Re:This book is destined
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: 2
You increase disoreder by writing an obfuscated code when it is not originally required.
No, I most certainly do not. I don't know how you got that impression, but you're wrong. As I alluded to (perhaps too causally), I do obfuscate code for fun in competitions such as the IOCCC, but when it comes to work, I consider obfuscation to be downright evil. Anyone who writes hard-to-read code in Perl, C, C++, Java, Python, Eiffel, LISP or any other language should be shown the door. It's simply not acceptable.
I think you and I agree on this point, so I'm not quite sure how we got on opposite sides of the debate. I guess you just assumed that because a lot of lousy programmers have used Perl, that Perl is a language only suited to lousy programmers. That is certainly not true.
Shoot my pet? Go ahead! This is regex you're talking about!
Heh, yeah I see a lot of that, and while I imagine you're joking, this is almost the attitude. In the end, I think learning Perl6 patterns will be hard for some people who never really got regular expressions in the first place. For them, there's the Perl5-to-Perl6-bytecode compiler.
For the rest of us, the future is very bright indeed.
Perl 6 is a big scary beast that sets people off in a lot of ways. Let me try to answer some of the big questions:
Why is Perl changing so much?!
Because it needs to. Perl is the legacy of something like 15 years of development and evolution. It started as a simple text processing system, and is now used in every field of endevor where computers are used. There are some old things that needed to go, some new things that were needed and generally a need to re-examine the way "stuff" was done.
But what about my programs? Why break them?!
Perl 6 is two things (at least): a parser for Perl 6 and a back-end virtual machine, much like Java or C#. One of the design criteria for the release of Perl 6 is a Perl 5 compatible parser front-end that outputs Perl 6 virtual machine bytecode. This means that your Perl 5 programs will run with no modification in a Perl 6 environment (or at most a path change to the interpreter, that much is still under some debate).
Why would you want to break compatibility with other regular expression engines?
Remember that Perl has been leading the pack in terms of regular expression handling for a long time. Now Perl is moving beyond regular expressions to grammar specification. This is a good thing, as long as the benefits of regular expressions are preserved.
Some of this will be good for everyone. Some of it some of you won't like, but a lot of it you will. Give Perl 6 a chance, and don't react as if we've shot your pet.
Re:This book is destined
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: 2
Your definition of "quick hack" seems to be questionable. I've cranked out quick hacks in every language I've ever used (C, C++, Perl, Pascal, CLIPS, numerous line-oriented scripting languages, LISP, etc.) It's always possible, and downright good. What's bad is writing code for any reason which others cannot understand and manage. If you do so in Perl, it's just as bad as doing so in Java, Python, C or COBOL.
Every language can be used to write obfuscated code. The question is, do you write obfuscated code for fun and when appropriate, or do you do it because you cannot do otherwise? If you cannot do otherwise, get out of the kitchen. If you can, do... in Perl or whatever langauge suits the job at hand.
Perl simply suits more jobs than most languages because of its flexibility, from complex data management (yes, of which its heralded capacity for text processing is a minor and rather unimpressive aspect) to elegant implementations of such high-level constructs as closures to the grace with which it does what you probably wanted in the first place by default, but always offers you the option to do otherwise.
Your comments make it pretty clear that you either do not know Perl, or you do not know it well. This is not shocking. Most people "know Perl" because they've seen some overglorified mailroom clerk's attempt at text processing written in it. The fact that Perl lends itself to being used by low-end programmers does not mean that that is the only domain in which it functions. If it were, I would have moved on long ago.
I have strong feelings about this case, and I want BT to lose, but I have to say that the judge missed the point that BT was making. The claim that the Internet infringes, not because it has a central computer with centralized data store as described in the patent, but that it is made up of many such arrangements.
This is fundamentally true, though inaccurate (the terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" are confused here). The World Wide Web's HTTP+HTML elements (certainly what most people think of as "The Web") do infringe the patent on this basis. A Web server provides a central service of delivering data to remote clients. Each Web server provides this function, and thus infringes. The "Internet", does not infringe, and thus Prodigy's ISP business does not infringe, IMH(IANAL)O, but the World Wide Web does. In this way, I think BT should have gone after Microsoft for making IIS, but then they would have had to explain why the didn't go after NCSA back in the days of the NCSA Web server....
Re:This book is destined
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The author correctly points out that Perl is best suited for quick, unmaintainable hacks and not serious, large-scale engineering.
A common misconception about Perl, and I understand why you would think this way. Having written several large systems in Perl (as well as several smaller systems in which maintainability was key), I will point out these problems with your thesis:
1. If your quick hacks are unmaintainable, get another job. If your prototypes aren't good enough to turn into a product with a small amount of work, you're wasting lots of your own (presumably valued) time.
2. PDL belies your comments. Take a look at it. It's large, maintainable and certainly serious. Scientific computing is a dream with it.
I generally find that "large scale engineering" is the easy part. What's hard is applying sound engineering and scientific principles to your code. You can do that as easily in C as in Perl as in Python as in Eiffel. It's a little harder in C++, though honestly not by much, because of the action-at-a-distance nature of C++'s object model.
Oddly, Java has a problem in neither area. Java's problems have very little to do with the language itself (which is an acceptable C derivative, if you want a C derivative with GC) and more to do with what Sun does with it, and how that has trained its users to approach it.
Perl's biggest problems are the following:
1. Incomplete object model. This was deliberate, and has given Perl6 the ability to form its object model out of a decade of best practices by those who "rolled their own" in Perl5.
2. Circa AWK/shell subroutine semantics. Also a major aim of the Perl6 effort, this is a subtle thorn in Perl's side. It's easily overcome once you get used to it, but leads to nearly impossible-to-optimize function calls in average code.
3. The lack of true compilation of the language leaves software developers with very few options in terms of shipping programs. Again one of the first aims of Perl6
See the Perl6 theme? Wait for it... it will rock your world.
The difference will not show in most of the productivity apps that are popular on palm devices, but the new big push, and certainly my reason for wanting color on a palmtop is the Web. Browsing the Web with a 12-bit pallette is going to hurt.
Try this. XFree86 allows -depth settings of 5, 15 and 16 among others. Try firing up a server under 16 bits. Bring up a browser and view a few sites. Then re-start the server at 15 bits and see the massive difference. Now imagine that difference magnified by a factor of 8! 12 bit display would really suck.
And all that assumes average Web needs. If you work with color-sensitive applications (no, Timmy pr0n is not the only thing that needs rich color), the palmtop becomes worthless for previewing someone's work while you're on the run.
Most all of the options sound really terrible. A friend of mine has researched this a lot, as he wants to have his remains treated naturally. There appears to be one option. There's a group in the central Atlantic states that was doing something with conservation land where you could be naturally buried (that is, no enbalmning, no concrete, no plastic in the casket, etc).
I'll have to look up the info, but if I find it, I'll post it here.
Absolutely not. First off, I think the idea of inventing a program for every major system file would be silly. Second, the idea behind vipw is locking, and vim will warn you if the file has changed (thus giving you a more CVS-style lock rather than the vipw model which is more like rcs).
Second, anyone who edits the passwd file without making a backup gets shot. It's that simple.
mg, microemacs, pico, etc. miss the point. I'm a vi user and an emacs user. Here's the problem with the debate: it misses the fact that emacs is not a text editor any more than sendmail is a regular expression engine. Yes, sendmail's core functionality is in regular expression handling. Yes, emacs' core functionality is in text editing. But, both do a whole lot more, and when you segment out mail header munging from regexen from dns from aliases from every which other thing, you find that they don't interoperate (about as far as you can go is qmail, which is lean compared to sendmail, but still has a lot of funtionality).
You can use mutt to read mail, vi to edit files, and any number of other programs to do source control, diff browsing, remote file management, USENET, syntax highlighting, interpreter and debugger interaction, interactive make and error finding, etc, etc, etc. Now you have to learn all of those tools, and get used to the different user interfaces.
You may like that. I find that using emacs for mail is too painful (emacs' single largest failing is that it does EVERYTHING, but is not multi-threaded), so I use mutt or evolution. There's no harm splitting away from emacs for one function or another, but you always have those tools there.
On the other hand, I'm a sysadmin. When I want to edit/etc/passwd on a remote box, I run vi. When I want to edit my dot-files, I run vi (actually, vim most of the time, but I don't use its extras). When I want to hack Perl code for a few hours, I use emacs for the IDE-like environment, not for the key-bindings. If I didn't like emacs' keybindings, I'd use vi's keybindings in emacs. I used to run emacs on a 33MHz 486, and before that on some ancient UNIX boxes that I will not admit to knowing anything about, so speed is not my concern when running on a 1.2GHz dual-processor Pentium++ NG 2.1 with a twist. I just want my editor to do some of the easy work while I worry about the code.
Don't fight over emacs vs vi, E vs twm, exim vs sendmail, Debian vs Red Hat, etc until you know both tools and all of the related tools cold. When you do, you can have an intellegent discussion about which to use when. Until you do, you're no better than the chuckle-heads who said that Last Temptation of Chirst was sacreligious without going to see it first.
This is roughly the same logic that leads to American media reporting that something has bi-partisan support as if it had universal support.
Think about what you're saying: the for-profit companies are the ones running the not-for-profit domain registration. If there's a fight between two groups over a domain and one of the groups is an industry association (oh, let's say the RIAA), which one do you think would be favored?
Slashdot Spam Comments
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
Fall like leaves from the tree that is the Internet.
Under their weight the Rock shatters and river halts Slashdotting like spam?
Making the wire hard to tap is useless when you're in the military. Once something is in widespread enough use SOMEONE will make a tool for breaking it. I'm sure there's a "fiber tapping kit" out there that every government uses some variant of. It might be hard, but it's not impossible, and that means it's going to be done.
Don't such buildings usually have some kind of metal moulding somehwere on the outside (along the roof, etc), or a wheathervein? You could connect your antenna to that, I guess.
Also, just putting the antenna in a window with a line-of-site to the target building might be good enough.
This is an excellent point, but let me expand on its relevance to the article. I saw this article last night, and it's all about sending newsletters and offers to customers who HAVE ASKED FOR IT. I have no problem at all with this. Email me all you like if I've asked you to. If I've accidentally clicked the opt-in button on the signup form, then I can go un-click it (if you don't provide that link and/or you're lying and I never signed up, then I have no sympathy for you).
Spam is UNSOLICITED commercial email, not just commercial email. Doubleclick provides a valuable service in that arena, and I don't even loathe them like I do on the banner-ad side of their business.
Yep, I got it working too, but its concept of how you managed sysadminish things like where storage went and how the database was found made Oracle's configuration look pleasant (scratch that, nothing makes Oracle's configuration look pleasant).
MySQL was distributed as RPMS at the time, but even compilng from source and installing was a matter of standard open source conventions. I didn't have to modify 3 config files to get it to install, etc.
I'm not trying to be pro-MySQL here. Personally I think PostgreSQL is good for MySQL and visa-versa. The competition is helping them both to grow. But, PostgreSQL lost me on ease of installation back then, where it would have been my database of choice if it had been easier to install.
Back in the day (about 2-3 years ago) MySQL was a bit of a pain to configure correctly under Linux and a bit moreso under other UNIXen. PostgreSQL was insane. I tried to get it to work on my box, and I'm a C programmer with many years of experience in understanding other people's code and installation systems.
I finally gave up. I got it installed and mostly working, but I just had better things to do and I wasn't at all happy with the number of hand-tweeks that were required. I slapped MySQL in place and never turned back.
I think a lot of folks were in the same boat, but had even less patience for PostgreSQL's difficult installation.
Now, I understand the two are about the same, and both are available with the major Linux distributions. However, now PostgreSQL has to work its way out of the hole its in. Admins like me will be loath to give up the DB we know best in favor of one that burned us, even if it was long ago.
There's an artist who did the same for dinosaurs. He painted in the early-to-mid part of last century, and did a lot of museum murals and such. Everyone from fantasy movie effects people (Harryhausen) to modern museum curators to paleantologists have been influenced by his take on dinosaurs, "cave men", and other topics that he worked on.
The amazing thing is that he was nearly blind, and yet his paintings were more accurate than anyone had a right to be (we now know that some of his ideas were off, but suprisingly few, and much of his work remains in the territory of good guess, but we don't know).
So, you get a machine that can identify everyone who is angry, upset, nervous or paranoid and you send in the rent-a-cops! Oh, lovely.
I'd actually like to see this deployed for the humor value, except that it would probably cause a lot of borderline paranoid psychotics to melt down...:-(
Because of the recent RIAA sillyness, I'm asking people to be evangelists for local music. Go listen to bands, push the ones you like to your friends. Buy CDs at concerts if they're selling them, rip them and listen to them on your portable instead of ill-gotten corporate junk. Download samples from local artist sites and share them with your friends. Flood Gnutella and its like with music that the artists WANT to share.
The best defense against the RIAA is to ignore the products of their members!
I like music. I used to buy a lot of it. I downloaded a lot of it too. No more.
I'll go listen to local bands play in local clubs. I'll buy or download music from a band's own Web site.
Downloading corporate music doesn't really get me anything, really. No more of my time, money or brain-power will be devoted to such a corrupt industry.
I get your point, but last I heard ISPs (be they retail or backbones) were not classified as common carriers by the FCC. Common carrier status is a major deal, and it's not all good for the carrier.
Wait. The poster asked if you'd heard of vendor-updates (he gave several examples). Then you proceded to berate him and the community in general because others (not the poster) had "laughed" at your use of those tools.
That means that you agree with the poster to whom you were responding, no?
If so, then I guess I agree with you too.
I disagree with you on Debian. Debian is a nice Linux distribution that does maintain security and bug-fix updates well. apt-get is every bit as good as (and in many cases better than) rpmui or up2date or redcarpet for maintaining a secure and otherwise patched system.
I happen to be a Red Hat user at work and at home, but that doesn't mean that I ignore the value of other distributions (be they commercial or volunteer).
Can you imagine the day everyone uses this. You send mail to a public list and get back 2000 messages asking you to "authenticate" yourself.
This is a bad plan for working in the large.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
This is slashdot. I'm not going to take 2 hours to write up a response to your post. However, suffice to say that at every step in your argument I see one of two things: misdirection (e.g. energy isn't a vector, in response to my assertion that you could apply the given energy along a vector of your chosing) or unfounded assumptions (e.g. time==money with no explanation of why taking 6 years to lob your waste into the Sun is more expensive than taking 6 months).
Try stating what you have to say in 2 paragraphs, and tightening up the logic on those two.
Slashdot Mirror
You increase disoreder by writing an obfuscated code when it is not originally required.
No, I most certainly do not. I don't know how you got that impression, but you're wrong. As I alluded to (perhaps too causally), I do obfuscate code for fun in competitions such as the IOCCC, but when it comes to work, I consider obfuscation to be downright evil. Anyone who writes hard-to-read code in Perl, C, C++, Java, Python, Eiffel, LISP or any other language should be shown the door. It's simply not acceptable.
I think you and I agree on this point, so I'm not quite sure how we got on opposite sides of the debate. I guess you just assumed that because a lot of lousy programmers have used Perl, that Perl is a language only suited to lousy programmers. That is certainly not true.
Shoot my pet? Go ahead! This is regex you're talking about!
Heh, yeah I see a lot of that, and while I imagine you're joking, this is almost the attitude. In the end, I think learning Perl6 patterns will be hard for some people who never really got regular expressions in the first place. For them, there's the Perl5-to-Perl6-bytecode compiler.
For the rest of us, the future is very bright indeed.
- Why is Perl changing so much?!
- But what about my programs? Why break them?!
- Why would you want to break compatibility with other regular expression engines?
Some of this will be good for everyone. Some of it some of you won't like, but a lot of it you will. Give Perl 6 a chance, and don't react as if we've shot your pet.Because it needs to. Perl is the legacy of something like 15 years of development and evolution. It started as a simple text processing system, and is now used in every field of endevor where computers are used. There are some old things that needed to go, some new things that were needed and generally a need to re-examine the way "stuff" was done.
Perl 6 is two things (at least): a parser for Perl 6 and a back-end virtual machine, much like Java or C#. One of the design criteria for the release of Perl 6 is a Perl 5 compatible parser front-end that outputs Perl 6 virtual machine bytecode. This means that your Perl 5 programs will run with no modification in a Perl 6 environment (or at most a path change to the interpreter, that much is still under some debate).
Remember that Perl has been leading the pack in terms of regular expression handling for a long time. Now Perl is moving beyond regular expressions to grammar specification. This is a good thing, as long as the benefits of regular expressions are preserved.
Your definition of "quick hack" seems to be questionable. I've cranked out quick hacks in every language I've ever used (C, C++, Perl, Pascal, CLIPS, numerous line-oriented scripting languages, LISP, etc.) It's always possible, and downright good. What's bad is writing code for any reason which others cannot understand and manage. If you do so in Perl, it's just as bad as doing so in Java, Python, C or COBOL.
Every language can be used to write obfuscated code. The question is, do you write obfuscated code for fun and when appropriate, or do you do it because you cannot do otherwise? If you cannot do otherwise, get out of the kitchen. If you can, do... in Perl or whatever langauge suits the job at hand.
Perl simply suits more jobs than most languages because of its flexibility, from complex data management (yes, of which its heralded capacity for text processing is a minor and rather unimpressive aspect) to elegant implementations of such high-level constructs as closures to the grace with which it does what you probably wanted in the first place by default, but always offers you the option to do otherwise.
Your comments make it pretty clear that you either do not know Perl, or you do not know it well. This is not shocking. Most people "know Perl" because they've seen some overglorified mailroom clerk's attempt at text processing written in it. The fact that Perl lends itself to being used by low-end programmers does not mean that that is the only domain in which it functions. If it were, I would have moved on long ago.
I have strong feelings about this case, and I want BT to lose, but I have to say that the judge missed the point that BT was making. The claim that the Internet infringes, not because it has a central computer with centralized data store as described in the patent, but that it is made up of many such arrangements.
This is fundamentally true, though inaccurate (the terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" are confused here). The World Wide Web's HTTP+HTML elements (certainly what most people think of as "The Web") do infringe the patent on this basis. A Web server provides a central service of delivering data to remote clients. Each Web server provides this function, and thus infringes. The "Internet", does not infringe, and thus Prodigy's ISP business does not infringe, IMH(IANAL)O, but the World Wide Web does. In this way, I think BT should have gone after Microsoft for making IIS, but then they would have had to explain why the didn't go after NCSA back in the days of the NCSA Web server....
The author correctly points out that Perl is best suited for quick, unmaintainable hacks and not serious, large-scale engineering.
A common misconception about Perl, and I understand why you would think this way. Having written several large systems in Perl (as well as several smaller systems in which maintainability was key), I will point out these problems with your thesis:
1. If your quick hacks are unmaintainable, get another job. If your prototypes aren't good enough to turn into a product with a small amount of work, you're wasting lots of your own (presumably valued) time.
2. PDL belies your comments. Take a look at it. It's large, maintainable and certainly serious. Scientific computing is a dream with it.
I generally find that "large scale engineering" is the easy part. What's hard is applying sound engineering and scientific principles to your code. You can do that as easily in C as in Perl as in Python as in Eiffel. It's a little harder in C++, though honestly not by much, because of the action-at-a-distance nature of C++'s object model.
Oddly, Java has a problem in neither area. Java's problems have very little to do with the language itself (which is an acceptable C derivative, if you want a C derivative with GC) and more to do with what Sun does with it, and how that has trained its users to approach it.
Perl's biggest problems are the following:
1. Incomplete object model. This was deliberate, and has given Perl6 the ability to form its object model out of a decade of best practices by those who "rolled their own" in Perl5.
2. Circa AWK/shell subroutine semantics. Also a major aim of the Perl6 effort, this is a subtle thorn in Perl's side. It's easily overcome once you get used to it, but leads to nearly impossible-to-optimize function calls in average code.
3. The lack of true compilation of the language leaves software developers with very few options in terms of shipping programs. Again one of the first aims of Perl6
See the Perl6 theme? Wait for it... it will rock your world.
The difference will not show in most of the productivity apps that are popular on palm devices, but the new big push, and certainly my reason for wanting color on a palmtop is the Web. Browsing the Web with a 12-bit pallette is going to hurt.
Try this. XFree86 allows -depth settings of 5, 15 and 16 among others. Try firing up a server under 16 bits. Bring up a browser and view a few sites. Then re-start the server at 15 bits and see the massive difference. Now imagine that difference magnified by a factor of 8! 12 bit display would really suck.
And all that assumes average Web needs. If you work with color-sensitive applications (no, Timmy pr0n is not the only thing that needs rich color), the palmtop becomes worthless for previewing someone's work while you're on the run.
Most all of the options sound really terrible. A friend of mine has researched this a lot, as he wants to have his remains treated naturally. There appears to be one option. There's a group in the central Atlantic states that was doing something with conservation land where you could be naturally buried (that is, no enbalmning, no concrete, no plastic in the casket, etc).
I'll have to look up the info, but if I find it, I'll post it here.
Absolutely not. First off, I think the idea of inventing a program for every major system file would be silly. Second, the idea behind vipw is locking, and vim will warn you if the file has changed (thus giving you a more CVS-style lock rather than the vipw model which is more like rcs).
Second, anyone who edits the passwd file without making a backup gets shot. It's that simple.
mg, microemacs, pico, etc. miss the point. I'm a vi user and an emacs user. Here's the problem with the debate: it misses the fact that emacs is not a text editor any more than sendmail is a regular expression engine. Yes, sendmail's core functionality is in regular expression handling. Yes, emacs' core functionality is in text editing. But, both do a whole lot more, and when you segment out mail header munging from regexen from dns from aliases from every which other thing, you find that they don't interoperate (about as far as you can go is qmail, which is lean compared to sendmail, but still has a lot of funtionality).
/etc/passwd on a remote box, I run vi. When I want to edit my dot-files, I run vi (actually, vim most of the time, but I don't use its extras). When I want to hack Perl code for a few hours, I use emacs for the IDE-like environment, not for the key-bindings. If I didn't like emacs' keybindings, I'd use vi's keybindings in emacs. I used to run emacs on a 33MHz 486, and before that on some ancient UNIX boxes that I will not admit to knowing anything about, so speed is not my concern when running on a 1.2GHz dual-processor Pentium++ NG 2.1 with a twist. I just want my editor to do some of the easy work while I worry about the code.
You can use mutt to read mail, vi to edit files, and any number of other programs to do source control, diff browsing, remote file management, USENET, syntax highlighting, interpreter and debugger interaction, interactive make and error finding, etc, etc, etc. Now you have to learn all of those tools, and get used to the different user interfaces.
You may like that. I find that using emacs for mail is too painful (emacs' single largest failing is that it does EVERYTHING, but is not multi-threaded), so I use mutt or evolution. There's no harm splitting away from emacs for one function or another, but you always have those tools there.
On the other hand, I'm a sysadmin. When I want to edit
Don't fight over emacs vs vi, E vs twm, exim vs sendmail, Debian vs Red Hat, etc until you know both tools and all of the related tools cold. When you do, you can have an intellegent discussion about which to use when. Until you do, you're no better than the chuckle-heads who said that Last Temptation of Chirst was sacreligious without going to see it first.
This is roughly the same logic that leads to American media reporting that something has bi-partisan support as if it had universal support.
Think about what you're saying: the for-profit companies are the ones running the not-for-profit domain registration. If there's a fight between two groups over a domain and one of the groups is an industry association (oh, let's say the RIAA), which one do you think would be favored?
Fall like leaves from the tree that
is the Internet.
Under their weight the
Rock shatters and river halts
Slashdotting like spam?
Making the wire hard to tap is useless when you're in the military. Once something is in widespread enough use SOMEONE will make a tool for breaking it. I'm sure there's a "fiber tapping kit" out there that every government uses some variant of. It might be hard, but it's not impossible, and that means it's going to be done.
Don't such buildings usually have some kind of metal moulding somehwere on the outside (along the roof, etc), or a wheathervein? You could connect your antenna to that, I guess.
Also, just putting the antenna in a window with a line-of-site to the target building might be good enough.
This is an excellent point, but let me expand on its relevance to the article. I saw this article last night, and it's all about sending newsletters and offers to customers who HAVE ASKED FOR IT. I have no problem at all with this. Email me all you like if I've asked you to. If I've accidentally clicked the opt-in button on the signup form, then I can go un-click it (if you don't provide that link and/or you're lying and I never signed up, then I have no sympathy for you).
Spam is UNSOLICITED commercial email, not just commercial email. Doubleclick provides a valuable service in that arena, and I don't even loathe them like I do on the banner-ad side of their business.
Yep, I got it working too, but its concept of how you managed sysadminish things like where storage went and how the database was found made Oracle's configuration look pleasant (scratch that, nothing makes Oracle's configuration look pleasant).
MySQL was distributed as RPMS at the time, but even compilng from source and installing was a matter of standard open source conventions. I didn't have to modify 3 config files to get it to install, etc.
I'm not trying to be pro-MySQL here. Personally I think PostgreSQL is good for MySQL and visa-versa. The competition is helping them both to grow. But, PostgreSQL lost me on ease of installation back then, where it would have been my database of choice if it had been easier to install.
Back in the day (about 2-3 years ago) MySQL was a bit of a pain to configure correctly under Linux and a bit moreso under other UNIXen. PostgreSQL was insane. I tried to get it to work on my box, and I'm a C programmer with many years of experience in understanding other people's code and installation systems.
I finally gave up. I got it installed and mostly working, but I just had better things to do and I wasn't at all happy with the number of hand-tweeks that were required. I slapped MySQL in place and never turned back.
I think a lot of folks were in the same boat, but had even less patience for PostgreSQL's difficult installation.
Now, I understand the two are about the same, and both are available with the major Linux distributions. However, now PostgreSQL has to work its way out of the hole its in. Admins like me will be loath to give up the DB we know best in favor of one that burned us, even if it was long ago.
There's an artist who did the same for dinosaurs. He painted in the early-to-mid part of last century, and did a lot of museum murals and such. Everyone from fantasy movie effects people (Harryhausen) to modern museum curators to paleantologists have been influenced by his take on dinosaurs, "cave men", and other topics that he worked on.
The amazing thing is that he was nearly blind, and yet his paintings were more accurate than anyone had a right to be (we now know that some of his ideas were off, but suprisingly few, and much of his work remains in the territory of good guess, but we don't know).
So, you get a machine that can identify everyone who is angry, upset, nervous or paranoid and you send in the rent-a-cops! Oh, lovely.
:-(
I'd actually like to see this deployed for the humor value, except that it would probably cause a lot of borderline paranoid psychotics to melt down...
Because of the recent RIAA sillyness, I'm asking people to be evangelists for local music. Go listen to bands, push the ones you like to your friends. Buy CDs at concerts if they're selling them, rip them and listen to them on your portable instead of ill-gotten corporate junk. Download samples from local artist sites and share them with your friends. Flood Gnutella and its like with music that the artists WANT to share.
The best defense against the RIAA is to ignore the products of their members!
I like music. I used to buy a lot of it. I downloaded a lot of it too. No more.
I'll go listen to local bands play in local clubs. I'll buy or download music from a band's own Web site.
Downloading corporate music doesn't really get me anything, really. No more of my time, money or brain-power will be devoted to such a corrupt industry.
I get your point, but last I heard ISPs (be they retail or backbones) were not classified as common carriers by the FCC. Common carrier status is a major deal, and it's not all good for the carrier.
Wait. The poster asked if you'd heard of vendor-updates (he gave several examples). Then you proceded to berate him and the community in general because others (not the poster) had "laughed" at your use of those tools.
That means that you agree with the poster to whom you were responding, no?
If so, then I guess I agree with you too.
I disagree with you on Debian. Debian is a nice Linux distribution that does maintain security and bug-fix updates well. apt-get is every bit as good as (and in many cases better than) rpmui or up2date or redcarpet for maintaining a secure and otherwise patched system.
I happen to be a Red Hat user at work and at home, but that doesn't mean that I ignore the value of other distributions (be they commercial or volunteer).
Can you imagine the day everyone uses this. You send mail to a public list and get back 2000 messages asking you to "authenticate" yourself.
This is a bad plan for working in the large.
This is slashdot. I'm not going to take 2 hours to write up a response to your post. However, suffice to say that at every step in your argument I see one of two things: misdirection (e.g. energy isn't a vector, in response to my assertion that you could apply the given energy along a vector of your chosing) or unfounded assumptions (e.g. time==money with no explanation of why taking 6 years to lob your waste into the Sun is more expensive than taking 6 months).
Try stating what you have to say in 2 paragraphs, and tightening up the logic on those two.