Yea,, I looked into that rip off of Egyptian mythology thing and found it to be very lacking when you attempt to verify what is being said. I'm not quite sure where that came from, but it sounds a bit questionable. There's some decent weight to substantiate the idea that most of the modern Judeo/Christian lore stemmed from multiple other traditions. The Genesis story is a prime example, and folds together strands of several other creation stories from the region in which it developed. As for the new Christian bits... well, I don't think anyone had a lock on the messiah idea. People had been doing that practically forever in any culture that had a messiah myth. After all, if someone says, "your new king will appear soon," someone's going to think, "hey, that could be me!" Jesus's only real contribution being yet another face in the crowd was in creating a stable following (probably more the work of those who came after) and in preaching an unusually pacifistic dogma, at least if we buy into the contents of Matthew.
We supposedly celebrate on the 25th because that is around the time conception would have happened and the birth of the soul that was Jesus. This is a big reason why religious organizations don't support abortion and claim that life begins at conception. Someone's been retconning at you. The reason that that date was chosen was many-fold, but essentially it was a compromise. Celebrations such as Saturnalia and the Feast of Sol Invictus were terribly important to Pagan Rome at the time of its conversion to Christianity. Recall that the Unconquered Sun and the Crucified God were in a dead-heat for control of decaying Rome's theology at one point, and that Christianity won out was almost certainly as much a matter of politics as religion. In the end, setting a new official holiday on the solstice allowed Rome to bless all existing celebrations on the 25th as worship of their new god.
The whole conception thing is absurd. Conception and the exact period of gestation were part of women's Mysteries and not to be toyed with by men (the ones making the laws about holidays).
But this Christmas celebration in December is a relatively recent event, not something that has been around in religion. Name a religion that did NOT have a solstice celebration prior to, say... 1300 AD (which neatly avoids the emergence of science and the demystification of celestial motion). Just one.
That entire Egyptian thing is a creation of someone's imagination. Sounds plausible.
Either way, it doesn't matter much, There are people who will believe and people who will not. What you believe is one thing. What you try to assert about history is another.
Yeah, it's pretty broken. My guess is it's a just a bug. From the comments of previous posters it seems like it's universally sucking in all browsers, so it's not just a case of having tested with the wrong browser.
My company has tripled in size over the last 2 years.
Yeah. People throw their hands in the air over this incoming recession, and sure the stock market is having some problems, but so many areas of this country are still doing well. True enough, and even the stock market isn't doing all that bad. Look at . Look at the S&P 500 over 5 years. We're seeing a sharp correction, but it's not like we're even returning to 2005 levels, much less earlier. You get a much clearer view when you look with some historical perspective (which the news media rarely does these days). Look back at the S&P 500 since 1950 and you'll see what an amazing market run we've had and continue to have.
Too bad there are no jobs My company has tripled in size over the last 2 years.
and the houses are way too expensive. Depends on your definition. Prices have come down, but living within the limits of a city is still a luxury for most. I do it, but the price I pay is that I live in a tiny house next to an auto-body repair garage (nice guys, it turns out).
Virtually all middle-class job fields are either stalled, or firing I know someone who is out of work. December was dead (as it typically is), but January has been one interview after another.
... and as far as the real estate market goes, here's a story.
In 1995, about 50% of Nassau county (Long Island, NYC metro area) residents could afford to purchase the homes they were living in, given market price. In 2005, that number was down to about 5%. Define "afford to purchase."
I could have purchased the house I was in in 1995, but it would have been a huge burden in terms of mortgage payments.
The correct age is 2. Before that, most children will not be able to work the controls for even the simplest games.
Now, if you had asked about what video games... that's another story. But if the question is merely, "at what age should they play games," I don't think there's a lower limit. Some games which present a cynical or violent outlook should be reserved for a time when the child understands the difference between reality and fantasy. There are also questions of complexity and how frustrated a young child will become playing a game that contains complexity that is beyond them (Myst comes to mind).
Sometimes I write comments in a rush and their punctuation suffers. I really do wish you hadn't felt the need to bring it into the conversation. It was only in the conversation if the only thing you choose to respond to is... oh wait.
Not every industry works like level 3 containment where checks, balances, inspections and certifications are so stringent. That is correct, and it happens to have been the core of my posts which you may or may not have read. I'm not trying to be antagonistic, but you're sort of doing the limit-like approach to what I was saying, and I'm no longer sure what you're trying to indicate that I got wrong....
Even then things do slip through the cracks and accidents happen. Picking your job based on public safety implications and expecting worker safety to follow would be unwise. I'm certain that I never suggested that worker safety was a strict function of public safety implications (see many fields of work that involve producing horrendously toxic waste).
I think you're trying to over-generalize my highest-level point into a set of assertions to which I would never agree.
3D ray tracing using Perl...what? Why?!? I can think of several reasons, but PDL is high on the list.
That said, the article claims that Perl isn't useful for the Web, citing its lame oh-so-1990s CGI capabilities. This ignores the fact that tools like TTK (you may be familiar with the site from which TTK developed....) and Mason are in large-scale use around the world and do an excellent job of providing the kind of code/content segregation that modern developers need.
They've shown they can cope with load. Well... sort of. The first company to figure out how to do this without having distinct servers will be much more successful.
Now if only they'd make a game worth playing, a plot not revolving around a Harry Pottery-ish universe. Ah... huh.
Harry Potter? Really?
Let's see. Magic in a fantasy setting. Well, other than the fact that HP is a modern fantasy setting, you have nailed it down to a sweepingly broad genre that includes everything from Tolkien to Jordan and back again.
But then it falls apart. HP was about a world where magic had pretty much mastered the dangers of the world, except for those manifested by humans (e.g. Voldimort and his cronies). On thee other hand WoW is about multiple worlds in which humans are the least powerful of the major races (competing with alien orcs, star-faring draenai, recently no-longer immortal elves, etc.) and all of those races live in the shadow of the Titans and to a lesser extent the dragons and demons who have been the power behind the world's events for the last tens of thousands of years.
No, they're just nothing like each other. You can make a strong point that it's Tolkienesque, and that Tolkien influenced Potter, but Potter influencing WoW? Not really.
However, none of this has anything to do with the game being worth playing (a Harry Potter MMO that was a decent game would be worth playing... but it would have to be a decent game first and a genre knockoff second).
WoW is vastly more playable than any other MMO I've seen for the following reasons:
1. The quests are fast and plentiful 2. Quests have decently entertaining storylines 3. In terms of leveling, quests are worth doing 4. The tradeskill system is extensive and useful 5. The PvP system is quite well developed 6. The economy works very well 7. User-authored mods can re-write the UI (and many do) 8. Blizzard supports the UI mod community 9. There are very few points of contention between players for objectives 10. Dungeons are all instanced 11. Itemization is typically excellent 12. Each class has a number of roles that it can fill 13. Talent trees allow substantial customization 14. PVP and PVE gear are distinct and both worth while 15. Raids are excellently designed (by former raiders)
I've yet to run into another MMO that beat WoW on even a substantial number of these points, and the software development framework for mods is a HUGE reason that I resist trying out other MMOs... I just don't want to go back to the bad old days of waiting for the vendor to tweak the UI.
Well, you could probably only expect so much out of a single game. Probably time for them to start on WoW II. WoW II was delivered in December of 2006. It was officially called World of Warcraft patch 2.0.1 and was tied to the release of The Burning Crusade expansion (though it came out a month before the release of the expansion itself). What MMO vendors are starting to realize is that, no matter how disruptive a change to the technology might be, introducing a new game is orders of magnitude more disruptive to their player base (and many will simply never play the new game). This was the case with EverQuest and EverQuest II. People don't play the game for the game after 2+ years, they play it because they've developed a string of social relationships with the other players, and they wish to keep playing with them.
WoW III will be coming out in the forthcoming months. It will be called either 3.0.x or 2.5.x.
Incremental change to huge gaming infrastructures will be the wave of the future, not brand new games with the same genre. The only way I could see that playing out differently would be if someone published a game where the characters could be moved about freely between different games and still communicate with others that play the previous games. That would be hard to do right, but could resolve the problem to an extent.
Wow what bad logic. Do you not understand that a different level of safety can apply for the worker than to the consumer in an industry. Your punctuation notwithstanding, no it wasn't bad logic, and of course I understand that. I was replying to a comment about employees, and was referring to employees only. The larger issues are interesting, but outside of the scope of the discussion I was having.
More pertinant to this discussion a worker might be contaminated with a pathogen due to lax internal controls while the external perimeter is much harder to penetrate. And that's quite true (your spelling notwithstanding), but as I pointed out, that's less of a concern when your every process and procedure is monitored at the corporate, state and federal levels. Lax controls simply aren't an option in the world of even level 3 containment. If you have lax controls, you don't go live, much less get the chance to fail an inspection.
You had competition from the kind of people who play World of Warcraft? You would be amazed at the diversity of the crowd these days. It's a social venue now, not a video game. There's everything from the hard-core twitch-based PvPers to the cliques of female players that are just as happy doing trade skills and treating the game as a glorified chat room with skillups as they are running instances and taking on bosses. There are also a HUGE number of military personnel who play now.
there is no way I'd walk into a room and work for hours with a virus that violently kills almost everyone it infects, should "something go wrong". What do you think happens should "something go wrong" when you're working with a vat of fry grease that can melt off skin at McDonalds? The risk there is much more serious, since training is much less strict and controls are not federally monitored.
What do you think happens should "something go wrong" when you're assembling a skyscraper? Pouring molten steel? Flying a plane? Heck, just driving a car can kill you in the most horrible ways.
If you want safe, you're pretty much hosed.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring.
PS: It doesn't kill everyone. To quote Wikipedia:
Mortality rates are extremely high, with the human case-fatality rate ranging from 50% - 89%, according to viral subtype.[3] The cause of death is usually due to hypovolemic shock or organ failure.
"...while having code so boring anyone can maintain it..."
I hope that I understand that wrong and that you don't consider unintelligible, unmaintainable, code 'interesting' in a good sense. First off, no, that's not what's being said.
Second, good code isn't always easy to maintain. I stared at a system at work (won't say which employer) and was humbled. It was code. I understood all of the syntax. It was fairly clean code. It was impossible for me to fully understand without hitting stacks of reference texts (not language texts). It took a team of people to maintain that one person's code. It was worth it. It did what everyone thought impossible - the best and brightest in the industry had tried and failed for many years.
It was also code that wasn't really practical in most languages. It required a set of language features that aren't easily found in today's Algol/C-derived universe of high-level languages.
Perl 5 offers some features that other languages typically don't (the integration between code and regular expressions comes to mind). These aren't killer features in the sense that any large system needs them in order to function, but they are quite useful. Python embraces a more limited set of features, but results in code that's easier to understand. This can be good for some sorts of environments, but in my experience, good developers don't need the hand-holding, and bad developers will write noise in anything.
Perl 6 offers a wider universe still of language features harvested from Smalltalk, LISP, Haskell and other places that many useful language tools have developed. Python is going the wrong way. Reducing language features to a core that can be maintained by even the lowest-common-denominator programmers isn't helping to solve the hard problems (hard problems can still be solved and solved well in Python, but the best solution to a problem isn't always available).
All that said, I find it frustrating that Perl 6 took center stage in this article... the really interesting part is the compiler development tools that are now a core part of the distribution. I've played with them a bit, and WOW... they really are amazingly powerful once you understand them. PGE alone is an oasis in a desert of painful-to-use compiler-writing tools.
Interesting that this was modded "flamebait". I think reasoned, well-informed language discussions are too few on Slashdot. We shouldn't be afraid to say Python and Perl or C++ and Groovy in the same paragraph. We shouldn't feel that to do so is to invoke argument. Everything on Slashdot invokes argument, but some good discussion can come of it as well.
Perhaps the folks who modded my post as flamebait were referring to the fact that I called Perl a "toy". In this respect (keeping in mind I've been a Perl programmer since 1991), I mean that it lacks certain features that one expects of a modern language (formal parameters being the most glaring), and the code base is such that a rewrite wasn't just a good idea, it was practically necessary. Now, I love Perl, but I love it like a brother that I know will never be able to take over the family business. I'm realistic about what Perl is and what it's not.
Python is a decently full-featured language. I find it a touch claustrophobia-inducing due to the aggressive enforcement of "the right way" to solve certain problems, but it also happens to be darned good at what it does. As a social experiment alone, I consider Python to be a success, and at this point its success in the realm of software development speaks for itself. For these reasons, I don't see Python losing a tremendous amount of market share to Perl 6... I do see its market share shrinking, but that's more a result of Groovy than anything else.
Ruby... well, sadly Ruby was a great idea, but was easily absorbed. Beyond its meta-object model (brilliant integration of such into a modern "scripting" language though it may be), it doesn't really offer very much. This is why I say that it's kind of doomed. It just doesn't have a niche that's unique enough. If Perl 6 is successful, then Ruby becomes rather redundant.
Groovy is a great idea for making Java more easily applied to small problems and rapid prototyping, but it fundamentally struggles against the bounds of Java, and for that reason, I don't see it gaining entrance to much of the world that Perl, Python and Ruby occupy.
PHP has, and I'm sorry to be so blunt here, never impressed me. It attempted to be Perl-like, but threw away too much of what made Perl powerful in the first place, and didn't actually resolve any of the shortcomings of Perl. It also encourages the worst kind of mingling of content and code in Web-based applications. I have a fair amount of respect for people who manage to write large systems in it, and I use MediaWiki on my Web site, but I just don't care for the language. That said, I still don't see it going anywhere any time soon. There's something seductive about being able to write code "as a Web page" that will keep people using it for quite some time, even when using a templating system in some other language might be the better solution.
Well, I've rambled on, and I have to go to work. I hope people understand where I was coming from. I'm not attempting to taunt the trolls, I'm actually interested in having the conversation about where the programming world will be in several years. Perl 6 looms, but it's loomed for a long time. If it's ever solid, I'm very interested in what people think that will mean for the landscape.
Nobody will care how awesome Perl 6 is. The audience of Perl 6/5 doesn't care about single binding vs multiple binding objects -- they won't even get out of bed to have an argument about strongly typed languages vs. weakly typed languages. They just like easy programming -- the metric of Perl 6's success is how much it caters to lazy people. If you want glue, use perl, if you want cement you use something stronger. I care how awesome Perl 6 is. I care about all of the language design points you raise. I am a current Perl 5 user and will be a Perl 6 user. I'm a minority, and I know it.
However, it's also true that Perl 6 has been designed to cater to both crowds, and that's one of the myriad reasons it took so long.
while =STDIN {
say; }
Is just as short and sweet as it always was in Perl 5, but if you want to get under that hood, you can.
(I was a Perl guy for 15 years, used to love it, now Perl and Ruby both look like line noise that's been encrypted -- compared to my new girlfriend, Python.) Frankly, I think Python is a great little language. It filled the gap between Perl and Java very, very nicely (though Groovy also does that now). Perl 6 won't replace Python, but I think it will become the way people write medium-to-large systems in certain niches, replacing some C++, Java, Python and Perl applications. PHP is probably safe where it is as a rapid Web prototyping system. Ruby will likely evaporate (being largely absorbed into the feature-set of Perl 6) but there's a large Rails community that will take some time to convert even if Rails is directly portable, and it probably will be at some point.
Perl 5 is a toy language (it's arguable that CPAN is Perl 5's most valuable feature, and that without it, Perl would not have a community today). It's a great little toy, and powerful in its own right, but it's a toy. Line noise? Eh, perhaps, but I started as a C programmer, and thus was trained early in how to write code in an unmaintainable syntax in a maintainable way. The largest problem is that Perl is far easier to be effective in than C, and that breeds long-standing unmaintainable code on its own. That problem is, unfortunately, the curse of all easy languages to use (PHP and Python suffer equally there, though Python has been somewhat stricter on not allowing the bad code to become community code). Perl 6, on the other hand is not a toy, and I'll use it for very different reasons.
Google Talk putting a dent in AIM? Uhh... maybe... but aren't you forgetting about YIM and MSNM? Me and a lot of other people, yes. At least we try.
They have been making noise about interoperability for months now and seem to have a much larger user base than Google Talk. Y! is unusable. Their spam filtering sucks, and everyone I know abandoned it as their annoyance threshold rose.
MSN is widely used by people who don't know that they're using it. I'm willing to bet that actual traffic volume is higher on Google.
This looks more like a "the enemy of my enemy" situation. Possibly.
In the time it took to develop Perl 6, other programming languages have been conceived, implemented, used and abandoned. That's true, but I don't think anything as ambitious as Perl 6 has made it this far. Haskell is really the only language that I know of that's been even nearly as ambitious in recent memory and then you have to go back to the likes of CommonLISP to find another. There are HARD problems to solve for Perl 6, and you can't just write a simple parser and be done. This isn't Perl 5 or Python or Ruby. This is real change in programming language design. If you disagree, sit down and try to take any given modern scripting language and make it code-data reversible. Then add LISP macros and allow any language feature to be written IN the language. Show your work;-)
While I am relieved that Perl 6 is finally showing signs of life, I have concerns:
1. Can Perl 6 take the place of Perl 5? By definition, yes (being backward compatible in the sense of being able to run Perl 5 code). In practical terms, people will keep a Perl 5 binary around for a long time to come, I'm sure.
2. Did it take too long? Moot question. If it's good, we'll use it.
3. Is it any good? It's every good... if you consider that good, then it's your good too.
Perl 6 is, to me, the most important language development since the CommonLISP standard was released, and in some ways more important due to Perl's existing audience size.
And as such, this is a clear admission that Google Talk was putting a serious dent in their business. They had no interest in standards until they had competition, but now that they do, they'll certainly want to make sure that their competition isn't the only one that can claim universal access (which is exactly what Google can claim now for their Web-based client).
Um, swifter justice would be good, yes. How do you get both swift and fair?
As would locking people charged with murder up before - not the same thing as without - trial. The reason we don't do this, of course, is because it can take quite some time to get to trial. We can increase the pace of that phase, but then your example would have been that some killer went free and killed again because the prosecutor didn't have enough time to put together his case.
We tread a very fine line between trampling on the rights of the accused (who are often innocent) and putting the public at risk. There are many variables, and the only thing that's really certain is that a simplistic solution will be wrong.
I wasn't advocating anything, just disapproving of those exceptional cases where someone with access to lots of money, or with a previously good character, can get bail despite being accused of a heinous crime. Actually, what I took issue with was mostly the poor statistics, here. Can you find a case where a building fell down and killed people? Sure. Are buildings therefore deathtraps? No. You try as hard as you can to make them safe without making the building of them too onerous and you accept that sometimes buildings are dangerous.
With the law, it's the same. You don't charge bail because you want to offer a "get out of jail free" card to the rich (in fact means are very often a factor in choosing a bail amount, so it scales up to an extent with wealth). You charge bail because, for many, this has proven to reduce flight risk because most people, even criminals, don't want to lose the money they've put up.
And seriously? You think that by commenting on a foolish judicial decision (and thereby implying agreement with normal practice in most countries over centuries) that I'm advocating brutal repression? You're saying it was foolish because you have the benefit of hindsight. If you were that judge and you'd presided over dozens of cases just like it where the accused was innocent, would you have the same clarity about it?
I'm not sure what you're advocating, but I'm sure of what happens when people single out a few cases and demand that the laws be harsher because of the risk posed by the extreme minority of examples. It *is* a slippery slope. Did you realize that and advocate for the ultimate conclusion, or were you just naive? I have no idea.
And that loss of life caused by free-roaming indicted murderers is acceptable loss? Sadly, you have to draw the line somewhere, and you will ALWAYS be able to find a horrible example of where the law failed to protect someone. If you can't, then you life in a stricter police state than any I have ever seen.
He used the time to shoot dead his wife's mother, then kill himself with the same gun... So, you're advocating swifter justice? Locking people up without a trial? What?
If you wish to protect the rights of the masses, then you must accept that you'll take some losses as a result. If losses are not acceptable, then take away the rights. Only problem is... it won't be YOU taking away said rights, it will be whoever can get their hands on the most power the fastest under a system of brutal repression... but if that's what you'd prefer, far be it for me to stop you from voting for whoever promises to give it to you.
As to an ISP that doesn't use an AT&T backbone? That's a tough one. You don't have to pay them twice is the point. Yes, at some point there's going to be AT&T equipment in your path, but you don't have to write them a check every month, and you can make damned sure that a good chunk of the check you DO write stays in the hands of someone else...
Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? Your packets will still likely go through an AT&T network and thus still be inspected. Of course. I don't think the OP was trying too hide their information (that's what encryption is for), but rather stop giving money to AT&T for what is clearly an anti-consumer stance.
I am glad that we are trusting the unwashed masses to make important technical decisions that they know nothing about. I think you misunderstand... the government almost certainly wanted to make sure that there would not be backlash against the idea after having ALREADY made their decision on a technical level (since the advisers in question would have been the ones to bring the issue to that level). However, I'm sure they formed the question in a reasonable way that didn't imply that the island of Dr. Moreau would be coming to a Kwiki-Mart near you. Slashdot, on the other hand....
Even the summary, once you get past that horrid title, makes it clear that we're not talking about changing the DNA involved, but rather using eggs from animals to grow cells that were taken from a human. I can't really imagine why I'd have a problem with growing cells from a human that way vs. previous experiments that have cultured human cells in a stand-alone environment.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole conception thing is absurd. Conception and the exact period of gestation were part of women's Mysteries and not to be toyed with by men (the ones making the laws about holidays). But this Christmas celebration in December is a relatively recent event, not something that has been around in religion. Name a religion that did NOT have a solstice celebration prior to, say... 1300 AD (which neatly avoids the emergence of science and the demystification of celestial motion). Just one. That entire Egyptian thing is a creation of someone's imagination. Sounds plausible. Either way, it doesn't matter much, There are people who will believe and people who will not. What you believe is one thing. What you try to assert about history is another.
Yeah, it's pretty broken. My guess is it's a just a bug. From the comments of previous posters it seems like it's universally sucking in all browsers, so it's not just a case of having tested with the wrong browser.
Yeah. People throw their hands in the air over this incoming recession, and sure the stock market is having some problems, but so many areas of this country are still doing well. True enough, and even the stock market isn't doing all that bad. Look at . Look at the S&P 500 over 5 years. We're seeing a sharp correction, but it's not like we're even returning to 2005 levels, much less earlier. You get a much clearer view when you look with some historical perspective (which the news media rarely does these days). Look back at the S&P 500 since 1950 and you'll see what an amazing market run we've had and continue to have.
... and as far as the real estate market goes, here's a story.In 1995, about 50% of Nassau county (Long Island, NYC metro area) residents could afford to purchase the homes they were living in, given market price. In 2005, that number was down to about 5%. Define "afford to purchase."
I could have purchased the house I was in in 1995, but it would have been a huge burden in terms of mortgage payments.
The correct age is 2. Before that, most children will not be able to work the controls for even the simplest games.
Now, if you had asked about what video games... that's another story. But if the question is merely, "at what age should they play games," I don't think there's a lower limit. Some games which present a cynical or violent outlook should be reserved for a time when the child understands the difference between reality and fantasy. There are also questions of complexity and how frustrated a young child will become playing a game that contains complexity that is beyond them (Myst comes to mind).
Sometimes I write comments in a rush and their punctuation suffers. I really do wish you hadn't felt the need to bring it into the conversation. It was only in the conversation if the only thing you choose to respond to is
I think you're trying to over-generalize my highest-level point into a set of assertions to which I would never agree.
That said, the article claims that Perl isn't useful for the Web, citing its lame oh-so-1990s CGI capabilities. This ignores the fact that tools like TTK (you may be familiar with the site from which TTK developed....) and Mason are in large-scale use around the world and do an excellent job of providing the kind of code/content segregation that modern developers need.
Harry Potter? Really?
Let's see. Magic in a fantasy setting. Well, other than the fact that HP is a modern fantasy setting, you have nailed it down to a sweepingly broad genre that includes everything from Tolkien to Jordan and back again.
But then it falls apart. HP was about a world where magic had pretty much mastered the dangers of the world, except for those manifested by humans (e.g. Voldimort and his cronies). On thee other hand WoW is about multiple worlds in which humans are the least powerful of the major races (competing with alien orcs, star-faring draenai, recently no-longer immortal elves, etc.) and all of those races live in the shadow of the Titans and to a lesser extent the dragons and demons who have been the power behind the world's events for the last tens of thousands of years.
No, they're just nothing like each other. You can make a strong point that it's Tolkienesque, and that Tolkien influenced Potter, but Potter influencing WoW? Not really.
However, none of this has anything to do with the game being worth playing (a Harry Potter MMO that was a decent game would be worth playing... but it would have to be a decent game first and a genre knockoff second).
WoW is vastly more playable than any other MMO I've seen for the following reasons:
1. The quests are fast and plentiful
2. Quests have decently entertaining storylines
3. In terms of leveling, quests are worth doing
4. The tradeskill system is extensive and useful
5. The PvP system is quite well developed
6. The economy works very well
7. User-authored mods can re-write the UI (and many do)
8. Blizzard supports the UI mod community
9. There are very few points of contention between players for objectives
10. Dungeons are all instanced
11. Itemization is typically excellent
12. Each class has a number of roles that it can fill
13. Talent trees allow substantial customization
14. PVP and PVE gear are distinct and both worth while
15. Raids are excellently designed (by former raiders)
I've yet to run into another MMO that beat WoW on even a substantial number of these points, and the software development framework for mods is a HUGE reason that I resist trying out other MMOs... I just don't want to go back to the bad old days of waiting for the vendor to tweak the UI.
It's also not shocking that the server population went up around 10% when the released their ad campaign on TV.
WoW III will be coming out in the forthcoming months. It will be called either 3.0.x or 2.5.x.
Incremental change to huge gaming infrastructures will be the wave of the future, not brand new games with the same genre. The only way I could see that playing out differently would be if someone published a game where the characters could be moved about freely between different games and still communicate with others that play the previous games. That would be hard to do right, but could resolve the problem to an extent.
What do you think happens should "something go wrong" when you're assembling a skyscraper? Pouring molten steel? Flying a plane? Heck, just driving a car can kill you in the most horrible ways.
If you want safe, you're pretty much hosed.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring.
PS: It doesn't kill everyone. To quote Wikipedia: Mortality rates are extremely high, with the human case-fatality rate ranging from 50% - 89%, according to viral subtype.[3] The cause of death is usually due to hypovolemic shock or organ failure.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola (citation from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no02/04-0533.htm)
I hope that I understand that wrong and that you don't consider unintelligible, unmaintainable, code 'interesting' in a good sense. First off, no, that's not what's being said.
Second, good code isn't always easy to maintain. I stared at a system at work (won't say which employer) and was humbled. It was code. I understood all of the syntax. It was fairly clean code. It was impossible for me to fully understand without hitting stacks of reference texts (not language texts). It took a team of people to maintain that one person's code. It was worth it. It did what everyone thought impossible - the best and brightest in the industry had tried and failed for many years.
It was also code that wasn't really practical in most languages. It required a set of language features that aren't easily found in today's Algol/C-derived universe of high-level languages.
Perl 5 offers some features that other languages typically don't (the integration between code and regular expressions comes to mind). These aren't killer features in the sense that any large system needs them in order to function, but they are quite useful. Python embraces a more limited set of features, but results in code that's easier to understand. This can be good for some sorts of environments, but in my experience, good developers don't need the hand-holding, and bad developers will write noise in anything.
Perl 6 offers a wider universe still of language features harvested from Smalltalk, LISP, Haskell and other places that many useful language tools have developed. Python is going the wrong way. Reducing language features to a core that can be maintained by even the lowest-common-denominator programmers isn't helping to solve the hard problems (hard problems can still be solved and solved well in Python, but the best solution to a problem isn't always available).
All that said, I find it frustrating that Perl 6 took center stage in this article... the really interesting part is the compiler development tools that are now a core part of the distribution. I've played with them a bit, and WOW... they really are amazingly powerful once you understand them. PGE alone is an oasis in a desert of painful-to-use compiler-writing tools.
Interesting that this was modded "flamebait". I think reasoned, well-informed language discussions are too few on Slashdot. We shouldn't be afraid to say Python and Perl or C++ and Groovy in the same paragraph. We shouldn't feel that to do so is to invoke argument. Everything on Slashdot invokes argument, but some good discussion can come of it as well.
... well, sadly Ruby was a great idea, but was easily absorbed. Beyond its meta-object model (brilliant integration of such into a modern "scripting" language though it may be), it doesn't really offer very much. This is why I say that it's kind of doomed. It just doesn't have a niche that's unique enough. If Perl 6 is successful, then Ruby becomes rather redundant.
Perhaps the folks who modded my post as flamebait were referring to the fact that I called Perl a "toy". In this respect (keeping in mind I've been a Perl programmer since 1991), I mean that it lacks certain features that one expects of a modern language (formal parameters being the most glaring), and the code base is such that a rewrite wasn't just a good idea, it was practically necessary. Now, I love Perl, but I love it like a brother that I know will never be able to take over the family business. I'm realistic about what Perl is and what it's not.
Python is a decently full-featured language. I find it a touch claustrophobia-inducing due to the aggressive enforcement of "the right way" to solve certain problems, but it also happens to be darned good at what it does. As a social experiment alone, I consider Python to be a success, and at this point its success in the realm of software development speaks for itself. For these reasons, I don't see Python losing a tremendous amount of market share to Perl 6... I do see its market share shrinking, but that's more a result of Groovy than anything else.
Ruby
Groovy is a great idea for making Java more easily applied to small problems and rapid prototyping, but it fundamentally struggles against the bounds of Java, and for that reason, I don't see it gaining entrance to much of the world that Perl, Python and Ruby occupy.
PHP has, and I'm sorry to be so blunt here, never impressed me. It attempted to be Perl-like, but threw away too much of what made Perl powerful in the first place, and didn't actually resolve any of the shortcomings of Perl. It also encourages the worst kind of mingling of content and code in Web-based applications. I have a fair amount of respect for people who manage to write large systems in it, and I use MediaWiki on my Web site, but I just don't care for the language. That said, I still don't see it going anywhere any time soon. There's something seductive about being able to write code "as a Web page" that will keep people using it for quite some time, even when using a templating system in some other language might be the better solution.
Well, I've rambled on, and I have to go to work. I hope people understand where I was coming from. I'm not attempting to taunt the trolls, I'm actually interested in having the conversation about where the programming world will be in several years. Perl 6 looms, but it's loomed for a long time. If it's ever solid, I'm very interested in what people think that will mean for the landscape.
However, it's also true that Perl 6 has been designed to cater to both crowds, and that's one of the myriad reasons it took so long. Is just as short and sweet as it always was in Perl 5, but if you want to get under that hood, you can. (I was a Perl guy for 15 years, used to love it, now Perl and Ruby both look like line noise that's been encrypted -- compared to my new girlfriend, Python.) Frankly, I think Python is a great little language. It filled the gap between Perl and Java very, very nicely (though Groovy also does that now). Perl 6 won't replace Python, but I think it will become the way people write medium-to-large systems in certain niches, replacing some C++, Java, Python and Perl applications. PHP is probably safe where it is as a rapid Web prototyping system. Ruby will likely evaporate (being largely absorbed into the feature-set of Perl 6) but there's a large Rails community that will take some time to convert even if Rails is directly portable, and it probably will be at some point.
Perl 5 is a toy language (it's arguable that CPAN is Perl 5's most valuable feature, and that without it, Perl would not have a community today). It's a great little toy, and powerful in its own right, but it's a toy. Line noise? Eh, perhaps, but I started as a C programmer, and thus was trained early in how to write code in an unmaintainable syntax in a maintainable way. The largest problem is that Perl is far easier to be effective in than C, and that breeds long-standing unmaintainable code on its own. That problem is, unfortunately, the curse of all easy languages to use (PHP and Python suffer equally there, though Python has been somewhat stricter on not allowing the bad code to become community code). Perl 6, on the other hand is not a toy, and I'll use it for very different reasons.
MSN is widely used by people who don't know that they're using it. I'm willing to bet that actual traffic volume is higher on Google. This looks more like a "the enemy of my enemy" situation. Possibly.
1. Can Perl 6 take the place of Perl 5? By definition, yes (being backward compatible in the sense of being able to run Perl 5 code). In practical terms, people will keep a Perl 5 binary around for a long time to come, I'm sure. 2. Did it take too long? Moot question. If it's good, we'll use it. 3. Is it any good? It's every good... if you consider that good, then it's your good too.
Perl 6 is, to me, the most important language development since the CommonLISP standard was released, and in some ways more important due to Perl's existing audience size.
And as such, this is a clear admission that Google Talk was putting a serious dent in their business. They had no interest in standards until they had competition, but now that they do, they'll certainly want to make sure that their competition isn't the only one that can claim universal access (which is exactly what Google can claim now for their Web-based client).
We tread a very fine line between trampling on the rights of the accused (who are often innocent) and putting the public at risk. There are many variables, and the only thing that's really certain is that a simplistic solution will be wrong. I wasn't advocating anything, just disapproving of those exceptional cases where someone with access to lots of money, or with a previously good character, can get bail despite being accused of a heinous crime. Actually, what I took issue with was mostly the poor statistics, here. Can you find a case where a building fell down and killed people? Sure. Are buildings therefore deathtraps? No. You try as hard as you can to make them safe without making the building of them too onerous and you accept that sometimes buildings are dangerous.
With the law, it's the same. You don't charge bail because you want to offer a "get out of jail free" card to the rich (in fact means are very often a factor in choosing a bail amount, so it scales up to an extent with wealth). You charge bail because, for many, this has proven to reduce flight risk because most people, even criminals, don't want to lose the money they've put up. And seriously? You think that by commenting on a foolish judicial decision (and thereby implying agreement with normal practice in most countries over centuries) that I'm advocating brutal repression? You're saying it was foolish because you have the benefit of hindsight. If you were that judge and you'd presided over dozens of cases just like it where the accused was innocent, would you have the same clarity about it?
I'm not sure what you're advocating, but I'm sure of what happens when people single out a few cases and demand that the laws be harsher because of the risk posed by the extreme minority of examples. It *is* a slippery slope. Did you realize that and advocate for the ultimate conclusion, or were you just naive? I have no idea. And that loss of life caused by free-roaming indicted murderers is acceptable loss? Sadly, you have to draw the line somewhere, and you will ALWAYS be able to find a horrible example of where the law failed to protect someone. If you can't, then you life in a stricter police state than any I have ever seen.
If you wish to protect the rights of the masses, then you must accept that you'll take some losses as a result. If losses are not acceptable, then take away the rights. Only problem is... it won't be YOU taking away said rights, it will be whoever can get their hands on the most power the fastest under a system of brutal repression... but if that's what you'd prefer, far be it for me to stop you from voting for whoever promises to give it to you.
Even the summary, once you get past that horrid title, makes it clear that we're not talking about changing the DNA involved, but rather using eggs from animals to grow cells that were taken from a human. I can't really imagine why I'd have a problem with growing cells from a human that way vs. previous experiments that have cultured human cells in a stand-alone environment.