Yeah -- "If you want your name to stand out, buy an ad".
This is just common sense on the part of journalists -- if they could get away with it, companies would insist that their name must always be in inch-high distinctive letters in bright colors. And all of their products, too.
The funny thing is, Yahoo got to where they are now by being conceptually what Google is now. They were originally a clean, simple, text-based index without many frills. This is why they dominated the Age of Portal Sites -- everyone else was overloaded with frilly junk. But then two things started to go wrong. First, the Internet got so big that the human-maintained index became impossible to keep up to date with anything short of an army of volunteers (a la dmoz). And second, some idiot marketter got tired of being a site that's primary focus was sending people elsewhere, and decided that maybe the frilly junk was the way to keep everyone "stuck" at Yahoo itself. The index -- the sole reason people ever cared about Yahoo at all -- drifted to the bottom corner of the page, and graphics and ads and contests and gossip and whatnot took over the page.
But there were already a lot of sites out there doing that stuff, so that made Yahoo not very interesting, and then, when Google came along and did the minimalist web search thing so much better than Yahoo ever had, there was no reason left for Yahoo at all except for the last remaining inertia.
"[Microsoft has] already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance," Ellison said, speaking of the Apache Web server's displacement of Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) technology. "They had a virtual monopoly on Web servers, and then they were wiped off the face of the earth. And it's going to happen to them again on Linux."
As anyone can clearly see at Netcraft, IIS never even came *close* to beating Apache, let alone did they have a "virtual monopoly". Back in 1997 when Microsoft and Netscape (now SunONE) were struggling for 10% shares, Apache was already at 40% -- and it only went up from there.
For what it's worth, Red Hat traditionally has been very good about changing major version numbers not based on "really excellent features" but rather on binary compatibility. This doesn't invalidate your concerns about developers' need for a stable target, but I'll be surprised if the version increase isn't justified. So far, the geeks at Red Hat seem to have struck a winning balance with the marketing folks -- hopefully, the tables haven't turned.
You know, like Canada or Australia. Hmmm. How necessary was the American Revolution, again? Things could have ended up quite a bit differently -- for example, maybe we would have had an end to slavery in 1834 instead of the 1860s, and could have skipped that whole Civil War thing too.
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
I'm VERY supportive of our troops. I want their lives to NOT be risked and possibly wasted in an unjustified aggressive war.
I think that some Python advocates come off as jerks, when talking about Perl, because they have had to work with Perl and loathed the experience.
So? I've had to do quite a few things that I've loathed in my life, but I don't feel compelled to complain about them every time I'm explaining something totally different.
I find it kind of odd that you think that a language with regular expressions in the syntax and one without cannot in general be used to solve the same kinds of problems.
Wow, I sure didn't say anything like that.
Does typing the parens change the nature of the problem that much?
Nope, but it changes the nature of the *solution*.
But more to the point, if Perl's raison d'etre is built-in regular expressions (as you claim) then why is it used for (e.g.) SlashCode. What about building a large weblog community is regular-expression-centric?
Hold on there. Where is this "as you claim" coming from? I said "two of Perl's main strengths", and you then say that I claim something *far* stronger. In that difference, you might find the answer to your question -- and I find a lot of the answer to my question about Python advocates.
(Skipping forward...)
But the most important reason Python users trash Perl is because the first question a newbie asks on hearing about Python, an object oriented scripting language is: "How is it different than Perl?"
What's wrong with "It's not really like Perl at all"?
The common feature that most of these folks share is that as far as the rest of us are concerned they need to get a life.
Ok, true enough. But I really do notice it particularly in Python users and particularly in terms of venom against Perl. It's one thing to go on and on about how great one's chosen language is, but it's another to have to lash out at something else whenever that other thing is mentioned -- and to bring it up if it hasn't been. This isn't just the case in newsgroups or on slashdot -- I've seen it in a "serious" Python books at the bookstore. Maybe even a majority of them.
I find it very interesting that so many Python users are so bitter about Perl, and so antagonistic. In fact, it was one of the things that kept me from even bothering to look at Python for a long time -- all of the Python advocates come across like a bunch of jerks. When I did get around to looking, I found that it's a nice, interesting, and useful language -- that doesn't really compare to or compete with Perl in a meaningful way at all.
Two of Perl's main strengths are 1) CPAN and 2) regular expressions integrated naturally into the language. Python's libraries are pretty good, and there's a lot of good stuff out there, but with Perl, I can pretty much count on 99% of anything I want to do having been done already. And sure, Python can "do" regular expressions -- in approximately the same way that one can do them in C or Java, by making a series of function calls.
At least on the second of these points, Python isn't even in the same *business* as Perl. There's just flat out no meaningful comparision. Python has *a lot* of strengths, but they're totally different from Perl's. So why do Python advocates get so worked up about something their preferred language fundamentally isn't designed to do? Why don't they raise a big stink every time someone mentions Java? That seems like a more usefully-comparible application space. Or C++, for that matter.
Bobby Fischer developed it to get rid of the the opening advantage the is gained with massive studying and memorization.
This just pushes things back by a few years. In not-so-long, computers will be able to analyze all of the different possible beginning sequences too -- in other words, even more massive studying and memorization.
Re:Does someone not like the 802 part?
on
WiFi Woes With .11g
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· Score: 2, Funny
No they don't. Normal people call it "wireless networking" or maybe wi-fi. No, wait, normal people probably don't call it anything at all.
Linux is GPL, any changes made to Linux *become* GPL. Period.
Changes, sure. Completely new contributions, however, can both become GPL'd and remain under some other license. Just because code touches something under the GPL doesn't mean it automatically becomes "contaminated" permanently.
[...] but I daresay that those are the people who are only interested in taking from the community without giving something in return.
You can daresay all you want, but looks like me the concern is more about getting a standard adopted and usable everywhere.
That's ridiculous. As a member of the general public, if they say: "we used some of our scientific instruments, and those say it's water", I'm going to go ahead and believe them, because I've got no reason not to. I don't even need to know if it's a spectrometer or some other sort of gizmo.
On the other hand, HTTP is great when you want to give lots of people unlimited ANONYMOUS access to something. I'm sure there is a way to throttle bandwidth, but can you do it on a class by class basis?
Sure, you can do all of that. Apache is very flexible. Try mod_throttle, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah -- "If you want your name to stand out, buy an ad".
This is just common sense on the part of journalists -- if they could get away with it, companies would insist that their name must always be in inch-high distinctive letters in bright colors. And all of their products, too.
The funny thing is, Yahoo got to where they are now by being conceptually what Google is now. They were originally a clean, simple, text-based index without many frills. This is why they dominated the Age of Portal Sites -- everyone else was overloaded with frilly junk. But then two things started to go wrong. First, the Internet got so big that the human-maintained index became impossible to keep up to date with anything short of an army of volunteers (a la dmoz). And second, some idiot marketter got tired of being a site that's primary focus was sending people elsewhere, and decided that maybe the frilly junk was the way to keep everyone "stuck" at Yahoo itself. The index -- the sole reason people ever cared about Yahoo at all -- drifted to the bottom corner of the page, and graphics and ads and contests and gossip and whatnot took over the page.
But there were already a lot of sites out there doing that stuff, so that made Yahoo not very interesting, and then, when Google came along and did the minimalist web search thing so much better than Yahoo ever had, there was no reason left for Yahoo at all except for the last remaining inertia.
As anyone can clearly see at Netcraft, IIS never even came *close* to beating Apache, let alone did they have a "virtual monopoly". Back in 1997 when Microsoft and Netscape (now SunONE) were struggling for 10% shares, Apache was already at 40% -- and it only went up from there.
Kernels don't necessarily break binary compatibility. glibc is a more typical culprit.
nptl.
For what it's worth, Red Hat traditionally has been very good about changing major version numbers not based on "really excellent features" but rather on binary compatibility. This doesn't invalidate your concerns about developers' need for a stable target, but I'll be surprised if the version increase isn't justified. So far, the geeks at Red Hat seem to have struck a winning balance with the marketing folks -- hopefully, the tables haven't turned.
You know, like Canada or Australia. Hmmm. How necessary was the American Revolution, again? Things could have ended up quite a bit differently -- for example, maybe we would have had an end to slavery in 1834 instead of the 1860s, and could have skipped that whole Civil War thing too.
I'm VERY supportive of our troops. I want their lives to NOT be risked and possibly wasted in an unjustified aggressive war.
For what it's worth, this is easily done with postfix too. The default character is + instead of -, but basically the same.
I think that some Python advocates come off as jerks, when talking about Perl, because they have had to work with Perl and loathed the experience.
So? I've had to do quite a few things that I've loathed in my life, but I don't feel compelled to complain about them every time I'm explaining something totally different.
I find it kind of odd that you think that a language with regular expressions in the syntax and one without cannot in general be used to solve the same kinds of problems.
Wow, I sure didn't say anything like that.
Does typing the parens change the nature of the problem that much?
Nope, but it changes the nature of the *solution*.
But more to the point, if Perl's raison d'etre is built-in regular expressions (as you claim) then why is it used for (e.g.) SlashCode. What about building a large weblog community is regular-expression-centric?
Hold on there. Where is this "as you claim" coming from? I said "two of Perl's main strengths", and you then say that I claim something *far* stronger. In that difference, you might find the answer to your question -- and I find a lot of the answer to my question about Python advocates.
(Skipping forward...)
But the most important reason Python users trash Perl is because the first question a newbie asks on hearing about Python, an object oriented scripting language is: "How is it different than Perl?"
What's wrong with "It's not really like Perl at all"?
I dunno.... I've looked at several books on SuSE, Slackware, and even Debian, and I don't remember any of them beginning with an anti-Red Hat rant.
The common feature that most of these folks share is that as far as the rest of us are concerned they need to get a life.
Ok, true enough. But I really do notice it particularly in Python users and particularly in terms of venom against Perl. It's one thing to go on and on about how great one's chosen language is, but it's another to have to lash out at something else whenever that other thing is mentioned -- and to bring it up if it hasn't been. This isn't just the case in newsgroups or on slashdot -- I've seen it in a "serious" Python books at the bookstore. Maybe even a majority of them.
I find it very interesting that so many Python users are so bitter about Perl, and so antagonistic. In fact, it was one of the things that kept me from even bothering to look at Python for a long time -- all of the Python advocates come across like a bunch of jerks. When I did get around to looking, I found that it's a nice, interesting, and useful language -- that doesn't really compare to or compete with Perl in a meaningful way at all.
Two of Perl's main strengths are 1) CPAN and 2) regular expressions integrated naturally into the language. Python's libraries are pretty good, and there's a lot of good stuff out there, but with Perl, I can pretty much count on 99% of anything I want to do having been done already. And sure, Python can "do" regular expressions -- in approximately the same way that one can do them in C or Java, by making a series of function calls.
At least on the second of these points, Python isn't even in the same *business* as Perl. There's just flat out no meaningful comparision. Python has *a lot* of strengths, but they're totally different from Perl's. So why do Python advocates get so worked up about something their preferred language fundamentally isn't designed to do? Why don't they raise a big stink every time someone mentions Java? That seems like a more usefully-comparible application space. Or C++, for that matter.
that's why you patch the library to fix just the specific problem instead of making a radical change.
in early betas of Windows 95, the taskbar defaulted to being at the top of the screen just like that.
Heh. You mean *we* could be reading it on a Friday night.
Does it *get* more geeky than a story about D&D sent in by Wil Wheaton? I can't see how it possibly could.
Bobby Fischer developed it to get rid of the the opening advantage the is gained with massive studying and memorization.
This just pushes things back by a few years. In not-so-long, computers will be able to analyze all of the different possible beginning sequences too -- in other words, even more massive studying and memorization.
No they don't. Normal people call it "wireless networking" or maybe wi-fi. No, wait, normal people probably don't call it anything at all.
Linux is GPL, any changes made to Linux *become* GPL. Period.
Changes, sure. Completely new contributions, however, can both become GPL'd and remain under some other license. Just because code touches something under the GPL doesn't mean it automatically becomes "contaminated" permanently.
[...] but I daresay that those are the people who are only interested in taking from the community without giving something in return.
You can daresay all you want, but looks like me the concern is more about getting a standard adopted and usable everywhere.
Hah. Kids today. I remember HOMR and its e-mail based predecessor RINGO.
That's ridiculous. As a member of the general public, if they say: "we used some of our scientific instruments, and those say it's water", I'm going to go ahead and believe them, because I've got no reason not to. I don't even need to know if it's a spectrometer or some other sort of gizmo.
On the other hand, HTTP is great when you want to give lots of people unlimited ANONYMOUS access to something. I'm sure there is a way to throttle bandwidth, but can you do it on a class by class basis?
Sure, you can do all of that. Apache is very flexible. Try mod_throttle,
for example.
Whether he actually touches computers is sorta beside the point, although everyone seems quite eager to bring me up to speed on that. :)