I would _really_ prefer a widespread jabber net, complete with client->server and client->client encryption, but that seems to be a pipe dream.
All hope for this lies with Google - if enough people start using Google Talk, Google will extend the protocol to make it support the features people want, and third parties will update their clients to add support (and then other third parties will update their servers to add support for the new features in the updated clients). If Google Talk doesn't take off, Jabber will continue to suck.
But I hate the fact that Yahoo seems to not want to develop for Mac OS X anymore.
I spoke to an engineer from Yahoo a couple months ago and asked him about that. He couldn't give me any details, but did say that despite appearances Yahoo is actually very interested in the Mac platform, and that this is the reason they acquired Konfabulator - they weren't interested in the software, they just wanted to hire Mac developers to work on exactly this sort of thing.
That's why there's bluetooth to the cell phone. It's only 32kbps down/16 kbps up, but hey, that's good enough until you can get back in range of a WiFi hotspot.;-)
has there been any legitimate hint that they are going to combine to offer spreadsheet/word processing via the web or is all of this just speculation?
Not only is it just speculation, it's just speculation from stupid people.
There's no way in hell Google or anyone else is gonna make an AJAX-based front-end to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org; that's a retarded idea. Google could build their own AJAX-based word processor and spreadsheet, and maybe license some of the code for importing/exporting.doc/.xls formats, but AJAX is completely different from a normal application GUI.
Excuse me. StarOffice is Sun's. OpenOffice is ours.
Not only that, but the name of it isn't OpenOffice, it's OpenOffice.org (which is incredibly stupid-sounding and I wish they'd figure out a way to fix that). If Google and Sun were partnering on this, they'd use StarOffice, not OpenOffice.org.
You'd think journalists would be more careful, this soon after the single-use DVD hoax...
No monitor. How does a product designed for "first-time technology users" not include a monitor? What exactly are they expected to plug it in to? The typical first-time users do not have old CRT monitors sitting around, colecting dust like most/.ers.
Um, it never occurred to you that "not included" is just another name for "sold separately"? If they want a 15" CRT, they can buy a 15" CRT; if they want a 17" LCD, they can buy a 17" LCD.
Is that sort of like, if you don't like the contracts that come with cell phone service, don't buy a cell phone or get one that doesn't require a contract?
I'm not even sure where to buy a cell phone that doesn't require a contract...
It complained of too many "junk" characters, even after I removed all of the comments and forward slashes.
Yeah, that's annoying. Someone else suggested you can post it in your journal, then post a link here.
The other ignorant thing getting on my nerves is the "feature" preventing posting too quickly. Yesterday it told me that it was an hour and 26 minutes since my last post and that I needed to slow down.
Obviously this is a bug. It's only supposed to make you wait two minutes after a successful post (and 20 seconds after clicking the Reply button) - which is still a little annoying, but in theory it cuts down on crapfloods.
What a load of BS - after all these years I'm beginning to think about dumping this forum as it's getting more and more crappy.
No DRM, no trying to control my computer, faster reboots and fewer reasons to need to.
Actually, fewer reasons to need to reboot is something Microsoft has publicly committed to, and I assume they're working on faster reboots as well (Apple has improved reboot time in OSX 10.4, and Microsoft usually tries to imitate that sort of thing).
The problem with ì is that it's not a lower ASCII character (0-127), so its value will depend on what character encoding is used - for example, ì is 236 (0xEC) in ISO-8859-1, 147 (0x93) in MacRoman, and 0xC3AC in UTF-8. When I try to copy and paste your code from Safari into Terminal on Mac OS X, it comes out like this:
push @x,ord()-32 for split'','Z=!;g&7?oO&:;- a\303\254';split'','phroggy'x4;print chr^shift @_ for @x
0303 and 0254 in octal are equivalent to 0xC3AC in hex, but of course you wanted to use ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8.
You're forgetting that greed is the reason the patent system was created in the first place. By awarding a temporary monopoly to the inventor of some new bit of technology in exchange for publishing their designs, greedy people are encouraged to invent new bits of technology and publish their designs, so that when the patent expires, the rest of society benefits.
Software patents lack a critical part of this deal: reading the patent doesn't make it any easier to reimplement the idea. It's trivially easy to violate Amazon's One-Click patent without reading the patent, or even using Amazon's implementation - just saying "hey, wouldn't it be nice if customer billing information were stored so they could make a new purchase without re-entering anything?" should not be patentable, but currently, just about anything that satisfies that idea will probably violate the patent. The public gains nothing by being able to read the patent. With traditional patents, reading the patent tells you what you would need to know to reproduce the invention.
My Data Structures professor once said: "Perl is a write-only language":)
Perl's syntax is very complex and it has a lot of operators. Most people don't know all of Perl's syntax, they only know a subset. However, each person knows a different subset of the language, so if you try to read code written by someone else who knows parts of the syntax you haven't learned yet, it won't make sense and you may not even be able to look it up in a reference to figure out what's going - it's easy to look up functions, but if you don't know what @foo[5..10] means, you may not know where to find out.
Perl is only as obfuscated as you make it. Code readability is entirely up to the developer - it is by no means 'obsfucated by default'.
This is exactly right. Perl doesn't force (or even encourage) you to write code in any particular style; it gives you a great deal of flexibility. If you want to write good clean maintainable code, you can; if you want to write something that looks like my sig, you can. The strict pragma will add certain restrictions to prevent you from doing particularly awful things (like not declaring your variables and not quoting your strings), but it's really up to you how you want to write your code.
Perl may be a fun hobby-toy (which is faster than Python in string manipulation) used for quick scripts (which it is admittedly brilliant at). But I would still use Python for serious work.
Python forces you to structure your code in a certain way, which makes it readable and maintainable in large projects. However, Perl doesn't in any way prevent you from writing readable and maintainable code - Perl just doesn't force you to write in a particular way, so it's up to you to implement self-imposed rules.
Re:Best Best Practice: Don't Bloat Perl
on
Perl Best Practices
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Perl is getting to the point where you need a 2-semester college course on the subject before you can fully understand all aspects of the language.
Perl's syntax is very complex; it has a lot of operators and provides many different ways to do the same thing. This makes reading other people's code very difficult.
Everyone starts by learning a subset of the language, then building upon that by learning more after they've mastered the basics. You can write a lot of perl code without knowing half the syntax. The problem is, since everyone learns a different subset, reading someone else's code is impossible for a beginner, and unfamiliar syntax isn't something you can easily look up in a reference. A language like PHP has a simpler syntax and far fewer operators, and makes up for it by having a large number of functions; once you've got the syntax down, you can just look up unfamiliar functions in the documentation and figure out what's going on. The result of this is that PHP looks easier to beginners while Perl looks daunting.
I'm completely ignoring Perl 6, and I'd advise others to do the same for at least a few more years.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're joking, because if not, you must be pretty dumb.
I would _really_ prefer a widespread jabber net, complete with client->server and client->client encryption, but that seems to be a pipe dream.
All hope for this lies with Google - if enough people start using Google Talk, Google will extend the protocol to make it support the features people want, and third parties will update their clients to add support (and then other third parties will update their servers to add support for the new features in the updated clients). If Google Talk doesn't take off, Jabber will continue to suck.
But I hate the fact that Yahoo seems to not want to develop for Mac OS X anymore.
I spoke to an engineer from Yahoo a couple months ago and asked him about that. He couldn't give me any details, but did say that despite appearances Yahoo is actually very interested in the Mac platform, and that this is the reason they acquired Konfabulator - they weren't interested in the software, they just wanted to hire Mac developers to work on exactly this sort of thing.
That's why there's bluetooth to the cell phone. It's only 32kbps down/16 kbps up, but hey, that's good enough until you can get back in range of a WiFi hotspot. ;-)
Tomorrow on slashdot: read about the new browser Google will build, based on Netscape's Mozilla!
Amazing! Will you be able to launch it from a toolbar button?
has there been any legitimate hint that they are going to combine to offer spreadsheet/word processing via the web or is all of this just speculation?
.doc/.xls formats, but AJAX is completely different from a normal application GUI.
Not only is it just speculation, it's just speculation from stupid people.
There's no way in hell Google or anyone else is gonna make an AJAX-based front-end to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org; that's a retarded idea. Google could build their own AJAX-based word processor and spreadsheet, and maybe license some of the code for importing/exporting
How does this help me when I have no network connectivity?
Exactly the same way that Google Maps helps you, I'd expect. Which is to say not at all.
Excuse me. StarOffice is Sun's. OpenOffice is ours.
Not only that, but the name of it isn't OpenOffice, it's OpenOffice.org (which is incredibly stupid-sounding and I wish they'd figure out a way to fix that). If Google and Sun were partnering on this, they'd use StarOffice, not OpenOffice.org.
You'd think journalists would be more careful, this soon after the single-use DVD hoax...
#!/usr/bin/perl
::),",\n",$");sub Perl {&another} #Just ($,,$\,$%,$@)
use strict;
use warnings ;sub Just {print map{(split$;,(caller$_)
[$#$a])[1]}@$a};sub another {&Just} ($.,$;,$_,$,)=(qw)
3
@_=0..$.;$a=\@_;sub hacker {&Perl} #another (phroggy)
{&hacker} #Perl
print #hacker
I only put unintelligible code in mine. :-D
No monitor. How does a product designed for "first-time technology users" not include a monitor? What exactly are they expected to plug it in to? The typical first-time users do not have old CRT monitors sitting around, colecting dust like most /.ers.
Um, it never occurred to you that "not included" is just another name for "sold separately"? If they want a 15" CRT, they can buy a 15" CRT; if they want a 17" LCD, they can buy a 17" LCD.
It's really this simple:
You get an email from PayPal or your bank? It's fake. Delete it.
Uhh, yeah, except for the legitimate e-mails that I get from PayPal or my bank which aren't fake.
PayPal's legit e-mails will always start with your name, so if they don't, that's an easy sign it's fake.
Great! Let's open a theme park. :-D
Is that sort of like, if you don't like the contracts that come with cell phone service, don't buy a cell phone or get one that doesn't require a contract?
I'm not even sure where to buy a cell phone that doesn't require a contract...
It complained of too many "junk" characters, even after I removed all of the comments and forward slashes.
:-)
Yeah, that's annoying. Someone else suggested you can post it in your journal, then post a link here.
The other ignorant thing getting on my nerves is the "feature" preventing posting too quickly. Yesterday it told me that it was an hour and 26 minutes since my last post and that I needed to slow down.
Obviously this is a bug. It's only supposed to make you wait two minutes after a successful post (and 20 seconds after clicking the Reply button) - which is still a little annoying, but in theory it cuts down on crapfloods.
What a load of BS - after all these years I'm beginning to think about dumping this forum as it's getting more and more crappy.
No you won't.
No DRM, no trying to control my computer, faster reboots and fewer reasons to need to.
Actually, fewer reasons to need to reboot is something Microsoft has publicly committed to, and I assume they're working on faster reboots as well (Apple has improved reboot time in OSX 10.4, and Microsoft usually tries to imitate that sort of thing).
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $q='XyLEoNgGmGjkrhPrrJtctlhe,auesenaoOmCnEfc';
for(sort split''=>substr$q,11,22,'Kfkz'){my$d=ord
substr$q,0,1,'';print"\e[".(ord uc chr $d^64).chr
(($d&32)/32+67)if($d<122);print}print"\n"#phroggy
Note that this uses ANSI escape sequences, so may not work on some platforms.
The problem with ì is that it's not a lower ASCII character (0-127), so its value will depend on what character encoding is used - for example, ì is 236 (0xEC) in ISO-8859-1, 147 (0x93) in MacRoman, and 0xC3AC in UTF-8. When I try to copy and paste your code from Safari into Terminal on Mac OS X, it comes out like this:
push @x,ord()-32 for split'','Z=!;g&7?oO&:;- a\303\254';split'','phroggy'x4;print chr^shift @_ for @x
0303 and 0254 in octal are equivalent to 0xC3AC in hex, but of course you wanted to use ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8.
The comma is not a typo; see Wikipedia.
Remember that foreach is just a synonym for for, and the two may be used interchangeably.
The banana flew through the air and bounced twice before coming to rest on the other side of the street.
You're forgetting that greed is the reason the patent system was created in the first place. By awarding a temporary monopoly to the inventor of some new bit of technology in exchange for publishing their designs, greedy people are encouraged to invent new bits of technology and publish their designs, so that when the patent expires, the rest of society benefits.
Software patents lack a critical part of this deal: reading the patent doesn't make it any easier to reimplement the idea. It's trivially easy to violate Amazon's One-Click patent without reading the patent, or even using Amazon's implementation - just saying "hey, wouldn't it be nice if customer billing information were stored so they could make a new purchase without re-entering anything?" should not be patentable, but currently, just about anything that satisfies that idea will probably violate the patent. The public gains nothing by being able to read the patent. With traditional patents, reading the patent tells you what you would need to know to reproduce the invention.
Sorry if that was a little incoherent; I'm tired.
You may be able to write readable code, almost no-one actually does.
:-)
Thus, this book.
My Data Structures professor once said: "Perl is a write-only language" :)
Perl's syntax is very complex and it has a lot of operators. Most people don't know all of Perl's syntax, they only know a subset. However, each person knows a different subset of the language, so if you try to read code written by someone else who knows parts of the syntax you haven't learned yet, it won't make sense and you may not even be able to look it up in a reference to figure out what's going - it's easy to look up functions, but if you don't know what @foo[5..10] means, you may not know where to find out.
Perl is only as obfuscated as you make it. Code readability is entirely up to the developer - it is by no means 'obsfucated by default'.
This is exactly right. Perl doesn't force (or even encourage) you to write code in any particular style; it gives you a great deal of flexibility. If you want to write good clean maintainable code, you can; if you want to write something that looks like my sig, you can. The strict pragma will add certain restrictions to prevent you from doing particularly awful things (like not declaring your variables and not quoting your strings), but it's really up to you how you want to write your code.
Perl may be a fun hobby-toy (which is faster than Python in string manipulation) used for quick scripts (which it is admittedly brilliant at). But I would still use Python for serious work.
Python forces you to structure your code in a certain way, which makes it readable and maintainable in large projects. However, Perl doesn't in any way prevent you from writing readable and maintainable code - Perl just doesn't force you to write in a particular way, so it's up to you to implement self-imposed rules.
Perl is getting to the point where you need a 2-semester college course on the subject before you can fully understand all aspects of the language.
Perl's syntax is very complex; it has a lot of operators and provides many different ways to do the same thing. This makes reading other people's code very difficult.
Everyone starts by learning a subset of the language, then building upon that by learning more after they've mastered the basics. You can write a lot of perl code without knowing half the syntax. The problem is, since everyone learns a different subset, reading someone else's code is impossible for a beginner, and unfamiliar syntax isn't something you can easily look up in a reference. A language like PHP has a simpler syntax and far fewer operators, and makes up for it by having a large number of functions; once you've got the syntax down, you can just look up unfamiliar functions in the documentation and figure out what's going on. The result of this is that PHP looks easier to beginners while Perl looks daunting.
I'm completely ignoring Perl 6, and I'd advise others to do the same for at least a few more years.