At least they're doing something what the hell have you contributed to in your miserable life? Wasting resources with your mere existance? Way to go, thanks a lot.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/pcmag/tinas/ 1999/82.html "No other company [Microsoft] has come close to providing so many innovative and groundbreaking products." I'll bet we never see that written about any Linux company or community.
How is it that the Microsoft advocates manage to bash everything, and still praise Microsoft. This is way offtopic, but I've got to ask, how is the Mars Crasher Probe IN ANY WAY related to Microsoft's innovation and bets about Linux companies not getting equivalence praise!
Why am I writing this!? Why is this here? What is wrong with these people!
One of the hallmarks of intelligence is the ability to solve problems and adapt to new situations.
Sadly, it mostly, if not always, involves the killing off of competitive species. We even kill off the non-competitive species with our largest discrimination being to protect cute species. Admittedly there are members of our race out there perfectly capable of coexistence with other species, but the vast majority of people are still unable to comprehend the ramifications of alternative ways of life within our own species, much less other species!
Given our current political system, as well, it is far too easy to scapegoat an alien intelligence where ignorance is abound, to political ends. (Much like Communism is the target of American politicians, and Capitalism is the target of mindless scrutiny in Communist countries.)
Pointing fingers and flinging lawsuits only makes lawyers richer and all of us poorer.
Entirely correct. Prevention is the key. After the fact, however, I'm at a loss to moderate the complexities of rebuttles to conscious actions that violate morality by an artificial entity.
The issue also surrounds the possibility that AI can breed AI, with no similarities or even specifications in common with the original development of a person. Who do we blame then? 500 years from now, do we punish the human children of the dead person who invented the original AI that went awry? Not likely, unless artificial sentients are doing the punishing themselves.
Aside: Contrary to many idealistic axioms, it is impossible for two equal fulcrums to exist in the same system. Coexistence with artificial sentients is only a temporary setting.
Sure, silicon can take credit for new ideas and inventions and great advances in our children's understanding of reality. That's fine with me. That doesn't concern me at all. I don't care who or what patents anything, so long as my personal abilities are not intervened on.
When automated drivers start crashing into me on the highway I start looking for liability. And if that automated driver was a self-contained, autonomous being that is otherwise incapable of making a sensible rebuttle in court, what am I to do then? Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets. Cannot sentients decide to kill without us knowing, obviated from liability by the nature of their ability to clone in an electronic existence. And as punishment, should we just switch the power off, that doesn't satiate me very much if I've just lost my family in a car accident to an artificial being. If the sentient was incapable to save lives, I can forgive. If a true sentient is unwilling to preserve life, how am I to correct it?
The ability of our artificial children to procreate, evolve, patent ideas, explore space, or serve up new fancy types of porn, doesn't concern me. My primary concerns are with the liability of sentient artificial entities, as the punishment and recuperate is as likely to work on artificial beings as it is on humans. Throw them in jail with a bunch of other sentients so they learn how not to get caught.
It's safe to presume that anything that can be legally declared intelligent will, on average, be by definition smarter than the vast majority of the human population. How are we to adapt to sentients other than ourselves, that will be created to be intelligent (rather than bred for jollies)?
That was the passing argument -- there are transendental numbers that we will never see. We can approximate many with algebraics, and we can take transendentals and perform algebraic operations on them.
The major cryptographic interests w.r.t. quantum computing in this area is the ability to calculate transendental numbers to a given precision such that algebraic approximation is no longer a viable option. The question is the method of transendental number generation.
Actually, you're a moron, and the underlying premise behind the comment is directly related to the most pressing issue at hand: where DO we draw the line between those who get the letter and those who get shafted. Saying that it is offtopic (ala metaphor) is indicative of not understanding the content of the message.
Half the time it's the writer who doesn't put in the thought, half the time it's the reader. I've also noted by your karma (-2) that you don't seem to have much in the way of writing ability either, making your entire contribution to the community largely negligible, and thus making you a hyppocrit. Not to attack you on a personal level, but you've offered no practical arguments to defunk.
It is very possible that cryptography will move from the relatively finite world of integers and prime numbers to the much more infinite:) world of irrationals.
I find this of interest: A straight line on a standard Euclidean distance metric can pass through an infinite number of algebraic numbers, that being, numbers that are a combination of a finite number of finite roots of primes. Whereas a line in contact with this algebraic line may pass through an infinite number of transendental numbers (ie. pi). These two lines may not differ by a real amount, ie. any number added to one or the other results in something larger than the difference of any two points on either line (respectively the same distance from the origin).
Anyway, I think it's neat because one can create a transendental number, extract points at some finite distance down the line (ie. 2^120,000) of it's digits, and you may have a unique number sequence. Without knowing the transendental number, it is quite a difficult problem to solve. But it can be approximated . . . for now, SFAIK.
All algebraic numbers can be expressed as the roots of primes. With finite precision numbers, transendental numbers can be approximated as the roots of primes.
When it comes to politics, we as nations should *want* to be judged, with the harshest criticisms possible, afforded by a free press and free speech.
I stand corrected. This is completely correct, and it is something that I am ashamed to have overlooked.
Judge not, lest ye be judged is applicable to flamboyant hyppocracy, well founded ignorance, and unsightly uneducated opinion. When one party stands for any of these, their arguments are preemptively undermined. Otherwise, they are genuine. Genuine tends to be good.
That's very informative, and quite interesting. However, it does not address the issue that people with money, make money. I'm not capable of a rebuttle to this (I don't particularly disagree with any of it), but my initial point was not on the topic of communism and capitalism, but on the indiscriminant bashing of communism.
I have seen both good and bad billionaires, good and bad dictators. People who are billionaires, like those who are dictators, have a tendancy to have a preoccupation with those priorities conducive to their respective situations.
I'm not fond of either of these priorities. It's all about incentives.:) Proletariat in one society tend to be similar to proletariat in other societies. So long
Alas, despite being interesting and informative... it's getting offtopic . . .:)
Can you explain for me why someone who has ability should be made the slave of someone who has less ability?
You see what you want to see. I would much rather work for someone who deserved to be my better, rather than the incompetent son of some rich bugger, thank you very much.
You tout ignorance out the ying yang, and directly epitomize my original post. Opinion without investigation is the pinnacle of ignorance. A wise man said that. Express your problem with communism in a way such that we can make up our own mind as the reader. Don't try and brainwash indiscriminantly, even if it was done onto you.
50 years of propaganda dies hard -- I've seen evidence to suggest that many people critize Communism without due cause, or reasonable background in the subject. There are *real* problems with communism, but there are *real* problems with capitalism as well, and I do not think that any of us should judge either until we have sufficiently experienced both.
Some of my closest friends hail from Yugoslavia and Russia. Those with justifiable animosity towards Communism, generally have valid critism of Capitalism as well. Those who like either, tend to like both. It is more a sign of the person, than what they speak of, when expressing opinion without investigation.
Not to go biblical on you:), but it is true: judge not, lest ye be judged.
This is on an SMB Celeron running Windows 2000.:) We had issues on a PIII 500 as well, but that was a hardware issues (one of the AGP pins was physically bent out of contact in the slot!)
ATI's Rage Pro is quite notorious for driver revisions. It's too bad, because the chip is so common, that the drivers tend to flake the whole system.
Oh, yes, we had some issues with SB Live! and TNT2 Ultra in Rogue Sphere and Homeworld. Yeesh. It's nothing but hardware and software conflicts out the ying-yang.;)
The sad thing is: some games it works. Others it don't. sigh What can ya do!
There's nothing like that brand new blue screen of death when playing on a brand new video card. Still get it with a TNT2 in half-life. Why? Because hardware is released about a year before the software drivers catch up.
I just bought 2 voodoo2's from Creative because I'm finally confident that they have reasonably stable drivers. I'm still waiting for stable Rage Pro drivers...
Of course, I'm still waiting for a stable OS to play games on (Yay Loki!) besides Windows, which should make a huge difference in the stability of the games. In particular, XFree86 4 DRI should be just great.
Admittedly, Tux has been a great refinement of our view of Linux, but let's not overkill it. Some way to graphically portray people from all over the world, united by free software, seems more apt to cover Linux community, rather than Tux, which seems symbolic of Linux software.
Then there are some twists -- like throwing in how this is pulling away from the corporate philosophy of profit, and moving towards the philanthropic philosophy of most members of this community
The penguin is an idol -- it's a nice single-symbol entity that Linux is reflected in. But it does not portray much real information about what Linux is.
It's all about people. Not to get wierd on you:), but I believe that Linux is about giving power to people. Linux is about rebellion and defiance, an anathema to corruption (speak not of it getting corrupted itself) and a way to perpetuate good technology, in the face of technological and economic and marketing forces working against it.
Yeah, explain it to me, too.:) We've been looking at this all week, and wondering how one gets to buy IPO at $22. Especially when it is, at the same time, up 565%, but first tradew were at $140.
Someone out there care to shed some light on these contradictions?
Since there is no way to automate source code testing, one of the issues that has been abound is some way to rate various types of software, based on their robustness. It'd be nice if there was a linear scale (ie. 1-5, 5 being mission-critical, threaded, scalable) or some such in a t-uple. (ie. (a,b,c), where a is efficiency, b is scalability, c is stability).
The next big thing is documentation. Some sort of XML standard for code and project and app documentation (separate, of course, but related), would be just dandy for everything. Relating everything ala one standard is what makes things work in nifty ways.
And a centralized source would be great. ie. something to Linux what CPAN is to Perl. That'd be a *huge* repository, difficult to update, on ultra-fast servers. That makes things very difficult to find as well. (See microsoft.com)
These things are difficult to implement without a given infrastructure. Without said infrastructure available to everyone, and used ubiquitously, things will probably centralize around companies such as Caldera, Red Hat, Corel, et al. The only difference is that, instead of a centralized repetoire of Linux software, it's distributed (perhaps with lots of overlap) between companies. That might be a good thing, though, as there is no central point of failure, and it is a competitive system.
Somehow, I seem to recall Corel Linux being based on Debian. Hopefully, as time goes on and Debian derivatives become more popular, the superior packaging (IMHO) program of Debian will become equally as popular as Red Hat's RPM's.
I wonder if the companies making money off of Debian plan on allocating resources and development to Debian, other than their particular distribution. It's only fair, but they aren't obligated to.
With all these distributions coming out, particularly of note is LinuxOne (Red Hat: s/Red Hat/LinuxOne/g) which seems to offer no valid improvements over existing distributions, what will be the turn-over for new technology to keep a distribution competitively ahead of another? If distributions constantly have derivatives of equivalent merit, what keeps a company developing?
Would the eventual money-oriented incentive be to use closed-software (so their distro can't be copied), or to focus on marketing? I don't know, but it'll be an interesting thing to watch.
But, so long as all the distros get along, I'm happy.:)
I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that the current CD fabs are not equipped to stamp DVD discs, and as such there was a certain amount of capital investment necessary to either bring the CD fab up to DVD par, or build a new plant for DVD's. Either way, the fabs (and upgrades) are costly and as such the supply of DVD fabs is relatively low, so DVD stamping is more expensive than CD stamping.
DVD's are more expensive because less fabs have the technology to burn the higher density DVD disks. But DVD drives are almost as cheap as CD drives of equivalent speed. With more demand for DVD's, because the drives are so cheeply available, more demand will arise for the actual discs, and as such the cost of DVD manufacturing will go down (according to scale). As for CD's dissappearing, I'm giving them two to three years until you *need* a CD player to get the goods.:)
I've been in several big scale projects requiring language decisions. And there are certainly places where Perl is just great; the string regular expression engine, and interpretation of on-the-fly generated code, make many things that are borderline multi-person projects, relatively simple one-person projects.
But it makes sacrifices. You can't beat C/C++ and assembler for having the ability to do things the way you want them done. For one project, an automated reasoner, the code was designed down to a bitwise memory manager. This simply wouldn't be possible in Perl. But we did make a web interface to the automated reasoner using Perl, thus decreasing our overall cost, in terms of development time and effort. And in particular, frustration. We also modularize the project into Perl and C/C++ parts, making debugging, documentation, and reviewing (and reuse) much better.
The best part about Perl was the documentation -- O'Reilly's books by Larry Wall et al., was superb. We bought the two books they publish (the "Cookbook", and the "Programming" guide), and were sufficently versed in the language and architecture of the interpreter to make robust, straight forward, and complex manipulation programs. Not very good for an automated reasoner (it'd probably take longer than the end of the universe to prove pigeon hole), but great for converting output between syntatical equivalents and testing validity (relatively trivial compared to generating a proof).
I think every language has it's place. I'm keen on the diagonal languages (C/C++, Perl, etc.), rather than the orthogonal languages (Python, Java, etc.). The diagonal languages let you do things in many equally correct interpretations, whereas the orthogonal reflect single best interpretations. Perl is the living epitemy of a diagonal language, which is part of it's beauty, and one of the reasons I like it so much, but diagonal languages are more difficult to understand the second time you try and work on it.:)
Like everything, there's reason to choose one language over another, and like everything in the real world surrounding choice, there's no perfect solution. Even COBOL has it's place.
I've been in several big scale projects requiring language decisions. And there are certainly places where Perl is just great; the string regular expression engine, and interpretation of on-the-fly generated code, make many things that are borderline multi-person projects, relatively simple one-person projects.
But it makes sacrifices. You can't beat C/C++ and assembler for having the ability to do things the way you want them done. For one project, an automated reasoner, the code was designed down to a bitwise memory manager. This simply wouldn't be possible in Perl. But we did make a web interface to the automated reasoner using Perl, thus decreasing our overall cost, in terms of development time and effort. And in particular, frustration. We also modularize the project into Perl and C/C++ parts, making debugging, documentation, and reviewing (and reuse) much better.
The best part about Perl was the documentation -- O'Reilly's books by Larry Wall et al., was superb. We bought the two books they publish (the "Cookbook", and the "Programming" guide), and were sufficently versed in the language and architecture of the interpreter to make robust, straight forward, and complex manipulation programs. Not very good for an automated reasoner (it'd probably take longer than the end of the universe to prove pigeon hole), but great for converting output between syntatical equivalents and testing validity (relatively trivial compared to generating a proof).
I think every language has it's place. I'm keen on the diagonal languages (C/C++, Perl, etc.), rather than the orthogonal languages (Python, Java, etc.). The diagonal languages let you do things in many equally correct interpretations, whereas the orthogonal reflect single best interpretations. Perl is the living epitemy of a diagonal language, which is part of it's beauty, and one of the reasons I like it so much, but diagonal languages are more difficult to understand the second time you try and work on it.:)
Like everything, there's reason to choose one language over another, and like everything in the real world surrounding choice, there's no perfect solution. Even COBOL has it's place.
This is the accepted theory, although Gold seems to indicate that this does not wholly encompass all the intricacies involved in petroleum's presence in various places, like space dust, nor the abundance of helium in underground material.
More than anything, I think he helps us look outside the prescribed antidotes to unanswered questions, by providing possible truths, rather than refined ones.
Is there any chance we can send questions off to this guy?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why am I writing this!? Why is this here? What is wrong with these people!
That's it ... I'm outa here.
Tut Tut Tut tut tut tut ... tut ... tut
Given our current political system, as well, it is far too easy to scapegoat an alien intelligence where ignorance is abound, to political ends. (Much like Communism is the target of American politicians, and Capitalism is the target of mindless scrutiny in Communist countries.)
Entirely correct. Prevention is the key. After the fact, however, I'm at a loss to moderate the complexities of rebuttles to conscious actions that violate morality by an artificial entity.Sure is something to think about. Hope it comes up at AAAI next year . . .
Aside: Contrary to many idealistic axioms, it is impossible for two equal fulcrums to exist in the same system. Coexistence with artificial sentients is only a temporary setting.
When automated drivers start crashing into me on the highway I start looking for liability. And if that automated driver was a self-contained, autonomous being that is otherwise incapable of making a sensible rebuttle in court, what am I to do then? Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets. Cannot sentients decide to kill without us knowing, obviated from liability by the nature of their ability to clone in an electronic existence. And as punishment, should we just switch the power off, that doesn't satiate me very much if I've just lost my family in a car accident to an artificial being. If the sentient was incapable to save lives, I can forgive. If a true sentient is unwilling to preserve life, how am I to correct it?
The ability of our artificial children to procreate, evolve, patent ideas, explore space, or serve up new fancy types of porn, doesn't concern me. My primary concerns are with the liability of sentient artificial entities, as the punishment and recuperate is as likely to work on artificial beings as it is on humans. Throw them in jail with a bunch of other sentients so they learn how not to get caught.
It's safe to presume that anything that can be legally declared intelligent will, on average, be by definition smarter than the vast majority of the human population. How are we to adapt to sentients other than ourselves, that will be created to be intelligent (rather than bred for jollies)?
The major cryptographic interests w.r.t. quantum computing in this area is the ability to calculate transendental numbers to a given precision such that algebraic approximation is no longer a viable option. The question is the method of transendental number generation.
The area has interest.
Half the time it's the writer who doesn't put in the thought, half the time it's the reader. I've also noted by your karma (-2) that you don't seem to have much in the way of writing ability either, making your entire contribution to the community largely negligible, and thus making you a hyppocrit. Not to attack you on a personal level, but you've offered no practical arguments to defunk.
Damnit -- my karma's 50 . . . can we move the line, just ever so slightly? . . . :-(
I find this of interest: A straight line on a standard Euclidean distance metric can pass through an infinite number of algebraic numbers, that being, numbers that are a combination of a finite number of finite roots of primes. Whereas a line in contact with this algebraic line may pass through an infinite number of transendental numbers (ie. pi). These two lines may not differ by a real amount, ie. any number added to one or the other results in something larger than the difference of any two points on either line (respectively the same distance from the origin).
Anyway, I think it's neat because one can create a transendental number, extract points at some finite distance down the line (ie. 2^120,000) of it's digits, and you may have a unique number sequence. Without knowing the transendental number, it is quite a difficult problem to solve. But it can be approximated . . . for now, SFAIK.
All algebraic numbers can be expressed as the roots of primes. With finite precision numbers, transendental numbers can be approximated as the roots of primes.
Interesting, nonetheless . . .
I stand corrected. This is completely correct, and it is something that I am ashamed to have overlooked.
Judge not, lest ye be judged is applicable to flamboyant hyppocracy, well founded ignorance, and unsightly uneducated opinion. When one party stands for any of these, their arguments are preemptively undermined. Otherwise, they are genuine. Genuine tends to be good.
I have seen both good and bad billionaires, good and bad dictators. People who are billionaires, like those who are dictators, have a tendancy to have a preoccupation with those priorities conducive to their respective situations.
I'm not fond of either of these priorities. It's all about incentives. :) Proletariat in one society tend to be similar to proletariat in other societies. So long
Alas, despite being interesting and informative ... it's getting offtopic . . . :)
You tout ignorance out the ying yang, and directly epitomize my original post. Opinion without investigation is the pinnacle of ignorance. A wise man said that. Express your problem with communism in a way such that we can make up our own mind as the reader. Don't try and brainwash indiscriminantly, even if it was done onto you.
Some of my closest friends hail from Yugoslavia and Russia. Those with justifiable animosity towards Communism, generally have valid critism of Capitalism as well. Those who like either, tend to like both. It is more a sign of the person, than what they speak of, when expressing opinion without investigation.
Not to go biblical on you :), but it is true: judge not, lest ye be judged.
ATI's Rage Pro is quite notorious for driver revisions. It's too bad, because the chip is so common, that the drivers tend to flake the whole system.
Oh, yes, we had some issues with SB Live! and TNT2 Ultra in Rogue Sphere and Homeworld. Yeesh. It's nothing but hardware and software conflicts out the ying-yang. ;)
The sad thing is: some games it works. Others it don't. sigh What can ya do!
Cheers!
I just bought 2 voodoo2's from Creative because I'm finally confident that they have reasonably stable drivers. I'm still waiting for stable Rage Pro drivers ...
Of course, I'm still waiting for a stable OS to play games on (Yay Loki!) besides Windows, which should make a huge difference in the stability of the games. In particular, XFree86 4 DRI should be just great.
It's funny because it's true! *rotflmao*
Then there are some twists -- like throwing in how this is pulling away from the corporate philosophy of profit, and moving towards the philanthropic philosophy of most members of this community
The penguin is an idol -- it's a nice single-symbol entity that Linux is reflected in. But it does not portray much real information about what Linux is.
It's all about people. Not to get wierd on you :), but I believe that Linux is about giving power to people. Linux is about rebellion and defiance, an anathema to corruption (speak not of it getting corrupted itself) and a way to perpetuate good technology, in the face of technological and economic and marketing forces working against it.
It's a philosophy. It is poetic justice.
Someone out there care to shed some light on these contradictions?
The next big thing is documentation. Some sort of XML standard for code and project and app documentation (separate, of course, but related), would be just dandy for everything. Relating everything ala one standard is what makes things work in nifty ways.
And a centralized source would be great. ie. something to Linux what CPAN is to Perl. That'd be a *huge* repository, difficult to update, on ultra-fast servers. That makes things very difficult to find as well. (See microsoft.com)
These things are difficult to implement without a given infrastructure. Without said infrastructure available to everyone, and used ubiquitously, things will probably centralize around companies such as Caldera, Red Hat, Corel, et al. The only difference is that, instead of a centralized repetoire of Linux software, it's distributed (perhaps with lots of overlap) between companies. That might be a good thing, though, as there is no central point of failure, and it is a competitive system.
My wish list. :)
I wonder if the companies making money off of Debian plan on allocating resources and development to Debian, other than their particular distribution. It's only fair, but they aren't obligated to.
With all these distributions coming out, particularly of note is LinuxOne (Red Hat: s/Red Hat/LinuxOne/g) which seems to offer no valid improvements over existing distributions, what will be the turn-over for new technology to keep a distribution competitively ahead of another? If distributions constantly have derivatives of equivalent merit, what keeps a company developing?
Would the eventual money-oriented incentive be to use closed-software (so their distro can't be copied), or to focus on marketing? I don't know, but it'll be an interesting thing to watch.
But, so long as all the distros get along, I'm happy. :)
I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that the current CD fabs are not equipped to stamp DVD discs, and as such there was a certain amount of capital investment necessary to either bring the CD fab up to DVD par, or build a new plant for DVD's. Either way, the fabs (and upgrades) are costly and as such the supply of DVD fabs is relatively low, so DVD stamping is more expensive than CD stamping.
DVD's are more expensive because less fabs have the technology to burn the higher density DVD disks. But DVD drives are almost as cheap as CD drives of equivalent speed. With more demand for DVD's, because the drives are so cheeply available, more demand will arise for the actual discs, and as such the cost of DVD manufacturing will go down (according to scale). As for CD's dissappearing, I'm giving them two to three years until you *need* a CD player to get the goods. :)
But it makes sacrifices. You can't beat C/C++ and assembler for having the ability to do things the way you want them done. For one project, an automated reasoner, the code was designed down to a bitwise memory manager. This simply wouldn't be possible in Perl. But we did make a web interface to the automated reasoner using Perl, thus decreasing our overall cost, in terms of development time and effort. And in particular, frustration. We also modularize the project into Perl and C/C++ parts, making debugging, documentation, and reviewing (and reuse) much better.
The best part about Perl was the documentation -- O'Reilly's books by Larry Wall et al., was superb. We bought the two books they publish (the "Cookbook", and the "Programming" guide), and were sufficently versed in the language and architecture of the interpreter to make robust, straight forward, and complex manipulation programs. Not very good for an automated reasoner (it'd probably take longer than the end of the universe to prove pigeon hole), but great for converting output between syntatical equivalents and testing validity (relatively trivial compared to generating a proof).
I think every language has it's place. I'm keen on the diagonal languages (C/C++, Perl, etc.), rather than the orthogonal languages (Python, Java, etc.). The diagonal languages let you do things in many equally correct interpretations, whereas the orthogonal reflect single best interpretations. Perl is the living epitemy of a diagonal language, which is part of it's beauty, and one of the reasons I like it so much, but diagonal languages are more difficult to understand the second time you try and work on it. :)
Like everything, there's reason to choose one language over another, and like everything in the real world surrounding choice, there's no perfect solution. Even COBOL has it's place.
But it makes sacrifices. You can't beat C/C++ and assembler for having the ability to do things the way you want them done. For one project, an automated reasoner, the code was designed down to a bitwise memory manager. This simply wouldn't be possible in Perl. But we did make a web interface to the automated reasoner using Perl, thus decreasing our overall cost, in terms of development time and effort. And in particular, frustration. We also modularize the project into Perl and C/C++ parts, making debugging, documentation, and reviewing (and reuse) much better.
The best part about Perl was the documentation -- O'Reilly's books by Larry Wall et al., was superb. We bought the two books they publish (the "Cookbook", and the "Programming" guide), and were sufficently versed in the language and architecture of the interpreter to make robust, straight forward, and complex manipulation programs. Not very good for an automated reasoner (it'd probably take longer than the end of the universe to prove pigeon hole), but great for converting output between syntatical equivalents and testing validity (relatively trivial compared to generating a proof).
I think every language has it's place. I'm keen on the diagonal languages (C/C++, Perl, etc.), rather than the orthogonal languages (Python, Java, etc.). The diagonal languages let you do things in many equally correct interpretations, whereas the orthogonal reflect single best interpretations. Perl is the living epitemy of a diagonal language, which is part of it's beauty, and one of the reasons I like it so much, but diagonal languages are more difficult to understand the second time you try and work on it. :)
Like everything, there's reason to choose one language over another, and like everything in the real world surrounding choice, there's no perfect solution. Even COBOL has it's place.
More than anything, I think he helps us look outside the prescribed antidotes to unanswered questions, by providing possible truths, rather than refined ones.
Is there any chance we can send questions off to this guy? :)