If MS deprecates it but makes support for the deprecated features the default option in their software, they'll still be contributing to people spewing incompatible files that don't render correctly in software following the standards. It'd be better to just rip out the parts that shouldn't be there and resubmit the standard. Having to recognize and either support or report lack of support for a maze of twisty little semi-standard features for sake of backwards compatibility is not going to help the situation much,
"Read the link given."? I ask for the examples the author gives of a specific point, and you want me to read all his rantings?
Keep in mind this author is the same guy who says, "Maybe there is some aspect of Perl I do not understand that makes it easier than I thought in Perl, and if so I would love to know. I still have to use Perl occasionally and so any advancement of that knowledge is useful, too.:) And actually, even though I still find it much easier to write DSLs in Ruby than in Perl, in writing this post's examples I discovered that writing a DSL in Perl was a lot easier than I thought it was."
I personally have never seen the use of Lisp macros referred to as a DSL. It's not a language specific to the domain, as it's still Lisp. The terminology might be in use somewhere but it makes little sense. Some other references where it's used that way might help the argument.
As for the tautological nature of my closing statement, I was simply keeping it in the terms I hear repeatedly from the promoters or Ruby. They claim to have a better version of Perl than the Perl folks. In some ways they may even be right. It's not a very good way to promote it to people who've already invested years in Perl. Specific examples of why it's better would be a good start. Fluff pieces, industry buzz, and the latest slick but narrowly focused toolkit don't mean much compared to programmer productivity in general.
I'm sure it's a great language for some, and might be better for someone with no Python, Perl, or Ruby experience to start with than Python or Perl. The authors who promote it as better than something else without reasons or with admittedly awkward use of the other languages only help to reinforce happy feelings inside the community. They do nothing to sway people who notice how awkward the author's work in the other language is. I'm sure even a COBOL fanatic can show that his language is more expressive and clear than, say, JavaScript if he picks specific examples and writes the other language poorly. By trying to treat Perl as Ruby and do a straight translation from idiomatic Ruby to non-idiomatic Perl, Cozine does the article and its readers a disservice. Perhaps next time he should ask chromatic to write the Perl example.
"The lithium battery limit in the checked bags makes this situation even more of a hassle. I guess soon people buying large quantities of laptop batteries will need to register with the government just like farmers with anhydrous ammonia and pseudoephidrine purchasers do in problem meth states,"
I guess that's as valid an interpretation as what I meant, but I had to reread my post to see how you got it. It's not how i meant it. I think my first post in the thread leans a bit heavier on the context of its parent than what others are seeing.
What I meant was that when you start offering specific definitions of words that most people agree on and make decisions based on already slanted sources without checking more than a handful of outlets, you end up slanting your information even more.
The extensive hyperbole and innuendo of the first paragraph of the post was meant to play off of the hyperbole of the grandparent post and the specific claim that in the parent that nobody in Antigua was going to be called a terrorist based on the definition provided. It's clear the parent was calling for reason, but the fact is that the US State Department is pretty much the arbiter of what the US State Department considers to be terrorism. Antigua's probably safe, but by the definition the parent offered:
terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)
the Viet Cong, the Zapatistas, the IRA, the US Government which interred Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, the Japanse troops at Nanking, the police who used a taser on that guy at the Kerry town hall meeting, and anyone who supports the Second Amendment of the Us Constitution as a check by the people against the US government itself could be included by some twisted contortion of logic. Even police who forcefully remove protesters from a sidewalk in front of a store without harming them (by using a level of force just enough to make them move) could be considered to be using "a calculated use of violence" "to attain goals that are" "ideological in nature".
The whole point boils down to a need to be careful whose information you trust, whose interpretation of that information you trust, and how much you trust it.
I'll give an example. I listen to Bill O'Reilly sometimes, and I agree with some of the stuff he says. He shcoked me the other day, though. According to Bill O'Reilly, a pot dealer is a violent person, because drugs can hurt people. He says you can't keep more violent people off the streets by freeing up prison space used to house drug offenders. Drug offenders, after all, are by his definition violent. Nice and tidy way to judge people, isn't it? From the "no spin zone", we get that drug offenders -- many of whom are in prison or county jails for possession for personal use or distribution for free to friends -- are violent offenders. Well, if you accept the premise, then it's easy to accept the decision that you can't let the two-ounce pot buyer out of jail so the murderer stays in longer. However, once you look past the words into the facts, you find that more harm might be done by locking these people up in the first place than by letting them smoke dope in their own homes where they're not hurting anyone. Crack, heroin, and crystal meth might be another story, because not all drugs are created equal.
Let me give you another idea on drug crimes. Some people just aren't happy with enough of a good thing, and others aren't happy with leaving others to live their lives. It's a problematic intersection of issues which creates mountains from molehills. The longer people are in prison, the harder it is to rehabilitate them from minor crimes. Long stays might give serious criminals more time to think about what they did, and would allow more time for counseling if they actually received any. However, if a petty drug dealer couldn't find a better way to make money before spending five years in prison, how is the conviction, the stigma, the time out of society, and the close company of more serious criminals for so long supposed to help the situation?
or many other parser tools, specific implementations of support for prexisting little languages, whole new little languages, or the strengths of Perl as a parsing and text munging language?
The whole "internal DSL" moniker just sounds like flexible and intuitive syntax. That's a good thing, but does not constitute a DSL as any other definition I've seen describes them. Perhaps it does need terminology, but you might find that with regular expressions, source filters (considered questionable practice, but still), formats, an interesting prototype system, eval, and the above modules that Perl has pretty darn good "external DSL" and "internal DSL" support. So do Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, and many other languages.
Forth is built on your idea of "internal DSLs", BTW. Data stacks, postfix syntax, and an executable library are the three basics idea of the language.
Is it a point-by-point comparison or just the author's unqualified opinion? Which points does the author consider, on which of those does Ruby score better than Perl, and why?
If you're wanting Perl programmers to concede that Ruby is better based on a simple opinion, I think you're kidding yourself. If you (or the author alluded to) can give good reasons, you'll likely find many in the Perl community willing to listen.
As for me, I'm still not sure why I'd mess with either Python or Ruby as long as Perl work holds out. If I want some variation in languages, there are ones out there that vary much more than Perl, Python, and Ruby. I tried ABC years ago and didn't like it then, so Python already has one strike. Ruby looks to be an interesting mix of Perl, Smalltalk, and Lisp alright, but I can use those three independently or together without it. I can get Perl to act more like either of the other two.
Ruby might be worthwhile for its specific blending of them, but so far all I hear is how cool Rails is and how much better of a Perl Ruby is supposed to than Perl 5. Well, we have Catalyst, Mason, CGI::Application, and a hundred other web toolkits. Perl 5 is still being developed, and Perl 6 has useful stuff being written in it even though it's not completely finished just yet. Perl is much more mature, performs generally better from what I've seen, is much more widely supported, and has a much broader base of publicly available modules. I have no doubts that Ruby is a better Ruby than Perl is, but I think people who say Ruby is a better Perl than Perl 5 wanted Ruby in the first place.
When you outlaw common everyday items on planes, only forgetful people and outlaws will try to board the plane with those items.
Given that a good laptop battery or a high-quality pocket knife can approach the price of a cheap off-season weekend ticket on a discount airline, just ditching your stuff looks pretty unappealing. It's a pain to leave the security screening, go back to the luggage check, check your stuff in your carry-on, and then get screened by security again. I'm not sure all airports will even let you do that.
It'd be nice if there was a way to combined baggage check and security so that knives, lighters, and other such things normally carried in pockets could be checked straight from your pockets into your checked luggage. Even a good reminder system to get fewer people forgetting to check those items in their checked bags would be nice.
The lithium battery limit in the checked bags makes this situation even more of a hassle. I guess soon people buying large quantities of laptop batteries will need to register with the government just like farmers with anhydrous ammonia and pseudoephidrine purchasers do in problem meth states,
How fast do you need your web pages to render, or your text editor to open a file? There are people who really just want a cheap machine to toss around and not worry so much about theft or breakage. If you want more performance, buy more performance. If you want a stripped-down system at a stripped-down price, it's nice to finally see that market served.
The people not sure the difference among $200, $500, $1000, and $2000 machines and who don't understand the specs were already in deep trouble trying to buy a computer without help. Using those people as the supposed only target market is a bit silly. i do pity those who thought it was just some outrageous "doorbuster" price on a more capable machine, but the type of retailer Wal-Mart is doesn't serve the question-asking crowd. Sometimes there's a price to be paid for cheap at the service level and not just at the product level. A local computer shop with clueful employees could have saved those people some time and frustration, but the $200 PC isn't at fault for that problem.
People who know it's half the price of anything else on the market would tend to expect it not to be a stellar performer. It's as fast or faster than systems we were using for writing code and even for playing games just a few years ago, at about a tenth of the price of those systems. People who would be fine with an eight-year-old Celeron 800 or a five-year old Celeron 1300 (or Athlon 1200) but who don't want to buy used could be well served with this kind of machine.
The saving up part is the stupid part of the review, IMO. The laptop is aimed at people who want a $200 laptop. If it was aimed at people who wanted a $450 laptop, it'd cost $450. Computer vendors know all about market segmentation.
Again, I'll have to ask someone if they read the post or just commented on the part they chose out of context. This time it's you, and usually I like your posts.
Add parity and/or redundancy, and consider it a Guinness commercial.
There's really little reason you couldn't load some clustering, redundant filesystem on all of your desktops. Using Linux (and probably some of the BSDs) it'd be pretty easy. Something like AFS or GFS with enough nodes wouldn't even need to be backed up explicitly if you had multiple office sites and configured your redundancies carefully.
Of course, you'd have to make sure your distributed data is only accessible to the proper people in your organization. That could be more difficult on many desktops than on a few servers, but perhaps locking down the desktops enough would suffice. Internal threats are the worst kind, though, and the workers have physical access to their workstations.
Okay, I was giving an explicitly hyperbolic and facetious argument at the beginning of my post, and I don't believe that police and corporations, as a rule, have anything to do with terrorism. Most in the US surely don't. To highlight lack of violence as a tactic, though, dismisses the armed police raids to confiscate copies of software, music, movies, and the computers used to copy them. The reason for the violence and whether it is legitimate is a much finer distinction than saying those people don't use violent tactics sometimes.
Steve Jackson Games almost went bankrupt because of the Secret Service armed raid of their company and the confiscation of their computers, and that was to catch one employee doing some things the company would have stopped him from doing on their computers if they'd just been contacted.
Kevin Mitnick was jailed for years for stealing data that he never used. I'd say forced relocation to a cell is pretty violent.
The use of force is often considered to be justified. Who is justifying it and for what reasons they consider it justified is a topic of heated debate internationally, but most Western societies have pretty clear common ground.
Who defines a word has much to do with who fits the definition. Many in southern Asia call George Bush a terrorist. Who's right should be about actions and motives. It shouldn't be about who can twist the words the proper way. If you believe anyone who makes an engaging speech, you're open to demagogues. That's true on both sides of any debate.
I work in a media industry, so losing 2000 GB of media for me could mean I've just hosed dozens of contracts and will likely be looking for a real job and good legal representation.
My ripped MP3s from my personal CD collection is different, but both can be called "media".
I'll go one better. I'll name six organizations that threaten civilians with violent raids and seizures to further political, ideological, and commercial goals that have not been named terrorists. The US federal government under the current Republican administration and current Democrat-controlled Congress, the MPAA, the RIAA, SCOX, Microsoft, and the Software Business Alliance.
Mod me flamebait without understanding the post if you want, but what I've said is factually true (although fantastically worded). I spun it so to make the spin obvious.
No, I don't think those organizations I named qualify as terrorists. I do think spin is a funny thing to those who understand it and dangerous to those who do not.
Spin is what the people in charge of "leaked" tidbits of information want to use to keep people in control. Don't be sheep, people. Search for factual information and make your own decisions. If you're not getting factual information, then your government and press don't really believe in a free, participatory society. You need true facts to participate properly in your government.
It is interesting, though, that commercial goals are not mentioned in that definition. I guess someone somewhere prefers old-fashioned crime family style organized crime for profit be kept as a separate matter.
I've yet to find many games with the replay value of Proximity or Bloxors. Fancy Pants Adventure, Magnetism, Circlo, and Circlo 2 were pretty cool, too. Games that have a definitive best trick for each level don't quite replay as well as games with a more random element AFAIAC.
I don't think facism ended with Franco. The Baath party in Iraq was of indirect Nazi descent.
It was a Vichy-sponsored, Nazi-inspired national socialist party which was founded in Vichy-controlled Damascus and spread to oust the British colonial government in Baghdad. The party then dropped its anti-communist element and allied with the Soviets to prolong their rule. Like national socialism in Germany, the Baathists worked largely on the ideals of a racial struggle between their own pure race and those they considered defilers of that race. Its shift in Iraq to pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite came later, and probably out of convenience.
The Baath party of Iraq was founded as a single-party pro-Vichy, pro-Nazi ruling group for racial Arabs. The Bath Party of Syria used to be the same party, but important rifts had formed between the two parties long before Saddam Hussein's regime ended. Baghdad was the traditional capital of the ideal pan-Arab world many true believers in that movement envisioned, which is probably why the more radical portions of the party ended up there.
In short, Saddam Hussein's government was not only eerily similar to Hitler's, but it was a family resemblance.
These references run from very conservative to very liberal, and from very Arab to very Western. Although several of them probably show strong biases, they weave an interesting story when read together.
So you're backing up 2000 GB on non-fault tolerant volume plus the data your other boxes to 320 GB of fault-tolerant space?
Since RAID 0 with 4 disks is 4 times as likely to fail as a single disk, I'd say that's not for everyone. If what you're implying is that you have prioritized your data needs and feel that backing up your media files is not necessary, then that's something else.
Actually, where MS went with the path separator was largely predetermined by an earlier decision. When they needed an option character for their commands, they chose '/' instead of '-' in versions of MS-DOS that didn't yet support directories.
Letters as drive labels made lots of sense when that was the only way to distinguish a device's files from another device's files.
Once directory support was added, MS's developers really wanted to use '/' so it would look like Unix. However, they were already using it as an option character. Making the command interpreter distinguish between an option and a path when both started with the same character would have been a mess. Getting people to change from '/' to '-' for options and then using '/' for directories would have been a support nightmare. So MS bit the bullet and preserved backwards compatibility with earlier mistakes.
They chose a character that was little used by everyone other than programmers, and it resembled the Unix path separator as a mirror image (I'm sure there's some font set where they look a little less alike, but...). So MS, while basically screwing the pooch on a path separator, did so by lack of foresight and not through an arbitrary decision to be different.
DOS didn't even use file handles, pipes, or command redirection until 2.0 so the path separator was far from the only thing that was strange about it to Unix programmers and Unix users.
So yes, MS operating systems have pretty much always sucked from a Unix user's perspective. However, for its day on home micros, MS-DOS was pretty cool compared to most of the alternatives until OS/2 came out. Once the 386 was mainstream, though, the free Unixes (and the original SCO) started targeting it. So OS/2, BSD, QNX, and Linux might be better than DOS, but they weren't there in the beginning.
From here down is a small treatise on what MS has done wrong, what they've done right, the state of MS vs. some alternatives, and some possible reasons. It follows from the above, but meanders well away from the topic at hand. I thought I'd give fair warning, so if you don't want to get too distracted you can just skip to another part of the thread.
MS also did a decent job, in my estimation, of making the Windows 9x compatible with enough DOS applications to make it worthwhile. They also made sure XP would run enough Win 9x apps to make it worthwhile. I haven't yet done any extensive testing of Vista because I can't get past the initial bad taste it leaves with me. From what I've read and heard from others, it seems the new OS breaks far more apps than the previous milestone OSes from Microsoft. That's largely the application vendors' fault, since it has to do with improper use of the weaknesses of XP. MS will still get most of the blame.
Other problems of Vista, like the large number of memory-bloated background tasks, probably were design trade-offs on Microsoft's part. Very likely, with a commercial OS being about five years behind schedule, there are things the developers at MS would have like to do better. They probably would have liked to simplify parts of the OS. They surely would have liked to optimize it more. However, doing more work for the sake of elegance and pushing back the delivery date even more was probably not a bankable decision.
The strength of Open Source software that's most often mentioned is probably the many eyes that can help find bugs. Another common one is that those many eyes can speed development. Yet another is that you're not trapped by one vendor, and that even if you're not a programmer you can at least still pay a third party to modify the source. On that Microsoft is probably really up against, though, is one that I don't see mentioned very often. In a command-and-control situation with a commercial goal like at Microsoft, what those limited eyes work on is dictated by the goals of the people at the top. With Open Source, the eyes look where the individual finds something interesting. If that means replacing a function th
No, they don't automatically get charged with manslaughter or murder. Have you really never heard of a case in which someone died and no charges were filed?
Yeah, because there haven't been 386, 486, and other systems on a chip and Via doesn't have a 1-watt processor anywhere to be found. This is not the first 1-chip chipset for all of the x86 line. That's bullshit. An SoC is even more integrated than just having the chipset as one chip. Somebody never read the old Computer Shopper before it slimmed down. SoC solutions for x86-compatible systems have been around more than a decade. The summary is bad, because TFA does not say this is a first for the x86 line.
You're right that even low-powered x86 chips like the C7 and the Geode line are generally no match for ARM and XScale. MIPS I'm not as familiar with for power usage purposes. It'd be nice if that question was answered, but I'm afraid it'd be summarized incorrectly too.
So is a PC technician, but this tech didn't act against the guy's interests as a computer user. He did the tech work just fine. He may have saved the life of some poor kid being exploited in that video, though. I say kudos on the tip to police.
Illegal source material is not protected by copyright, so child porn is not copyrightable.
Also, if the PC owner took his own video, he'd own the copyright on that (if it's not also something illegal) and the PC tech wouldn't. However, the guy gave the PC over for the work according to reasonable practices without specifying that the technician was not to look at the drive. Most people in the PC field assume that if it's handed over and unencrypted then it's not private. The misunderstanding between lay people and those in the field is the biggest part of the guy's defense, I think. The judges have held that he has no expectation of privacy when he gives them a chance to use their knowledge to do the work how they see fit.
Slashdot Mirror
If MS deprecates it but makes support for the deprecated features the default option in their software, they'll still be contributing to people spewing incompatible files that don't render correctly in software following the standards. It'd be better to just rip out the parts that shouldn't be there and resubmit the standard. Having to recognize and either support or report lack of support for a maze of twisty little semi-standard features for sake of backwards compatibility is not going to help the situation much,
"Read the link given."? I ask for the examples the author gives of a specific point, and you want me to read all his rantings?
:) And actually, even though I still find it much easier to write DSLs in Ruby than in Perl, in writing this post's examples I discovered that writing a DSL in Perl was a lot easier than I thought it was."
Keep in mind this author is the same guy who says, "Maybe there is some aspect of Perl I do not understand that makes it easier than I thought in Perl, and if so I would love to know. I still have to use Perl occasionally and so any advancement of that knowledge is useful, too.
I personally have never seen the use of Lisp macros referred to as a DSL. It's not a language specific to the domain, as it's still Lisp. The terminology might be in use somewhere but it makes little sense. Some other references where it's used that way might help the argument.
As for the tautological nature of my closing statement, I was simply keeping it in the terms I hear repeatedly from the promoters or Ruby. They claim to have a better version of Perl than the Perl folks. In some ways they may even be right. It's not a very good way to promote it to people who've already invested years in Perl. Specific examples of why it's better would be a good start. Fluff pieces, industry buzz, and the latest slick but narrowly focused toolkit don't mean much compared to programmer productivity in general.
I'm sure it's a great language for some, and might be better for someone with no Python, Perl, or Ruby experience to start with than Python or Perl. The authors who promote it as better than something else without reasons or with admittedly awkward use of the other languages only help to reinforce happy feelings inside the community. They do nothing to sway people who notice how awkward the author's work in the other language is. I'm sure even a COBOL fanatic can show that his language is more expressive and clear than, say, JavaScript if he picks specific examples and writes the other language poorly. By trying to treat Perl as Ruby and do a straight translation from idiomatic Ruby to non-idiomatic Perl, Cozine does the article and its readers a disservice. Perhaps next time he should ask chromatic to write the Perl example.
What I meant was that when you start offering specific definitions of words that most people agree on and make decisions based on already slanted sources without checking more than a handful of outlets, you end up slanting your information even more.
The extensive hyperbole and innuendo of the first paragraph of the post was meant to play off of the hyperbole of the grandparent post and the specific claim that in the parent that nobody in Antigua was going to be called a terrorist based on the definition provided. It's clear the parent was calling for reason, but the fact is that the US State Department is pretty much the arbiter of what the US State Department considers to be terrorism. Antigua's probably safe, but by the definition the parent offered:
the Viet Cong, the Zapatistas, the IRA, the US Government which interred Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, the Japanse troops at Nanking, the police who used a taser on that guy at the Kerry town hall meeting, and anyone who supports the Second Amendment of the Us Constitution as a check by the people against the US government itself could be included by some twisted contortion of logic. Even police who forcefully remove protesters from a sidewalk in front of a store without harming them (by using a level of force just enough to make them move) could be considered to be using "a calculated use of violence" "to attain goals that are" "ideological in nature".
The whole point boils down to a need to be careful whose information you trust, whose interpretation of that information you trust, and how much you trust it.
I'll give an example. I listen to Bill O'Reilly sometimes, and I agree with some of the stuff he says. He shcoked me the other day, though. According to Bill O'Reilly, a pot dealer is a violent person, because drugs can hurt people. He says you can't keep more violent people off the streets by freeing up prison space used to house drug offenders. Drug offenders, after all, are by his definition violent. Nice and tidy way to judge people, isn't it? From the "no spin zone", we get that drug offenders -- many of whom are in prison or county jails for possession for personal use or distribution for free to friends -- are violent offenders. Well, if you accept the premise, then it's easy to accept the decision that you can't let the two-ounce pot buyer out of jail so the murderer stays in longer. However, once you look past the words into the facts, you find that more harm might be done by locking these people up in the first place than by letting them smoke dope in their own homes where they're not hurting anyone. Crack, heroin, and crystal meth might be another story, because not all drugs are created equal.
Let me give you another idea on drug crimes. Some people just aren't happy with enough of a good thing, and others aren't happy with leaving others to live their lives. It's a problematic intersection of issues which creates mountains from molehills. The longer people are in prison, the harder it is to rehabilitate them from minor crimes. Long stays might give serious criminals more time to think about what they did, and would allow more time for counseling if they actually received any. However, if a petty drug dealer couldn't find a better way to make money before spending five years in prison, how is the conviction, the stigma, the time out of society, and the close company of more serious criminals for so long supposed to help the situation?
Then, on t
On what grounds is the claim made that ruby supports DSLs better than Perl?
Does the author mention any of:
Parse::RecDescent, Parse::Yapp, Parse::Earley, Parse::EBNF, Parse::Plain, Tree::Parser, Text::Diff::Parser, Parse::NMap, Mail::Address, Parse::Tinymush, Lingua::TokenParse, Parse::MediaWikiDump, Rosetta, Apache::ConfigFile, WWW::RobotuRules::Parser, Graph::Easy::Parser, Parse::Tokens, Metacode::Reader, MIME-tools, Config::Seting::IniParser, Config::Setting::XMLParser, Data::SExpression, Mail::Cap, BIND::Config::Parser, Parse::Flex, MRTG::Parse, YAML, Email::Received, Gnus::Newsrc, Parse::YALALR, Parse::CLex, Parse::Lex, Parse::Token, Parse::YYLex, CSS::Parse, PDF::Parse, Text::Template, the Template Toolkit, HTML::Template, OODoc::Template, XML::Template
or many other parser tools, specific implementations of support for prexisting little languages, whole new little languages, or the strengths of Perl as a parsing and text munging language?
The whole "internal DSL" moniker just sounds like flexible and intuitive syntax. That's a good thing, but does not constitute a DSL as any other definition I've seen describes them. Perhaps it does need terminology, but you might find that with regular expressions, source filters (considered questionable practice, but still), formats, an interesting prototype system, eval, and the above modules that Perl has pretty darn good "external DSL" and "internal DSL" support. So do Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, and many other languages.
Forth is built on your idea of "internal DSLs", BTW. Data stacks, postfix syntax, and an executable library are the three basics idea of the language.
Is it a point-by-point comparison or just the author's unqualified opinion? Which points does the author consider, on which of those does Ruby score better than Perl, and why?
If you're wanting Perl programmers to concede that Ruby is better based on a simple opinion, I think you're kidding yourself. If you (or the author alluded to) can give good reasons, you'll likely find many in the Perl community willing to listen.
As for me, I'm still not sure why I'd mess with either Python or Ruby as long as Perl work holds out. If I want some variation in languages, there are ones out there that vary much more than Perl, Python, and Ruby. I tried ABC years ago and didn't like it then, so Python already has one strike. Ruby looks to be an interesting mix of Perl, Smalltalk, and Lisp alright, but I can use those three independently or together without it. I can get Perl to act more like either of the other two.
Ruby might be worthwhile for its specific blending of them, but so far all I hear is how cool Rails is and how much better of a Perl Ruby is supposed to than Perl 5. Well, we have Catalyst, Mason, CGI::Application, and a hundred other web toolkits. Perl 5 is still being developed, and Perl 6 has useful stuff being written in it even though it's not completely finished just yet. Perl is much more mature, performs generally better from what I've seen, is much more widely supported, and has a much broader base of publicly available modules. I have no doubts that Ruby is a better Ruby than Perl is, but I think people who say Ruby is a better Perl than Perl 5 wanted Ruby in the first place.
Trailing 'if' as a statement modifier works just as well as trailing 'unless' does. :s/unless/if/
That's not so hard in a proper editor. I'm sure Emacs has its own sensible way to replace text, too.
When you outlaw common everyday items on planes, only forgetful people and outlaws will try to board the plane with those items.
Given that a good laptop battery or a high-quality pocket knife can approach the price of a cheap off-season weekend ticket on a discount airline, just ditching your stuff looks pretty unappealing. It's a pain to leave the security screening, go back to the luggage check, check your stuff in your carry-on, and then get screened by security again. I'm not sure all airports will even let you do that.
It'd be nice if there was a way to combined baggage check and security so that knives, lighters, and other such things normally carried in pockets could be checked straight from your pockets into your checked luggage. Even a good reminder system to get fewer people forgetting to check those items in their checked bags would be nice.
The lithium battery limit in the checked bags makes this situation even more of a hassle. I guess soon people buying large quantities of laptop batteries will need to register with the government just like farmers with anhydrous ammonia and pseudoephidrine purchasers do in problem meth states,
How fast do you need your web pages to render, or your text editor to open a file? There are people who really just want a cheap machine to toss around and not worry so much about theft or breakage. If you want more performance, buy more performance. If you want a stripped-down system at a stripped-down price, it's nice to finally see that market served.
The people not sure the difference among $200, $500, $1000, and $2000 machines and who don't understand the specs were already in deep trouble trying to buy a computer without help. Using those people as the supposed only target market is a bit silly. i do pity those who thought it was just some outrageous "doorbuster" price on a more capable machine, but the type of retailer Wal-Mart is doesn't serve the question-asking crowd. Sometimes there's a price to be paid for cheap at the service level and not just at the product level. A local computer shop with clueful employees could have saved those people some time and frustration, but the $200 PC isn't at fault for that problem.
People who know it's half the price of anything else on the market would tend to expect it not to be a stellar performer. It's as fast or faster than systems we were using for writing code and even for playing games just a few years ago, at about a tenth of the price of those systems. People who would be fine with an eight-year-old Celeron 800 or a five-year old Celeron 1300 (or Athlon 1200) but who don't want to buy used could be well served with this kind of machine.
The saving up part is the stupid part of the review, IMO. The laptop is aimed at people who want a $200 laptop. If it was aimed at people who wanted a $450 laptop, it'd cost $450. Computer vendors know all about market segmentation.
Again, I'll have to ask someone if they read the post or just commented on the part they chose out of context. This time it's you, and usually I like your posts.
Add parity and/or redundancy, and consider it a Guinness commercial.
There's really little reason you couldn't load some clustering, redundant filesystem on all of your desktops. Using Linux (and probably some of the BSDs) it'd be pretty easy. Something like AFS or GFS with enough nodes wouldn't even need to be backed up explicitly if you had multiple office sites and configured your redundancies carefully.
Of course, you'd have to make sure your distributed data is only accessible to the proper people in your organization. That could be more difficult on many desktops than on a few servers, but perhaps locking down the desktops enough would suffice. Internal threats are the worst kind, though, and the workers have physical access to their workstations.
Okay, I was giving an explicitly hyperbolic and facetious argument at the beginning of my post, and I don't believe that police and corporations, as a rule, have anything to do with terrorism. Most in the US surely don't. To highlight lack of violence as a tactic, though, dismisses the armed police raids to confiscate copies of software, music, movies, and the computers used to copy them. The reason for the violence and whether it is legitimate is a much finer distinction than saying those people don't use violent tactics sometimes.
Steve Jackson Games almost went bankrupt because of the Secret Service armed raid of their company and the confiscation of their computers, and that was to catch one employee doing some things the company would have stopped him from doing on their computers if they'd just been contacted.
Kevin Mitnick was jailed for years for stealing data that he never used. I'd say forced relocation to a cell is pretty violent.
The use of force is often considered to be justified. Who is justifying it and for what reasons they consider it justified is a topic of heated debate internationally, but most Western societies have pretty clear common ground.
Who defines a word has much to do with who fits the definition. Many in southern Asia call George Bush a terrorist. Who's right should be about actions and motives. It shouldn't be about who can twist the words the proper way. If you believe anyone who makes an engaging speech, you're open to demagogues. That's true on both sides of any debate.
Care to read the post?
I work in a media industry, so losing 2000 GB of media for me could mean I've just hosed dozens of contracts and will likely be looking for a real job and good legal representation.
My ripped MP3s from my personal CD collection is different, but both can be called "media".
I'll go one better. I'll name six organizations that threaten civilians with violent raids and seizures to further political, ideological, and commercial goals that have not been named terrorists. The US federal government under the current Republican administration and current Democrat-controlled Congress, the MPAA, the RIAA, SCOX, Microsoft, and the Software Business Alliance.
Mod me flamebait without understanding the post if you want, but what I've said is factually true (although fantastically worded). I spun it so to make the spin obvious.
No, I don't think those organizations I named qualify as terrorists. I do think spin is a funny thing to those who understand it and dangerous to those who do not.
Spin is what the people in charge of "leaked" tidbits of information want to use to keep people in control. Don't be sheep, people. Search for factual information and make your own decisions. If you're not getting factual information, then your government and press don't really believe in a free, participatory society. You need true facts to participate properly in your government.
It is interesting, though, that commercial goals are not mentioned in that definition. I guess someone somewhere prefers old-fashioned crime family style organized crime for profit be kept as a separate matter.
I've yet to find many games with the replay value of Proximity or Bloxors. Fancy Pants Adventure, Magnetism, Circlo, and Circlo 2 were pretty cool, too. Games that have a definitive best trick for each level don't quite replay as well as games with a more random element AFAIAC.
I don't think facism ended with Franco. The Baath party in Iraq was of indirect Nazi descent.
It was a Vichy-sponsored, Nazi-inspired national socialist party which was founded in Vichy-controlled Damascus and spread to oust the British colonial government in Baghdad. The party then dropped its anti-communist element and allied with the Soviets to prolong their rule. Like national socialism in Germany, the Baathists worked largely on the ideals of a racial struggle between their own pure race and those they considered defilers of that race. Its shift in Iraq to pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite came later, and probably out of convenience.
The Baath party of Iraq was founded as a single-party pro-Vichy, pro-Nazi ruling group for racial Arabs. The Bath Party of Syria used to be the same party, but important rifts had formed between the two parties long before Saddam Hussein's regime ended. Baghdad was the traditional capital of the ideal pan-Arab world many true believers in that movement envisioned, which is probably why the more radical portions of the party ended up there.
In short, Saddam Hussein's government was not only eerily similar to Hitler's, but it was a family resemblance.
Eretzy Isroel
Weekly Standard
Paul Johnson, a historian at Hillsdale College
Dissent Magazine
Free Republic
Syrian Embassy
a well-bibiliographied attack on the Bush family as supporters of the Baath party
International Socialist Review article in support of Iraq vs. US invasion
These references run from very conservative to very liberal, and from very Arab to very Western. Although several of them probably show strong biases, they weave an interesting story when read together.
So you're backing up 2000 GB on non-fault tolerant volume plus the data your other boxes to 320 GB of fault-tolerant space?
Since RAID 0 with 4 disks is 4 times as likely to fail as a single disk, I'd say that's not for everyone. If what you're implying is that you have prioritized your data needs and feel that backing up your media files is not necessary, then that's something else.
Actually, where MS went with the path separator was largely predetermined by an earlier decision. When they needed an option character for their commands, they chose '/' instead of '-' in versions of MS-DOS that didn't yet support directories.
Letters as drive labels made lots of sense when that was the only way to distinguish a device's files from another device's files.
Once directory support was added, MS's developers really wanted to use '/' so it would look like Unix. However, they were already using it as an option character. Making the command interpreter distinguish between an option and a path when both started with the same character would have been a mess. Getting people to change from '/' to '-' for options and then using '/' for directories would have been a support nightmare. So MS bit the bullet and preserved backwards compatibility with earlier mistakes.
They chose a character that was little used by everyone other than programmers, and it resembled the Unix path separator as a mirror image (I'm sure there's some font set where they look a little less alike, but...). So MS, while basically screwing the pooch on a path separator, did so by lack of foresight and not through an arbitrary decision to be different.
DOS didn't even use file handles, pipes, or command redirection until 2.0 so the path separator was far from the only thing that was strange about it to Unix programmers and Unix users.
So yes, MS operating systems have pretty much always sucked from a Unix user's perspective. However, for its day on home micros, MS-DOS was pretty cool compared to most of the alternatives until OS/2 came out. Once the 386 was mainstream, though, the free Unixes (and the original SCO) started targeting it. So OS/2, BSD, QNX, and Linux might be better than DOS, but they weren't there in the beginning.
From here down is a small treatise on what MS has done wrong, what they've done right, the state of MS vs. some alternatives, and some possible reasons. It follows from the above, but meanders well away from the topic at hand. I thought I'd give fair warning, so if you don't want to get too distracted you can just skip to another part of the thread.
MS also did a decent job, in my estimation, of making the Windows 9x compatible with enough DOS applications to make it worthwhile. They also made sure XP would run enough Win 9x apps to make it worthwhile. I haven't yet done any extensive testing of Vista because I can't get past the initial bad taste it leaves with me. From what I've read and heard from others, it seems the new OS breaks far more apps than the previous milestone OSes from Microsoft. That's largely the application vendors' fault, since it has to do with improper use of the weaknesses of XP. MS will still get most of the blame.
Other problems of Vista, like the large number of memory-bloated background tasks, probably were design trade-offs on Microsoft's part. Very likely, with a commercial OS being about five years behind schedule, there are things the developers at MS would have like to do better. They probably would have liked to simplify parts of the OS. They surely would have liked to optimize it more. However, doing more work for the sake of elegance and pushing back the delivery date even more was probably not a bankable decision.
The strength of Open Source software that's most often mentioned is probably the many eyes that can help find bugs. Another common one is that those many eyes can speed development. Yet another is that you're not trapped by one vendor, and that even if you're not a programmer you can at least still pay a third party to modify the source. On that Microsoft is probably really up against, though, is one that I don't see mentioned very often. In a command-and-control situation with a commercial goal like at Microsoft, what those limited eyes work on is dictated by the goals of the people at the top. With Open Source, the eyes look where the individual finds something interesting. If that means replacing a function th
No, they don't automatically get charged with manslaughter or murder. Have you really never heard of a case in which someone died and no charges were filed?
Yeah, because there haven't been 386, 486, and other systems on a chip and Via doesn't have a 1-watt processor anywhere to be found. This is not the first 1-chip chipset for all of the x86 line. That's bullshit. An SoC is even more integrated than just having the chipset as one chip. Somebody never read the old Computer Shopper before it slimmed down. SoC solutions for x86-compatible systems have been around more than a decade. The summary is bad, because TFA does not say this is a first for the x86 line.
You're right that even low-powered x86 chips like the C7 and the Geode line are generally no match for ARM and XScale. MIPS I'm not as familiar with for power usage purposes. It'd be nice if that question was answered, but I'm afraid it'd be summarized incorrectly too.
2005 article on anx86 SoC
another 2005 article about a different x86 SoC
2004 product page for an already obsolete x86 SoC
Linux Devices list of x86 SoC solutions, some dated to 2000
2000 Register article about the year since Cyrix released an x86 SoC
Chipslist page showing availability of AMD processor with 80188 features plus DMA, watchdog timer, serial ports, and I/O pins in 1995
article on the National Semiconductor Geode (the owners of that line before AMD bought it) thin client system-on-chip
And the best proof of all: an archive of a 1996 story on the AMD Elan,which featured a 386, ISA bus, serial UART, memory controller, power management, and PLL hardware ON ONE CHIP
So is a PC technician, but this tech didn't act against the guy's interests as a computer user. He did the tech work just fine. He may have saved the life of some poor kid being exploited in that video, though. I say kudos on the tip to police.
Illegal source material is not protected by copyright, so child porn is not copyrightable.
Also, if the PC owner took his own video, he'd own the copyright on that (if it's not also something illegal) and the PC tech wouldn't. However, the guy gave the PC over for the work according to reasonable practices without specifying that the technician was not to look at the drive. Most people in the PC field assume that if it's handed over and unencrypted then it's not private. The misunderstanding between lay people and those in the field is the biggest part of the guy's defense, I think. The judges have held that he has no expectation of privacy when he gives them a chance to use their knowledge to do the work how they see fit.