in the '50s much that purported to be SF was actually just a warmed over adventure novel, with a bit of fancy stage setting
Oh, I have to disagree!
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man, 1953 The Stars My Destination, 1956
Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood's End, 1953
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot, 1950
These are just some examples off the top of my head (and with a quick google search to confirm dates). The 1950s were the dawn of the era of SF inspired by advances in engineering, rocketry, nuclear engineering and the philosophical changes taking place, mostly in the US, though SF was present and even strong in many other countries.
Sure, there were a lot of Robert Heinlein juveniles and the like, but that too was an SF reaction to the powerful ideas of space exploration, computing devices and other influences of the day.
You don't need to know who authored the file. My suggestion of long ago is this: maintain a service serperate from gnutella that rates content. Refer to that content by name, but include MD5 signatures. The first signature is for the first 1k, the second signature is for the first 10k and so on, through the logarithmic orders of magnitude, base 10. One final signature would be for the whole file.
Now web sites can present reviews that tie into this new protocol with a URL (something like "gsig://sigs.mediahype.net/ab3827d9827eab39f2c-1") and that URL is then submitted to a signature-aware gnutella client which contacts the signature server, downloads the filename and signatures and then gets that file from Gnutella. The file download will be aborted if the signature fails to match at any of the signatures, or it will be aborted immediately if the file size is smaller or larger than the one in the signature server.
Sure, you can still put out a 10-second clip with empty noise after, but the download will stop at that 10-second mark. What's more: a smart client can keep the section that DID match the signatures and look for an intact copy to CONTINUE from. Thus, truncated versions will now be ignored immediately.
This introduces a centralized client-server model for trust purposes, but reviewers are not providing content, just reviewing it. The MPAA and RIAA could even put up servers that review valid promotional content, and warn users of copyright violations in other files! *This* is the way to solve everyone's problems at once (unless of course your problem happens to be a failing business model).
I know it's a bit late ot chime in, but I don't really care if some 16 year-old can't wait to see the movie on the big screen. The Internet is a medium for the exchange of information (by Internet, I mean networks connected via the Internet Protocol, not the World Wide Web). If you design an application-level protocol that can be used to exchange information easily, it will be used by said 16 year-old to swap naughty pictures (without respect to the age of the models); scanned and OCRed books; copyrighted movies and songs and much more. That, in no way, precludes my doing something useful with the medium, and I should not have to explain away the actions of said 16 year-old in order to continue to use the medium.
The RIAA and MPAA are in the middle of a crisis of business model. They will have to continue to struggle with the question of what digital communication means to their industry even if we all decide to throw out Gnutella clients in the trash. But, here's the key factor: just as I should be left alone if I'm not doing anything illegal with P2P networks, so too should the RIAA and MPAA be left alone to ponder their business models. We need to stop trying to save companies form the future.
Flying naked is not sufficient, and the FAA has known that for at least a decade! What we need is to strap people down into a small box that you then enclose in a sound-proof faraday cage. I'm disgusted that we fail to take these precautions. When will Washington wake up and understand that security is all-important because children are at risk!!!
We also need to get luggage off of airplanes. It should be shipped by train and pass through customs, even for domestic travel.
Magic Realism isn't so much about alternate realities as looking at the mundane in a fantastic way, or telling realistic stories with fantastic elements.
I'm a huge fan of this genre as it begins to evolve into the mainstream. It's allowing many authors who have been struggling for credibility in the F&SF genres to start to get some real notice for their extraordinary talents (not to mention producing stores like "American Gods" and "Gun With Occasional Music").
Magic Realism is a sub-genre of both Fantasy and Science Fiction (though its roots are more firmly in Fantasy than Science Fiction) that was fist recognized in South America, but has spread across the globe. I consider much of Gaiman's work to be in this catagory, though others might argue. Certainly American Gods is part Magic Realism, though also part traditional Fantasy.
It's nice to see Fantasy moving forward beyond the niches in which it had languished for so long. Not that there weren't brilliant Fantasy authors or stories that broke out of the standard molds of the genre, but let's face it: science fiction has roamed far and wide from hard science speculation to space opera to the new wave SF of the 60s to the alternate histories of the 90s. Fantasy has maintained a fairly narrow range during that time, focusing mostly on European mythology in various forms (here I include purists such as Tolkein and origial mythologies such as Moorecock's) and the Horror Fantasy that was pioneered in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Poe and Lovecraft among others.
Fantasy is now re-discovering its vast potential, and I could not be more thrilled. Authors like Ian Banks, Jonathan Lethem and others of the genre are well worth checking out. Hopefully this is only the beginning, and we'll have another three or four sub-genres of Fantasy sprouting in the coming decades!
Eventually, the script-kiddie counter culture will get tired of using those words and get some new ones.
Those of us who've been around for a while recognize that d00d-speak is just a modern variant on an old theme. I first saw such slang on BBSes in the late 80s, but it really began to take off on USENET.
What people miss when they say that this or that fad of slang "died" is that no element of culture truly dies. Like a pebble thrown into the ocean, fads leave their mark, but its sometimes hard to tell. "Funk" was in the language before the 70s, but it acquired new meaning. Most of the "jive" slang melted away but some words in the general vocabulary were subtly altered.
I'm mearly suggesting that some of d00d-speak (if only the name "d00d-speak") will persist because it frames a cultural changing-of-the-guard that will be important even a few generations from now.
Certainly emoticons are a solid presence, and those will pose an even more interesting puzzle. Are they puctuation? I guess so. Are they part of english grammar? Umm...:-/
You're suggesting that I should a spell a word like everyone else... just because most everyone else is doing it that way? Sounds familiar.:)
Nope. I'm suggesting that if we're going to debate what's right and wrong spelling-wise, the "ayes" have it. Language is not a stagnant thing that someone can write down in a book. Every dictionary ever written was obsolete the moment it was published. If you want to say "virii", have fun. If you're writing professionally, then I suggest that you use the spelling that will have the desired effect. Sometimes that effect is to convey the simple meaning of the word. Sometimes it's not, d00d;)
I take back my comment about "more people would... correct me...." According to google, there is a landslide of support on the Web for viruses over virii and viri combined. While I've always heared viri in technical conversation, I'll concede to popular usage.
I double-checked by looking for the following strings:
vir* computer vir* "computer vir*"
In each case, the viruses spelling was far-and-away the winner.
Since the importance of common usage was my whole point, I have to suggest that people use "viruses".
Ok, for those of you who might make the mistake of listening to this guy, pay close attention: english is a living language. If enough people think that the correct plural spelling of virus would be potatoe, then potatoe it is! I think if I wrote viruses, more people would try to correct me than if I wrote viri (virii looks wrong to me), and if my goal is not to have a debate about spelling, I'm going to go for the one that looks right to more people. Same goes for octopi, ain't and eventually, yes, even hax0r will be a valid word in the american dialect of english (and in many other dialects and languages for that matter).
Actually that last one intrigues me a great deal. Words like hax0r, 1337, d00d and other techno-slang are catching on like wildfire. Currently they are only used in limited sub-cultures but certainly some of these words have such a strong and unique connotation that they will leak into common usage. This is a radical shift for english as it adds new characters into to language for the first time in a very long time (mostly characters have just been removed).
the us army is ready to invest 50 millions dollars in a project where ideas come from a comic book?
It's hard not to react sarcastically to that comment, but I'm going to try....
Such "concept pictures" on a proposal are ignorable, and I assure you that the picture is not what sold it. MIT is quite capable of putting together a proposal that would interest the U.S. Army, and they have no need of comic book art to inspire it.
Elitism is where you want to find it. In the case of MIT, there are certainly elitists to be had, but I think that will be the case at any school that's been around for a substantial period. It is however, one of the most open institutions in the world.
As for theivery... I see no theft here. Certainly Radix has a case to be made on copyright infringement, but that's not theft (any more now than when the RIAA claims it is). MIT also has a good case to be made for fair use.
...it doesn't give you the right to steal an artists work.
We've already dealt with the topic of theft and fair use, but I want to take the time to point out that all the dancing around that we do doesn't escape the fact that Radix made no claims of any theft at any time, even with their wild-ass claims that the value of their property has been deminished because no one can see it as fantasy any more, they've never claimed that anything has been stolen.
This is a simple case of a grant proposal using copyrighted images. I think it's useful to look at from the legal standpoint of fair use (which needs to be revitalized before the RIAAs and the MPAAs of the world crush it), but beyond that its just kind of sad that Radix is wigging out so badly.
MIT clearly messed up (or, more to the point, the grad student who was doubtless the one who snagged the art-work did). However, this line from Radix's site:
MIT's unwarranted use of Radix's lead character, "Valerie Fiores," permanently damaged the comic book, said creator Ray Lai.
"People who buy Radix buy a fantasy," said Lai. "Now MIT says all future U.S. soldiers will look like Radix. They're saying Radix is not fantasy, it's reality. By doing that, MIT stole our ability to market Radix as escapist entertainment."
Makes me think that Radix is really just drooling over the opportunity to sue such a large organization. Sad, really. MIT should be forced to pay a royalty for the use of the art. Nothing more.
You're technically correct, though I never actually said "Galeon is written in XUL", I did imply it. Sorry, I had a phone screen to do in 3 minutes, and I was rushing. What I meant was
Mozilla is a development platform. It provides an XUL interface do developers AS WELL AS A NUMBER OF COMPONENTS WHICH CAN BE USED MODULARLY to write their own applicaitons. Mozilla the browser is one such application (the reference app, you might say), but so is Galeon. For that matter so are Netscape, Komodo (not a browser, but an IDE!) and at some point, presumably AOL's UI.
It's interesting to note that AOL will probably be more Galeon-like in the sense that they're not planning to use XUL either, just the rendering engine.
Then again "rendering engine" might be a bit misleading. There's a whole lot of Mozilla in Galeon, and the two are not really seperate applications. This is, IMHO, a good thing. We're reaching the point where large systems like a Web browser can be modularized and re-build when needed. I use Galeon on a day-to-day basis, and I never have to go back to Mozilla to get a page to render correctly, because it would be the same. I do keep Netscape around for those few times that I feel the need to get some wizzy, extra-plugin thing to work. I don't want Galeon to render Flash, Java, etc. So, I use Netscape (7) as a sort of alternate configuration.
Mozilla is two things, and many people get them confused. First, there's the browser that most Slashdotters know and some love.
However, more fundamentally, there's the development platform which presents an XUL interface for developers to write their own applications. Mozilla the browser is one such application (the reference app, you might say), but so is Galeon. For that matter so are Netscape, Komodo (not a browser, but an IDE!) and at some point, presumably AOL's UI.
When we compare these apps to Mozilla, it's kind of like comparing XFree86 to the MIT reference server. Yes, there's some value in the comparison, but let us not forget that the one is built on top of the other, and here's to hoping that Galeon (in which I'm writing this) becomes as mature and feature-rich as XFree86!
[NOTE: Yes, it's only a loose comparison, since XFree has re-written much of the internals of the MIT refernce server, where Galeon is pretty much layered right atop the Mozilla framework. Still, it's the best comparison I can think of right now]
Your analysis is missing a few steps. It's the granting of patents that's at fault here. Thompson was getting annoyed at Red Hat, I'm sure (Red Hat could use the "we're not selling mp3 decoders, we're selling service and packaging" thing, but I dunno if that would work) among others (Linux and BSD vendors mostly) for selling software that was not licensed. I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming the process that put this power in their hands.
My solution for the USPTO and those who follow the US lead in patent laws: restrict patents to individuals, not corporations; make patents non-transferable; require software patents to be MUCH more specific and approve software patents in under 1 year or reject it. None of this re-submit 3 times and get the patent 6 years later crap. That's what's killing us.
If the above changes are made, individuals, not companies will have the burdon of concience (could you keep working for Thompson if they were doing this with your patent?) It also means that patents would no longer be viable as a corporate tool of war. Yes, you can bully me now, but if your key patent-holder leaves the company, you're going to have to eat some of that crow.
Patents are an incentive, not a right. Companies should not be allowed to harm the common good by applying for patents. That breaks the entire purpose of them.
You're missing the point. No one cares about pirates. Pirates bulk-copy CDs, and a bulk copy is going to contain these odd keys. The target here is the guy who backs up his software. That guy is hurting business because we know that if he loses his copy of a piece of software, he's going to march right back into Best Buy and pay for it again. That's revenue, and we all know that revenue is a good thing!
The anti-consumer attitude that the software and hardware industry is pushing is just beyond belief.
Perl is so easy to learn and alows a lot of "Baby Talk"
Perl is easy to learn, and yes it allows "baby talk" in the same way that C++, Java, smalltalk or any other complex language does. Those who are just learning will use only a small subset of the language. This is always true.
it makes a good programmer indistinguishable from a amateur wannabe
I can certainly tell the difference, and I do so in phone screens and interviews for my company.
Someone just coming to the language can write code, yes. But they won't be able to write high-quality programs that take advantage of the language. This is true everywhere. Read "Effective C++" for a really good sense of what it is that C++ programmers won't know from day one, even if they've memorized the BNF for the language.
I was with you right up to there, but man! You can't dis the tabs! Only EBCDIC-lovin mainframe-huggers want spaces over tabs. You're not a mainframe-hugger... are you?!
Kidding asside, this whole article is rather disturbing to me. It seems like we're feeding trolls and whiners because it gets Slashdot riled up. That kind of muckraking isn't really productive for the OSS community as a whole.
many have reported that it's still there. I'll have to look once I have it installed on my home box (my work laptop and desktop will continue to run 7.3 until the new version is stable).
was I the only one who expected, after the demonstration of matching method invocations, to be told that the entire source code for perl6 was just one giant RegEx/Grammar?
That's correct, and has been Larry's plan since the beginning. The Perl6 eval will be a rule like so:
if/^<$code <perlgrammar>>$/ {
Parrot.execute $code.bytecode;
}
Add command-line handling and that's your/usr/bin/perl in a nutshell.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do all the Slashdot headlines suddenly say, "THIS IS YOUR GOD"? :-)
I guess it's better than all my money saying "COWBOYNEAL"....
Oh, I have to disagree!
- Alfred Bester:
- Arthur C. Clarke:
- Isaac Asimov:
These are just some examples off the top of my head (and with a quick google search to confirm dates). The 1950s were the dawn of the era of SF inspired by advances in engineering, rocketry, nuclear engineering and the philosophical changes taking place, mostly in the US, though SF was present and even strong in many other countries.The Demolished Man, 1953
The Stars My Destination, 1956
Childhood's End, 1953
I, Robot, 1950
Sure, there were a lot of Robert Heinlein juveniles and the like, but that too was an SF reaction to the powerful ideas of space exploration, computing devices and other influences of the day.
You don't need to know who authored the file. My suggestion of long ago is this: maintain a service serperate from gnutella that rates content. Refer to that content by name, but include MD5 signatures. The first signature is for the first 1k, the second signature is for the first 10k and so on, through the logarithmic orders of magnitude, base 10. One final signature would be for the whole file.
) and that URL is then submitted to a signature-aware gnutella client which contacts the signature server, downloads the filename and signatures and then gets that file from Gnutella. The file download will be aborted if the signature fails to match at any of the signatures, or it will be aborted immediately if the file size is smaller or larger than the one in the signature server.
Now web sites can present reviews that tie into this new protocol with a URL (something like "gsig://sigs.mediahype.net/ab3827d9827eab39f2c-1"
Sure, you can still put out a 10-second clip with empty noise after, but the download will stop at that 10-second mark. What's more: a smart client can keep the section that DID match the signatures and look for an intact copy to CONTINUE from. Thus, truncated versions will now be ignored immediately.
This introduces a centralized client-server model for trust purposes, but reviewers are not providing content, just reviewing it. The MPAA and RIAA could even put up servers that review valid promotional content, and warn users of copyright violations in other files! *This* is the way to solve everyone's problems at once (unless of course your problem happens to be a failing business model).
I know it's a bit late ot chime in, but I don't really care if some 16 year-old can't wait to see the movie on the big screen. The Internet is a medium for the exchange of information (by Internet, I mean networks connected via the Internet Protocol, not the World Wide Web). If you design an application-level protocol that can be used to exchange information easily, it will be used by said 16 year-old to swap naughty pictures (without respect to the age of the models); scanned and OCRed books; copyrighted movies and songs and much more. That, in no way, precludes my doing something useful with the medium, and I should not have to explain away the actions of said 16 year-old in order to continue to use the medium.
The RIAA and MPAA are in the middle of a crisis of business model. They will have to continue to struggle with the question of what digital communication means to their industry even if we all decide to throw out Gnutella clients in the trash. But, here's the key factor: just as I should be left alone if I'm not doing anything illegal with P2P networks, so too should the RIAA and MPAA be left alone to ponder their business models. We need to stop trying to save companies form the future.
Flying naked is not sufficient, and the FAA has known that for at least a decade! What we need is to strap people down into a small box that you then enclose in a sound-proof faraday cage. I'm disgusted that we fail to take these precautions. When will Washington wake up and understand that security is all-important because children are at risk!!!
:-/
We also need to get luggage off of airplanes. It should be shipped by train and pass through customs, even for domestic travel.
Consider this a modest proposal.
Here are a couple of referneces:
- http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/magic-realis
m .html
- http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/novel.htm
You can also find more references on google.I'm a huge fan of this genre as it begins to evolve into the mainstream. It's allowing many authors who have been struggling for credibility in the F&SF genres to start to get some real notice for their extraordinary talents (not to mention producing stores like "American Gods" and "Gun With Occasional Music").
Magic Realism is a sub-genre of both Fantasy and Science Fiction (though its roots are more firmly in Fantasy than Science Fiction) that was fist recognized in South America, but has spread across the globe. I consider much of Gaiman's work to be in this catagory, though others might argue. Certainly American Gods is part Magic Realism, though also part traditional Fantasy.
It's nice to see Fantasy moving forward beyond the niches in which it had languished for so long. Not that there weren't brilliant Fantasy authors or stories that broke out of the standard molds of the genre, but let's face it: science fiction has roamed far and wide from hard science speculation to space opera to the new wave SF of the 60s to the alternate histories of the 90s. Fantasy has maintained a fairly narrow range during that time, focusing mostly on European mythology in various forms (here I include purists such as Tolkein and origial mythologies such as Moorecock's) and the Horror Fantasy that was pioneered in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Poe and Lovecraft among others.
Fantasy is now re-discovering its vast potential, and I could not be more thrilled. Authors like Ian Banks, Jonathan Lethem and others of the genre are well worth checking out. Hopefully this is only the beginning, and we'll have another three or four sub-genres of Fantasy sprouting in the coming decades!
Eventually, the script-kiddie counter culture will get tired of using those words and get some new ones.
:-/
Those of us who've been around for a while recognize that d00d-speak is just a modern variant on an old theme. I first saw such slang on BBSes in the late 80s, but it really began to take off on USENET.
What people miss when they say that this or that fad of slang "died" is that no element of culture truly dies. Like a pebble thrown into the ocean, fads leave their mark, but its sometimes hard to tell. "Funk" was in the language before the 70s, but it acquired new meaning. Most of the "jive" slang melted away but some words in the general vocabulary were subtly altered.
I'm mearly suggesting that some of d00d-speak (if only the name "d00d-speak") will persist because it frames a cultural changing-of-the-guard that will be important even a few generations from now.
Certainly emoticons are a solid presence, and those will pose an even more interesting puzzle. Are they puctuation? I guess so. Are they part of english grammar? Umm...
You're suggesting that I should a spell a word like everyone else... just because most everyone else is doing it that way? Sounds familiar. :)
;)
Nope. I'm suggesting that if we're going to debate what's right and wrong spelling-wise, the "ayes" have it. Language is not a stagnant thing that someone can write down in a book. Every dictionary ever written was obsolete the moment it was published. If you want to say "virii", have fun. If you're writing professionally, then I suggest that you use the spelling that will have the desired effect. Sometimes that effect is to convey the simple meaning of the word. Sometimes it's not, d00d
I double-checked by looking for the following strings:In each case, the viruses spelling was far-and-away the winner.
Since the importance of common usage was my whole point, I have to suggest that people use "viruses".
Ok, for those of you who might make the mistake of listening to this guy, pay close attention: english is a living language. If enough people think that the correct plural spelling of virus would be potatoe, then potatoe it is! I think if I wrote viruses, more people would try to correct me than if I wrote viri (virii looks wrong to me), and if my goal is not to have a debate about spelling, I'm going to go for the one that looks right to more people. Same goes for octopi, ain't and eventually, yes, even hax0r will be a valid word in the american dialect of english (and in many other dialects and languages for that matter).
Actually that last one intrigues me a great deal. Words like hax0r, 1337, d00d and other techno-slang are catching on like wildfire. Currently they are only used in limited sub-cultures but certainly some of these words have such a strong and unique connotation that they will leak into common usage. This is a radical shift for english as it adds new characters into to language for the first time in a very long time (mostly characters have just been removed).
the us army is ready to invest 50 millions dollars in a project where ideas come from a comic book?
It's hard not to react sarcastically to that comment, but I'm going to try....
Such "concept pictures" on a proposal are ignorable, and I assure you that the picture is not what sold it. MIT is quite capable of putting together a proposal that would interest the U.S. Army, and they have no need of comic book art to inspire it.
Elitism is where you want to find it. In the case of MIT, there are certainly elitists to be had, but I think that will be the case at any school that's been around for a substantial period. It is however, one of the most open institutions in the world.
As for theivery... I see no theft here. Certainly Radix has a case to be made on copyright infringement, but that's not theft (any more now than when the RIAA claims it is). MIT also has a good case to be made for fair use.
We've already dealt with the topic of theft and fair use, but I want to take the time to point out that all the dancing around that we do doesn't escape the fact that Radix made no claims of any theft at any time, even with their wild-ass claims that the value of their property has been deminished because no one can see it as fantasy any more, they've never claimed that anything has been stolen.
This is a simple case of a grant proposal using copyrighted images. I think it's useful to look at from the legal standpoint of fair use (which needs to be revitalized before the RIAAs and the MPAAs of the world crush it), but beyond that its just kind of sad that Radix is wigging out so badly.
Do you have to go through run-level "spin" to reboot?
Then again "rendering engine" might be a bit misleading. There's a whole lot of Mozilla in Galeon, and the two are not really seperate applications. This is, IMHO, a good thing. We're reaching the point where large systems like a Web browser can be modularized and re-build when needed. I use Galeon on a day-to-day basis, and I never have to go back to Mozilla to get a page to render correctly, because it would be the same. I do keep Netscape around for those few times that I feel the need to get some wizzy, extra-plugin thing to work. I don't want Galeon to render Flash, Java, etc. So, I use Netscape (7) as a sort of alternate configuration.
Mozilla is two things, and many people get them confused. First, there's the browser that most Slashdotters know and some love.
However, more fundamentally, there's the development platform which presents an XUL interface for developers to write their own applications. Mozilla the browser is one such application (the reference app, you might say), but so is Galeon. For that matter so are Netscape, Komodo (not a browser, but an IDE!) and at some point, presumably AOL's UI.
When we compare these apps to Mozilla, it's kind of like comparing XFree86 to the MIT reference server. Yes, there's some value in the comparison, but let us not forget that the one is built on top of the other, and here's to hoping that Galeon (in which I'm writing this) becomes as mature and feature-rich as XFree86!
[NOTE: Yes, it's only a loose comparison, since XFree has re-written much of the internals of the MIT refernce server, where Galeon is pretty much layered right atop the Mozilla framework. Still, it's the best comparison I can think of right now]
Your analysis is missing a few steps. It's the granting of patents that's at fault here. Thompson was getting annoyed at Red Hat, I'm sure (Red Hat could use the "we're not selling mp3 decoders, we're selling service and packaging" thing, but I dunno if that would work) among others (Linux and BSD vendors mostly) for selling software that was not licensed. I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming the process that put this power in their hands.
My solution for the USPTO and those who follow the US lead in patent laws: restrict patents to individuals, not corporations; make patents non-transferable; require software patents to be MUCH more specific and approve software patents in under 1 year or reject it. None of this re-submit 3 times and get the patent 6 years later crap. That's what's killing us.
If the above changes are made, individuals, not companies will have the burdon of concience (could you keep working for Thompson if they were doing this with your patent?) It also means that patents would no longer be viable as a corporate tool of war. Yes, you can bully me now, but if your key patent-holder leaves the company, you're going to have to eat some of that crow.
Patents are an incentive, not a right. Companies should not be allowed to harm the common good by applying for patents. That breaks the entire purpose of them.
You're missing the point. No one cares about pirates. Pirates bulk-copy CDs, and a bulk copy is going to contain these odd keys. The target here is the guy who backs up his software. That guy is hurting business because we know that if he loses his copy of a piece of software, he's going to march right back into Best Buy and pay for it again. That's revenue, and we all know that revenue is a good thing!
The anti-consumer attitude that the software and hardware industry is pushing is just beyond belief.
this means the Sox will win the pennant!
:-)
No, they'll just say that they would have won it if they hadn't been forced to go on strike. Shame, that...
Sorry, this is Slashdot. I forgot I wasn't supposed to know about current sporting events. Heck I was just listening to NPR, it's ok!
I thought beta was still heavily used in TV production. Does anyone know if Sony is dumping all beta products, or just the consumer stuff?
Perl is so easy to learn and alows a lot of "Baby Talk"
Perl is easy to learn, and yes it allows "baby talk" in the same way that C++, Java, smalltalk or any other complex language does. Those who are just learning will use only a small subset of the language. This is always true.
it makes a good programmer indistinguishable from a amateur wannabe
I can certainly tell the difference, and I do so in phone screens and interviews for my company.
Someone just coming to the language can write code, yes. But they won't be able to write high-quality programs that take advantage of the language. This is true everywhere. Read "Effective C++" for a really good sense of what it is that C++ programmers won't know from day one, even if they've memorized the BNF for the language.
[...] and spaces are better than tabs.
I was with you right up to there, but man! You can't dis the tabs! Only EBCDIC-lovin mainframe-huggers want spaces over tabs. You're not a mainframe-hugger... are you?!
Kidding asside, this whole article is rather disturbing to me. It seems like we're feeding trolls and whiners because it gets Slashdot riled up. That kind of muckraking isn't really productive for the OSS community as a whole.
many have reported that it's still there. I'll have to look once I have it installed on my home box (my work laptop and desktop will continue to run 7.3 until the new version is stable).
was I the only one who expected, after the demonstration of matching method invocations, to be told that the entire source code for perl6 was just one giant RegEx/Grammar?
/^<$code <perlgrammar>>$/ {
/usr/bin/perl in a nutshell.
That's correct, and has been Larry's plan since the beginning. The Perl6 eval will be a rule like so:
if
Parrot.execute $code.bytecode;
}
Add command-line handling and that's your