before somebody brings up how Canada has DSL "everywhere" with their larger land mass and smaller population... Maybe because the Canadian population isn't as dispersed as the American population?
More dispersed, less dispersed: your argument might hold water if U.S. DSL service weren't horrid everywhere. Look at the "National ISPs/Telco ADSL" section of's reviews. Bell Canada is the cheapest provider there (even ignoring the exchange rate!) and has the shortest wait time by far. Excluded from that list are all the non-Bell providers who offer equivalent service for even less.
Are you seriously claiming that "outback" regions like California, New Jersey, or New York state are less densely-populated than the whole of Canada?
Begging to differ
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"a firm principle of language design [...] that in all respects equivalent programs should have few possibilities for different representation [...]. Otherwise completely different styles of programming arise unnecessarily, [...]"
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra on Ada (source)
Perl's philosophy is largely a complement of this sentiment. This kind of thinking was in vogue for a long time, and Perl's bucking of the trend was (largely) responsible for its popularity.
Perl advanced the notion that syntax is not a byproduct of grammar. It should not be an orthogonal representation of the language's capabilities. It is important that the concatenation operator be one or two characters. A language is for humans to use; it should reflect how humans think. Give the computer the tedious job of normalizing that input, and spare the human's cycles for more important things.
Read the Apocalypses, or Larry's intro to the ORA books, or the Exegeseses(es?). You'll note artifacts of this philosophy everywhere, including in a discussion of original complaint, anonymous character classes: Unicode makes unnamed character ranges less of a Right Thing than before. And with real set operators for named classes (you can say Word Characters and Whitespace but not Digits), they're a lot less necessary. They're still in there, but it's a couple extra characters to reflect their diminished relevance.
There are some that disagree with this thinking, but I'd question what attracted them to the language in the first place.
drivers aged 15-20 made up 6.3% of the population, but were involved in 12.5% of the injury and fatality collisions
If all drivers are equally dangerous, and the typical accident involves two drivers, then:
(1-.063)^2 = 87.8% of accidents would involve zero 15-to-20-year-olds.
(.063*.937)*2 = 11.8% would involve one 15-to-20 year-old.
.063^2 = 0.4% would involve two 15-to-20-year-olds.
(Note grand total of 100%) That gives us an expected 11.8+0.4 = 12.2% involvement rate for that age group, if all drivers are equally likely to get into an accident. That makes the 12.5% number look less exciting.
The second statistic is more illustrative, but it's not clear whether "The group made up of 16-year-olds" means "16-year-olds" or "an arbitrary age range including 16-year-olds and younger, obviously unlicensed drivers". It would be valuable to see these numbers with unlicensed drivers excluded (since unlicensed / untrained drivers are probably more dangerous, and generally younger).
Someone should tip off the drilling companies: rather than pay skilled people to operate fancy drilling rigs, just drop the rigs and/or people out of an airplane.
I've never run into something that was only possible (or even easier) using the GNU tools.
There are niceties -- tar's switch to invoke gzip for one, bc's arbitrary precision for another -- but the killer for me is date arithmetic. GNU date will (a) give you time in time_t format, and (b) convert relative times ("2 days ago", "next monday") to absolute.
Absent the GNU tools, you need perl or select awks to accomplish the first thing; the second requires non-standard Perl modules or painful ksh handsprings.
no reason to run *linux anymore and risk losing your data due to *linux instability.
*the only downside is that since *free*b*s*d doesn't support the *shift key, you need to type in lowercase and denote capitals with the asterisk. *it's not that bad, once you're used to it.
on a project with 150,000 lines of code, I pray to god it's not Perl.
Understandable, since that much Perl would probably be sentient.
I think of "150000 lines of Perl" the same way I'd think of 100 million lines of C -- it's conceivable that much could exist, but I can imagine no problem whose solution demands so much complexity.
cheers, mike
It's also a DVD/CD player
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 4, Funny
... but it only plays R&B albums and Burt Reynolds movies. Use of the pain sender is optional during DVD or CD playback.
A C book would have to be truly awful not to mention malloc. In fact, I have a hard time believing such a book exists.
--
Kernighan & Ritchie,
The C Programming Language (Prentice-Hall, 1978). ISBN 0-13-110163-3.
I have a copy on my desk and if there's any mention of malloc it's well-hidden. It does present an implementation of a general-purpose storage allocator [alloc(), pp.175], which you could presumably adapt into a malloc-workalike.
I contend they would have succeeded with or without the patent. Like the old Altavista, Google has a cohesive picture of what a search engine should (and shouldn't) be.
The unwashed mass of portal-shopping-news-flowers-and-oh-yeah-searching engines might mimic the ranking scheme, but the vision and interface? I'd be less surprised if the giant pandas solved their endangerment problem by building underwater colonies.
To go straight to tape you'll need at least 6 DLT drives, assuming you can keep the tape streaming and get 6Mbytes/s, and you balance them across a wide enough SCSI and PCI bus
One SuperDLT drive is capable of 15MB/s (~50GB/hr) with mildly compressable data (a typical DB meets that requirement easily). A pair of MSL5026 or similar, 2 drives & one SCSI adapter per library would be more than enough.
Slashdot Mirror
More dispersed, less dispersed: your argument might hold water if U.S. DSL service weren't horrid everywhere. Look at the "National ISPs/Telco ADSL" section of's reviews. Bell Canada is the cheapest provider there (even ignoring the exchange rate!) and has the shortest wait time by far. Excluded from that list are all the non-Bell providers who offer equivalent service for even less.
Are you seriously claiming that "outback" regions like California, New Jersey, or New York state are less densely-populated than the whole of Canada?
Perl's philosophy is largely a complement of this sentiment. This kind of thinking was in vogue for a long time, and Perl's bucking of the trend was (largely) responsible for its popularity.
Perl advanced the notion that syntax is not a byproduct of grammar. It should not be an orthogonal representation of the language's capabilities. It is important that the concatenation operator be one or two characters. A language is for humans to use; it should reflect how humans think. Give the computer the tedious job of normalizing that input, and spare the human's cycles for more important things.
Read the Apocalypses, or Larry's intro to the ORA books, or the Exegeseses(es?). You'll note artifacts of this philosophy everywhere, including in a discussion of original complaint, anonymous character classes: Unicode makes unnamed character ranges less of a Right Thing than before. And with real set operators for named classes (you can say Word Characters and Whitespace but not Digits), they're a lot less necessary. They're still in there, but it's a couple extra characters to reflect their diminished relevance.
There are some that disagree with this thinking, but I'd question what attracted them to the language in the first place.
Fuck that, just get a GeForce4 MX, $59 on Pricewatch and 80+ FPS. Even with a monitor it'll be a lot less than 100 large.
- (1-.063)^2 = 87.8% of accidents would involve zero 15-to-20-year-olds.
- (.063*.937)*2 = 11.8% would involve one 15-to-20 year-old.
.063^2 = 0.4% would involve two 15-to-20-year-olds.
(Note grand total of 100%)That gives us an expected 11.8+0.4 = 12.2% involvement rate for that age group, if all drivers are equally likely to get into an accident. That makes the 12.5% number look less exciting.
The second statistic is more illustrative, but it's not clear whether "The group made up of 16-year-olds" means "16-year-olds" or "an arbitrary age range including 16-year-olds and younger, obviously unlicensed drivers". It would be valuable to see these numbers with unlicensed drivers excluded (since unlicensed / untrained drivers are probably more dangerous, and generally younger).
cheers,
mike
I was conveying the relative hugeness of 80x25 on a 17" monitor, or in fact any type on a small display.
And yes, it was funny. Thanks!.
Someone should tip off the drilling companies: rather than pay skilled people to operate fancy drilling rigs, just drop the rigs and/or people out of an airplane.
Does the distribution include mod_chip?
Connor: The 500 series had cameras on their heads. We spotted them easy. Also they were tethered to a wall, and deadly only at pool.
Absent the GNU tools, you need perl or select awks to accomplish the first thing; the second requires non-standard Perl modules or painful ksh handsprings.
cheers,
mike
Step 1: Launch a $5bn satellite network, then rig it to deliver four pictures of birds every day.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
...a golden statue depicting a jackboot pressing down on a human head.
It's a Doc Marten standing on a mummy's head. I thought it was some goth award at first.
cat | grep is known as useless use of cat
... prevents that when you don't want it.
For programs that include filenames in their output (such as wc and err... grep), cat * |
There are sometimes switches to do the same thing, but they aren't portable across different programs or flavors of OS.
cheers,
mike
First they laugh at you...
Suit #1: We need to make more money!
Suit #2: Perhaps disclose of web habits is the answer.
Suit #1: I concur!
(door explodes)
Minnesota Bill: Not so fast!
Suits #1&2 (unison): Minnesota Bill!
(Bill lays waste to their plush conference room, taking their scumware source code and user database with him as he leaves).
If this works out they can employ Bill's sidekicks, Nebraska Tyrone and Maine Blaine, in the fight against spam.
cheers,
mike
The 400-pound robot is powered by a battery that is recharged by pharmacy workers every 12 hours.
I'm a little more concerned by the implication that the robot eats pharmacy workers. Twice a day.
Well shit, I guess that means I have to go to work tomorrow. Hope my co-workers see this story
or else I'll be all alone in the office.
Outright stupidity on the front page is nothing new, but somedays it's hard to believe the editors don't know better.
cheers,
mike
cheers,
mike
I think of "150000 lines of Perl" the same way I'd think of 100 million lines of C -- it's conceivable that much could exist, but I can imagine no problem whose solution demands so much complexity.
cheers,
mike
... but it only plays R&B albums and Burt Reynolds movies. Use of the pain sender is optional during DVD or CD playback.
cheers,
mike
I contend they would have succeeded with or without the patent. Like the old Altavista, Google has a cohesive picture of what a search engine should (and shouldn't) be.
g engines might mimic the ranking scheme, but the vision and interface? I'd be less surprised if the giant pandas solved their endangerment problem by building underwater colonies.
The unwashed mass of portal-shopping-news-flowers-and-oh-yeah-searchin
cheers,
mike
cheers,
mike
... and Tripwire to turn it purple if someone pees in it.