From comments on other blogs, I know my experience is not unique. The number of temporary glitches and server errors has been increasing recently. Today, I can't even get on the system because it's been Server Error all morning.
I love gmail greatly, and would gladly pay for it. If the stability of the thing were improved. Right now, I'm in the really bad situation of depending on Gmail for non-trivial things, and if this lasts much longer, I might have to switch to some other service.
On the topic of *this* thread...the big problem with finance.google.com is indeed the lack of acquisition data for holdings in your portfolio. You really want and need that, especially come tax time if you need to claim cap gains and losses.
That doesn't look like too big of a change. Does losing $50 million really do that much?
In a word: yes it does. A lot. For starters, The loss from 2004 to 2006 looks more like $124M to me, which is a 2.2% cut But that's not really stating the full extent of the problem, since these are nominal dollars and not real dollars. If we assume the inflation rate is 3%, we find that the level (no real cuts) budget for 2006 should have been $5,941M.
The budget as proposed is a 7.8% cut over the two years. This is the problem, and yes, it is a huge one. And the article points out that the era of austerity for science is only beginning at NASA.
In other news, the NIH budget, which was doubled in recent years, is about to be treated in a similar way to the NASA budget. This year's proposed appropriation was flat. I would feel a lot better about these moves if I were convinced that they reflected a careful planning process and a real change in priorities, but it looks a lot more like somebody is arranging the fiscal details around the political message. We're going to Mars, like it or not, and we shouldn't have cut the NSF in the recent past, so now we'll stiff the NIH to get NSF funding back to where you could argue it should be. That's not really a coherent science policy at work.
Ouch; I'm not exactly sure where you came up with those liquidity numbers, but I find that I can't dispute their accuracy. Yahoo Finance tells me that 103% of their stock is owned by insiders and institutional investors. This suggests that most of the trading activity is going from the left hand to the right hand, and exists primarily to make sure that the stock is not de-listed. The stock has a market cap consistent with the probability that either IBM just buys them to end the nonsense or somebody else buys them the dessicated remains just to keep a lawsuit going at IBM for whatever reason.
If we assume that somebody thinks the sole positive outcome of the lawsuit could be worth $5 billion for SCO in a cash settlement, the market says the odds of this are about 2%. Mega ouch.
iBook (all with 13.3" widescreen display and integrated graphics - 945GM MCH)
$799: Intel Centrino Solo 1.66Ghz
$999: Intel Centrino Duo 1.66Ghz
$1199: Intel Centrino Duo 1.83GHz
Uh...no. The iBook will be all Centrino Solo, running at 1.5 GHz for the $899 starter model and 1.66 GHz for the 14" and loaded 12" models. The Powerbooks will be the only Intel Macs offering dual core processors, since Steve Jobs isn't going to screw himself.
Seriously, why does anybody think that an entry level notebook from Apple is going to get the best dual core notebook processor on the market? It Just Won't Happen. The mini is a more interesting issue; I think we'll see a "classic mini" paralleling the iBook, but also a mini-on-steroids meant for home entertainment, and that will be an all-stops-out component of high end video, or a built-in with a new large plasma screen TV/computer.
9. X86 Powerbook - Could be. I would bet on this one.
8. iWork '06 - Could be. Who cares? I really like iWork '05. Pages is a treat, and Keynote is indespensible for me. But if they are working on a spreadsheet, yeah, this is the time to release it.
About the Powerbooks, what people haven't paid much attention to is the fact that Intel will be offering a single core low end version of Yonah. Ladies and gentlemen: your new iBook. This then frees the faster dual core models to be the PowerBook Advantage (tm). Similarly, the Mac mini will be single core. The re-revised iMac, which may or may not come at MacWorld, will be dual core. Higher performance desktop class chips will be used in the new PowerMacs, due in several months. Interestingly, Apple has almost no incentive to mess with the XServe line until Intel provides something really compelling.
About iWork: I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Pages is lacking many, many, many features. It's not integrated with any citation software, it's really slow, its html export features are not quite there, it chokes on large documents, it's really slow, there seems to be an issue with color calibration of embedded PDFs (anybody else see this?), its Word import is pretty buggy, and it's really slow. Also, slowness is an issue unless you're using the latest/greatest hardware. That said, Pages is the very best scientific conference poster maker of all time, bar none. You can use Keynote for this as well, but Pages, being a page layout program more than a presentation program, is more suitable, at least in my hands.
Keynote is getting quite nice, on the other hand. I don't like the UI for some "do this to all slides" tasks like defaulting transitions to incremental. Its Powerpoint import/export could be better, and I wish I knew the way to get it to default to the "reduce file size" Quartz filter on PDF export. Also, I'd like to be able to export to a useful HTML format; presumably, somebody could write a Keynote/S5 converter, but if they did it before the file format were really fixed, they'd just get hosed over by the next format change.
The problem is that in 2004 we thought it was going to revolutionize email.
2005 came and went with no significant advances in gmail, and it's still in beta mode with some annoying issues. It's basically just another webmail service now.
Evidently, what counts as "significant" for some people differs from others. I use gmail as my preferred email account these days, and here's what I've seen:
2+ GB of storage up from 1 GB, and the promise that you'll never run out of space.
Everybody can get gmail now, unlike last year. That's actually a major tech move in the sense that there now must be litereally tens of millions of gmail accounts, and it might actually be the largest email system on the planet.
Gmail now has autosave, which is much nicer than (say) the Outlook webmail client we have.
Gmail now lets you add formatting to your message. Useless to me, but some people probably like it...
POP access is new in 2005, I believe.
Gmail now checks all attachments for viruses. Not very important for a Mac OSX user like me, but probably a God-send for my pathetic little brother.:-)
You can now customize your "From:" address, which might be handy if I wanted to use my "professional" email address from Gmail
Gmail now lets you see RSS and Atom Feeds from Gmail itself. Not a huge plus for me, again, but I can see the utility in some situations.
Basic HTML view of Gmail is nice in situations where you must use a screwed up or obsolete browser.
Mobile access to Gmail is also new. I don't own a cell-phone, so I don't care, but my brother does, and he thought it was the bomb.
So I can understand if you feel like there are things that Gmail could do even better, or do differently, but to pretend that nothing happened to Gmail in 2005 is just plain weird.
How many good stories which could have gotten a good converstation going got rejected because of this dupe.
Probably not so many. My last story got rejected, but it was just the latest ThinkSecret rumor about Yonah-based notebooks and minis. To be honest, there aren't that many real Apple stories these days. That should change as we get closer to MacWorld Expo. They might be able to use a real story on the G4- and G5-optimized builds of Firefox, but other than that...I'm not thinking of much.
Indeed, as the press is cautious enough to point out, there is just possibly an innocent explanation for what now looks like systematically faked data. Historically, though, when you get prominent senior authors on a paper asking for it to be retracted, there is a major problem.
One thing to point out is that scientific fraud at this level of the scientific game, while not unprecedented, is quire rare. And a big part of this is simply due to the fact that anything truly important is worth replicating and extending, and a result that was faked is often impossible to replicate because it is the wrong result. I like to think that scientists are more honest than average, but surely to some extent it is the fear and shame of being caught doing this that keeps them more honest than that.
So I was trying to think of frauds that even come close to competing with the high profile that this case could assume, and it hasn't been easy. The Piltdown Hoax was very different in spirit. The faking of data in the report of element 118 might be close, but the original report got nothing like press attention that the Korean cloning breakthrough did. Can anybody else think of anything that really would compete?
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
So I'm really trying to figure out what your point is here. If I have two tools I use in my work, and one costs twice what the other does, are you really saying that makes no sense? A few weeks ago, I used like $100 worth of precision tools to take apart an iBook, but I put the parts I got out in a $2 mini-muffin tin. Was there something wrong there?
The closest I can get to a useful argument here is (I think) your opinion that a $300 camera can't generate pictures "good enough" for a $500 editing program, but that isn't a slam-dunk these days, especially if the software saves you a lot of time no matter how much you camera costs *and* your time is worth something. Another possibility is that you're pointing out that most casual users probably don't use most of the features from the $500 piece of software, and would be better off using something cheaper and spending the other money on something else. Now, that would be my opinion most of the time, but I don't see that it has much to do with how fancy your camera is...
Unless they have also re-engineered a DNA polymerase and can sufficiently prove that denaturation and annealing stages can be completed much faster, we're talking about maybe a 30 to 45 minute decrease in PCR. That's it. I've never seen anything less than 30-30-30 before, even in the smallest of genotyping markers.
I agree that this is obviously hype. For starters, PCR is an important part of finger-printing, but it doesn't give you the sequence. It just amplifies the DNA; you might be able to go a different way for rapid (but not completely accurate) identification. For people who don't do much PCR or sequencing or the whole process, it goes like this:
Get sample including DNA. (Can be really fast with a cheek swab.)
Extract DNA from the sample. (Minutes to hours; from a fruit fly, I can do this in an hour.)
Set up the PCR reaction. (Can be automated to be very fast.)
Run PCR. With miniaturization and with some other tricks (see below) this can get quite fast.
Interpret what you've got. If you're doing this via sequencing, add (currently) hours to the process right now. If you're doing this by examining VNTRs, you might be able to get away faster. (VNTR = variable number of tandem repeats; if you look at enough sites that have these, you can get close to a unique identification, and I'm supposing you could get the numbers in at least a loose fashion via real-time quantitative PCR and a final melt curve analysis. That's faster than sequencing by a lot, but not 3-5 minutes that people are suggesting.)
So it would be nice to miniaturize and (thus) build faster thermocyclers, but it alone would not be a panacea. So the last point about 30-30-30: if you've got good primers, ideal sequence, and a short product, you can cut those times down quite a bit in some situations. I've seen (nominal) extension times in RT-PCR as short as 8 seconds being used for ~100 bp sequences. But that's still not the whole cycle, and you still need to multiply by 30-35 for the number of cycles, and the target article is just a hype-y blurb.
(Emphasis mine.) I look forward to your contributions of time, money, code, documentation, ideas, evangelism, testing, support, and praise.
I already did contribute the money. Twice. Nothing much happened (this was 3-4 years ago), so I got discouraged. To be brutally honest, right now Perl needs fewer ideas (they should junk Parrot TODAY if it is slowing anything else down) and less praise. The thing that must be communicated is this: if we don't have a beta by summer 2006, we are _dead_. Pugs has done a world of good to help Perl6 already (we would surely be dead if that project hadn't started up), and if I had any time at all, I would try to write code for that. If the Perl Foundation were serious at all, they'd buy out Autrijus so he didn't have to worry about $work until next summer. Then we would probably have Perl6. If they don't, we won't. I'm thinking it's getting just about this simple, although I'd love to be wrong.
This suggests an obvious question: what's wrong with Perl? Well, there's plenty wrong with Perl that I can point out, but interestingly, I've discovered that the complaints which Perl experts have are radically different from the complaints that casual Perl users have (amusingly, many folks who criticize Perl couldn't tell simple Perl and PHP snippets apart).
What you say is true, but misses a major, major point. Perl right now has a pretty horrible reputation in some quarters, and even though it might be the result of kvetching from a lot of uninformed people, pointing this out is not a solution to the problem. More than a couple of political campaigns have gone down in flames when candidates made no useful response to baseless negative campaigning. Right now, I'm finally getting more excited by Perl6 now that there looks like there will be one, but we're still realistically looking at January 2007 for that, which is about seven years after the effort started.
Given the comment at the very end of your post about Ruby, you realize the kind of mortal peril that Perl finds itself in. If Matz had not been Japanese, and therefore more of the Ruby docs had been available in English maybe 3 years earlier, Perl could have ended up stone cold dead. What the new leadership has got to keep in mind is very simple: if we don't finish Perl6 *right now*, we're all going to die. This was not the only way to have done things, but so much has been invested in Perl6 for so long that there is really no way to make Perl5 better in ways that will convince people that it isn't last year's language. If only a bit more thought had gone into Perl5 these last five years or so, we'd be in better shape right now.
But I have one more point to make, while I'm on the soap box:
People complain about Perl's "line noise" characteristics and unmaintainable programs and ignore that much of this stems from heavy regular expression use (yell at regexes, not Perl) and people without a strong programming background finding the language easy to use (yell at those people, not at their tool).
That's not completely true. Like it or not, every Perl variable name has a piece of line noise attached to it that 90% of the time clarifies nothing. For that matter, there is the madness surrounding lexical variables in Perl. Using them is good programming practice, but every declaration of such a thing adds another "my" to the list. It would have been SO EASY to define a flag or a pragma noting that all of the declarations in a file were implicitly of "my" variables, but this never happened. And then there is the fiasco of function argument declarations. As in: Perl, unique among all other scripting languages doesn't yet have useful parameter lists in function definitions Every time I type somehing like my ($foo, bar, $baz) = @_; I think to myself "lame lame lame". Sure, Perl6 solves this one quite handily, and gives eleventy-seven different ways to call and declare function parameters, but Yeesh! Did we really have to wait for the One Great Perl to arrive to get something that sucks less than Javascript 1.0 in this respect?
I have been a Perl programmer for 14 years now, and I think the world of what it can do. But I am telling you this: if we don't fix Perl, we will die. The seven lean years will kill us unless we make it completely obvious to people how superior Perl6 is, and unless we make sure that it really is out there to hack with. If betas of Perl 6 don't arrive before the middle of 2006, I swear we are doomed. Please do everything in your power to make sure this doen't happen.
Joe Ossanna and Lee McMahon. Both made significant contributions which made UNIX, as we know it today, possible.
By all means we should not forget them. And, while I know that you know this, other Slashdot readers might not know that both of these amazing men are dead, having died far too young. Sigh...there are days when I feel I am the last person on the planet to have used troff, Scribe, and LaTeX. And troff started the whole game.
An interesting thing is that trying to open one of those files in Pages results in a dialog that says "This XML files was created with an unsupported beta version of Word" and it doesn't open it. I'm not drawing any conclusions, I just think it's interesting.
Ah, Pages. The program has some neat features, but has all of the hallmarks of being rushed out of the door for the 1.0 release. It's a nifty program for making flyers, and maybe short newsletters, but it's pretty much a loss to do any serious word processing in the thing, as it currently stands. In a way, it doesn't surprise me to hear that TextEdit is leading the way on the XML front, despite the fact that Pages has an XML native format...
It's good to finish off high school and join a college. As a part of high school chemistry, we were expected to know the periodic table by-heart - all the groups and atomic numbers and stuff like that.
And, Lord knows, there's nothing in the periodic table that tells you anything useful about chemistry.:-)
Seriously, I understand your ironic tone here, but I don't think it comes across well in your post.
Doing this calculation naively from the perl command line (for example) gives the result you state. The Calculator widget under 10.4.2, however, gives the result you seem to want. I think you're right that this is the correct answer to give in the context that's most likely to come up with somebody using the calculator app, but if you were doing serious floating point calculations, you don't want the computer to act like it had some kind of DWIM mode.
To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.
Ooh...that works great. Now why is that icon a weird "don't go here" red button rather than a trash can? But thanks for helping me blow away Hula Girl in like 2 seconds.:-)
Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me at all. It might be that I'm using a faster Mac (or have a smaller hard disk to search.) You are, however, absolutely right about Dashboard widgets. Even if you don't want this to be default behavior (to reload a bunch of stuff), refreshing in the background should definitely be an option.
Some widgets I use a ton (e.g., Wikipedia) don't really have a problem like this, but most of the real weather ones sure do.
It wasn't on the list of bugs fixed as far as I can tell, but it now appears that you can make and save annotations on a PDF document using Preview.
This is really great, but, of course, when I really needed this was right after Tiger came out when I was grading a bunch of undergrad papers, and could have done it all electronically...
I know it will never happen, but it would be nice to see some more bugzilla like representation of current issues with more applications. I also think that the "bug" (reporting) icon that Safari has should work in every app. And they also need to find a way to put a pony in every box...
Basically, you can use the annotate tool to create the annotation boxes, and type anything you like in them, but your text is not saved when you hit save. This is most unfortunate (he says, hoping he could use this feature to mark the term papers he has to grade next week).
OK, first I'd like to clarify that I'm not that interested in a Google OS in the sense of: something you need to have to boot your machine. What I *am* interested in, however, is something like a remotely mounted Googlefs archive of all my files, lovingly backed up and redundantly kept available and, yes, google-searchable at will. And the irony here is this is *just* because:
Also, as if this needs to be said, it's not exactly the most practical idea for notebook users, is it? Last time I checked, wi-fi wasn't universal.
Actually, NOT having user files on one machine is *precisely* the most practical idea for notebook users. Right now, the biggest pain I go through on a daily basis is syncing everything up. Given my essentially casual nature and the fact that I use any of 4 different PCs and a notebook during the day, this becomes a hassle. Now, sure, some things are already remote mounts from the university, but not everything I have really belongs there, and they have a pretty tiny quota by default.
And as far as wifi not being universal, maybe it's not in some backwater locations, but here in central Missouri it's as good as universal. We have wireless in every building I work in, on campus generally, in every restaurant/coffeeshop I go to regularly, at home (of course). Also at every airport I've been to recently, at the conference site for the last 8 consecutive meetings I've been to, at 7 out of the last 8 hotels I've been to for said conferences... No, it's not completely seemless. Yes, quality has varied. But wireless connectivity in my life really is getting up to complete.
Or I can put it another way: inside of 3 years, you'll be able to buy a notebook computer that will have *no hard disk at all*; it will have 20 gigs of flash, firewire and USB ports, and maybe just maybe a DVD/CD (but I doubt it). Disklessness is where I want to be, and if Google can make it so, I'll pay them actual money for that blessed state.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh! Good call. So far the stock's down 2.91% on the day. :-)
I love gmail greatly, and would gladly pay for it. If the stability of the thing were improved. Right now, I'm in the really bad situation of depending on Gmail for non-trivial things, and if this lasts much longer, I might have to switch to some other service.
On the topic of *this* thread...the big problem with finance.google.com is indeed the lack of acquisition data for holdings in your portfolio. You really want and need that, especially come tax time if you need to claim cap gains and losses.
In a word: yes it does. A lot. For starters, The loss from 2004 to 2006 looks more like $124M to me, which is a 2.2% cut But that's not really stating the full extent of the problem, since these are nominal dollars and not real dollars. If we assume the inflation rate is 3%, we find that the level (no real cuts) budget for 2006 should have been $5,941M.
The budget as proposed is a 7.8% cut over the two years. This is the problem, and yes, it is a huge one. And the article points out that the era of austerity for science is only beginning at NASA.
In other news, the NIH budget, which was doubled in recent years, is about to be treated in a similar way to the NASA budget. This year's proposed appropriation was flat. I would feel a lot better about these moves if I were convinced that they reflected a careful planning process and a real change in priorities, but it looks a lot more like somebody is arranging the fiscal details around the political message. We're going to Mars, like it or not, and we shouldn't have cut the NSF in the recent past, so now we'll stiff the NIH to get NSF funding back to where you could argue it should be. That's not really a coherent science policy at work.
Ouch; I'm not exactly sure where you came up with those liquidity numbers, but I find that I can't dispute their accuracy. Yahoo Finance tells me that 103% of their stock is owned by insiders and institutional investors. This suggests that most of the trading activity is going from the left hand to the right hand, and exists primarily to make sure that the stock is not de-listed. The stock has a market cap consistent with the probability that either IBM just buys them to end the nonsense or somebody else buys them the dessicated remains just to keep a lawsuit going at IBM for whatever reason. If we assume that somebody thinks the sole positive outcome of the lawsuit could be worth $5 billion for SCO in a cash settlement, the market says the odds of this are about 2%. Mega ouch.
Uh...no. The iBook will be all Centrino Solo, running at 1.5 GHz for the $899 starter model and 1.66 GHz for the 14" and loaded 12" models. The Powerbooks will be the only Intel Macs offering dual core processors, since Steve Jobs isn't going to screw himself.
Seriously, why does anybody think that an entry level notebook from Apple is going to get the best dual core notebook processor on the market? It Just Won't Happen. The mini is a more interesting issue; I think we'll see a "classic mini" paralleling the iBook, but also a mini-on-steroids meant for home entertainment, and that will be an all-stops-out component of high end video, or a built-in with a new large plasma screen TV/computer.
About the Powerbooks, what people haven't paid much attention to is the fact that Intel will be offering a single core low end version of Yonah. Ladies and gentlemen: your new iBook. This then frees the faster dual core models to be the PowerBook Advantage (tm). Similarly, the Mac mini will be single core. The re-revised iMac, which may or may not come at MacWorld, will be dual core. Higher performance desktop class chips will be used in the new PowerMacs, due in several months. Interestingly, Apple has almost no incentive to mess with the XServe line until Intel provides something really compelling.
About iWork: I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Pages is lacking many, many, many features. It's not integrated with any citation software, it's really slow, its html export features are not quite there, it chokes on large documents, it's really slow, there seems to be an issue with color calibration of embedded PDFs (anybody else see this?), its Word import is pretty buggy, and it's really slow. Also, slowness is an issue unless you're using the latest/greatest hardware. That said, Pages is the very best scientific conference poster maker of all time, bar none. You can use Keynote for this as well, but Pages, being a page layout program more than a presentation program, is more suitable, at least in my hands.
Keynote is getting quite nice, on the other hand. I don't like the UI for some "do this to all slides" tasks like defaulting transitions to incremental. Its Powerpoint import/export could be better, and I wish I knew the way to get it to default to the "reduce file size" Quartz filter on PDF export. Also, I'd like to be able to export to a useful HTML format; presumably, somebody could write a Keynote/S5 converter, but if they did it before the file format were really fixed, they'd just get hosed over by the next format change.
Evidently, what counts as "significant" for some people differs from others. I use gmail as my preferred email account these days, and here's what I've seen:
So I can understand if you feel like there are things that Gmail could do even better, or do differently, but to pretend that nothing happened to Gmail in 2005 is just plain weird.
Probably not so many. My last story got rejected, but it was just the latest ThinkSecret rumor about Yonah-based notebooks and minis. To be honest, there aren't that many real Apple stories these days. That should change as we get closer to MacWorld Expo. They might be able to use a real story on the G4- and G5-optimized builds of Firefox, but other than that...I'm not thinking of much.
One thing to point out is that scientific fraud at this level of the scientific game, while not unprecedented, is quire rare. And a big part of this is simply due to the fact that anything truly important is worth replicating and extending, and a result that was faked is often impossible to replicate because it is the wrong result. I like to think that scientists are more honest than average, but surely to some extent it is the fear and shame of being caught doing this that keeps them more honest than that.
So I was trying to think of frauds that even come close to competing with the high profile that this case could assume, and it hasn't been easy. The Piltdown Hoax was very different in spirit. The faking of data in the report of element 118 might be close, but the original report got nothing like press attention that the Korean cloning breakthrough did. Can anybody else think of anything that really would compete?
So I'm really trying to figure out what your point is here. If I have two tools I use in my work, and one costs twice what the other does, are you really saying that makes no sense? A few weeks ago, I used like $100 worth of precision tools to take apart an iBook, but I put the parts I got out in a $2 mini-muffin tin. Was there something wrong there?
The closest I can get to a useful argument here is (I think) your opinion that a $300 camera can't generate pictures "good enough" for a $500 editing program, but that isn't a slam-dunk these days, especially if the software saves you a lot of time no matter how much you camera costs *and* your time is worth something. Another possibility is that you're pointing out that most casual users probably don't use most of the features from the $500 piece of software, and would be better off using something cheaper and spending the other money on something else. Now, that would be my opinion most of the time, but I don't see that it has much to do with how fancy your camera is...
I agree that this is obviously hype. For starters, PCR is an important part of finger-printing, but it doesn't give you the sequence. It just amplifies the DNA; you might be able to go a different way for rapid (but not completely accurate) identification. For people who don't do much PCR or sequencing or the whole process, it goes like this:
So it would be nice to miniaturize and (thus) build faster thermocyclers, but it alone would not be a panacea. So the last point about 30-30-30: if you've got good primers, ideal sequence, and a short product, you can cut those times down quite a bit in some situations. I've seen (nominal) extension times in RT-PCR as short as 8 seconds being used for ~100 bp sequences. But that's still not the whole cycle, and you still need to multiply by 30-35 for the number of cycles, and the target article is just a hype-y blurb.
We are all touched by His Noodly Appendage. May the FSM hear our prayers in the name of the Parmesan, the Romano, and the Crushed Red Pepper. Amen.
I already did contribute the money. Twice. Nothing much happened (this was 3-4 years ago), so I got discouraged. To be brutally honest, right now Perl needs fewer ideas (they should junk Parrot TODAY if it is slowing anything else down) and less praise. The thing that must be communicated is this: if we don't have a beta by summer 2006, we are _dead_. Pugs has done a world of good to help Perl6 already (we would surely be dead if that project hadn't started up), and if I had any time at all, I would try to write code for that. If the Perl Foundation were serious at all, they'd buy out Autrijus so he didn't have to worry about $work until next summer. Then we would probably have Perl6. If they don't, we won't. I'm thinking it's getting just about this simple, although I'd love to be wrong.
What you say is true, but misses a major, major point. Perl right now has a pretty horrible reputation in some quarters, and even though it might be the result of kvetching from a lot of uninformed people, pointing this out is not a solution to the problem. More than a couple of political campaigns have gone down in flames when candidates made no useful response to baseless negative campaigning. Right now, I'm finally getting more excited by Perl6 now that there looks like there will be one, but we're still realistically looking at January 2007 for that, which is about seven years after the effort started.
Given the comment at the very end of your post about Ruby, you realize the kind of mortal peril that Perl finds itself in. If Matz had not been Japanese, and therefore more of the Ruby docs had been available in English maybe 3 years earlier, Perl could have ended up stone cold dead. What the new leadership has got to keep in mind is very simple: if we don't finish Perl6 *right now*, we're all going to die. This was not the only way to have done things, but so much has been invested in Perl6 for so long that there is really no way to make Perl5 better in ways that will convince people that it isn't last year's language. If only a bit more thought had gone into Perl5 these last five years or so, we'd be in better shape right now.
But I have one more point to make, while I'm on the soap box:
That's not completely true. Like it or not, every Perl variable name has a piece of line noise attached to it that 90% of the time clarifies nothing. For that matter, there is the madness surrounding lexical variables in Perl. Using them is good programming practice, but every declaration of such a thing adds another "my" to the list. It would have been SO EASY to define a flag or a pragma noting that all of the declarations in a file were implicitly of "my" variables, but this never happened. And then there is the fiasco of function argument declarations. As in: Perl, unique among all other scripting languages doesn't yet have useful parameter lists in function definitions Every time I type somehing like my ($foo, bar, $baz) = @_; I think to myself "lame lame lame". Sure, Perl6 solves this one quite handily, and gives eleventy-seven different ways to call and declare function parameters, but Yeesh! Did we really have to wait for the One Great Perl to arrive to get something that sucks less than Javascript 1.0 in this respect?
I have been a Perl programmer for 14 years now, and I think the world of what it can do. But I am telling you this: if we don't fix Perl, we will die. The seven lean years will kill us unless we make it completely obvious to people how superior Perl6 is, and unless we make sure that it really is out there to hack with. If betas of Perl 6 don't arrive before the middle of 2006, I swear we are doomed. Please do everything in your power to make sure this doen't happen.
Thanks for listening. :-)
By all means we should not forget them. And, while I know that you know this, other Slashdot readers might not know that both of these amazing men are dead, having died far too young. Sigh...there are days when I feel I am the last person on the planet to have used troff, Scribe, and LaTeX. And troff started the whole game.
Ah, Pages. The program has some neat features, but has all of the hallmarks of being rushed out of the door for the 1.0 release. It's a nifty program for making flyers, and maybe short newsletters, but it's pretty much a loss to do any serious word processing in the thing, as it currently stands. In a way, it doesn't surprise me to hear that TextEdit is leading the way on the XML front, despite the fact that Pages has an XML native format...
Holy cow; I you mean I'll have to register a bunch of typo domin names as well? That's progress for you...
Now you get double extra bonus geek points if your name is in fact "Chris Kydd", but I'm sure you get that comment a lot. :-)
And, Lord knows, there's nothing in the periodic table that tells you anything useful about chemistry. :-)
Seriously, I understand your ironic tone here, but I don't think it comes across well in your post.
Doing this calculation naively from the perl command line (for example) gives the result you state. The Calculator widget under 10.4.2, however, gives the result you seem to want. I think you're right that this is the correct answer to give in the context that's most likely to come up with somebody using the calculator app, but if you were doing serious floating point calculations, you don't want the computer to act like it had some kind of DWIM mode.
Ooh...that works great. Now why is that icon a weird "don't go here" red button rather than a trash can? But thanks for helping me blow away Hula Girl in like 2 seconds. :-)
Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me at all. It might be that I'm using a faster Mac (or have a smaller hard disk to search.) You are, however, absolutely right about Dashboard widgets. Even if you don't want this to be default behavior (to reload a bunch of stuff), refreshing in the background should definitely be an option.
Some widgets I use a ton (e.g., Wikipedia) don't really have a problem like this, but most of the real weather ones sure do.
Slashdot user 837? So who should be bowing to whom here?
This is really great, but, of course, when I really needed this was right after Tiger came out when I was grading a bunch of undergrad papers, and could have done it all electronically...
I know it will never happen, but it would be nice to see some more bugzilla like representation of current issues with more applications. I also think that the "bug" (reporting) icon that Safari has should work in every app. And they also need to find a way to put a pony in every box...
Basically, you can use the annotate tool to create the annotation boxes, and type anything you like in them, but your text is not saved when you hit save. This is most unfortunate (he says, hoping he could use this feature to mark the term papers he has to grade next week).
Does anybody have a work-around for this?
OK, first I'd like to clarify that I'm not that interested in a Google OS in the sense of: something you need to have to boot your machine. What I *am* interested in, however, is something like a remotely mounted Googlefs archive of all my files, lovingly backed up and redundantly kept available and, yes, google-searchable at will. And the irony here is this is *just* because:
Actually, NOT having user files on one machine is *precisely* the most practical idea for notebook users. Right now, the biggest pain I go through on a daily basis is syncing everything up. Given my essentially casual nature and the fact that I use any of 4 different PCs and a notebook during the day, this becomes a hassle. Now, sure, some things are already remote mounts from the university, but not everything I have really belongs there, and they have a pretty tiny quota by default.
And as far as wifi not being universal, maybe it's not in some backwater locations, but here in central Missouri it's as good as universal. We have wireless in every building I work in, on campus generally, in every restaurant/coffeeshop I go to regularly, at home (of course). Also at every airport I've been to recently, at the conference site for the last 8 consecutive meetings I've been to, at 7 out of the last 8 hotels I've been to for said conferences... No, it's not completely seemless. Yes, quality has varied. But wireless connectivity in my life really is getting up to complete.
Or I can put it another way: inside of 3 years, you'll be able to buy a notebook computer that will have *no hard disk at all*; it will have 20 gigs of flash, firewire and USB ports, and maybe just maybe a DVD/CD (but I doubt it). Disklessness is where I want to be, and if Google can make it so, I'll pay them actual money for that blessed state.