Since for me, anyways, Perl's usefulness is at least 50% about the HUGE body of modules already out there, I'd say the single most valuable Perl resource is CPAN. In fact, there are so many modules there and the numbers are increasing so rapidly that there are almost TOO many modules, creating an embarassment of riches...it's getting difficult to find just what you need because there is often more than a few modules out there to do it.
Why is it that I assume this supposedly "objective" series of articles about Linux look at Linux very positively ? Could it be that the arbiters here of objectivity here might not themselves be very objective ?
Microsoft dropping an exclusive contract with Microsoft is going to do little to increase competition, for desktops, anyways, because there's nothing out there to compete with their desktop software. KDE and GNOME are poor substitutes for the Windows desktop, which is not saying much at all. What alternatives are there for Office ? StarOffice, KOffice, and OpenOffice are still miles away. And let's not forget the many sites that won't be viewable under Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera.
I'm not saying I'm happy with this, and nobody would be happier to see Windows eradicated from the desktop, but that's our present unhappy state, and Norway's move isn't going to do anything to fix a problem that has been 10 years brewing. Heck, Microsoft has had a near hegemony in desktop software for AT LEAST 7 years, and it's only getting stronger.
A few weeks ago we mentioned Wilco, who released their album on their website for free. The strategy appears to have paid off.
The hypocrisy and inconsistency of arguments on these matters stuns me.. When record industry execs point to apparently flagging CD sales and the rise of P2P file sharing/piracy, people snidely attribute the drop in sales to poor record-company product, and NOT to P2P, rightly pointing out that correlation does not point to causation.
Yet when one band makes their album available for free, and coincidentally sell a lot of records/gets a lot of favorable press, people here (and the author of the referenced article) automatically attribute the PRESUMED increase (the numbers aren't in yet) in sales to the free availability of the CD. Yet they so willingly fall for the same statistical fallacy, namely in assuming that there is some causal relationship between the free availability of the CD and increased sales/buzz the CD is receiving. MIGHT ALL THE HYPE ABOUT WILCO BE ABOUT THE MUSIC, AND NOT THE DISTRIBUTION ?
But what really perplexes me is that the author of the referenced article HIMSELF points out (while damning viewpoint contrary to his own) that "correlation is not causation", even though his whole thesis is BASED on that very fallacy.
There have been lots of bands that have made their music freely available, yet I can't think of ONE that is successful BECAUSE they have done so. Certainly, if Wilco sells a lot of records, people will be cheering filesharing and deriding the RIAA, even though they may well have sold as many or more records without the free distribution.
I use Mandrake, but I for one do not plan to send them anything. And I plan to continue using Mandrake, for free, because that is exactly what their business model calls for. If open-source is a viable business model, as is so often argued here, then it deserves to be judged by hard, cold, business metrics - namely, whether companies based on this model can survive on their merits alone. Contrary and au-courant opinions aside, it appears that most companies based on this model CAN'T survive, and Mandrake appears to be just one in what is a growing list of failures. Consumers AND the capital markets appear to have spoken somewhat decisively on Mandrake.
And if Mandrake ultimately ends up surviving, by measure of donations/contributions, I'll judge it as a feasible example of a charity case. Because it seems clear that Mandrake is not going to survive on the merit of the saleability of its products and can only survive by appeals to the goodwill of the open-source community. But the long-term problem is (and it IS a long-term problem, not a short-term one as the source post claims), the community only has so much pocket change to give to so many panhandlers. There is no reason to suspect that a bit of cash here and now is going to somehow change the fundamental, underlying economic reality that there aren't many people willing to pay for software which by rights they don't have to pay for.
Well for all your talk about "good college"s laughing at Kansas, *you* must be in some f**king great university, if *you're* making admissions decisions and you don't even know that Kansas City is NOT IN KANSAS BUT IN MISSOURI.
Any review purporting to cover "the earliest days of RTS" - as the referenced article purports to do - is incomplete without a mention of this game.
I'm not even sure if this is exactly the right name - perhaps it was "Ancient Art of War" - but this was the first RTS game I had ever played, and it must have come out around 1987 or earlier. It ran on the PC, and if I recall ran in black and white, and certainly did not feature the huge armies or innumerable unit types that are available today, but games like WC and AOE play - in broad strokes - VERY VERY similar to "Art of War". It was, for its time, a great game.
It doesn't matter that once-upon-a-time-when-we-didnt-have-violent-video- games, that life may have been more violent than it is now. It still may be true that violent video games make people more violent, while OTHER factors conspire to reduce the overall level of violence in society. I'm not arguing that this is true (or false), but I am constantly shocked by the logical fallacies that get made over and over by chauvinists everywhere.
These sales figures couldn't possibly shaped by the fact that the RIAA is releasing the shittiest music in a decade, could it?
Even accepting your proposition of the quality of current music, this does NOTHING to discredit the original proposition that CD-burners (not to mention MP3s) are eating into album sales. Of course shitty music, CD-burners that enable CD-copying, and MP3s eat into album sales. To deny any of these would be chauvinistic.
I reject the notion that as a creator of code, I have an obligation to release this to the public if it becomes obsolete. It may be generous, it may be a good thing to do, but the proposition that I am obligated to do so is ludicrous.
And frankly, I find Tim O'Reilly's constant railing on the open source issue to be quite hypocritical. Almost all his books, it seems are under a license which would be roundly discredited if they were code, and I doubt that all his older books are all available for free. If O'Reilly believes so strongly in openness, why not release electronic copies of ALL his books, under a GPL-style license ? What makes book publishing so fundamentally different than publishing software ? Is it that he is making a pretty penny selling books to the crowd that is producing and studying this open source code ?
What numbers would you prefer ?
on
The Eyes Have It
·
· Score: 2
Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed.
So you don't like the S/N ratio implied. What numbers would make you happy ? 1 out 100 liars get away; 1 in 1000 innocents incorrectly accused ? Higher ? Because if you're looking for something with no Type I and II errors, you will be looking forever - ANY system you can imagine will ALWAYS falsely accuse innocents and miss the guilty.
PDF is well understood but PDF now has form input widgets and scripting.
There isn't an open source viewer that can render these.
Though you intended your post as a knock on the British government, your post stands as a stronger indictment of open source. If open source can't provide people with a viewer that can render one of the world's most widely used formats, then there is something seriously wrong with the blind faith that the open source world is going to provide the tools that everyone else needs to work.
It seems every time I turn around, I see a new magazine or web site running a "Best XXX" award ceremony. What's the deal?
It's because, no matter how badly Linux/Windows/Macs suck (and they all DO suck, for differing reasons), there is always SOMETHING that is best of breed for a given platform. This gives the advocates something to cheer about, even if they don't deserve to do so. Think Linux sucks as a desktop OS ? Wait, it CAN'T, if there is a "best spreadsheet" and "best desktop", can it ???
Gifts are gifts. And if youre buying a gift just to throw money at someone in lieu of actually giving a shit about them, you suck in my book. Similarly, if you don't even bother to consider the thought and effort someone else put in to giving you something they felt you'd enjoy, you also suck. Hard.
Come on....someone CAN put some thought into a gift and still give me something I don't want, can't use, or already have. Are you telling me I should keep the sweater someone gave me if I already have the same sweater, or if it doesn't fit me ? This Xmas, my aunt gave me a package of flavoured beef jerky. I don't eat meat. Should I keep the gift instead of exchanging it or returning it ? Do I suck if I do exchange or return ? Come on....most people want to give gifts other people can use and enjoy. If that means returning/exchanging, most gift-givers I know would be happy.
You presume that because you have are good at computer programming, you can easily finish a CS degree in one year - in essence, you propose that you know pretty much all that a CS major knows. But what is taught in a CS degree is FAR DIFFERENT than what you know having programmed for however many years. This also is precisely the reason why your advancement potential MAY be limited because you DON'T have a CS degree - the business world recognizes the difference.
More proof that Microsoft does not hold a monopoly on bugs.
Oh, the self-righteous smarniness of chauvinists everywhere. If we needed more proof that Microsoft does not hold a monopoly on bugs, one only need look at any major open-sourced project. The Changelog for the Linux kernel, for instance, documents beaucoup bugs that users were living with on their OS (forget about their DB, which as someone else pointed out is most likely stashed away behind a firewall anyways). Why does such bugginess there not bear the same level of ridicule ?
The University of Toronto used to teach their Comp Sci students a language called Turing. I can't recall what the rationale was, but no doubt they believed it was well suited for teaching programming. I am not sure if it is still taught today.
I remember at the time (over 10 years ago) thinking this was the most ill-advised thing the department could have done. I thought it was absolutely pointless to teach kids a language that was not also in wide use outside the classroom - such as C. To this day, I have never seen any jobs for Turing programmers, and I laugh out loud every time I see a resume where the only language the applicant knows is Turing, which still happens.
I can't imagine how this is going to work well. If the player automatically strips out violence/sex/offensive language, what will this do to movies where certain such scenes are integral ?
I'm thinking of movies like "Saving Private Ryan", "Apocalypse Now", "The Matrix", "Terminator", "The Wild Bunch", "Rocky", "Scarface", - heck, even "Star Wars", where the movies turn crucially on scenes that would be deleted. In the above movies, for instance, if you delete the violence you end up with something that is incomprehensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Since for me, anyways, Perl's usefulness is at least 50% about the HUGE body of modules already out there, I'd say the single most valuable Perl resource is CPAN. In fact, there are so many modules there and the numbers are increasing so rapidly that there are almost TOO many modules, creating an embarassment of riches...it's getting difficult to find just what you need because there is often more than a few modules out there to do it.
Why is it that I assume this supposedly "objective" series of articles about Linux look at Linux very positively ? Could it be that the arbiters here of objectivity here might not themselves be very objective ?
The new 10GB model is 7.692 percent thinner than the previous version.
I think I need a few more significant digits to adequately assess this new iPod.
Microsoft dropping an exclusive contract with Microsoft is going to do little to increase competition, for desktops, anyways, because there's nothing out there to compete with their desktop software. KDE and GNOME are poor substitutes for the Windows desktop, which is not saying much at all. What alternatives are there for Office ? StarOffice, KOffice, and OpenOffice are still miles away. And let's not forget the many sites that won't be viewable under Netscape/Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera.
I'm not saying I'm happy with this, and nobody would be happier to see Windows eradicated from the desktop, but that's our present unhappy state, and Norway's move isn't going to do anything to fix a problem that has been 10 years brewing. Heck, Microsoft has had a near hegemony in desktop software for AT LEAST 7 years, and it's only getting stronger.
We figured since OSCON 2002 is almost upon us that this would be a fun thing to post.
I guess Linux geeks have a different definition of 'fun' than I do...
what will it take to unite all these individual IM networks under one umbrella?
Microsoft buying AOLTW ?
A few weeks ago we mentioned Wilco, who released their album on their website for free. The strategy appears to have paid off.
The hypocrisy and inconsistency of arguments on these matters stuns me.. When record industry execs point to apparently flagging CD sales and the rise of P2P file sharing/piracy, people snidely attribute the drop in sales to poor record-company product, and NOT to P2P, rightly pointing out that correlation does not point to causation.
Yet when one band makes their album available for free, and coincidentally sell a lot of records/gets a lot of favorable press, people here (and the author of the referenced article) automatically attribute the PRESUMED increase (the numbers aren't in yet) in sales to the free availability of the CD. Yet they so willingly fall for the same statistical fallacy, namely in assuming that there is some causal relationship between the free availability of the CD and increased sales/buzz the CD is receiving. MIGHT ALL THE HYPE ABOUT WILCO BE ABOUT THE MUSIC, AND NOT THE DISTRIBUTION ?
But what really perplexes me is that the author of the referenced article HIMSELF points out (while damning viewpoint contrary to his own) that "correlation is not causation", even though his whole thesis is BASED on that very fallacy.
There have been lots of bands that have made their music freely available, yet I can't think of ONE that is successful BECAUSE they have done so. Certainly, if Wilco sells a lot of records, people will be cheering filesharing and deriding the RIAA, even though they may well have sold as many or more records without the free distribution.
Was Gygax responsible for "Top Secret" and that post-nuclear-mutant-game-whose-name-I've-forgotten ?
It's been a long time...
the second-best thing to do at four in the morning
Judging by the crowd, I would guess the writer was referring to building the latest buggy Linux kernel.
I use Mandrake, but I for one do not plan to send them anything. And I plan to continue using Mandrake, for free, because that is exactly what their business model calls for. If open-source is a viable business model, as is so often argued here, then it deserves to be judged by hard, cold, business metrics - namely, whether companies based on this model can survive on their merits alone. Contrary and au-courant opinions aside, it appears that most companies based on this model CAN'T survive, and Mandrake appears to be just one in what is a growing list of failures. Consumers AND the capital markets appear to have spoken somewhat decisively on Mandrake.
And if Mandrake ultimately ends up surviving, by measure of donations/contributions, I'll judge it as a feasible example of a charity case. Because it seems clear that Mandrake is not going to survive on the merit of the saleability of its products and can only survive by appeals to the goodwill of the open-source community. But the long-term problem is (and it IS a long-term problem, not a short-term one as the source post claims), the community only has so much pocket change to give to so many panhandlers. There is no reason to suspect that a bit of cash here and now is going to somehow change the fundamental, underlying economic reality that there aren't many people willing to pay for software which by rights they don't have to pay for.
It is now based on perl 5.6.1 -- actually on the latest unreleased 5.6 sources, so MacPerl is the most advanced release of perl ever
Surely you mean this is the most advanced release of perl ever for the Mac, as the developer's release is at 5.7.3.
Well for all your talk about "good college"s laughing at Kansas, *you* must be in some f**king great university, if *you're* making admissions decisions and you don't even know that Kansas City is NOT IN KANSAS BUT IN MISSOURI.
Any review purporting to cover "the earliest days of RTS" - as the referenced article purports to do - is incomplete without a mention of this game.
I'm not even sure if this is exactly the right name - perhaps it was "Ancient Art of War" - but this was the first RTS game I had ever played, and it must have come out around 1987 or earlier. It ran on the PC, and if I recall ran in black and white, and certainly did not feature the huge armies or innumerable unit types that are available today, but games like WC and AOE play - in broad strokes - VERY VERY similar to "Art of War". It was, for its time, a great game.
It doesn't matter that once-upon-a-time-when-we-didnt-have-violent-video- games, that life may have been more violent than it is now. It still may be true that violent video games make people more violent, while OTHER factors conspire to reduce the overall level of violence in society. I'm not arguing that this is true (or false), but I am constantly shocked by the logical fallacies that get made over and over by chauvinists everywhere.
These sales figures couldn't possibly shaped by the fact that the RIAA is releasing the shittiest music in a decade, could it?
Even accepting your proposition of the quality of current music, this does NOTHING to discredit the original proposition that CD-burners (not to mention MP3s) are eating into album sales. Of course shitty music, CD-burners that enable CD-copying, and MP3s eat into album sales. To deny any of these would be chauvinistic.
I reject the notion that as a creator of code, I have an obligation to release this to the public if it becomes obsolete. It may be generous, it may be a good thing to do, but the proposition that I am obligated to do so is ludicrous.
And frankly, I find Tim O'Reilly's constant railing on the open source issue to be quite hypocritical. Almost all his books, it seems are under a license which would be roundly discredited if they were code, and I doubt that all his older books are all available for free. If O'Reilly believes so strongly in openness, why not release electronic copies of ALL his books, under a GPL-style license ? What makes book publishing so fundamentally different than publishing software ? Is it that he is making a pretty penny selling books to the crowd that is producing and studying this open source code ?
Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed.
So you don't like the S/N ratio implied. What numbers would make you happy ? 1 out 100 liars get away; 1 in 1000 innocents incorrectly accused ? Higher ? Because if you're looking for something with no Type I and II errors, you will be looking forever - ANY system you can imagine will ALWAYS falsely accuse innocents and miss the guilty.
PDF is well understood but PDF now has form input widgets and scripting.
There isn't an open source viewer that can render these.
Though you intended your post as a knock on the British government, your post stands as a stronger indictment of open source. If open source can't provide people with a viewer that can render one of the world's most widely used formats, then there is something seriously wrong with the blind faith that the open source world is going to provide the tools that everyone else needs to work.
It's because, no matter how badly Linux/Windows/Macs suck (and they all DO suck, for differing reasons), there is always SOMETHING that is best of breed for a given platform. This gives the advocates something to cheer about, even if they don't deserve to do so. Think Linux sucks as a desktop OS ? Wait, it CAN'T, if there is a "best spreadsheet" and "best desktop", can it ???
Come on....someone CAN put some thought into a gift and still give me something I don't want, can't use, or already have. Are you telling me I should keep the sweater someone gave me if I already have the same sweater, or if it doesn't fit me ? This Xmas, my aunt gave me a package of flavoured beef jerky. I don't eat meat. Should I keep the gift instead of exchanging it or returning it ? Do I suck if I do exchange or return ? Come on....most people want to give gifts other people can use and enjoy. If that means returning/exchanging, most gift-givers I know would be happy.
You presume that because you have are good at computer programming, you can easily finish a CS degree in one year - in essence, you propose that you know pretty much all that a CS major knows. But what is taught in a CS degree is FAR DIFFERENT than what you know having programmed for however many years. This also is precisely the reason why your advancement potential MAY be limited because you DON'T have a CS degree - the business world recognizes the difference.
More proof that Microsoft does not hold a monopoly on bugs.
Oh, the self-righteous smarniness of chauvinists everywhere. If we needed more proof that Microsoft does not hold a monopoly on bugs, one only need look at any major open-sourced project. The Changelog for the Linux kernel, for instance, documents beaucoup bugs that users were living with on their OS (forget about their DB, which as someone else pointed out is most likely stashed away behind a firewall anyways). Why does such bugginess there not bear the same level of ridicule ?
Why didn't you post a reply to the original post, rather than start your own thread ?
The University of Toronto used to teach their Comp Sci students a language called Turing. I can't recall what the rationale was, but no doubt they believed it was well suited for teaching programming. I am not sure if it is still taught today.
I remember at the time (over 10 years ago) thinking this was the most ill-advised thing the department could have done. I thought it was absolutely pointless to teach kids a language that was not also in wide use outside the classroom - such as C. To this day, I have never seen any jobs for Turing programmers, and I laugh out loud every time I see a resume where the only language the applicant knows is Turing, which still happens.
I can't imagine how this is going to work well. If the player automatically strips out violence/sex/offensive language, what will this do to movies where certain such scenes are integral ?
I'm thinking of movies like "Saving Private Ryan", "Apocalypse Now", "The Matrix", "Terminator", "The Wild Bunch", "Rocky", "Scarface", - heck, even "Star Wars", where the movies turn crucially on scenes that would be deleted. In the above movies, for instance, if you delete the violence you end up with something that is incomprehensible.