I've said it before, but advance and progress comes from researching and creating _new_ stuff, not from a million monkeys copying someone else's work.
If you believe in biological evolution, then advance and progress comes from a million monkeys copying themselves and making small improvements for a million generations.
And the White House will continue to push its idea that Greed is what makes America innovative and strong...
Huh? I'm a libertarian Republican, and I agreed with everything you said up until that. I'm amazed at how you guys will try to blame everything on Bush.
But then, I advocate the abolition of copyright, so maybe I'm not the typical Republican. But last I checked, Democrats were just as concerned with preserving our draconian copyright laws.
Bruce, I have a lot of respect for you, but your signature has detracted from that. I went to check out Technocrat because of your sig recommending it as a more mature forum... and found a picture of the Statue of Liberty draped, from moveon.org, with an appeal to get the ad placed on TV. And I thought slashdot was left-biased! Any forum associating itself with moveon.org is not "mature." There is a mature way to make the leftist progressive case, and there is an immature way. moveon.org, and technocrat, are choosing the immature way.
In your eagerness to discredit and malign Bush, you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars (for which there are many plans on the board of varying practicality), and possibly of manned spaceflight in general, is unreasonable. Surely you do not mean this. Even if you personally do not hold the same idea of value and feasibility for this type of exploration, surely you agree that there are some respectable scientists who disagree with you, correct?
No, that wasn't it, although that is certainly similar. The essay I remember had more tests, longer comments about them, and few if any actual books mentioned.
I think you've conflated the Perl community with some other group of people. The real Perl community values program clarity, modular and readable code, and high software quality. Yes, there are some games to make the tersest programs possible, but the guys out there like Larry Wall who actually write Perl do not feel that way.
I have the impression that Perlmonks is pretty good, though I don't tend to use it much
Finally, the Perl5 Porters mailing list is the real original heart of the Perl community, though I think nowadays many of those guys have moved onto Perl6 work
A list of names is also useful: material by Damian Conway, Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz, Mark Jason Dominus, Simon Cozens (Perl involvement now minimal due to career change), and persons associated with them is going to be top notch. Plug their names into Google and see what they have to say. Catch a presentation or read a book by one of them if you can. Meanwhile, there is truly a lot of junk out there. There's an article out there somewhere about "how to tell a good Perl book from a bad Perl book," which I thought was by Mark Jason Dominus, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
Finally, 90% of the useful modules you'll see recommended for use from CPAN are written by the intelligent lights in the Perl community. The time-tested modules that are now standard solutions are those that were written with high quality by good programmers.
If you think the Perl community describes the Obfuscation contests as an argument for the use of Perl, you are confused about who the community is.
To me, the Perl community is that group of people that does promote readable Perl. Randal Schwartz is a part of that. There is a community out there of very good programmers who love Perl, and plugging into that community has been one of the best moves of my career. The people who actually invented and maintain Perl (Larry Wall, et al) are the real community, and they are very good programmers. The fact that there are a lot of other people out there knocking off quick scripts, running obfuscated contests, and writing ignorant books without reference to the accumulated wisdom of the real Perl community is not in any way a poor reflection on the Perl community and the Perl language.
Yes, the good programmers of the Perl community do occasionally play a round of "Perl golf" or have an obfuscation contest. But noone worth his salt has ever put those forth as if it were a positive reason to use the language.
Good programmers who use Perl use Perl because it is possible to write very good, high quality, modular, readable code in Perl. The people who actually create Perl exemplify and encourage this.
I am not in the pay of any campaign and I assert my right to continue to say whatever I want on the Internet. This law had better not impact my first amendment rights.
I also find it disconcerting that it has been mentioned that advocate groups cannot contest FCC rules...since when can't the public contest a law/rule by a gov't agency...last I heard gov't agencies (i.e. FCC) work for us.
I checked my Bill of Rights, and it said, "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." I wonder if the government knows that.
Unfortunately for webhosting the demand for MySQL is higher than for the other available DBMS's, since most available open source software and gratis software that requires a database is going to have been developed originally with MySQL. I would much prefer to be using PostgreSQL for the applications I run with a hosting provider, but the apps I use don't function with it, and the hosting provider (NearlyFreeSpeech.net) doesn't offer anything else, anyway.
I figure once the advantages of the other DBMS systems become more apparent (and enough disaster stories happen to highlight the advantages) the apps will begin to offer and improve support for PostgreSQL and others, and then there will be a demand for them and some hosting providers will begin to offer them. I do understand that PostgreSQL consumes a lot more resources than MySQL, though, so it will not be cheap.
You get what you pay for. How much is reliability worth?
If I was paying for an entire run of a TV series, I'd at least want to read the scripts.
To each their own. If I were paying for it, I'd want to NOT read the scripts, so as not to spoil the surprise. But I would prefer the option to be available, because I figure it will be better if some of you guys read them first and bellyache if there's any problems.
Then again, this being Enterprise, maybe I would like to read the scripts first before spending the money. But my wife and some members of my family like the show, so they'd probably be content regardless.
I think when I was a kid and reading dozens of Star Trek books, I read that Earth-Moon was a dual planet with the center of mass somewhere in the space between them. But at some point I started writing some far-future sci-fi story of my own, in which the Earth and the Moon had actually been connected, and I decided to look the issue up in the World Book Encyclopedia. I remember drawing a scale diagram on notebook paper, where I defined the distance between lines to be some large enough distance to make the diagram work, and plotting the center of mass and discovering that what I had read from Star Trek was wrong.
Made for a fun summer afternoon, though. At least, for a geek like me.
I propose the addition of H for Black Hole mass (which would do for the galactic center), and appending a superscripted + to indicate whether or not fusion is occurring.
Given the dual licensing, can you please answer a question that has made me wonder about Qt for years? If I submit to Trolltech a fix or new feature for GPL'ed Qt, you can't include it in the commercial-license Qt, can you? Does the commercial-license version include community-submitted changes? Does the GPL version include fixes and improvements not present in the commercial version?
In addition to somebody's idea about giving away pilot episodes for free, I'll mention that under that model word of mouth advertising would be the way shows spread in popularity. That's actually not too much different from how it is, now. You hear the show hyped, you hear it mentioned in "news" items (which are always conveniently from the news of the same network running the show), and you might accidentally catch a few minutes, but what really gets you is your friends say it's good.
Actually what I'd really like to do is submit the data about what I watch to a large database with a bunch of other people and have a machine-learning algorithm (or algorithms) generate suggestions for me off of that database. (I know a lot of the privacy advocates around here will freak over that suggestion, and actually I am usually one of them, but I could care less if a bunch of geeks know what TV shows I watch). I'll bet it could be even better than Tivo suggestions. I hope a feature like that gets added to MythTV and Freevo at some point.
And to really put things in perspective, I remember an article on Wal-Mart for a year or two back that said, "This year, Wal-Mart plans to grow by the equivalent of one Microsoft."
I won't argue that Apple's been wrong, but the three issues listed are debatable:
the one button mouse: some people still swear by it (and that's still all they sell, last I checked)
the Newton: I think the success of Palm shows they were right, although they might have been a little too early
The Cube: The Mac Mini is basically the Cube revisited. If Mini is successful, it would seem they were right about the Cube, too, although again maybe just too early
The real reason we want open source software to be compatible with the GPL is not because we want everybody to have drunk the kool aid (okay, there are some fanatics who do want it for that reason), but for the more practical reason of wanting to be able to incorporate code from one open project not under the GPL into code from the large body of existing GPL code, either to create a new app or enhance an existing one. If Sun's license is not GPL compatible, then code from Solaris cannot be included into the Linux kernel, for example. Yes, there are a lot of kool aid fanatics, but there is a practical reason behind desiring this compatibility. (Of course, that still doesn't obligate anyone.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've said it before, but advance and progress comes from researching and creating _new_ stuff, not from a million monkeys copying someone else's work.
If you believe in biological evolution, then advance and progress comes from a million monkeys copying themselves and making small improvements for a million generations.
And the White House will continue to push its idea that Greed is what makes America innovative and strong...
Huh? I'm a libertarian Republican, and I agreed with everything you said up until that. I'm amazed at how you guys will try to blame everything on Bush.
But then, I advocate the abolition of copyright, so maybe I'm not the typical Republican. But last I checked, Democrats were just as concerned with preserving our draconian copyright laws.
Bruce, I have a lot of respect for you, but your signature has detracted from that. I went to check out Technocrat because of your sig recommending it as a more mature forum ... and found a picture of the Statue of Liberty draped, from moveon.org, with an appeal to get the ad placed on TV. And I thought slashdot was left-biased! Any forum associating itself with moveon.org is not "mature." There is a mature way to make the leftist progressive case, and there is an immature way. moveon.org, and technocrat, are choosing the immature way.
Large enterprises should not use UNIX because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours.
In your eagerness to discredit and malign Bush, you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars (for which there are many plans on the board of varying practicality), and possibly of manned spaceflight in general, is unreasonable. Surely you do not mean this. Even if you personally do not hold the same idea of value and feasibility for this type of exploration, surely you agree that there are some respectable scientists who disagree with you, correct?
No, that wasn't it, although that is certainly similar. The essay I remember had more tests, longer comments about them, and few if any actual books mentioned.
I think you've conflated the Perl community with some other group of people. The real Perl community values program clarity, modular and readable code, and high software quality. Yes, there are some games to make the tersest programs possible, but the guys out there like Larry Wall who actually write Perl do not feel that way.
Please see also this post.
A list of names is also useful: material by Damian Conway, Larry Wall, Randal Schwartz, Mark Jason Dominus, Simon Cozens (Perl involvement now minimal due to career change), and persons associated with them is going to be top notch. Plug their names into Google and see what they have to say. Catch a presentation or read a book by one of them if you can. Meanwhile, there is truly a lot of junk out there. There's an article out there somewhere about "how to tell a good Perl book from a bad Perl book," which I thought was by Mark Jason Dominus, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
Finally, 90% of the useful modules you'll see recommended for use from CPAN are written by the intelligent lights in the Perl community. The time-tested modules that are now standard solutions are those that were written with high quality by good programmers.
If you think the Perl community describes the Obfuscation contests as an argument for the use of Perl, you are confused about who the community is.
To me, the Perl community is that group of people that does promote readable Perl. Randal Schwartz is a part of that. There is a community out there of very good programmers who love Perl, and plugging into that community has been one of the best moves of my career. The people who actually invented and maintain Perl (Larry Wall, et al) are the real community, and they are very good programmers. The fact that there are a lot of other people out there knocking off quick scripts, running obfuscated contests, and writing ignorant books without reference to the accumulated wisdom of the real Perl community is not in any way a poor reflection on the Perl community and the Perl language.
Yes, the good programmers of the Perl community do occasionally play a round of "Perl golf" or have an obfuscation contest. But noone worth his salt has ever put those forth as if it were a positive reason to use the language.
Good programmers who use Perl use Perl because it is possible to write very good, high quality, modular, readable code in Perl. The people who actually create Perl exemplify and encourage this.
I am not in the pay of any campaign and I assert my right to continue to say whatever I want on the Internet. This law had better not impact my first amendment rights.
I just upgraded from 1.0PR to the real 1.0 Wednesday...
I also find it disconcerting that it has been mentioned that advocate groups cannot contest FCC rules...since when can't the public contest a law/rule by a gov't agency...last I heard gov't agencies (i.e. FCC) work for us.
I checked my Bill of Rights, and it said, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." I wonder if the government knows that.
Unfortunately for webhosting the demand for MySQL is higher than for the other available DBMS's, since most available open source software and gratis software that requires a database is going to have been developed originally with MySQL. I would much prefer to be using PostgreSQL for the applications I run with a hosting provider, but the apps I use don't function with it, and the hosting provider (NearlyFreeSpeech.net) doesn't offer anything else, anyway.
I figure once the advantages of the other DBMS systems become more apparent (and enough disaster stories happen to highlight the advantages) the apps will begin to offer and improve support for PostgreSQL and others, and then there will be a demand for them and some hosting providers will begin to offer them. I do understand that PostgreSQL consumes a lot more resources than MySQL, though, so it will not be cheap.
You get what you pay for. How much is reliability worth?
In case nobody else says it: thank you.
If I was paying for an entire run of a TV series, I'd at least want to read the scripts.
To each their own. If I were paying for it, I'd want to NOT read the scripts, so as not to spoil the surprise. But I would prefer the option to be available, because I figure it will be better if some of you guys read them first and bellyache if there's any problems.
Then again, this being Enterprise, maybe I would like to read the scripts first before spending the money. But my wife and some members of my family like the show, so they'd probably be content regardless.
I think when I was a kid and reading dozens of Star Trek books, I read that Earth-Moon was a dual planet with the center of mass somewhere in the space between them. But at some point I started writing some far-future sci-fi story of my own, in which the Earth and the Moon had actually been connected, and I decided to look the issue up in the World Book Encyclopedia. I remember drawing a scale diagram on notebook paper, where I defined the distance between lines to be some large enough distance to make the diagram work, and plotting the center of mass and discovering that what I had read from Star Trek was wrong.
Made for a fun summer afternoon, though. At least, for a geek like me.
I propose the addition of H for Black Hole mass (which would do for the galactic center), and appending a superscripted + to indicate whether or not fusion is occurring.
Need to explain to him that proprietary != commercial.
Given the dual licensing, can you please answer a question that has made me wonder about Qt for years? If I submit to Trolltech a fix or new feature for GPL'ed Qt, you can't include it in the commercial-license Qt, can you? Does the commercial-license version include community-submitted changes? Does the GPL version include fixes and improvements not present in the commercial version?
Google's official statement on search engine optimization gives a number of reasons to be wary of search engine optimizers. While not condemning them outright, they have almost nothing positive to say.
I would think anyone paying money to "guarantee a higher rank on Google" would want to first see what Google itself says about the subject.
In addition to somebody's idea about giving away pilot episodes for free, I'll mention that under that model word of mouth advertising would be the way shows spread in popularity. That's actually not too much different from how it is, now. You hear the show hyped, you hear it mentioned in "news" items (which are always conveniently from the news of the same network running the show), and you might accidentally catch a few minutes, but what really gets you is your friends say it's good.
Actually what I'd really like to do is submit the data about what I watch to a large database with a bunch of other people and have a machine-learning algorithm (or algorithms) generate suggestions for me off of that database. (I know a lot of the privacy advocates around here will freak over that suggestion, and actually I am usually one of them, but I could care less if a bunch of geeks know what TV shows I watch). I'll bet it could be even better than Tivo suggestions. I hope a feature like that gets added to MythTV and Freevo at some point.
And to really put things in perspective, I remember an article on Wal-Mart for a year or two back that said, "This year, Wal-Mart plans to grow by the equivalent of one Microsoft."
Well, yes, that is a plus. :)
I won't argue that Apple's been wrong, but the three issues listed are debatable:
The real reason we want open source software to be compatible with the GPL is not because we want everybody to have drunk the kool aid (okay, there are some fanatics who do want it for that reason), but for the more practical reason of wanting to be able to incorporate code from one open project not under the GPL into code from the large body of existing GPL code, either to create a new app or enhance an existing one. If Sun's license is not GPL compatible, then code from Solaris cannot be included into the Linux kernel, for example. Yes, there are a lot of kool aid fanatics, but there is a practical reason behind desiring this compatibility. (Of course, that still doesn't obligate anyone.)