Clarke goes into the idea behind his book about Fermat's Theorem, and while I like the idea, he should change the CIA to the NSA in the book. The CIA deals with crypto quite a bit, but the worlds largest employer of mathemeticians (or so I have heard them called) would be far more likely to scoop up someone who made a breakthrough in prime number theory: the NSA.
It just seems they would make much more sense for his book.
Woefully, this is not about being lazy, but incompetent. I really do believe that Darl got into this business to make a huge amount of money over whoever's body (or bodies) were required, and I also honestly think that the suit against IBM was an attempt to a) make an IBM buyout or settlement a possible end-game b) de-stabalize the Linux market for Microsoft (whose payoff SCO has still failed to hand over to Novell, which they are required to do by contract).
Let's not try to put a humane face on this. Darl isn't doing this because he thinks he was wronged or because he is desperate to save SCO... he's doing this because there could well be a lot of money in it, and if burning Caldera and SCO's reputation and user-base to get that money is required... why would he care? I *want* to see that man go to prison for this so very badly.
The real loser is SCO... SCO was a very cool company long, long ago.
The thing that is starting to bother me is not the search-spam (easily removed over time with increasingly smart ranking), but the mailing lists. If 20 sites around the net archive the same mailing list, then I'll get the first 20 hits in most techical searches from the same list. Google really needs some way to identify duplicate archives (which is hard given that they're all formatted differently) and treat them as one "site".
"I haven't done too much on the OO side yet but the block constructs are a whole lot more intuitive than having to pass around chunks of code with Perl and using 'eval'."
I'm not a detractor of Ruby's (it's on my list of things to get around to learning some day), but you're way off base with respect to Perl.
Sure, you can pass around strings of code in Perl, e.g.:
foo(q{print "Hello, world!\n"}) sub foo {
my $code = shift;
eval $code; }
but that's not very efficient. You're much better off passing around closures:
foo(sub {print "Hello, world!\n"}); sub foo {
my $code = shift;
$code->(); }
Why is that more efficient? Well the obvious way is that there's no second parser pass, it's all parsed at initial compile time, and optimized in one pass. Second, you can do somewhat fancier things like:
foo(sub {print @_}); sub foo {
my $code = shift;
$code->("Hello, world!\n"); }
and because you're passing a closure, you can access lexically scoped variables as well:
my $hi = "Hello"; foo(sub {print "$hi, ", @_, "!\n"}); sub foo {
my $code = shift;
$code->("world"); }
As you can see, passing around code is a strength of Perl's. It's so useful in fact that there's a shorthand for it that allows you to write your own functions like the built-in grep and map functions:
sub printit (&@) {
my $transform = shift;
print $_->($transform) foreach @_; } printit {uc($_)} "hello world!\n";
Ximian Evolution -- Certainly the look and feel is outlookish, but unified calendar / contact / task / email clients are old hat, and far pre-date Outlook. Outlook just had (arguably) the best UI, though it was often quirky and hard to use. One of Evolution's best features, though, is its virtual mailbox handling which is a hybrid of VM (Emacs) and mutt handling.
Mozilla -- This one Microsoft had nothing to do with, though they did push Netscape's development cycles, that was just competition, not a reaction to MS' closed products per se. Mozilla is the child of Netscape and Netscape was a re-implementation of Mosaic from scratch... interestingly Microsoft's IE is a descendent of another Mosaic variant: Spyglass.
One point to back you up here is the most acidic environments on earth are CREATED by bacteria. Recent cave research has found that many (most?) caves were formed by intense mineral-consuming bacteria that produce powerful acids as a waste product.
The acid oceans of Euorpa could easily be the result of such activity, though there's nothing to sugges that that's more likely than the other theories.
One this is for sure: with the gravity and radiation from Jupiter and the possibility of a molten core, Europa is going to be a complex environment and complexity is the first (arguably most important) ingredient for life.
Let's make this clear: the value of open source to security is not that there are this passive pool of eyes waiting to look at all code, but rather that when you have the eyes, they already have the code.
How is this practical? Look at Linux, and more specifically Red Hat. There was a period of a year or two where Red Hat was finding a TON of bugs and fixing them. Why? Because they paid an external auditing firm to find them.
This seems like business as usual until you think about the SuSE user... he gets a security update to openssh and sendmail even though HIS vendor didn't do the audit. This idea that everyone benefits whenever ANYONE in the community does the right thing means that the right thing gets done far more often. It's not that Linux vendors are more security conscious, it's that there are more of them.
When Microsoft gets around to doing a security audit that's great, but they don't benefit when Red Hat does one or when FreeBSD does, etc., and that's hurting them and their reputation.
Bad programmers can make hash out of anything. Good luck with that. At my company we take the startlingly bold approach of not hiring the bad programmers.
I'm sorry, did I mention on-liners? I was talking about OO models, and you're comparing Ruby to C and dismissing Perl with talk of one-liners... I sense a lack of desire to have a serious conversation here...
That's not to say it's bad, but it simply isn't. Perl provides you with all of the tools you need to build a GREAT OO system, but that's not an OO system.
This is one of those things that Larry does that's just unfathomable to the rest of the world. He didn't really grok OO back 10 years ago when P5 was in the works. He understood it well enough to program in the large in C++, but he didn't quite have his head fully around the implications, so when he added OO to Perl 5, he did so in such a way that all of the various ways of approaching code from an OO standpoint could be accomodated.
This means that writing OO code in Perl kind of sucks, but if you want to design an OO model for a programming language, no tool (other than a parser generator) will be more powerful.
Come Perl 6, Larry finally feels that he gets it enough to tell all of the people who are going to have to use his language how to do it. He doesn't take that responsibility lightly, and the fact that SO MANY other language designers do should worry you.
That said, if you want to write medium-sized programs that are heavily OO-dependent, I suggest Ruby or Python or even Java. If you are writing small tools, OO vs non-OO won't matter that much.
If you are building huge systems, then you don't care because the amount of work required to lay out how you will use OO in Perl is insignificant next to the architecture that you have to lay out for the rest of your app. It's just noise in your timeline, and you can fully re-use that policy in every other project that your company tackles.
What's amazing is how Perl lets all of these OO models interact. I'm always stunned by this, and frankly it's a tribute to the language and its designer.
As for your comment about typing less... I don't think that languages with the level of abstraction of Ruby or Perl really need to have line-count contests. Dynamic typing, run-time data structure definition and garbage collection make programming SO much easier that Perl and Ruby are in the same order of magnitude, and I don't see a reason to quibble over the details.
Believe me, I understand you completely (other than the pejorative use of the ill-defined term "scripting").
I used to feel the same way after having programmed in C for many years. Some yahoo made me work with Perl, so I treated it like any other language that I had to pick up... and I hated it. It was full of little special cases and everything broke the rules in at least 3 ways. Most languages strove to remain as context-free as possible, but Perl was awash in as much context-senstivity as Larry Wall could mamage to make his C-compiler-stress-test of a tokenizer handle!
So, why am I a staunch Perl advocate many years later?
1. Because I can think in Perl better than any other language 2. Because Perl favors human beings who have to program, not compilers and interpreters that have to parse the code 3. Because I got orders of magnitude more work done in Perl than C, C++, awk, Java, LISP, or any other language I could find.
"However, with Perl, there are so many things that if they aren't present, they are assumed. It is very "hacky" and makes it very hard to read. When things are assumed, to me as a programmer, it just means it creates uncertainty, and this inevitably leads to bugs."
That's the theory... and that's what I was taught in school... It seems to make sense.
And yet, there is this massive body of good code written in Perl. There is also a ton of BAD code written in Perl. Just check out bugzilla if you want to see the worst case scenario.
But then ask yourself... is that Perl's fault any more than bad C++ code (and man I've seen some amazingly bad, impossible to debug C++) C++'s fault? I judge a programming language on the basis of what good programmers can do with it. If you want bondage languages that force bad programs to be minimally debuggable, use Python, but don't expect to be as productive in a language that forces you to think in some particular way about your problem.
Lots of shameless plugs, yes, but look at what's being advocated:
* More intuitive * More inclusive * Pattern recognition vs. "yes/no" type logic
Ah... ok, let's turn those 90 degrees:
* More context-aware * There's more than one way to do it * Logic using higher order comparison such as regular expressions and grammars
Hmmm... Perl anyone?;-)
Perl is universally panned by people who don't use it for being "opaque", and yet that opacity is the result of all three of the above, and CPAN is a monumental testiment to the value of those features in terms of large-scale software engineering.
If your opinion of dollar-signs is so valuable to you that you can't see the value in 4GB of source code sitting at your fingertips, then I direct you to the nearest Java tutorial....
Yep, you're probably right, which is why I asked if his other OS of choice lacked session/login management of any sort, which is, now that I think about it, unfair. It might just default to runlevel 3 and he didn't know any other way to start X up.
For those who don't know, the command (as root) is:
init 5
Then you should get (on any properly configured Linux variant) a session manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, etc) that will guide you through logging in as whatever user with that user's saved settings (except xdm which only provides login management, not session management).
Actually, you can also use Gnutella for this. The Gnutella protocol has had this kind of multi-sourced-download available for a long time, but only recently are clients beginning to support it. I use gtk-gnutella which works quite well. I got the fedora core isos just about as fast as my line could handle. No waiting here;-)
So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc. The only thing they don't provide is a guarantee of support.
I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL. Red Hat provided an excellent upgrade path from Red Hat Linux 1 all the way to the most recent releases of RHEL WS, AS, etc.
Where was the problem? If it was too much money, fine, you can't afford it, I understand. But, don't blame Red Hat for that. We all knew a long time ago that supporting hundreds of diverse projects loosely gathered together into an OS distribution was a mountain of work. No one is shocked here.
If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on! I use Fedora every day, and it's a great system. The apt integration is perfect, the compatibility with Red Hat Linux is seemless and the software selection is unrivaled (though it tends to be slightly more conservative than Debian unstable and slightly less so than Debian stable (which always lags unstable by a year or more).
Yep. More to the point, it's how xdm and every well behaved sysv-init-friendly window manager behaves. Does this other OS (Knopix, I think you said) invent its own semantics around X-server-exit, or does it simply not provide a session manager at all?
I know that Hollywood is going to have a major use for DRM: proving who did and did not have access to submitted materials when.
You would not believe how much work and money it takes to prove that you didn't steal your idea from someone's spec script / treatment / whatever. DRM gives studios a way to manage information in a way that can be demonstrated to a court, and which has much better defined security characteristics (note: not perfect, just better defined which matters a lot).
DRM is a good tool, it's just the early adopters that are giving it a bad name.
This is a logical falacy. If, 5 years from now, you see no analisys of what this object was, I would agree. Right now, the mission is under way, and to say that NASA is "refusing" to give information leads one to believe that they are in the process of analyzing everything BUT that. There is a TON of work going on at NASA around Spirit and Opportunity right now, and I think there's probably 99% of the data flowing through NASA's hands and most of the analysis of that that they simply don't have time to digest for the public.
Look at what a complicated tangle just releasing images was! You now have to explain to the public why, when looking at red planet, you might not want one of the wavelengths you use to be a standard red filter... duh!
When you start to release analysis before all the proper work has been done... well, that's just reckless.
It looks like you took your image from the JPEG that NASA put up on the Web. Bad idea, of course. At first, I just wrote it off as an artifact, but it does exist in the original image (a 48MB TIFF file from the Mars gallery).
I have put up a crop of the original which you can feel free to stare at. Yes, it does appear to be some sort of round object with two large protrusions. It could easily be a rock of volcanic origin, but my bet is on its being some piece of the lander itself.
The both added to and subtracted from the claims... The one that really killed me was this bit I got from Ziff:
"With the amendment, the suit also includes new allegations that IBM violated its SCO contract by improperly exporting Unix software to India and countries subject to federal export controls, including Iran, North Korea and Cuba, echoing recent comments by SCO CEO Darl McBride that characterized the spread of Linux as a threat to national security."
-ZDNet
You just have to laugh at how far they're reaching here;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Clarke goes into the idea behind his book about Fermat's Theorem, and while I like the idea, he should change the CIA to the NSA in the book. The CIA deals with crypto quite a bit, but the worlds largest employer of mathemeticians (or so I have heard them called) would be far more likely to scoop up someone who made a breakthrough in prime number theory: the NSA.
It just seems they would make much more sense for his book.
Woefully, this is not about being lazy, but incompetent. I really do believe that Darl got into this business to make a huge amount of money over whoever's body (or bodies) were required, and I also honestly think that the suit against IBM was an attempt to a) make an IBM buyout or settlement a possible end-game b) de-stabalize the Linux market for Microsoft (whose payoff SCO has still failed to hand over to Novell, which they are required to do by contract).
Let's not try to put a humane face on this. Darl isn't doing this because he thinks he was wronged or because he is desperate to save SCO... he's doing this because there could well be a lot of money in it, and if burning Caldera and SCO's reputation and user-base to get that money is required... why would he care? I *want* to see that man go to prison for this so very badly.
The real loser is SCO... SCO was a very cool company long, long ago.
Yeah, they just need to expand that to the special case of mailing lists where formatting can be wildly different, but content is the same.
The thing that is starting to bother me is not the search-spam (easily removed over time with increasingly smart ranking), but the mailing lists. If 20 sites around the net archive the same mailing list, then I'll get the first 20 hits in most techical searches from the same list. Google really needs some way to identify duplicate archives (which is hard given that they're all formatted differently) and treat them as one "site".
I'm not a detractor of Ruby's (it's on my list of things to get around to learning some day), but you're way off base with respect to Perl.
Sure, you can pass around strings of code in Perl, e.g.:but that's not very efficient. You're much better off passing around closures:Why is that more efficient? Well the obvious way is that there's no second parser pass, it's all parsed at initial compile time, and optimized in one pass. Second, you can do somewhat fancier things like:and because you're passing a closure, you can access lexically scoped variables as well:As you can see, passing around code is a strength of Perl's. It's so useful in fact that there's a shorthand for it that allows you to write your own functions like the built-in grep and map functions:Enjoy!
True in a humorous way to a point:
Ximian Evolution -- Certainly the look and feel is outlookish, but unified calendar / contact / task / email clients are old hat, and far pre-date Outlook. Outlook just had (arguably) the best UI, though it was often quirky and hard to use. One of Evolution's best features, though, is its virtual mailbox handling which is a hybrid of VM (Emacs) and mutt handling.
Mozilla -- This one Microsoft had nothing to do with, though they did push Netscape's development cycles, that was just competition, not a reaction to MS' closed products per se. Mozilla is the child of Netscape and Netscape was a re-implementation of Mosaic from scratch... interestingly Microsoft's IE is a descendent of another Mosaic variant: Spyglass.
Ooops, it's the acids that are intense, not the bacteria... heh, I sounded like a surfer dude for a minute there... ;-)
One point to back you up here is the most acidic environments on earth are CREATED by bacteria. Recent cave research has found that many (most?) caves were formed by intense mineral-consuming bacteria that produce powerful acids as a waste product.
The acid oceans of Euorpa could easily be the result of such activity, though there's nothing to sugges that that's more likely than the other theories.
One this is for sure: with the gravity and radiation from Jupiter and the possibility of a molten core, Europa is going to be a complex environment and complexity is the first (arguably most important) ingredient for life.
Let's make this clear: the value of open source to security is not that there are this passive pool of eyes waiting to look at all code, but rather that when you have the eyes, they already have the code.
How is this practical? Look at Linux, and more specifically Red Hat. There was a period of a year or two where Red Hat was finding a TON of bugs and fixing them. Why? Because they paid an external auditing firm to find them.
This seems like business as usual until you think about the SuSE user... he gets a security update to openssh and sendmail even though HIS vendor didn't do the audit. This idea that everyone benefits whenever ANYONE in the community does the right thing means that the right thing gets done far more often. It's not that Linux vendors are more security conscious, it's that there are more of them.
When Microsoft gets around to doing a security audit that's great, but they don't benefit when Red Hat does one or when FreeBSD does, etc., and that's hurting them and their reputation.
The latter... but I have no idea why such practices are rare... it's not like having your best programmers vet the new guys is hard.
Bad programmers can make hash out of anything. Good luck with that. At my company we take the startlingly bold approach of not hiring the bad programmers.
I'm sorry, did I mention on-liners? I was talking about OO models, and you're comparing Ruby to C and dismissing Perl with talk of one-liners... I sense a lack of desire to have a serious conversation here...
Perl's OO model isn't.
That's not to say it's bad, but it simply isn't. Perl provides you with all of the tools you need to build a GREAT OO system, but that's not an OO system.
This is one of those things that Larry does that's just unfathomable to the rest of the world. He didn't really grok OO back 10 years ago when P5 was in the works. He understood it well enough to program in the large in C++, but he didn't quite have his head fully around the implications, so when he added OO to Perl 5, he did so in such a way that all of the various ways of approaching code from an OO standpoint could be accomodated.
This means that writing OO code in Perl kind of sucks, but if you want to design an OO model for a programming language, no tool (other than a parser generator) will be more powerful.
Come Perl 6, Larry finally feels that he gets it enough to tell all of the people who are going to have to use his language how to do it. He doesn't take that responsibility lightly, and the fact that SO MANY other language designers do should worry you.
That said, if you want to write medium-sized programs that are heavily OO-dependent, I suggest Ruby or Python or even Java. If you are writing small tools, OO vs non-OO won't matter that much.
If you are building huge systems, then you don't care because the amount of work required to lay out how you will use OO in Perl is insignificant next to the architecture that you have to lay out for the rest of your app. It's just noise in your timeline, and you can fully re-use that policy in every other project that your company tackles.
What's amazing is how Perl lets all of these OO models interact. I'm always stunned by this, and frankly it's a tribute to the language and its designer.
As for your comment about typing less... I don't think that languages with the level of abstraction of Ruby or Perl really need to have line-count contests. Dynamic typing, run-time data structure definition and garbage collection make programming SO much easier that Perl and Ruby are in the same order of magnitude, and I don't see a reason to quibble over the details.
Believe me, I understand you completely (other than the pejorative use of the ill-defined term "scripting").
I used to feel the same way after having programmed in C for many years. Some yahoo made me work with Perl, so I treated it like any other language that I had to pick up... and I hated it. It was full of little special cases and everything broke the rules in at least 3 ways. Most languages strove to remain as context-free as possible, but Perl was awash in as much context-senstivity as Larry Wall could mamage to make his C-compiler-stress-test of a tokenizer handle!
So, why am I a staunch Perl advocate many years later?
1. Because I can think in Perl better than any other language
2. Because Perl favors human beings who have to program, not compilers and interpreters that have to parse the code
3. Because I got orders of magnitude more work done in Perl than C, C++, awk, Java, LISP, or any other language I could find.
"However, with Perl, there are so many things that if they aren't present, they are assumed. It is very "hacky" and makes it very hard to read. When things are assumed, to me as a programmer, it just means it creates uncertainty, and this inevitably leads to bugs."
That's the theory... and that's what I was taught in school... It seems to make sense.
And yet, there is this massive body of good code written in Perl. There is also a ton of BAD code written in Perl. Just check out bugzilla if you want to see the worst case scenario.
But then ask yourself... is that Perl's fault any more than bad C++ code (and man I've seen some amazingly bad, impossible to debug C++) C++'s fault? I judge a programming language on the basis of what good programmers can do with it. If you want bondage languages that force bad programs to be minimally debuggable, use Python, but don't expect to be as productive in a language that forces you to think in some particular way about your problem.
Lots of shameless plugs, yes, but look at what's being advocated:
;-)
* More intuitive
* More inclusive
* Pattern recognition vs. "yes/no" type logic
Ah... ok, let's turn those 90 degrees:
* More context-aware
* There's more than one way to do it
* Logic using higher order comparison such as regular expressions and grammars
Hmmm... Perl anyone?
Perl is universally panned by people who don't use it for being "opaque", and yet that opacity is the result of all three of the above, and CPAN is a monumental testiment to the value of those features in terms of large-scale software engineering.
If your opinion of dollar-signs is so valuable to you that you can't see the value in 4GB of source code sitting at your fingertips, then I direct you to the nearest Java tutorial....
For those who don't know, the command (as root) is:Then you should get (on any properly configured Linux variant) a session manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, etc) that will guide you through logging in as whatever user with that user's saved settings (except xdm which only provides login management, not session management).
Actually, you can also use Gnutella for this. The Gnutella protocol has had this kind of multi-sourced-download available for a long time, but only recently are clients beginning to support it. I use gtk-gnutella which works quite well. I got the fedora core isos just about as fast as my line could handle. No waiting here ;-)
It was done a long time ago for Red Hat Linux, and is still maintained.
Install apt (comes with Fedora as an optional component) and then make sure the first line in your
So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc. The only thing they don't provide is a guarantee of support.
I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL. Red Hat provided an excellent upgrade path from Red Hat Linux 1 all the way to the most recent releases of RHEL WS, AS, etc.
Where was the problem? If it was too much money, fine, you can't afford it, I understand. But, don't blame Red Hat for that. We all knew a long time ago that supporting hundreds of diverse projects loosely gathered together into an OS distribution was a mountain of work. No one is shocked here.
If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on! I use Fedora every day, and it's a great system. The apt integration is perfect, the compatibility with Red Hat Linux is seemless and the software selection is unrivaled (though it tends to be slightly more conservative than Debian unstable and slightly less so than Debian stable (which always lags unstable by a year or more).
Please re-mod the parent as funny. It is most certainly not "informative". The word "joke" should have tipped off moderators. :-(
Yep. More to the point, it's how xdm and every well behaved sysv-init-friendly window manager behaves. Does this other OS (Knopix, I think you said) invent its own semantics around X-server-exit, or does it simply not provide a session manager at all?
Absolutely.
I know that Hollywood is going to have a major use for DRM: proving who did and did not have access to submitted materials when.
You would not believe how much work and money it takes to prove that you didn't steal your idea from someone's spec script / treatment / whatever. DRM gives studios a way to manage information in a way that can be demonstrated to a court, and which has much better defined security characteristics (note: not perfect, just better defined which matters a lot).
DRM is a good tool, it's just the early adopters that are giving it a bad name.
This is a logical falacy. If, 5 years from now, you see no analisys of what this object was, I would agree. Right now, the mission is under way, and to say that NASA is "refusing" to give information leads one to believe that they are in the process of analyzing everything BUT that. There is a TON of work going on at NASA around Spirit and Opportunity right now, and I think there's probably 99% of the data flowing through NASA's hands and most of the analysis of that that they simply don't have time to digest for the public.
Look at what a complicated tangle just releasing images was! You now have to explain to the public why, when looking at red planet, you might not want one of the wavelengths you use to be a standard red filter... duh!
When you start to release analysis before all the proper work has been done... well, that's just reckless.
It looks like you took your image from the JPEG that NASA put up on the Web. Bad idea, of course. At first, I just wrote it off as an artifact, but it does exist in the original image (a 48MB TIFF file from the Mars gallery).
I have put up a crop of the original which you can feel free to stare at. Yes, it does appear to be some sort of round object with two large protrusions. It could easily be a rock of volcanic origin, but my bet is on its being some piece of the lander itself.