That's completely beside the point. You're library might not have smut in the stacks (although I'd double check that before making the assertion. Libraries carry a lot of surprising stuff for research. You just might have to ask for it specifically), but the library doesn't pull The Age of Reason just because it uses some of the same words as Hustler. That's effectively what current censorware does.
Will SPACE be airing the NEW mini-series DUNE starring William Hurt and Giancarlo Giannini?
YES! SPACE: The Imagination Station will be airing a NEW version of Frank Herbert's epic novel, DUNE, in form of a T.V mini-series closer to the new-year. At this time we do not have a specific date or time to give you. Keep watching SPACE and logging on to our website for further details as they become available.
Well I understand them because when Internet came up with the Web, many
of us also wanted the same thing.
Yeah, but at least we grew out of it. Law enforcement institutions aren't exactly known for their growing maturity. Hell, most lawmen I've met were stunted adolescents for that matter.
Just read the article (has some very interesting insights) and though it doesn't really draw any conclusions, it demonstrates very well why.Net's not going to work.
To quote form the article:
For the next nine months, the struggle would be over how exactly the new 'it' [.Net] would blend with the old [Windows]
This is the exact problem. It's not that.Net in itself is a bad idea. The purported purpose of it - cross platform, internet enabled application development - is going to happen, whether MS does it or someone else does. They're in a good position to pull it off, but they're not the only ones.
The reason they won't is that they can't see that the technology has to lead the business, not the other way around.
Gates was apparently underwhelmed with the entire.Net concept until
The group showed how the Web program was even snappier when it interacted with Windows...
In other words, in MS's view,.Net has to serve their business, not the needs of the user. That's bad technology.
Now, before someone goes pointing out all the times bad technology has won because of canny business sense, think for a moment. This is a brand new arena, and a space where there's a lot of other monkeys just waiting for their chance to be top gorilla (if I can mix my primates for a moment). This is one time that the needs of the user will far outweigh marketing hype. Maybe not immediately, in the next year, two years. But ultimately.
Unless MS can understand that they need to first listen to the needs of the user, they're going to fail. Spectacularly.
I have to echo this - telecommuting is the best. I've been working at home for a web development company for about a year and a half now, and I love it. I don't have to tell my co-workers to shut the hell up while I get something done, the boss doesn't wander in to "see how things are going" every fifteen minutes, and I'm much more productive.
I've found some caveats, though.
First, it's far to easy to let work bleed into every corner of your life when you don't have the physical seperation between work and real life. The freedom to set your own hours can become a curse real fast.
Second, as much as I don't miss stupid coworkers hassling me, I do miss the meatspace interaction with coworkers I like. email and instant messaging go a long way towards a *cough* virtual office, but it's not quite the same. If at all possible, get some face-time in once in a while.
Third, it does take some time to get into your groove, especially if you're used to working in an standard office environment. I found that stupid rituals, like wandering up the hill for a coffee first thing in the morning, went a long way toward breaking myself in. Just something that signals the start (and the end) of the day.
If you can manage those things, you're set. I highly recommend it.
I love this. This makes the physical media a value-add, making paying for the book more attractive, even if the e-text is readily available/transferrable. Having other extras in the print version is another good way of encouraging people to shell out the bucks for it. For some kinds of books (children's books, tech manuals) things like illustrations would make owning the physical media very worthwhile, too.
Even though copying the e-text would be really easy, I'm willing to bet that the psychological aspect of tying the digital version to a physical book would help cut down copyright violation as well.
And god knows, I'd have loved to have had an e-text of The Cryptonomicon. Carting that sucker around was work.
My first instinct is to agree that this isn't something fundamentally new. (Although I'd probably argue that writing is something that always has been, and always will be, a solitary art. No matter how much interaction you add, it ultimately comes down to the author and the paper in front of him).
These are old ideas. It's only a new distribution.
My second instinct is to wonder if this isn't the whole point. Would Dickens have happened without the press? It was only a new form of distribution, but how much did knowing how it would be distributed affect the author? Did the fact that his work was published as serials change his approach?
How much is the ability to publish and interact in near real-time with the reader going to affect what's written? How much will the ability to directly link otherwise disparate pieces of writing together affect the use of context in a work? Obviously, this won't impart any great increase in the quality of what's written, but it does change the nature of what's possible. And when you do that, you tend to get new things.
I need my dead trees. I love books (the objects as well as the data they contain). I like the feel of the paper, the smell of them, the intimate tactile interaction with them. I like the history a book collects as it bangs around in your knapsack or when it gets coffee on it when you lend it to a friend. Curling up on the couch with a Palm will never be the same.
That said, I like the idea of having an electronic version as well. It's easier to find that quote you were looking for, or send someone an excerpt. I hope analog books are never replaced, but digital books will increase the number of ways I can use them.
One thing I find really entertaining is the perennial whining about how literature is dead. Putting aside for a moment that writers like Milorad Pavic or Milan Kundera (to name-drop just two mainstream authors) put the lie to that rather quickly, the critics making the claim are obviously completely unaware of what's going on outside of their little dead-tree sphere.
I haven't read House of Leaves (although I'll be looking for it right away), but it should be patently obvious to anyone paying attention that the 'net is the most interesting thing to happen to text in a long time.
You can have stagnant authors in any medium, but when you give a whole generation of writers such a fabulous new tool, you're going to have interesting things come out of it. We're barely seeing the beginning of it.
Funny thing is, the only articles that I almost never read the comments on are the Katz articles. It's just too much work to sift through the "I hate Katz, but don't really have anything of substance to say" posts.
Tell you what - you don't litter up the comments page, and I won't tell you to suck it up and change your preferences.
I've been coding perl for a couple years now, and I've never had this problem, except maybe in my most newbie-ish first month or two.
But then, I also document my interfaces.
I've started learning C (and liking it for what it is, not hating it for what it isn't *ahem*) and I can see how a person could get used to letting the compiler catch that. But, really, if you're watching what you're doing, it's just not an issue.
If I only had access to first-tier music distribution, I'd:
buy less music ('cause more of what I'd be exposed to would be pure crap)
have much more predictable buying habits ('cause I'd be exposed to fewer choices)
In the end, that's probably a win for the big music distributors. What little they'd lose in revenue from the non-mainstream music loving public they'd more than make up for in being able to more accurately predict music buying trends.
I'm pretty sure this is what they've figured out too, and they're working on that future.
Ok, so you're getting ripped off and your publisher is getting ripped off. With taxes like this, your publisher will see some kind of compensation. Any bets on how much will trickle down to you?
I have much more sympathy for the creator than for the companies that do the distribution, yet they're the ones that get the cash. What kind of guarantees are there that they'll handle this fairly?
I agree with you more than I disagree. I really wasn't lucid enough when I posted that.
1. as you point out, complete originality is overrated, and perhaps even impossible. Every writer (books, poetry, screenplays, whatever) is influenced by those that have gone before, and somehow has to deal with that tension (yes, I'm ripping off Harold Bloom here). To criticize something simply as being unoriginal is disingenious at best, and usually just a cheap attack. On the other hand, a work can be so derivitive that you might as well just go to the source.
My initial reaction to the movie was heavily biased by the fact that I had heard so many people say how wonderfully original it was. Well, maybe by Hollywood's standards, but it's a difficult position to hold if you're aware of the vast amount of good science fiction that has been written over the decades (and I'm not trying to imply that you don't. Just that a frightening number of sf fans haven't read anything published before 1990).
2. I'm not sure whether the type of media matters, but I can't agree strongly enough that it's nice to see a movie that brings some of the better concepts from science fiction to the mainstream. Too many movies in this genre have the consistency of Wonderbread. The Matrix was definitely a nice change from that.
3. Again, you're absolutely right that theologians were tackling ideas that Dick later picked up. Books like VALIS, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Radio Free Albemuth draw heavily on gnostic literature, St. Francis of Assisi, and probably a half dozen others I don't know anything about.
But my point is that he didn't merely copy their work over from one medium to another, he used it as a starting point for his own explorations. The Matrix wasn't straight plagiarism either, but it also didn't explore the ideas that it introduced in a terribly fresh way. Maybe you can't do that in a movie yet and expect anything at the box office. The audience is listening, but they might not be ready to think that hard.
My long-winded point is really that while I enjoyed The Matrix, I think it gets too much credit for being things that it's not. It was a great ride, visually gorgeous depiction of one of the more interesting ideas in science fiction. But it wasn't a creative or thorough exploration of that idea.
I enjoyed The Matrix alot the second time I saw it. That was after I had gotten over the hype and realized you shouldn't watch it for the plot. It's great eye candy, and a very well done translation of that anime feel to live action, but an original story it's not. Phillip Dick (to mention only one)was playing with those world-inverting ideas forty years ago. And in the list of nominations for this year's Hugos, The Thirteenth Floor did much more interesting things with the same idea.
I haven't seen Galaxy Quest, so I can't really say whether or not it deserved to win, but I'd be disappointed if The Matrix had. I'd like to think that the Hugos favour glossy special effects over story less often than the movie-going public usually does.
Of the four that made the ballot that I did see, Being John Malkovich was by far my favorite. It actually contained some original thought, and what it lacked in rigour was more than made up for in it's wonderfully playful approach.
The heart of the problem, IMHO, though is that far too many business look to the corporate website as a gimick and not a true marketing tool.
Only too true. Almost every one of our clients (generally corporate robber baron types) have at least asked about how they can keep people from leaving their site. Fortunately, the worst I've had to deal with so far is the directive to make sure there were no links to other sites. Stupid, sure, but at least it's only hurting themselves.
There are some very simple rules about web site design:
never piss off the user
pointing to the outside world increases your value, thereby increasing visits
make your site downgrade gracefully.
don't rely on cute client-side tricks
I mean, really, is that so hard? Oddly enough (or depressingly enough), the one we have must trouble explaining to clients is the first.
I was at an sf con many years ago in Calgary (Alberta, Canada) and they served up something they called a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It was prepared by exposing 2 oz. of Everclear to liquid nitrogen, scraping off the frozen impurities that rose to the top, and adding one drop of lemon juice. Tasty.
PS Trivia. If $a is an anonymous subroutine then $a->(@args) calls the subroutine with those arguments. This is very useful because $handler{$foo}->($bar) is far cleaner and more understandable than &{$handler{$foo}}($bar). OTOH I am amused that such a nice feature got included in Perl on a bar bet...
A bar bet? Feed me details - this is one of my current favorite constructs, and if beer and gambling was involved, so much the better.
Re:But here's a question...Plse help
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 1
"The internet is not a bandaid. Its introduction into a chaotic society will not suddenly make everyone polite and good to each other. It is a wasted gesture until the society in question is stable enough that the people don't have to worry about starvation, disease, and violence and actually have the resources to learn how to use the information given to them."
Nor was that his point. One point might be summed up as "More people with more information is better." Increased access is not a panacea for all the world's ills, but you'll have a hard time arguing that 'net access decreases the amount of data available, and that a more informed populace is less able to make rational decisions.
And as for this specific question, I don't think jonkatz is talking about educating third world nations - I think he's talking about educating Joe Sixpack. We're so used to these machines that we forget that the guy at the assembly line hasn't had the kind of exposure to them we've had, and that they are an amazingly complicated and intimidating device for the new user.
/* O2 systems monitor clean up later - too drunk right now */
- eddy the lip
Re:Usability Collapse?
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, the story's getting a bit stale, but I thought this article on Salon was interesting.
"The fashion retail site Boo.com was laid to rest Wednesday, after reportedly burning through $120 million in a mere six months. The Web's first immersive retail environment had its own online guide (Miss Boo), its own online magazine (Boom) and some of the hippest clothing brands. But it was wildy overdesigned, difficult to navigate and completely out of touch with most Web retailers' vision of quick shopping and ease of use."
One big thing it needs to work out is usability. I checked out the site ages ago when it first went online 'cause someone told me how cool it was. Sure it was cool, if you liked waiting for five minutes for java applets that didn't actually add any functionality to the site to download.
And I just visited it now to have another look at it, and you can't even get into the site without java turned on. Brilliant.
Understand, I've got nothing against java or flashy sites, but keep it reasonable. Don't waste my bandwidth to keep your designers happy. And if you're selling, be damned sure you're site degrades well - ie, don't count on the extras (java, javascript, flash) working. To do otherwise is like not letting anyone into your real world store without a secret decoder ring.
My point? People are doing you a favour by shopping at your store. It's real easy to leave and go somewhere else, so don't try their patience when you're trying to close a sale.
Excellent example. That perl is a write-only language is an accusation that gets thrown at perl far too often, when it's really the programmer's goddamned fault.
Unless I'm just throwing a few lines together to mangle something on my own machine, I'm very careful about how I write my code. Not that anyone else has to look at it, but I frequently have to come back to it six months later. And I guarantee there's no way in hell I'll remember what I was thinking.
On the other side, I recently had to cobble something together for what I was promised was a one-time-only affair on a tight deadline. I made the conscious decision to write the quickest, dirtiest, I-don't-give-a-damn-so-long-as-it-compiles code I could, just to get the job done.
Now I understand the siren call that has for some - I was amazed at how fast I could put together a medium-complex CGI if I didn't worry about such petty things as commenting and legibility.
God it was ugly.
A week later, the powers that be mentioned that we'd be doing the same thing next year, and great, we've got the code now. I didn't bother pointing out that wasn't the deal. I just wiped all my copies.
Re:Regexps and... what DOES ++@_[0]; do?
on
The Perl Black Book
·
· Score: 1
I dunno - I think $a[0] makes more sense than @a[0]. Anytime I see @, I expect to be dealing with more than one value. @a[0] tends to make me think there's an array stuffed in there (which would of course be @$a[0], but the half second of confusion slows me down).
Slashdot Mirror
That's completely beside the point. You're library might not have smut in the stacks (although I'd double check that before making the assertion. Libraries carry a lot of surprising stuff for research. You just might have to ask for it specifically), but the library doesn't pull The Age of Reason just because it uses some of the same words as Hustler. That's effectively what current censorware does.
A bit more digging found this:
Well I understand them because when Internet came up with the Web, many of us also wanted the same thing.
Yeah, but at least we grew out of it. Law enforcement institutions aren't exactly known for their growing maturity. Hell, most lawmen I've met were stunted adolescents for that matter.
Just read the article (has some very interesting insights) and though it doesn't really draw any conclusions, it demonstrates very well why .Net's not going to work.
To quote form the article:
This is the exact problem. It's not thatThe reason they won't is that they can't see that the technology has to lead the business, not the other way around.
Gates was apparently underwhelmed with the entire .Net concept until
In other words, in MS's view,Now, before someone goes pointing out all the times bad technology has won because of canny business sense, think for a moment. This is a brand new arena, and a space where there's a lot of other monkeys just waiting for their chance to be top gorilla (if I can mix my primates for a moment). This is one time that the needs of the user will far outweigh marketing hype. Maybe not immediately, in the next year, two years. But ultimately.
Unless MS can understand that they need to first listen to the needs of the user, they're going to fail. Spectacularly.
I have to echo this - telecommuting is the best. I've been working at home for a web development company for about a year and a half now, and I love it. I don't have to tell my co-workers to shut the hell up while I get something done, the boss doesn't wander in to "see how things are going" every fifteen minutes, and I'm much more productive.
I've found some caveats, though.
First, it's far to easy to let work bleed into every corner of your life when you don't have the physical seperation between work and real life. The freedom to set your own hours can become a curse real fast.
Second, as much as I don't miss stupid coworkers hassling me, I do miss the meatspace interaction with coworkers I like. email and instant messaging go a long way towards a *cough* virtual office, but it's not quite the same. If at all possible, get some face-time in once in a while.
Third, it does take some time to get into your groove, especially if you're used to working in an standard office environment. I found that stupid rituals, like wandering up the hill for a coffee first thing in the morning, went a long way toward breaking myself in. Just something that signals the start (and the end) of the day.If you can manage those things, you're set. I highly recommend it.
I love this. This makes the physical media a value-add, making paying for the book more attractive, even if the e-text is readily available/transferrable. Having other extras in the print version is another good way of encouraging people to shell out the bucks for it. For some kinds of books (children's books, tech manuals) things like illustrations would make owning the physical media very worthwhile, too.
Even though copying the e-text would be really easy, I'm willing to bet that the psychological aspect of tying the digital version to a physical book would help cut down copyright violation as well.
And god knows, I'd have loved to have had an e-text of The Cryptonomicon. Carting that sucker around was work.
My first instinct is to agree that this isn't something fundamentally new. (Although I'd probably argue that writing is something that always has been, and always will be, a solitary art. No matter how much interaction you add, it ultimately comes down to the author and the paper in front of him).
My second instinct is to wonder if this isn't the whole point. Would Dickens have happened without the press? It was only a new form of distribution, but how much did knowing how it would be distributed affect the author? Did the fact that his work was published as serials change his approach?
How much is the ability to publish and interact in near real-time with the reader going to affect what's written? How much will the ability to directly link otherwise disparate pieces of writing together affect the use of context in a work? Obviously, this won't impart any great increase in the quality of what's written, but it does change the nature of what's possible. And when you do that, you tend to get new things.
I need my dead trees. I love books (the objects as well as the data they contain). I like the feel of the paper, the smell of them, the intimate tactile interaction with them. I like the history a book collects as it bangs around in your knapsack or when it gets coffee on it when you lend it to a friend. Curling up on the couch with a Palm will never be the same.
That said, I like the idea of having an electronic version as well. It's easier to find that quote you were looking for, or send someone an excerpt. I hope analog books are never replaced, but digital books will increase the number of ways I can use them.
One thing I find really entertaining is the perennial whining about how literature is dead. Putting aside for a moment that writers like Milorad Pavic or Milan Kundera (to name-drop just two mainstream authors) put the lie to that rather quickly, the critics making the claim are obviously completely unaware of what's going on outside of their little dead-tree sphere.
I haven't read House of Leaves (although I'll be looking for it right away), but it should be patently obvious to anyone paying attention that the 'net is the most interesting thing to happen to text in a long time.
You can have stagnant authors in any medium, but when you give a whole generation of writers such a fabulous new tool, you're going to have interesting things come out of it. We're barely seeing the beginning of it.
Funny thing is, the only articles that I almost never read the comments on are the Katz articles. It's just too much work to sift through the "I hate Katz, but don't really have anything of substance to say" posts.
Tell you what - you don't litter up the comments page, and I won't tell you to suck it up and change your preferences.
I've been coding perl for a couple years now, and I've never had this problem, except maybe in my most newbie-ish first month or two.
But then, I also document my interfaces.
I've started learning C (and liking it for what it is, not hating it for what it isn't *ahem*) and I can see how a person could get used to letting the compiler catch that. But, really, if you're watching what you're doing, it's just not an issue.
If I only had access to first-tier music distribution, I'd:
In the end, that's probably a win for the big music distributors. What little they'd lose in revenue from the non-mainstream music loving public they'd more than make up for in being able to more accurately predict music buying trends.
I'm pretty sure this is what they've figured out too, and they're working on that future.
Gotta go have some doubleplus goodthoughts.
Ok, so you're getting ripped off and your publisher is getting ripped off. With taxes like this, your publisher will see some kind of compensation. Any bets on how much will trickle down to you?
I have much more sympathy for the creator than for the companies that do the distribution, yet they're the ones that get the cash. What kind of guarantees are there that they'll handle this fairly?
...and my grammar may vary. guh.
I agree with you more than I disagree. I really wasn't lucid enough when I posted that.
1. as you point out, complete originality is overrated, and perhaps even impossible. Every writer (books, poetry, screenplays, whatever) is influenced by those that have gone before, and somehow has to deal with that tension (yes, I'm ripping off Harold Bloom here). To criticize something simply as being unoriginal is disingenious at best, and usually just a cheap attack. On the other hand, a work can be so derivitive that you might as well just go to the source.
My initial reaction to the movie was heavily biased by the fact that I had heard so many people say how wonderfully original it was. Well, maybe by Hollywood's standards, but it's a difficult position to hold if you're aware of the vast amount of good science fiction that has been written over the decades (and I'm not trying to imply that you don't. Just that a frightening number of sf fans haven't read anything published before 1990).
2. I'm not sure whether the type of media matters, but I can't agree strongly enough that it's nice to see a movie that brings some of the better concepts from science fiction to the mainstream. Too many movies in this genre have the consistency of Wonderbread. The Matrix was definitely a nice change from that.
3. Again, you're absolutely right that theologians were tackling ideas that Dick later picked up. Books like VALIS, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Radio Free Albemuth draw heavily on gnostic literature, St. Francis of Assisi, and probably a half dozen others I don't know anything about.
But my point is that he didn't merely copy their work over from one medium to another, he used it as a starting point for his own explorations. The Matrix wasn't straight plagiarism either, but it also didn't explore the ideas that it introduced in a terribly fresh way. Maybe you can't do that in a movie yet and expect anything at the box office. The audience is listening, but they might not be ready to think that hard.
My long-winded point is really that while I enjoyed The Matrix, I think it gets too much credit for being things that it's not. It was a great ride, visually gorgeous depiction of one of the more interesting ideas in science fiction. But it wasn't a creative or thorough exploration of that idea.
You're opinions may vary.
I enjoyed The Matrix alot the second time I saw it. That was after I had gotten over the hype and realized you shouldn't watch it for the plot. It's great eye candy, and a very well done translation of that anime feel to live action, but an original story it's not. Phillip Dick (to mention only one)was playing with those world-inverting ideas forty years ago. And in the list of nominations for this year's Hugos, The Thirteenth Floor did much more interesting things with the same idea.
I haven't seen Galaxy Quest, so I can't really say whether or not it deserved to win, but I'd be disappointed if The Matrix had. I'd like to think that the Hugos favour glossy special effects over story less often than the movie-going public usually does.
Of the four that made the ballot that I did see, Being John Malkovich was by far my favorite. It actually contained some original thought, and what it lacked in rigour was more than made up for in it's wonderfully playful approach.
Only too true. Almost every one of our clients (generally corporate robber baron types) have at least asked about how they can keep people from leaving their site. Fortunately, the worst I've had to deal with so far is the directive to make sure there were no links to other sites. Stupid, sure, but at least it's only hurting themselves.
There are some very simple rules about web site design:
I mean, really, is that so hard? Oddly enough (or depressingly enough), the one we have must trouble explaining to clients is the first.
I was at an sf con many years ago in Calgary (Alberta, Canada) and they served up something they called a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It was prepared by exposing 2 oz. of Everclear to liquid nitrogen, scraping off the frozen impurities that rose to the top, and adding one drop of lemon juice. Tasty.
A bar bet? Feed me details - this is one of my current favorite constructs, and if beer and gambling was involved, so much the better.
Nor was that his point. One point might be summed up as "More people with more information is better." Increased access is not a panacea for all the world's ills, but you'll have a hard time arguing that 'net access decreases the amount of data available, and that a more informed populace is less able to make rational decisions.
And as for this specific question, I don't think jonkatz is talking about educating third world nations - I think he's talking about educating Joe Sixpack. We're so used to these machines that we forget that the guy at the assembly line hasn't had the kind of exposure to them we've had, and that they are an amazingly complicated and intimidating device for the new user.
- eddy the lip
Or this:
clean up later -
too drunk right now */
- eddy the lip
Yeah, the story's getting a bit stale, but I thought this article on Salon was interesting.
- eddy the lip
One big thing it needs to work out is usability. I checked out the site ages ago when it first went online 'cause someone told me how cool it was. Sure it was cool, if you liked waiting for five minutes for java applets that didn't actually add any functionality to the site to download.
And I just visited it now to have another look at it, and you can't even get into the site without java turned on. Brilliant.
Understand, I've got nothing against java or flashy sites, but keep it reasonable. Don't waste my bandwidth to keep your designers happy. And if you're selling, be damned sure you're site degrades well - ie, don't count on the extras (java, javascript, flash) working. To do otherwise is like not letting anyone into your real world store without a secret decoder ring.
My point? People are doing you a favour by shopping at your store. It's real easy to leave and go somewhere else, so don't try their patience when you're trying to close a sale.
- eddy the lip
Excellent example. That perl is a write-only language is an accusation that gets thrown at perl far too often, when it's really the programmer's goddamned fault.
Unless I'm just throwing a few lines together to mangle something on my own machine, I'm very careful about how I write my code. Not that anyone else has to look at it, but I frequently have to come back to it six months later. And I guarantee there's no way in hell I'll remember what I was thinking.
On the other side, I recently had to cobble something together for what I was promised was a one-time-only affair on a tight deadline. I made the conscious decision to write the quickest, dirtiest, I-don't-give-a-damn-so-long-as-it-compiles code I could, just to get the job done.
Now I understand the siren call that has for some - I was amazed at how fast I could put together a medium-complex CGI if I didn't worry about such petty things as commenting and legibility.
God it was ugly.
A week later, the powers that be mentioned that we'd be doing the same thing next year, and great, we've got the code now. I didn't bother pointing out that wasn't the deal. I just wiped all my copies.
I dunno - I think $a[0] makes more sense than @a[0]. Anytime I see @, I expect to be dealing with more than one value. @a[0] tends to make me think there's an array stuffed in there (which would of course be @$a[0], but the half second of confusion slows me down).