Sure, Perl's syntax for dereferencing sucks: @array{$listofarrays->[$element]}
Maybe it does, but your words would have more effect if you actually used valid syntax. Your syntax is so hopelessly wrong, I can't even guess what you want to do.
A normal deference would be: $arrayref -> [1]; # Or ${$arrayref} [1]; Is that so much harder, than say, C?
If you are thinking about learning Perl, do you (and anyone who has to maintain your code) a favour, and learn Python instead.
Why is it that any thread on slashdot about Perl have people saying "use Python instead"? Or should I say, how come that Larry gets such an interview, and Guido doesn't? If Python is so much better, then why don't I see as many Python items on slashdot as I see Perl items?
Mind, I'm not saying Perl is better than Python. They are different. For some people, Perl works better than Python. For others, Pythons works better. I would never recommend Perl as a first language; I might recommend Python. But there are lots of people who no longer need a language with training wheels, although some never can part from the comfort of having them.
-- Abigail
Re:MS SQL Server Sucks Rocks then coughs up blood
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
·
· Score: 1
dbcc's and 17hr queries - quess who is using Microsoft SQL Server.
I've no idea. I've never used Microsoft SQL Server.
Do you know that the upgrade to a full licence of SQL Server trashes any and all development / test databases you might have run using the Evaluation licence version?
Uhm, no. Why should I bother learning trivia like that? I've never run anything Microsoftish in my life. The closest I've ever got was having an unplugged NT machine under my desk.
Lets see, some old crone spills Mcdonalds coffee on her cooter - MULTIMILLIONS.
Yeah, yeah, but that's only part of the story.
"The old crone" wasn't quite smart and spilled coffee that turned out to be quite hot. So, she needed medical attention. Urged by her ensurance company, she turned to McDonalds to get her medical expenses covered - McDonalds had an existing track record of paying such expenses.
Now, McDonalds tried to make use of the fact she was "an old crone", and refused to pay. Since her medical expenses weren't trivial, she decided to sue, and found some kick ass lawyers. The rest is history.
Had McDonalds just paid her medical expenses, McDonalds wouldn't have lost the millions.
I don't know about Japan, but satire is protected here
"here" is an interesting concept to be used on a medium like the WWW. It basically doesn't say anything.
Having said that, I don't think `satire' is any defense. Uri Geller made fame in the 70s. Pokemon is aiming at kids, most of them being single digit years old. Show me one kid with memories of the 70s that's still younger than 10 years old. Satire needs context to be satire, and the context isn't here. Not to mention that satire is entirely lost on the target audience of pokemon. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more children believing pokemons are real than there are adults believing Uri Geller is for real.
I think Uri Geller has a case. The fact he's a charletan doesn't matter. As for the enormous amount of money, that's probably to have a lot negotiation grounds for an out-of-court settlement.
-- Abigail, who rather sees a Uri Geller performance than pokemon nonsense.
Re:The importance (or lack thereof) of uptime
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
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· Score: 1
The kernel is so out of date that any random script kiddie can grab an exploit or buffer overflow from bugtraq and root the system, obviously not a Good Thing if your computer is running any sort of critical task.
You got that all wrong. It should read:
The fact a script kiddie can send a single IP package to your machine is not a Good Thing if your computer is running any sort of task that has any importance.
If you really, really have to have (Inter)net connectivity on your box with a critical task (which seems unlikely) one should use a firewall.
-- Abigail
Re:The importance (or lack thereof) of uptime
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
·
· Score: 1
I would also hope that one performs the neccesary upgrades at off peak hours.
But you don't always have off-peak hours. Take a company with offices in in New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Singapore, and a central mail server. There are no off peak hours.
And even if there are off-peak hours, there's often so much to do, you cannot do it all in the maintainance window, and some things have to wait.
-- Abigail
Re:The importance (or lack thereof) of uptime
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
·
· Score: 1
Not that going down once every month will prevent you from having a day-long outage.
Well, if your database has been cranking for 17 hours to do the end of the month report, you crash, and you spend 7 hours running dbcc's untill your database server is back up, than you would count in my book as "having a day-long outage".
And that's excluding the time figuring out *why* the system crashed.
The only claim was that having an uptime ny longer than the most recent necessary security patch is stupid.
Not at all. That's why there are firewalls. Besides, for the majority of real computers out there (not counting the toys at peoples homes) net connectivity is just an extra, not a necessity.
When you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk', you're insulting the people putting money in your pockets.
And it's ok to insult people who don't put money in your pocket?
John Cleese once said: "Noone has the right not to be insulted.".
why don't you sit back and think how much you knew about computers when you first sat down at one
Oh, that must have been that autumn afternoon back in 1984, in a computer lab full with other people in the same situation. Indeed, I didn't know much about computers at that moment. But I had two things. A manual, and the ability to read. BTW, there was not much tech support - just a TA who wouldn't hesitate to mock you for doing stupid things.
I feel like an idiot when I have had to call tech support
I usually feel sorry for myself when I have to call tech support, as generally, tech support consists of clueless morons. I dealt with tech support of my ISP once (when I signed on) and I had questions and answers like: TS: "How will you be accessing your email?" Me, wondering why they want to know: "Oh, fetchmail I guess, using POP or IMAP, whatever you support." TS: "We only support Netscape and Internet Explorer". Me: "Uh, yeah, and how do you think Netscape or Internet Explorer get the email?" TS: "Uhm, uhm, I don't know." .... Me: "One more question, what is your pop or imap server?" TS: "We don't have those." Me: "What did you say?" TS: "We don't have those." Me: "You are an ISP and you don't have a pop or imap server? Why am I signing up with you?" TS: "Well..." Me: [telnet obvious.obvious.com 110] "FYI, it looks like you have a pop server on obvious.obvious.com."
I've had many dealing with Sybase tech support as well. A whole army of dummies, although there are a few exceptions. You explain them what the problem is. Tell them that, yes, you have shutdown and restarted the server, you have done your dbcc's, and no tempdb isn't full, nor are we running out of locks or another resource problem, and yes, I've followed all the steps in the manual, up to the point were it says "contact Sybase tech support", and all they can suggest is to try things I told them I had already done. Or the dumb bimbo who after two hours on the phone still couldn't reproduce the problem because she had no clue how to set an environment variable. I had to email her a shell script so she could reproduce the problem. Her reply? "If I run that, I end up in an editor". Yes. *wack* I *wack* have *wack* been *wack* trying *wack* to *wack* tell *wack* you *wack* that *wack* for *wack* the *wack* past *wack* few *wack* hours. *wack* BTW *wack* here's *wack* a *wack* workaround *wack* Can *wack* you *wack* now *wack* please *wack* log *wack* the *wack* bug *wack* in *wack* your *wack* bugtracking *wack* system? *wack* *wack* *wack*.
Tech support "escalating" a case aren't fun either. I once got a request from tech support to contact a customer who had a database problem, which I promptly refused to do. Database problems of a client aren't our problem, they have to contact their database vendor. And no, I don't care if your PHB says that you have to be nice to the customer. It's not our problem. Besides, the reported error has an error number. There's a manual where you can look up the error and it tells you what to do. If you don't want to tell the client to RTFM, RTFM yourself. And to top it of, the error messages even tells you want you need to do to fix the problem....
And then there's my blind friend, who can't always read the manual and hence have to call tech support more often than sighted people have to. Many support people will, even after being told that she's blind, give her instructions to click with the mouse on some icon....
Lusers are a nightmare to deal with, but tech support isn't much better either.
Oh, BTW, I've done tech support myself, and I think UF is funny. Scott's strip however....
It's like installing a 1.x kernel and saying, "I want it to do this so I'm gonna code that" when it's already in a later release, -and- you lose everything that's been added since then and have to write it all over. Does that sound like progress?
It's like Linus saying "Let's start all over" and creating Linux, instead of just enhancing Minix. Or Thomson and Ritchie enchancing an existing OS instead of creating Unix. You think we would be better off if they had not started from scratch?
Pay on delivery I suppose, or with his credit card. Dotcomguy is getting a nice amount of money for this. $24 dollars the first month, and each month the amount doubles. Which means that over a year, he'll get $98,280.
Just wanted to add my thanks to you guys (and girls) out there who DID spend countless hours making sure we'd have heat and light and water on New Year's Day.
I've always wondered about that. Even if a heat or light system would have a Y2K bug, why would that mean it no longer would provide us with water or heat? Is the system coded in such a way that it thinks 1900 is a very warm year all around, and noone needs heating? Or that people in 19100 no longer need water? What kind of dating bug would actually lead to a shutdown of a system - in such a way that a manual override doesn't work either?
But humans don't. A large fragment of code written has been written by humans. Furthermore, people have been spotted doing data entry - and rumour goes they use a decimal number system for their data entry. But that's just rumours. I'm sure your credit card has a binary number, and an expire date in binary. And could you repeat your birthday again, in binary please?
Jan 2 01:12 cpu0: SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi (upaid 0 impl 0x12 ver 0x13 clock 333 MHz) SunOS Release 5.6 Version Generic_105181-15 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
Frankly, I fail to see your point. In fact, doesn't it exactly confirm what I said? dmesg on my Linux machine for instance mentions Linux version 2.2.13 (abigail@alexandra) (gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #2 Wed Nov 3 12:57:15 EST 1999 and not the Debian release. Or are you suggesting that dmesg doesn't mention the kernel version, but the name of the distribution of the kernel, and all the packages, like the windowing system?
That's not quite true. SunOS 5.7 is not Solaris 7, just like Linux 2.0.22 isn't Debian 2.2. SunOS is the kernel, while Solaris is the distribution.
As for dropping the leading 2, Solaris went from version 1 to version 2 when Sun switched from a BSD to a System V based kernel. (People tend to refer to "SunOS 4" went talking about Solaris 1). Suns says they never plan to make such an incompatible chance again, and hence they dropped the redundant leading 2 in the Solaris version number.
It's partially marketing of course, but at least it has some reasoning, and it isn't doing any major leaps in version numbers.
but to what extent does her role in the creation of COBOL stand for or against her ?
The creation of COBOL isn't what gives Grace Hopper a place in a top 10. The creation of COBOL is just a result of her pioneering work on the concept, and implementation of early compilers. When she first starting with computers, there were no compilers, or higher level languages. But the result of her work shaped the computing world as we know of to a large extend: high level languages and compilers. Without her, many of the people on/. wouldn't have the job they have now. And that ears her a place on the list.
I agree that a political hijacker probably wouldn't mind if the pilot passes out, but in that case, very little would. You can't negotiate with someone who already has what he wants (hostages and media coverage). There is still the probability of the political hijacker failing to get the pilot's oxygen mask in time.
In most cases of political hijacks, none, or only a few of the hostages are killed. You seem to be willing to gamble with the lives of the passengers. I'd say the pilot passing out is a big loss.
I personally would refuse to fly if they had to put me through that thing.
14 year olds should be able to read. The article clearly said it's a choice you have as an alternative to being frisked. If you don't want it, you do not have to. Apparently, you seem to be happy with being felt up with - I guess everyone has his preferences.
Of course, to get as far as getting offered a choice, they first have to suspect you from carrying something illegal - for instance, repeatedly setting of the metal detector with something that you don't remove, not even after the magic wand waved at you.
To be scanned with this machine, you have to do three things first:
Opt to fly in a plane with many other people whose safety depends on your behaviour.
Behave in a way that makes security officers suspect you of carrying illegal/dangerous goods.
Choose the scanner instead of being frisked.
All that time, it was just metal detector after metal detector.
These new scanners are not a replacement for metal detectors. They only come in play if you repeatedly set off the metal detector, and fail to produce the goods that set of the metal detector.
I'm sure a 14 year old girl would hate it even more.
And the reason for a 14 year old girl to hate it more is....?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I do. The topic is an interview of Larry, not an interview of Guido. Discussing Python is off-topic.
-- Abigail
@array{$listofarrays->[$element]}
Maybe it does, but your words would have more effect if you actually used valid syntax. Your syntax is so hopelessly wrong, I can't even guess what you want to do.
A normal deference would be:
$arrayref -> [1]; # Or
${$arrayref} [1];
Is that so much harder, than say, C?
-- Abigail
Why is it that any thread on slashdot about Perl have people saying "use Python instead"? Or should I say, how come that Larry gets such an interview, and Guido doesn't? If Python is so much better, then why don't I see as many Python items on slashdot as I see Perl items?
Mind, I'm not saying Perl is better than Python. They are different. For some people, Perl works better than Python. For others, Pythons works better. I would never recommend Perl as a first language; I might recommend Python. But there are lots of people who no longer need a language with training wheels, although some never can part from the comfort of having them.
-- Abigail
I've no idea. I've never used Microsoft SQL Server.
Do you know that the upgrade to a full licence of SQL Server trashes any and all development / test databases you might have run using the Evaluation licence version?
Uhm, no. Why should I bother learning trivia like that? I've never run anything Microsoftish in my life. The closest I've ever got was having an unplugged NT machine under my desk.
-- Abigail
Yeah, yeah, but that's only part of the story.
"The old crone" wasn't quite smart and spilled coffee that turned out to be quite hot. So, she needed medical attention. Urged by her ensurance company, she turned to McDonalds to get her medical expenses covered - McDonalds had an existing track record of paying such expenses.
Now, McDonalds tried to make use of the fact she was "an old crone", and refused to pay. Since her medical expenses weren't trivial, she decided to sue, and found some kick ass lawyers. The rest is history.
Had McDonalds just paid her medical expenses, McDonalds wouldn't have lost the millions.
-- Abigail
"here" is an interesting concept to be used on a medium like the WWW. It basically doesn't say anything.
Having said that, I don't think `satire' is any defense. Uri Geller made fame in the 70s. Pokemon is aiming at kids, most of them being single digit years old. Show me one kid with memories of the 70s that's still younger than 10 years old. Satire needs context to be satire, and the context isn't here. Not to mention that satire is entirely lost on the target audience of pokemon. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more children believing pokemons are real than there are adults believing Uri Geller is for real.
I think Uri Geller has a case. The fact he's a charletan doesn't matter. As for the enormous amount of money, that's probably to have a lot negotiation grounds for an out-of-court settlement.
-- Abigail, who rather sees a Uri Geller performance than pokemon nonsense.
You got that all wrong. It should read:
The fact a script kiddie can send a single IP package to your machine is not a Good Thing if your computer is running any sort of task that has any importance.
If you really, really have to have (Inter)net connectivity on your box with a critical task (which seems unlikely) one should use a firewall.
-- Abigail
But you don't always have off-peak hours. Take a company with offices in in New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Singapore, and a central mail server. There are no off peak hours.
And even if there are off-peak hours, there's often so much to do, you cannot do it all in the maintainance window, and some things have to wait.
-- Abigail
Well, if your database has been cranking for 17 hours to do the end of the month report, you crash, and you spend 7 hours running dbcc's untill your database server is back up, than you would count in my book as "having a day-long outage".
And that's excluding the time figuring out *why* the system crashed.
The only claim was that having an uptime ny longer than the most recent necessary security patch is stupid.
Not at all. That's why there are firewalls. Besides, for the majority of real computers out there (not counting the toys at peoples homes) net connectivity is just an extra, not a necessity.
-- Abigail
And it's ok to insult people who don't put money in your pocket?
John Cleese once said: "Noone has the right not to be insulted.".
why don't you sit back and think how much you knew about computers when you first sat down at one
Oh, that must have been that autumn afternoon back in 1984, in a computer lab full with other people in the same situation. Indeed, I didn't know much about computers at that moment. But I had two things. A manual, and the ability to read. BTW, there was not much tech support - just a TA who wouldn't hesitate to mock you for doing stupid things.
-- Abigail
I usually feel sorry for myself when I have to call tech support, as generally, tech support consists of clueless morons. I dealt with tech support of my ISP once (when I signed on) and I had questions and answers like:
....
TS: "How will you be accessing your email?"
Me, wondering why they want to know: "Oh, fetchmail I guess, using POP or IMAP, whatever you support."
TS: "We only support Netscape and Internet Explorer".
Me: "Uh, yeah, and how do you think Netscape or Internet Explorer get the email?"
TS: "Uhm, uhm, I don't know."
Me: "One more question, what is your pop or imap server?"
TS: "We don't have those."
Me: "What did you say?"
TS: "We don't have those."
Me: "You are an ISP and you don't have a pop or imap server? Why am I signing up with you?"
TS: "Well..."
Me: [telnet obvious.obvious.com 110] "FYI, it looks like you have a pop server on obvious.obvious.com."
I've had many dealing with Sybase tech support as well. A whole army of dummies, although there are a few exceptions. You explain them what the problem is. Tell them that, yes, you have shutdown and restarted the server, you have done your dbcc's, and no tempdb isn't full, nor are we running out of locks or another resource problem, and yes, I've followed all the steps in the manual, up to the point were it says "contact Sybase tech support", and all they can suggest is to try things I told them I had already done. Or the dumb bimbo who after two hours on the phone still couldn't reproduce the problem because she had no clue how to set an environment variable. I had to email her a shell script so she could reproduce the problem. Her reply? "If I run that, I end up in an editor". Yes. *wack* I *wack* have *wack* been *wack* trying *wack* to *wack* tell *wack* you *wack* that *wack* for *wack* the *wack* past *wack* few *wack* hours. *wack* BTW *wack* here's *wack* a *wack* workaround *wack* Can *wack* you *wack* now *wack* please *wack* log *wack* the *wack* bug *wack* in *wack* your *wack* bugtracking *wack* system? *wack* *wack* *wack*.
Tech support "escalating" a case aren't fun either. I once got a request from tech support to contact a customer who had a database problem, which I promptly refused to do. Database problems of a client aren't our problem, they have to contact their database vendor. And no, I don't care if your PHB says that you have to be nice to the customer. It's not our problem. Besides, the reported error has an error number. There's a manual where you can look up the error and it tells you what to do. If you don't want to tell the client to RTFM, RTFM yourself. And to top it of, the error messages even tells you want you need to do to fix the problem....
And then there's my blind friend, who can't always read the manual and hence have to call tech support more often than sighted people have to. Many support people will, even after being told that she's blind, give her instructions to click with the mouse on some icon....
Lusers are a nightmare to deal with, but tech support isn't much better either.
Oh, BTW, I've done tech support myself, and I think UF is funny. Scott's strip however....
-- Abigail
It's like Linus saying "Let's start all over" and creating Linux, instead of just enhancing Minix. Or Thomson and Ritchie enchancing an existing OS instead of creating Unix. You think we would be better off if they had not started from scratch?
-- Abigail
-- Abigail
Nah, he just orders a sherpa over the web to climb the Everest for him.
-- Abigail
Pay on delivery I suppose, or with his credit card. Dotcomguy is getting a nice amount of money for this. $24 dollars the first month, and each month the amount doubles. Which means that over a year, he'll get $98,280.
-- Abigail
I've always wondered about that. Even if a heat or light system would have a Y2K bug, why would that mean it no longer would provide us with water or heat? Is the system coded in such a way that it thinks 1900 is a very warm year all around, and noone needs heating? Or that people in 19100 no longer need water? What kind of dating bug would actually lead to a shutdown of a system - in such a way that a manual override doesn't work either?
I'm curious.
-- Abigail
But humans don't. A large fragment of code written has been written by humans. Furthermore, people have been spotted doing data entry - and rumour goes they use a decimal number system for their data entry. But that's just rumours. I'm sure your credit card has a binary number, and an expire date in binary. And could you repeat your birthday again, in binary please?
-- Abigail
Jan 2 01:12
cpu0: SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi (upaid 0 impl 0x12 ver 0x13 clock 333 MHz)
SunOS Release 5.6 Version Generic_105181-15 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
Frankly, I fail to see your point. In fact, doesn't it exactly confirm what I said? dmesg on my Linux machine for instance mentions
Linux version 2.2.13 (abigail@alexandra) (gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #2 Wed Nov 3 12:57:15 EST 1999
and not the Debian release. Or are you suggesting that dmesg doesn't mention the kernel version, but the name of the distribution of the kernel, and all the packages, like the windowing system?
-- Abigail
That's not quite true. SunOS 5.7 is not Solaris 7, just like Linux 2.0.22 isn't Debian 2.2. SunOS is the kernel, while Solaris is the distribution.
As for dropping the leading 2, Solaris went from version 1 to version 2 when Sun switched from a BSD to a System V based kernel. (People tend to refer to "SunOS 4" went talking about Solaris 1). Suns says they never plan to make such an incompatible chance again, and hence they dropped the redundant leading 2 in the Solaris version number.
It's partially marketing of course, but at least it has some reasoning, and it isn't doing any major leaps in version numbers.
-- Abigail
The creation of COBOL isn't what gives Grace Hopper a place in a top 10. The creation of COBOL is just a result of her pioneering work on the concept, and implementation of early compilers. When she first starting with computers, there were no compilers, or higher level languages. But the result of her work shaped the computing world as we know of to a large extend: high level languages and compilers. Without her, many of the people on /. wouldn't have the job they have now. And that ears her a place on the list.
-- Abigail
You are. Most people aren't.
-- Abigail
In most cases of political hijacks, none, or only a few of the hostages are killed. You seem to be willing to gamble with the lives of the passengers. I'd say the pilot passing out is a big loss.
-- Abigail
You shouldn't take a job if that involves doing things you seriously object to.
-- Abigail
And your suggestion how to get security without trading in your privacy is....?
-- Abigail
I personally would refuse to fly if they had to put me through that thing.
14 year olds should be able to read. The article clearly said it's a choice you have as an alternative to being frisked. If you don't want it, you do not have to. Apparently, you seem to be happy with being felt up with - I guess everyone has his preferences.
Of course, to get as far as getting offered a choice, they first have to suspect you from carrying something illegal - for instance, repeatedly setting of the metal detector with something that you don't remove, not even after the magic wand waved at you.
To be scanned with this machine, you have to do three things first:
All that time, it was just metal detector after metal detector.
These new scanners are not a replacement for metal detectors. They only come in play if you repeatedly set off the metal detector, and fail to produce the goods that set of the metal detector.
I'm sure a 14 year old girl would hate it even more.
And the reason for a 14 year old girl to hate it more is....?
-- Abigail