I wish Larry Wall would get more involved in promoting the general idea of open source. Larry would be so much easier for government and corporate types to accept, and he certainly has a solid reputation in the open source world. This is not to say anything about ESR or RMS, just that L?W would make an excellent addition to the public relations efforts of open source.
Carp and Exporter and most everything else in the Perl world are issued under the Artistic License, not the GPL. The Artistic License is an OSI approved open source license. It's the license that is refered to when all those modules say "This module is freely available and is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself".
The fact that the modules are AL instead of GPL may have an effect on Tilly's case, particularly this sentence (not from the license itself but from Perl's distribution notes):
The bottom line is that this is a kinder and gentler version of the GNU license -- one that doesn't infect your work if you care to borrow from Perl or package up pieces of it as part of a commercial product!
Soviets were never really far ahead
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The only reason the Soviets ever appeared to be significantly ahead of the US during the moon race era was that the Soviets started sooner and were willing to take higher risks. Keep in mind that the US's Explorer went into orbit only
a few months after Sputnik. Granted, Sputnik was more advanced, but the difference was mostly due to a lack of motivation on the part of the US. Once the US got motivated, we surged ahead. By the time of Apollo it was barely a contest at all, in terms of "firsts": the US was far closer to the moon.
In short, it was a tortoise and hare race. In terms of the space race, the US took a nap after WWII and the USSR got to work. Once the hare woke up it was just a question of how much of a head start the hare had. For the moon race, it wasn't enough of a head start.
Still, don't think I'm disrepecting the USSR space effort. They did great things and I hope Russians today are proud when they think of the Soviet space program.
The official Soviet line was that they never were really trying to land a person on the moon. That was the best line they could come up with when they weren't able to beat the U.S. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cosmonauts from the 60's, such as Leonov, made it quite clear that the USSR was in fact trying to land a person on the moon, and do it first.
If your point is that the Soviet space program was, on the whole, a success not a failure, I completely agree. Their space programs was one of the few things the Communist world could be truly proud of.
... and yet Greenpeace is singled out as representative of everybody who is concerned about environmental issues and then sneered at. It's a great way to sidetrack a conversation. Someone says "I'm concerned about ozone depletion" and you respond "Oh, Greenpeace is just a set of whackos. It's been proven that the founders were just in it for the money". By the time the issue of the Greenpeace founders and their credibility has been dealt with, any real discussion of the ozone has been forgotten.
Similar things happen with discussions of preventing cruelty to animals, Palistinean rights, civil liberties, rights of the unborn, and I'm sure we could come up with a few more.
BTW, for the record, I don't agree or disagree with your statements about Greenpeace, I'm just pointing out that discussions tend to go that way.
Clarence Darrow was one of the best defense lawyers of all time, and he knew it. So when he himself was put on trial, what did he do? He got himself a lawyer. He knew that defending yourself is stupid.
Trivia: that fact about Darrow was cited to the Supreme Court when it was considering the idea that defendents have a legel right to have a lawyer appointed and paid for on their behalf if they can't afford one themselves.
As a long time skeptic on many issues myself (just ask my friends who have asked me what sign I am) skepticism is a good thing. Just remember that it goes both ways.
I agree that simply mimicking Windows just for the sake of being similar to something familiar is not a worthwhile goal. Your average desktop user doesn't really care about it that much... if they did they would never have moved from DOS to Windows 3.x to Windows 95/98/2K to XP over the last ten years.
That being said, mimicking Windows because it's a nice clean interface isn't such a bad idea. Like everything else in building a good product, being a copycat isn't a bad policy. Users generally want these simple UI features, and not much more:
A single "start" button in one corner
A few well organized choices inside the start menu
A strip along to top or bottom showing the currently running apps
Some icons on the desktop that start the things they mostly want
a taskbar in one corner with a very few important icons, probably just a clock and an email indicator
One window per open document
The ability to add to all of the above, but nothing else by default
Anybody attempting to design a truly user-friendly Linux distro needs to start by making
IceWM the default window manager. IceWM gives the average users What They Want: a simple clean desktop. The taskbar isn't filled with junk (well, maybe a little, but the distro should default it out), just a set of simple buttons. Yes, it looks a lot like Windows, but that's not necessarily bad. What's important is that it's a clean interface that users can understand right away. The desktop war is won or lost in the first minute that the user looks at the screen and decides if s/he understands what's going on.
A lot of people commenting on how various anti-theft devices won't help because they can be worked around are missing the point. Security is done in layers. You implement a variety of security measures to improve the odds catching different situations. So, the car-alarm style card in the laptop won't stop the person who sat and watched you tilt in your "passtilt", but it will inhibit the many, many potential thieves who simply walk by and see an unattended laptop.
The best laptop-theft-prevention is staying with the computer. That may be where wearable computers have their best value. A computer around your belt with a glasses-style display won't be easily forgotten.
If everybody started wearing the systems, and you could hack the systems, you could be walking down the street and your server could discover that the girl walking towards you (it knows who she is because she's wearing the system too) subscribes to certain magazines, is a mamber of such and such clubs, and has participated in certain discussions. Then the system could provide info for picking up.
This reminds me of the uniforms the marines wore in Aliens. They had cameras mounted in the helmets and streaming biofeedback back to the base unit where an incompetent lieutenent gives orders. I always thought those uniforms made a lot of sense, except for the incompetent lieutenent part.
I've often thought a universal PayPal-like system could be implemented by simply creating bank accounts which can only accept deposits. When the account is set up it is associated with a normal account which can be used for deposits and withdrawals. You would be able to give out your deposit-only account number to anybody and they could simply wire a transfer to that account from their own bank. They wouldn't be able to use the number to get money. When money is deposited into a deposit only account, it is automatically flushed into the associated regular account.
I don't know a lot about how banks work, however, so I'd be interested to hear the opinions of some bank-smart people.
The crematorium in Georgia that wasn't officially defined as a crematorium, even though it did cremations, so it didn't have to follow cremation regulations.
... I hadn't give it much thought, but I almost never use the floating window paradigm anymore. As I type I have three applications runnning, each in full-screen mode. I alt-tab between them with as little conscious effort as steering the car. I can't stand working in a floating windows except when they are small utilities like a calculator.
The interesting development may not just be that floating windows go away but also that hardly anybody even notices.
This article begs an important question for OpenSourceLobby and other organizations devoted to public education about open source: how adversarial is our relationship with other closed-source OS's? Our relationship with Microsoft up until now has been clear: they're the adversary. That isn't going to change. However, there are other vendors of closed-source OS's and open source is competition for them. The strange part of this equation is that many producers of closed-source OS's also push open source products. IBM and Sun both come to mind.
So the question is this: how much effort should we devote to pushing Linux and BSD as alternatives to close-source OS's?
My answer to that question is "not much". We need to focus on our main adversary: Microsoft. John Q. Public and Buford T. Congressman are probably not going care much about which version of Un*x somebody ought to choose, but will care very much about whether to use Windows.
In short, "open source Un*x or close source Un*x?" is simply not on the political map, and doesn't need to be.
-Miko
Re:Messing things up or using Perl for what it fit
on
Perl6 for Mortals
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
most Perl code that uses advanced/obscure features already does
I'm preparing a presentation on Perl for my coworkers right now and I address this issue. It's my position that Perl's reputation for ugliness "comes mostly from fancy-pants Perl hackers showing off their obfuscation skills."
I use an actual example of code that someone used to "prove" that Perl is ugly:
Actually, that's just lousy coding. The following code, which does the same thing, is much better:
#!usr/local/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
# grab a line from STDIN, chomp off the EOL
my $input = <STDIN>;
chomp $input;
# change first letter to uppercase
$input =~ s/(^|\ )([a-z])/$1\U$2/g;
# output it
print $input, "\n";
In answer to the inevitable question "why is it better?", two reasons. First, it uses warnings, strictures and tainting which strongly channel the programmer towards writing robust, secure code. Second, by using well-named variables and comments, it's clear what the program does and how it does it.
Perl does provide the freedom to write lousy code, perhaps even more so than other languages, and many programmers use that freedom. That's one of the side-effects of freedom: people will make choices you disagree with.
There is a movement afoot in the Perl culture to shun bad programming... that's also how freedom works: if enough people don't like something, social pressure reduces it. For example, if the author of the exmple above were to post the code in comp.lang.perl.misc asking for help, he/she wouldn't get much help beyond "use strict and warnings" because those techniques are regarded as essential to any Perl programming and people won't help you if you don't help yourself (again, that's how freedom works).
IMHO, Perl is the language for "general programming purposes". Don't let some lousy coding throw you off on this point.
It sounds like the real request is not so much for software but for software, installation, and support. In other words, you want someone to be in charge of making it happen.
There are probably plenty of excellent consulting companies that are qualified to be in charge of making it happen with Jabber.
Feingold is not up for reelection until 2004, so hopefully any passionate disagreement with him in his state on this will have cooled by then.
However, I'm helping out now. Here's where you can snail-mail a donation. (How 'bout one of Russ' Wisconsin constituents tell them they ought to set up a PayPal account.)
Feingold Senate Committee
P.O. Box 620062
Middleton, WI 53562
The only reason I keep AV bookmarked at all is to answer
Kickstart's Question of the Day on UserFriendly. He likes to do "fill in the blank" questions and I find it interesting to search for the pattern he requests.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish Larry Wall would get more involved in promoting the general idea of open source. Larry would be so much easier for government and corporate types to accept, and he certainly has a solid reputation in the open source world. This is not to say anything about ESR or RMS, just that L?W would make an excellent addition to the public relations efforts of open source.
Maybe not, but when Chrysler promoted Lee Iococca (formal training: engineering) to CEO they were the happiest carmaker in Detroit.
The fact that the modules are AL instead of GPL may have an effect on Tilly's case, particularly this sentence (not from the license itself but from Perl's distribution notes):
-Miko
In short, it was a tortoise and hare race. In terms of the space race, the US took a nap after WWII and the USSR got to work. Once the hare woke up it was just a question of how much of a head start the hare had. For the moon race, it wasn't enough of a head start.
Still, don't think I'm disrepecting the USSR space effort. They did great things and I hope Russians today are proud when they think of the Soviet space program.
-Miko
If your point is that the Soviet space program was, on the whole, a success not a failure, I completely agree. Their space programs was one of the few things the Communist world could be truly proud of.
-Miko
Similar things happen with discussions of preventing cruelty to animals, Palistinean rights, civil liberties, rights of the unborn, and I'm sure we could come up with a few more.
BTW, for the record, I don't agree or disagree with your statements about Greenpeace, I'm just pointing out that discussions tend to go that way.
Trivia: that fact about Darrow was cited to the Supreme Court when it was considering the idea that defendents have a legel right to have a lawyer appointed and paid for on their behalf if they can't afford one themselves.
-Miko
- UCS examines The Skeptical Environmentalist
- Nine things journalists should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist
As a long time skeptic on many issues myself (just ask my friends who have asked me what sign I am) skepticism is a good thing. Just remember that it goes both ways.-Miko
That being said, mimicking Windows because it's a nice clean interface isn't such a bad idea. Like everything else in building a good product, being a copycat isn't a bad policy. Users generally want these simple UI features, and not much more:
Anybody attempting to design a truly user-friendly Linux distro needs to start by making IceWM the default window manager. IceWM gives the average users What They Want: a simple clean desktop. The taskbar isn't filled with junk (well, maybe a little, but the distro should default it out), just a set of simple buttons. Yes, it looks a lot like Windows, but that's not necessarily bad. What's important is that it's a clean interface that users can understand right away. The desktop war is won or lost in the first minute that the user looks at the screen and decides if s/he understands what's going on.
... that Java is better than Perl. It takes so many more lines of code to do the same simple thing. 'splains everything.
The best laptop-theft-prevention is staying with the computer. That may be where wearable computers have their best value. A computer around your belt with a glasses-style display won't be easily forgotten.
It could happen.
-Miko
-Miko
-Miko
I don't know a lot about how banks work, however, so I'd be interested to hear the opinions of some bank-smart people.
-Miko
-Miko
So, should every geek in the world simaltaneously show up for the wedding, making it impossible to actually get the thing done?
-Miko
The interesting development may not just be that floating windows go away but also that hardly anybody even notices.
So the question is this: how much effort should we devote to pushing Linux and BSD as alternatives to close-source OS's?
My answer to that question is "not much". We need to focus on our main adversary: Microsoft. John Q. Public and Buford T. Congressman are probably not going care much about which version of Un*x somebody ought to choose, but will care very much about whether to use Windows.
In short, "open source Un*x or close source Un*x?" is simply not on the political map, and doesn't need to be.
-Miko
I'm preparing a presentation on Perl for my coworkers right now and I address this issue. It's my position that Perl's reputation for ugliness "comes mostly from fancy-pants Perl hackers showing off their obfuscation skills."
I use an actual example of code that someone used to "prove" that Perl is ugly:
Actually, that's just lousy coding. The following code, which does the same thing, is much better: In answer to the inevitable question "why is it better?", two reasons. First, it uses warnings, strictures and tainting which strongly channel the programmer towards writing robust, secure code. Second, by using well-named variables and comments, it's clear what the program does and how it does it.Perl does provide the freedom to write lousy code, perhaps even more so than other languages, and many programmers use that freedom. That's one of the side-effects of freedom: people will make choices you disagree with.
There is a movement afoot in the Perl culture to shun bad programming ... that's also how freedom works: if enough people don't like something, social pressure reduces it. For example, if the author of the exmple above were to post the code in comp.lang.perl.misc asking for help, he/she wouldn't get much help beyond "use strict and warnings" because those techniques are regarded as essential to any Perl programming and people won't help you if you don't help yourself (again, that's how freedom works).
IMHO, Perl is the language for "general programming purposes". Don't let some lousy coding throw you off on this point.
There are probably plenty of excellent consulting companies that are qualified to be in charge of making it happen with Jabber.
However, I'm helping out now. Here's where you can snail-mail a donation. (How 'bout one of Russ' Wisconsin constituents tell them they ought to set up a PayPal account.)
The only reason I keep AV bookmarked at all is to answer Kickstart's Question of the Day on UserFriendly. He likes to do "fill in the blank" questions and I find it interesting to search for the pattern he requests.