Even then, "string =~ s/foo/bar/" isn't inherently better than "string = re.replace('foo', 'bar', string)". It's slightly less typing, but since Python's using Perl's RE engine, there's no difference in actual functionality.
Oh, lovely ARexx - the most hideous and fun of languages. For those not in the know, it was common for Amiga programs to have "ARexx ports", which were basically ABI hooks where you could call any of a number of that program's internal functions. The cool thing was that once you'd "addressed" a running program, you could call its functions just like any other ARexx function. For example:
address BACKUPPROGRAM new backup add/home add/usr add/var results = dobackup address EMAILPROGRAM new email subject "backup results" to "me@example.com" body results send
It's been 10 years since I've really messed with it, so the syntax is almost certainly wrong, but you get the idea.
The coolest thing about ARexx was finding new and weird ways to bind programs together. I wrote a script to link an FTP program and a graphics program (ImageFX?), so that the progress bar was rendered as a bolt of photorealistic lightning that started in one corner of the screen and stretched to the other as the download continued. This certainly wasn't the most useful of hacks, but it was fun and took less than a half page of code.
Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.
First, you still own your application. It's copyrighted to you. You own it. Second, is the app one your plan on distributing? If not, then the GPL is moot.
It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.
The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it. You seem to be under the unsupported belief that I should let you.
If all evidence points against you, even if you're innocent, you're likely to confess to get a lower sentence.
Were he innocent, it would be have difficult for him to produce a body.
It seems to me that the bargain worked for everyone. Hans gets less time, and society gets to know beyond all reasonable doubt that he's truly guilty. His kids get to know the truth. Nina's family doesn't have to wonder for decades.
Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?
To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.
Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?
I did so because Python is a complete superset of Perl for me. Anything I'd previously wanted to do in Perl, I can more easily do in Python. I guess that I can't think of a problem where Perl would be the best solution anymore.
Yeah, yeah, one language make it easier for the programmer to manipulate text or to develop some functionality for a particular task. But this jazz of "the right tool for the right job" is non-sense. We're talking about programming languages: not screwdrivers, drills and hammers. It's all going to be a processor's instruction set one way or another.
Sure! So Python and COBOL are exactly equivalent and there's no real reason you'd pick one over the other.
You know, there's more to a language than Turing completeness.
That's it! I couldn't think of the name for the life of me.
I'm kind of afraid that's exactly what's happening to Perl. It promises to be so much better than Perl 5 that people are unwilling to commit to Perl 5 development for new projects.
Sorta. Was it Sinclair who announced how great their next computers would be, to the point that no one would buy their current offerings? I think Perl's going down that route, and the longer it takes, the fewer programmers there will be to try it when it comes available. I'm not a Perl hater by any means, but I jumped ship for Python a long time ago. I think most Perl hackers have done the same, or picked up Ruby. Perl 6 always sounded interesting, but not so much that I'd put up with Perl 5 until it was ready.
I'm not totally ignorant of it. Yesterday I was upgrading Python on one of our Win2k3 servers so that I could roll out a new version of some software I've written. It's just that I'm not an expert in day-to-day management of Windows systems, nor do I want to be.
I still think my original point still stands. I have a degree in computer science and write network services for a living. Still, it'd take me some Googleing and experimentation to figure out how to purify a brand-new laptop. There's no "click this to get a clean system" button or installer CD on most new systems, so even people who know about computer have to dig in and research the problem. I think that's a pretty poor state of affairs.
For being an IT guy, I'm surprised you haven't considered utilizing your hardware to it's maximum performance.
Totally off-topic, but this laptop is to run one specific piece of medical office management software, and is the only computer owned by said medical office. For tax reasons it's much easier to say that "this laptop is used solely for running this business and nothing else" than to share other resources.
If I'm ever show to the door, I would insist on my ability to operate on the system being terminated at that moment. I don't want VPN access. I don't want an email account. I don't want SSH keys. I sure don't want the boss's password. Why? Because I don't want to be accountable for anything that goes wrong afterward.
Think about it, people. If the IDS catches you SSHing in a couple of weeks after you've left, then they have carte blanche to hold you responsible for whatever breaks, even if it's totally unrelated. Good luck convincing a jury that Oracle coincidentally just happened to explode an hour after you logged into your old workstation. Seriously, what good can possibly come from putting yourself in that situation?
I do Unix. I bought the laptop to run Quickbooks and some industry-specific applications. I appreciate the link, but the point was that you don't have to be a complete babe in the woods to have these sorts of problems.
On the other hand, it's simple enough for someone who knows what they're doing to just reformat the computer with a fresh install of their OS of choice, so the discount you get on your PC for it is pretty nice.
Oh? How's that? I buy a laptop for business use. I am keenly interested in keeping on the safe side of licensing because I don't want the BSA jackboots on my back. I haven't bought a boxed copy of Windows so do not have an installer disk. The OEM media restores my drive to the same state as when I first brought it home.
I'm an IT guy and totally happy with do-it-yourself; I'm typing this on a system I built from Newegg parts. Still, it's not at all obvious to me how I'd clean up that laptop without involving The Pirate Bay or shelling out for official installation disks.
Third party? Don't be an idiot. A third party will not get elected in this cycle, maybe we can work for a viable third party over time, but not now.
My state's going for McCain - no ifs, ands, or buts. I'm voting for Barr to send a message to the Republicans.
But beyond that, your argument against voting for third parties is stupid in a way that a self-proclaimed engineer should immediately grok. If third parties call only win the N+1 election, where N is the first one where they make a good showing and demonstrate viability, then at some point you have to have N or you'll never get to N+1. If the people using your logic last time had thought it through and voted their conscience, then maybe 2004 would have been N and this year could have been N+1.
Yeah, that'll turn the h4xx04z away. Want to really make it worthwhile? Force a pink-on-pink color scheme, license the theme song to "My Little Pony", and play that in an uninterruptable background loop on all available sound devices. That'll do a lot more to keep a kid honest than would making his desktop look 1337.
opinion that speaking ill of self-proclaimed 'psychics', 'healers', or tarot card readers is fundamentally not only naive, but also immature and detrimental to your own ability to understand your surroundings. Many of us have experienced things not you nor we can begin to comprehend,
None of us have experienced things that humans are unable to comprehend. Even the odd corner cases, like quantum entanglement, are being actively explored.
and your ridiculous belittling attitude only serves to stop us from sharing our experiences.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to make every would-be psychic keep their traps shut? Cause I'd personally make sure it happened to all those idiots hosting "talk to your pet" TV shows.
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Even then, "string =~ s/foo/bar/" isn't inherently better than "string = re.replace('foo', 'bar', string)". It's slightly less typing, but since Python's using Perl's RE engine, there's no difference in actual functionality.
Oh, lovely ARexx - the most hideous and fun of languages. For those not in the know, it was common for Amiga programs to have "ARexx ports", which were basically ABI hooks where you could call any of a number of that program's internal functions. The cool thing was that once you'd "addressed" a running program, you could call its functions just like any other ARexx function. For example:
It's been 10 years since I've really messed with it, so the syntax is almost certainly wrong, but you get the idea.
The coolest thing about ARexx was finding new and weird ways to bind programs together. I wrote a script to link an FTP program and a graphics program (ImageFX?), so that the progress bar was rendered as a bolt of photorealistic lightning that started in one corner of the screen and stretched to the other as the download continued. This certainly wasn't the most useful of hacks, but it was fun and took less than a half page of code.
Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.
First, you still own your application. It's copyrighted to you. You own it. Second, is the app one your plan on distributing? If not, then the GPL is moot.
It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.
The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it. You seem to be under the unsupported belief that I should let you.
If all evidence points against you, even if you're innocent, you're likely to confess to get a lower sentence.
Were he innocent, it would be have difficult for him to produce a body.
It seems to me that the bargain worked for everyone. Hans gets less time, and society gets to know beyond all reasonable doubt that he's truly guilty. His kids get to know the truth. Nina's family doesn't have to wonder for decades.
Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?
To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.
Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?
An often overlooked scripting language is Mumps (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), developed in the late 1960's.
I would rather hack APL than M, and that is not meant as a compliment to either language.
I did so because Python is a complete superset of Perl for me. Anything I'd previously wanted to do in Perl, I can more easily do in Python. I guess that I can't think of a problem where Perl would be the best solution anymore.
Yeah, yeah, one language make it easier for the programmer to manipulate text or to develop some functionality for a particular task. But this jazz of "the right tool for the right job" is non-sense. We're talking about programming languages: not screwdrivers, drills and hammers. It's all going to be a processor's instruction set one way or another.
Sure! So Python and COBOL are exactly equivalent and there's no real reason you'd pick one over the other.
You know, there's more to a language than Turing completeness.
That's it! I couldn't think of the name for the life of me.
I'm kind of afraid that's exactly what's happening to Perl. It promises to be so much better than Perl 5 that people are unwilling to commit to Perl 5 development for new projects.
IF you were an IT guy you would have a reasonably sized collection of default installation CDs.
I do. I have the FreeBSD 7.0 AMD64 CD, Ubuntu 8.04, and an OpenBSD case laying around on the desk in front of me.
Sorta. Was it Sinclair who announced how great their next computers would be, to the point that no one would buy their current offerings? I think Perl's going down that route, and the longer it takes, the fewer programmers there will be to try it when it comes available. I'm not a Perl hater by any means, but I jumped ship for Python a long time ago. I think most Perl hackers have done the same, or picked up Ruby. Perl 6 always sounded interesting, but not so much that I'd put up with Perl 5 until it was ready.
Windows is just too big to remain ignorant about.
I'm not totally ignorant of it. Yesterday I was upgrading Python on one of our Win2k3 servers so that I could roll out a new version of some software I've written. It's just that I'm not an expert in day-to-day management of Windows systems, nor do I want to be.
I still think my original point still stands. I have a degree in computer science and write network services for a living. Still, it'd take me some Googleing and experimentation to figure out how to purify a brand-new laptop. There's no "click this to get a clean system" button or installer CD on most new systems, so even people who know about computer have to dig in and research the problem. I think that's a pretty poor state of affairs.
For being an IT guy, I'm surprised you haven't considered utilizing your hardware to it's maximum performance.
Totally off-topic, but this laptop is to run one specific piece of medical office management software, and is the only computer owned by said medical office. For tax reasons it's much easier to say that "this laptop is used solely for running this business and nothing else" than to share other resources.
If I'm ever show to the door, I would insist on my ability to operate on the system being terminated at that moment. I don't want VPN access. I don't want an email account. I don't want SSH keys. I sure don't want the boss's password. Why? Because I don't want to be accountable for anything that goes wrong afterward.
Think about it, people. If the IDS catches you SSHing in a couple of weeks after you've left, then they have carte blanche to hold you responsible for whatever breaks, even if it's totally unrelated. Good luck convincing a jury that Oracle coincidentally just happened to explode an hour after you logged into your old workstation. Seriously, what good can possibly come from putting yourself in that situation?
If it was a barrier, you wouldn't be /able/ to break it.
Yeah.
Just make a copy of the OEM windows install disk
Which OEM install disk? Most systems come without those now.
I do Unix. I bought the laptop to run Quickbooks and some industry-specific applications. I appreciate the link, but the point was that you don't have to be a complete babe in the woods to have these sorts of problems.
Eventually, someone at experts-exchange.com gave me the answer to my problem.
You had me until then.
Does an OEM make more or less than $30 by preinstalling all that junk?
On the other hand, it's simple enough for someone who knows what they're doing to just reformat the computer with a fresh install of their OS of choice, so the discount you get on your PC for it is pretty nice.
Oh? How's that? I buy a laptop for business use. I am keenly interested in keeping on the safe side of licensing because I don't want the BSA jackboots on my back. I haven't bought a boxed copy of Windows so do not have an installer disk. The OEM media restores my drive to the same state as when I first brought it home.
I'm an IT guy and totally happy with do-it-yourself; I'm typing this on a system I built from Newegg parts. Still, it's not at all obvious to me how I'd clean up that laptop without involving The Pirate Bay or shelling out for official installation disks.
Third party? Don't be an idiot. A third party will not get elected in this cycle, maybe we can work for a viable third party over time, but not now.
My state's going for McCain - no ifs, ands, or buts. I'm voting for Barr to send a message to the Republicans.
But beyond that, your argument against voting for third parties is stupid in a way that a self-proclaimed engineer should immediately grok. If third parties call only win the N+1 election, where N is the first one where they make a good showing and demonstrate viability, then at some point you have to have N or you'll never get to N+1. If the people using your logic last time had thought it through and voted their conscience, then maybe 2004 would have been N and this year could have been N+1.
My daughters are 8 and 5. As far as I know, they have not yet installed pirated copies of XP.
Yeah, that'll turn the h4xx04z away. Want to really make it worthwhile? Force a pink-on-pink color scheme, license the theme song to "My Little Pony", and play that in an uninterruptable background loop on all available sound devices. That'll do a lot more to keep a kid honest than would making his desktop look 1337.
I just bought a Gigabyte motherboard last month, so they're the only manufacturer allowed to get out of the business this year.
I hold the educated
Ahem.
opinion that speaking ill of self-proclaimed 'psychics', 'healers', or tarot card readers is fundamentally not only naive, but also immature and detrimental to your own ability to understand your surroundings. Many of us have experienced things not you nor we can begin to comprehend,
None of us have experienced things that humans are unable to comprehend. Even the odd corner cases, like quantum entanglement, are being actively explored.
and your ridiculous belittling attitude only serves to stop us from sharing our experiences.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to make every would-be psychic keep their traps shut? Cause I'd personally make sure it happened to all those idiots hosting "talk to your pet" TV shows.