see, yelling and making yourself larger usually repels predators.
See, tigers are apex predators, very efficient killing machines at the top of the food chain. Tigers are also known to be very territorial. Now, standing and shouting in the full view of the tiger is dominance behaviour, especially if you're looking straight at it. What do you think the natural reaction of a tiger to an invasion of its territory by a creature showing dominant behaviour is going to be?
Note also that most stories of wild tigers attacking humans are in the context of human settlements encroaching upon tiger territory.
So yes, yelling and making yourself larger is taunting in the context of tiger behaviour.
Side note: when a Dutch woman taunted a gorilla and it went on a rampage, the animal was tranquilised and put back in its enclosure, even after mauling several unrelated bystanders. Somehow the shooting of Tatiana does not a lot to dispel the image of Americans as a bunch of trigger-happy rednecks.
Believe this man! Mod him up! Buy him a beverage of choice when you meet him!
All joking aside, I ride Italian motorcycles, and by God isn't this post on the money. The engine, the frame and the suspension are a wonderful unit, the cycle rides like a dream, the styling is great. Yet, stupid little design flaws keep cropping up, like the headlight fittings not being designed to hold up under heavy use (my headlight is now fixed to the frame with tie-wrap).
That's Italian design for you: it does what it's supposed to do, so we it out of the factory. Never mind the details, they're not important to the main purpose of the product. So we get cars that look great, drive great, and have body panels that fit badly; the creaking of the body of some Alfa Romeos can really get on your nerves. Or motorcycles where someone thought it was a good idea to run the cables to the rear light right through the middle underside of the rear fender (my previous bike).
And yet...there is something in Italian engineering that captivates us fans, and makes us put up with their lackadaisical attitude to details. Damned if I know what it is, but it's there.
I've been doing some work with a recent release (just a little hobby project), and as far as I understand, dispatching is not based on file extensions, so from the point of view of a developer, the underlying mechanism is hidden from view, including FastCGI. I must admit that I don't use FastCGI though.
And of course, since Catalyst handles the nitty gritty of mod_perl, why not use mod_perl?
I have no clue how German tax law works. I just brought up Germany's privacy laws as the EU commissioner in question was German, so I assume he wants to model IP privacy on his countries implementation of the relevant EU directive.
I do know that Dutch tax law isn't as broken as your U.S. example.
Nah. Just use an MVC framework, like Catalyst. Switching from the built-in testserver to CGI, or FastCGI or mod_perl is handled by the framework itself.
And the existence of Catalyst really makes that article's "Don't use Perl for Webapps" a sign that the author probably hasn't touched Perl since the 5.005 days.
The use you hypothetical Joe the barber would put your telephone number to is exactly within the scope of the EU privacy directive upon which German law is based. Joe must tell you what info he stores, and what use he puts it to. If that use is vital to his business relationship with you, it is allowed. All other uses need your specific consent.
So Joe can store your appointment information. Without your consent, he may have to remove all telephone numbers except on the latest appointment. He can most definitely not sell your information to a third party. Not without explicit consent in any case. But he may keep and process that information if it is vital to manage your appointments with him, and he does not need consent for that.
Yes, the Nazis called themselves National Socialists. That makes them as much Socialists as the GDR was a Democratic Republic.
Idiot.
Mart
Re:I didn't go to business school, but...
on
Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I concur. I have had experience with Sun's Platinum support, and they do good work. You call up, explain your problem to the first line support, and you get immediately put through to an engineer, who'll do the preliminary troubleshooting with you. If you already have done some troubleshooting, the engineer will listen patiently to your results, and if they're sufficient, he'll either provide a fix or send on-site support over.
No two-week hassle with first-line support who work from a script and are unwilling to escalate to an engineer until you start threatening to escalate to your account manager (like a large firewall vendor I currently work with), just an entire support structure that just assumes that you know what you are talking about, and yet are trained to ask the right questions to weed out the lusers who don't even know how to do basic troubleshooting. Bad disk in a RAID set? Just read the error messages from the log, run iostat -E and report the output, and voila, a new disk is on its way.
Sun support is wonderful. Lower levels than Platinum may take a little longer, but I doubt that the technical knowledge displayed is any less. Too bad I currently don't need the level of support and reliability Sun provides. If you don't, like me, then Sun kit is massively overpriced. If you do, it's right on the money.
As another poster rightly pointed out, the Fascists considered themselves Right. And in the context of George Orwell, calling Fascism 'Totalitarian Right' is using his own words.
You would do well to read a little more Orwell than just the wing-nut commentaries. Start with his 1946 essay 'Why I Write' for an education.
In summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by both totalitarian movements in Europe, both of the Left and of the Right. In fact, Orwell discusses this very point in a lenghty essay on the work of John Burnham, who he acknowledges as an inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Wrong question. ODF is a document format, it defines the form of the data. The data does not determine what tools must be used to process it, except in cases of proprietary formats, where the only tools are the vendor supplied ones. Tying the format closely to the tools meant to process it, to the point of embedding the processing code in the data, is one of the design blunders perpetuated by Microsoft, which gave us such wonderful 'innovations' as Word Macro Viruses.
ODF can in principle be processed by any language that has a decent XML processing library available, or through the API of the document editing tools. The leading API at the moment is OpenOffice.org's, which is open to any language with bindings to its UNO component model, including the language shipping with OpenOffice.org, a version of BASIC resembling VBA.
If there are two ways to cancel an operation, and one gives focus back to the right app, and one just focuses any old where, then this is not consistent. And the complaint was not about the Windows key per se, but of Windows' handling of it.
That's an internationalisation issue. Shift-2 for double quotes is standard in the UK layout, and several continental European layouts (such as in the Netherlands).
The most annoying part of the Windows key on Windows is getting the Start menu every time you tap it
No, that's only the second most annoying thing. The most annoying thing is tapping the Windows key by accident, hitting Esc to cancel the Start menu, and Windows once again going: 'Window order? Huh, me not know what dat is', aka the window you were working in is now unfocused. The Unix window managers I'm used to (sawfish, metacity and kwin) are at least smart enough to always give me the previous window that had focus when I unfocus a window or a control element. I don't know what crack the MS devs were smoking, but Windows' focus handling feels like voodoo to me.
And heaven help you if you wanted to change a function to return a hash of list of hashes instead of a scalar, because then you'd have to change the calling code's semantics for storing the results.
Being somewhat conversant in both languages, I can't help but wonder how you would go about the same thing in Python. I mean, the difference between a single value and a dictionary of lists of dictionaries is just as big. If your function returns data in a certain format, and you change the format of the return value, you must adjust the calling code's semantics, there is no way around that. Unless you stick the data in a class and only use accessor functions to manipulate it, but that works in Perl just as well as in Python, and you're still stuck changing calling semantics, albeit in one place only this time.
Good point there. I blame my background: I learned binary math as part of learning 6502 assembly. And there it is very much used in control structures. OK, technically there are a lot of control instructions (the conditional/relative branches), that depend on the outcomes of binary math operators. But the end result was that the two are definitely linked in my mind and with boolean logic.
Wait a second. Programmers that clam up at binary math? How the hell are they expected to write any code at all in that case? The very basis of control structures is being able to do binary math, isn't it? Or do modern programmers skip AND, OR, NOT (and cognates) by nesting?
Sadly, since I have actually seen someone use a nested IF block instead of an AND operator in example code for a Perl module, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
You're reading it wrong, I think. Operational excellence is a finance euphemism for 'pumping money into Operations'. Operations is usually seen by bean-counters as a cost sink, not an investment. That is why people end up with script-monkeys for tech support. Operational excellence in this case means investing in Red Hat's Operations side (support and consultancy) to create more customer satisfaction, and thus grow the market.
It's a slow strategy, but a very satisfying one to execute well, because you will end up with both happy customers and a workforce with high morale. Done well, these two factors tend to play off each other and grow your revenue: if your Operations team keeps the customer happy, the customer will be more likely to listen to the company if Sales tells them they have a solution for other problems that may crop up.
However, the stereotype of the muscle-bound bad-ass caters to a male fantasy. The stereotype of the oversexualised female also caters to a male fantasy. You start to see a pattern? It's not a big problem, as things go, but it is there, nonetheless.
The difference is that at least images and video are documented to be images and video. And since decoders for most of these are available (even if of questionable legality due to idiotic patents), they are documented enough to be used. A binary blob that's a represention of an internal MS data structure on the other hand must be reverse engineered from the bottom up, starting with even its purpose in the document.
His argument basically boils down to: "MS uses undocumented binary data in OOXML". The fact that video and graphics are also encoded in binary in OOXML is irrelevant, because that was not what his argument was about.
Next time someone doesn't want to reply to red herrings, you might show some maturity in actually addressing the point.
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see, yelling and making yourself larger usually repels predators.
See, tigers are apex predators, very efficient killing machines at the top of the food chain. Tigers are also known to be very territorial. Now, standing and shouting in the full view of the tiger is dominance behaviour, especially if you're looking straight at it. What do you think the natural reaction of a tiger to an invasion of its territory by a creature showing dominant behaviour is going to be?
Note also that most stories of wild tigers attacking humans are in the context of human settlements encroaching upon tiger territory.
So yes, yelling and making yourself larger is taunting in the context of tiger behaviour.
Side note: when a Dutch woman taunted a gorilla and it went on a rampage, the animal was tranquilised and put back in its enclosure, even after mauling several unrelated bystanders. Somehow the shooting of Tatiana does not a lot to dispel the image of Americans as a bunch of trigger-happy rednecks.
MartBelieve this man! Mod him up! Buy him a beverage of choice when you meet him!
All joking aside, I ride Italian motorcycles, and by God isn't this post on the money. The engine, the frame and the suspension are a wonderful unit, the cycle rides like a dream, the styling is great. Yet, stupid little design flaws keep cropping up, like the headlight fittings not being designed to hold up under heavy use (my headlight is now fixed to the frame with tie-wrap).
That's Italian design for you: it does what it's supposed to do, so we it out of the factory. Never mind the details, they're not important to the main purpose of the product. So we get cars that look great, drive great, and have body panels that fit badly; the creaking of the body of some Alfa Romeos can really get on your nerves. Or motorcycles where someone thought it was a good idea to run the cables to the rear light right through the middle underside of the rear fender (my previous bike).
And yet...there is something in Italian engineering that captivates us fans, and makes us put up with their lackadaisical attitude to details. Damned if I know what it is, but it's there.
MartI've been doing some work with a recent release (just a little hobby project), and as far as I understand, dispatching is not based on file extensions, so from the point of view of a developer, the underlying mechanism is hidden from view, including FastCGI. I must admit that I don't use FastCGI though.
And of course, since Catalyst handles the nitty gritty of mod_perl, why not use mod_perl?
MartI have no clue how German tax law works. I just brought up Germany's privacy laws as the EU commissioner in question was German, so I assume he wants to model IP privacy on his countries implementation of the relevant EU directive.
I do know that Dutch tax law isn't as broken as your U.S. example.
MartNah. Just use an MVC framework, like Catalyst. Switching from the built-in testserver to CGI, or FastCGI or mod_perl is handled by the framework itself.
And the existence of Catalyst really makes that article's "Don't use Perl for Webapps" a sign that the author probably hasn't touched Perl since the 5.005 days.
MartI left out the Mussolini quote because you take it just as idiotically out of context as you did National Socialism.
Frankly, you may claim a victory (which you will surely do), but I don't feel like debating politics with idiots today.
MartThe use you hypothetical Joe the barber would put your telephone number to is exactly within the scope of the EU privacy directive upon which German law is based. Joe must tell you what info he stores, and what use he puts it to. If that use is vital to his business relationship with you, it is allowed. All other uses need your specific consent.
So Joe can store your appointment information. Without your consent, he may have to remove all telephone numbers except on the latest appointment. He can most definitely not sell your information to a third party. Not without explicit consent in any case. But he may keep and process that information if it is vital to manage your appointments with him, and he does not need consent for that.
MartYes, the Nazis called themselves National Socialists. That makes them as much Socialists as the GDR was a Democratic Republic.
Idiot.
MartI concur. I have had experience with Sun's Platinum support, and they do good work. You call up, explain your problem to the first line support, and you get immediately put through to an engineer, who'll do the preliminary troubleshooting with you. If you already have done some troubleshooting, the engineer will listen patiently to your results, and if they're sufficient, he'll either provide a fix or send on-site support over.
No two-week hassle with first-line support who work from a script and are unwilling to escalate to an engineer until you start threatening to escalate to your account manager (like a large firewall vendor I currently work with), just an entire support structure that just assumes that you know what you are talking about, and yet are trained to ask the right questions to weed out the lusers who don't even know how to do basic troubleshooting. Bad disk in a RAID set? Just read the error messages from the log, run iostat -E and report the output, and voila, a new disk is on its way.
Sun support is wonderful. Lower levels than Platinum may take a little longer, but I doubt that the technical knowledge displayed is any less. Too bad I currently don't need the level of support and reliability Sun provides. If you don't, like me, then Sun kit is massively overpriced. If you do, it's right on the money.
MartOh, goody. Another Libertarian.
As another poster rightly pointed out, the Fascists considered themselves Right. And in the context of George Orwell, calling Fascism 'Totalitarian Right' is using his own words.
MartYou would do well to read a little more Orwell than just the wing-nut commentaries. Start with his 1946 essay 'Why I Write' for an education.
In summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by both totalitarian movements in Europe, both of the Left and of the Right. In fact, Orwell discusses this very point in a lenghty essay on the work of John Burnham, who he acknowledges as an inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
MartDo you perhaps mean this one?
MartWrong question. ODF is a document format, it defines the form of the data. The data does not determine what tools must be used to process it, except in cases of proprietary formats, where the only tools are the vendor supplied ones. Tying the format closely to the tools meant to process it, to the point of embedding the processing code in the data, is one of the design blunders perpetuated by Microsoft, which gave us such wonderful 'innovations' as Word Macro Viruses.
ODF can in principle be processed by any language that has a decent XML processing library available, or through the API of the document editing tools. The leading API at the moment is OpenOffice.org's, which is open to any language with bindings to its UNO component model, including the language shipping with OpenOffice.org, a version of BASIC resembling VBA.
MartIf there are two ways to cancel an operation, and one gives focus back to the right app, and one just focuses any old where, then this is not consistent. And the complaint was not about the Windows key per se, but of Windows' handling of it.
MartThat's an internationalisation issue. Shift-2 for double quotes is standard in the UK layout, and several continental European layouts (such as in the Netherlands).
MartNo, that's only the second most annoying thing. The most annoying thing is tapping the Windows key by accident, hitting Esc to cancel the Start menu, and Windows once again going: 'Window order? Huh, me not know what dat is', aka the window you were working in is now unfocused. The Unix window managers I'm used to (sawfish, metacity and kwin) are at least smart enough to always give me the previous window that had focus when I unfocus a window or a control element. I don't know what crack the MS devs were smoking, but Windows' focus handling feels like voodoo to me.
MartBeing somewhat conversant in both languages, I can't help but wonder how you would go about the same thing in Python. I mean, the difference between a single value and a dictionary of lists of dictionaries is just as big. If your function returns data in a certain format, and you change the format of the return value, you must adjust the calling code's semantics, there is no way around that. Unless you stick the data in a class and only use accessor functions to manipulate it, but that works in Perl just as well as in Python, and you're still stuck changing calling semantics, albeit in one place only this time.
MartYeah, Cleopatra is more Python's style.
But what would be Perl suicide? Let yourself be trampled by camels?
MartWell, let's SHIFT the conversation away to a different topic then.
MartGood point there. I blame my background: I learned binary math as part of learning 6502 assembly. And there it is very much used in control structures. OK, technically there are a lot of control instructions (the conditional/relative branches), that depend on the outcomes of binary math operators. But the end result was that the two are definitely linked in my mind and with boolean logic.
MartWait a second. Programmers that clam up at binary math? How the hell are they expected to write any code at all in that case? The very basis of control structures is being able to do binary math, isn't it? Or do modern programmers skip AND, OR, NOT (and cognates) by nesting?
Sadly, since I have actually seen someone use a nested IF block instead of an AND operator in example code for a Perl module, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
MartYou're reading it wrong, I think. Operational excellence is a finance euphemism for 'pumping money into Operations'. Operations is usually seen by bean-counters as a cost sink, not an investment. That is why people end up with script-monkeys for tech support. Operational excellence in this case means investing in Red Hat's Operations side (support and consultancy) to create more customer satisfaction, and thus grow the market.
It's a slow strategy, but a very satisfying one to execute well, because you will end up with both happy customers and a workforce with high morale. Done well, these two factors tend to play off each other and grow your revenue: if your Operations team keeps the customer happy, the customer will be more likely to listen to the company if Sales tells them they have a solution for other problems that may crop up.
MartHowever, the stereotype of the muscle-bound bad-ass caters to a male fantasy. The stereotype of the oversexualised female also caters to a male fantasy. You start to see a pattern? It's not a big problem, as things go, but it is there, nonetheless.
MartThe difference is that at least images and video are documented to be images and video. And since decoders for most of these are available (even if of questionable legality due to idiotic patents), they are documented enough to be used. A binary blob that's a represention of an internal MS data structure on the other hand must be reverse engineered from the bottom up, starting with even its purpose in the document.
Really, do you have to work at being this stupid?
MartWhat do you mean, his argument falls apart?
His argument basically boils down to: "MS uses undocumented binary data in OOXML". The fact that video and graphics are also encoded in binary in OOXML is irrelevant, because that was not what his argument was about.
Next time someone doesn't want to reply to red herrings, you might show some maturity in actually addressing the point.
Mart