.
Why?
Volume, that's why.
You used to have to actully prove, with documentation, that you were entitled to
the domain name for which you were seeking an SSL cert. Prove, as in, here are the legal documents incorporating "example corporation", here is the registrar record showing
example corporation as the registrant of example.com. Here's the documentation that
I'm John Q. Example, Jr., CIO of example.com.
Then the CA would presumably vet you. It was how the perception of trust was established
for SSL in the early days.
Now, the demand for SSL certs is too high to make it cost effective or timely to vet everybody. All you need is a pulse and a credit card, and a pulse is usually optional.
It's just my opinion, but I'd reckon that there are more email users than web servers,
maybe even by an order of magnitude.
Can we have your liver then?
Mama's Boy Ultra Light Menthol are not macho smokes.
Shortly before me...
They present the homeowners association documents at your closing, by which time, you aren't going to back out of the deal, because you stand to lose a bunch of money, and probably have nowhere to live if you do.
You didn't put "the homeowners association rules being agreeable to me" as a contract contingency, did you?
The seller agreed to that?
Even so, you shouldn't schedule the closing if you haven't satisfied all of the contract contingencies.
Right. Because nothing ever goes wrong on the internet.
So the merchant calls you to tell you that something went squirrely,
and even though they know you purchased a pallet of adult diapers,
an "I'm with stupid ^" t-shirt and three year subscription to
"Soldier of Fortune" magazine, and know the exact time you did your
transaction, and ask you whether you want them to run the tx for you,
or if you want to redo your order, you're going to decide it's phishing?
It's called customer service. You're just not used to it. Much like
hearing somebody in Westchester say "please" and "thank you".
There is no reason I can think of for a mechant to store CC data in their e-commerce application's database. All they need is to go to their CC gateway's
console, and they can deal with all of their transactions.
Need to reprocess the card due to a glitch? Pick up the phone, your customers
will appreciate the personal touch.
Storing card numbers is like stockpiling nukes. A bad accident waiting to happen.
No thanks.
I have enough worries having to maintain a password file for customers who want to have "accounts".
With big competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask, and little competitors all up and down the web, and telecomm companies threatening to charge them more because they have huge piles of cash, Google needs to fight as dirty as those who would do them in.
You don't bring a knife to a gun fight, and you don't hire "Up With People" to combat vampires.
3. That you can set long term goals and meet them. That you have the temprament to undertake something that lasts many years (like a career) and see it through.