I'm fairly anti-MS, and I can only spin this negatively a few ways.
Opera already passes in release versions, so MS is late and this isn't even in public testing yet.
They only did this after Opera filed a complaint about IE not following standards.
They reserve the right to murder markup in their quirks mode, but they don't say specifically in TFBP what triggers standards mode vs. quirks mode. Can we set the browser to standards mode in the preferences? Are pages with a valid DTD guaranteed to get rendered in their standards mode? Is it still only going to be documents with a doctype of XHTML 1.0 Strict or HTML 4.01 Strict that get standards mode? The whole idea of the browser selecting when to enforce the standards makes it not very supportive of the standards. Opera lets you play with settings that make ti disobey the standard, but that's the user's control, which is different.
If IE's not just a monopoly-reinforcement tool for other MS products, why can't we get it for Solaris, OS X, and AIX? Lots of other browser vendors with fewer resources support a much wider array of targets. It'd be great to see IE for Linux, too, but we know that's too much to ask.
Sorry if that's not inflammatory enough. I could try harder. I must say, though, this is good news and I'm glad the IE 8 team is working on this. Better late than never. Oh, and I can't get Firefox 2 or the beta of 3 to pass Acid2 either.
While we're on the subject of Firefox, whose bright idea was it to solve the memory leaks in 2.0.0.8 or so by making 2.0.0.11 use more and more processor time instead of more memory? Seriously, it's easy enough to kill a 200 MB Firefox instance and reopen the browser, but this 97% processor usage is just a pain in the ass. Infinite loops are not progress. I don't have to worry about that particular problem in any version of IE I've ever seen from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive.
It's more expressive in that it takes less syntax to achieve the same result than most other languages. I think that's a fairly common definition. Python and Ruby have the advantage of coming after Perl, and Ruby is actually the designer's idea of re-imagining Perl to be more regular and better at OO. They are more expressive than many other languages, too. C and C++ are not nearly as expressive as Perl. They can express the same programs, but it takes much more syntax to do so.
The flexibility isn't just CPAN, although that's a good thing. It's in the ability to express the same program in more than one way, too. That flies in the face of orthogonality, but orthogonality is a means and not an end. In Perl one can write a functional program, a procedural program, an OO program, or a largely declarative program. One can even use an OO module in a procedural program or a procedural module in an OO program with little hassle.
Perl has bindings into OpenGL, SDL, Qt, GTK, Tk, WxWidgets, and Motif. That is doesn't have a standard GUI binding is kind of sad, but it has lots of bindings from which to choose.
The language being more flexible and the end product of a program written in the language being more flexible are two very different things. A program written in Perl can be very rigid and inflexible, while a program written in RPG could be, at great difficulty to the programmer, fairly flexible. The difference is that Perl makes it easy to make the program you're writing either rigid or flexible.
While it's true that any Turing-complete language can in theory produce the same program as any other Turing-complete language, you've got to be kidding if you think 70 lines of COBOL vs. 10 lines of C vs. 3 lines of Perl means they're all equally expressive. Expressibility and expressiveness are not the same thing.
There's another tipping point, though. If you and everyone else nearly never needed the charging stations, they'd be rare and expensive. It's true to a point that lower demand lowers prices, but with low demand there's low margin, so there will be low supply.
Some languages are more suitable to certain developers. Perl is suitable mostly to those who are willing to learn lots of idiomatic usage and can restrain themselves from certain bad habits without the language enforcing a style. It's great to be able to bend the rules when it provides a real gain, but abusing the language is not a good idea in production code. Abusing Perl is quite easy to do. Those who have a team prone to pushing a language out of shape would be wise to use a language a little more rigid. It's good to see a reasoned decision to use a different language based on that understanding.
Perl6 will change parts of this, but it will still be designed for a great deal of expressiveness and flexibility. For those who value other things over what's in Perl's list of goals, it's still going to be the wrong language. For those who like Perl5 but want lots of the advantages of other languages that Perl5 lacks, Perl6 I think will be a great thing.
I'm glad you've come to a conclusion based on weighing costs and benefits. My conclusion, based on different needs and preferences, leads me to Perl more often than not. Other languages can often be a better choice, though, depending on the project and the developers.
It's not exactly a new concept. Pascal had write() and writeln(). Java has print() and println(). Perl's keywords, standard variables, and operators are chosen for making common things take fewer characters before orthogonality.
### from print "Hello, World!\n"; ### or from print 'Hello, World!' . "\n"; ### to say 'Hello, World!'; ### and not to println "Hello, World!\n";
It's not necessary, and you can still print a newline with print or printf if you like.
As for threading, people have been using it in production for some time now. You do know the original threads implementation was trashed and replaced? The new one's not perfect, but it's much better than it was.
That's certainly one way to do it. I prefer a hash of sub references. I find the control flow much clearer that way, but YMMV. BTW, you mention you can use regexps with your method in your post, but your example doesn't show any. You could also use regexps with this type of construct, but not as easily as with yours. You have the option of easily having equality in one place, a regexp in another, and some other condition in another.
Just because you can write unreadable slop in Perl doesn't mean you have to. Just like the idea that you can write an accounting package in COBOL doesn't mean any non-masochist would do so by choice.
According to CPAN, 5.10.0 is a "release version", and 5.8.8 is still listed as the "stable version". This could be confusing, but generally a "release version" is stable, given the standard caveat about anything with a ".0" version. The 5.8.8 could still be considered "more stable", as a trusted version for conservative production environments.
Perl has, since 5.6.0, followed the Linux-style numbering system. Anything with an even-numbered middle section is a stable release. The development branch leading to 5.10.0 was the 5.9.x branch.
The Python community doesn't have to adopt it. There's a considerable overlap of community members among Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Haskell, and other languages. So long as Pirate keeps close enough to the official Python stuff, people who want to use Python and Perl together will be able to put their Python code into a project using Pirate instead of Jython or whatever.
Larry has said that he went too simple for the object model in Perl5. It's different in Perl6.
You might want to check it out once there's something a little closer to the final Perl6 available. Right now, you can try it out but count on updating your kit quite often, as the language is still in quite a bit of flux. For those willing to live on that cutting edge, most of them prefer it to Perl5. They're mostly people who really liked Perl5 but wanted more Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, Ruby, Python, D, or Java niceties.
There's multiple dispatch in Perl6, optional static typing, a full grammar system instead of source filters, proper prototypes, a clearer idea of exceptions, a native switch statement (which there is in 5.10), and more. A large part of Perl6's default object system is available in Perl5 via the Moose packages on CPAN if anyone's interested.
One of the interesting things about Perl5's objects is that, like the language motto says, There's More Than One Way To Do It (often abbreviated TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWDI in the Perl community). There are half a dozen object systems for Perl5 as modules and it's quite possible to write even more. The Perl6 default object model is based on the strengths of some of the more popular Perl5 ones with nice touches from other languages. It'll still be possible to make an alternative object system for Perl6, but it'll probably be a lot more rare that someone does.
The specific niche for Parrot is as a VM for a register machine which works well with dynamic languages. Java is a very statically typed language, and the JVM is written to suit that (and I believe it's a stack machine, but don't quote me on that). Forth is a stack machine. CLR is a stack machine and mostly suited to statically typed languages.
Plus, Parrot and Perl6 aren't as tightly bound together as some may think. Perl6 runs on Pugs, which is written in Haskell. It's going to run on Parrot. It should also run on the JVM and CLR, but probably not as well as on Parrot. It may even run on top of Neko some day, as there's been talk of targeting that VM. It'll also be able to be compiled down to machine language, which is quite difficult to do with Perl5.
Parrot can be the target for more than Perl6. As Parrot is written and refined, several language implementations are being written and refined along with it as test cases. This helps iron out edge cases and corner cases, and helps drive the selection of features necessary to properly support those languages without a lot of extra fluff.
ABC, Tcl, brainfuck (called "bf"), a subset of Python, a subset of PHP, APL, a C compiler, Ruby, a subset of Common Lisp, a.Net to PIR translator, a couple of Scheme implementations, a Forth interpreter, Lua, Perl5, an Infocom ZMachine, and more are in different states of readiness at the moment. The goal is to standardize how to implement dynamic languages on Parrot and to standardize how to call into and out of languages on Parrot. Those will allow Perl6 and other languages to interact more cleanly than is possible with Perl5. Two languages implemented on Parrot will even be able to call subroutines written in each other.
ParrotCode has far more information about the Parrot project.
So we're on the same page, actually. I placed the 'may' in that first sentence very carefully.
My post was a purposely over-the-top response to your purposely over-the-top assertions. I'm sure you realize that a semester of CS is not necessary to spot the fallacies in the article, yet a PhD in CS is not sufficient to spot them. It's the critical thinking skills you mention that are most important, and some simple understanding of bug reports helps. I don't think a person really even needs to know how to create a diff file to understand how wrong the article is.
Technically, of course, a post which drops the "fanboi" label might still contain some logically valid points. It may, though doubtfully, start from a decent premise. The question, I think, is whether a post which sinks so low can be redeemed. I'm of the opinion that a post in which the author sinks to ad hominem attacks like derogatory labeling should be considered for their lowest level of discourse, and aren't worth searching for nuggets of wisdom even if any are to be found. (Yes, I realize that my previous post in the thread can be read that way, and it really is entirely worth passing over if the reader interprets it that way. It was, truthfully, tongue-in-cheek, but not so clearly translated into text as I see upon re-reading it and reading your response.) There are too many intelligently and rationally (even if sometimes subjectively) argued points on Slashdot to worry about the ones that aren't.
For what it's worth, I'm a CS dropout myself, due to illness. I never went back because I found I enjoyed working at the margins of the industry more enjoyable than studying to be a star theoretical programmer somewhere. I'm considering going back to school, but it probably wouldn't be for CS. What I really want to study, in case it's not apparent, is philosophy. It's not that I'd do much with the degree professionally, but it's what intrigues me.
Frankly, it may make you a pompous egotist, but not a fanboi or unintelligent at all.
It doesn't take an Associate's in Underwater Basket Weaving to understand that the reporting is flawed, but you used it as an opportunity to discount the opinions of everyone who doesn't have a post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree.
Firstly, this has more to do with statistics than theoretical C.S. Secondly, it has to do more with logic and rhetoric than theoretical C.S. Thirdly, nobody on Slashdot cares that you, personally, have an M.S., M.A., or Ph.D. in Computer Science nor any reasonable way to confirm that's actually the case.
You have committed the opposite of an ad hominem attack on another person. You have attempted to invoke "proof by expert opinion" in a forum in which people tend to value a valid assertion over the user ID of the poster, and you have used yourself as the alleged expert. It might be useful to note your qualifications in addition to a reasoned response, but it just doesn't stand on its own that you're so well educated and say something is indeed so.
You should be proud of your advanced degree, and I hope it and your actual ability bring you much success. However, Slashdot isn't a job recruiting board, and blowing your horn to hear the sound isn't that useful here.
In a product field like game consoles, confirmation bias can coincide with enlightened self-interest or can fill the same logical need. The more people think Console A is great and represents the future direction of all consoles, the more content gets targeted to Console A. If this is in addition to another console or in place of another console that would have been the exclusive target for that content, then it's a win for the owner of Console A. It's one of the few instances in which a format war or platform war actually benefits people.
Unfortunately, the people often pick the technically inferior platform or format. Beta was superior to VHS but was more expensive. In the short term, VHS was more suitable because of its price. It became a shorter-term solution than Beta could have been, because Beta is (a bit) closer to DVD quality with video and closer to DVD in audio quality. The IBM PC was in many ways inferior to the MicroVax, the Alpha, the Sun workstations, the SGI workstations, the Apollo, the Amiga, the Mac,and even the Color Computer 3. It has caught up pretty well, and surpassed the older systems that never got established or that were allowed to die. It's difficult to argue that the Intel x86 line was originally an elegant design, but it was made primarily to run 8080 and 8085 code with minimal porting effort and was not a fresh design like the Motorola 68000. It won based on its business case, so it's difficult to blame Intel for it.
So yeah, confirmation bias is one part of it. People really do want to own the platform that gets the best games, though. The little control consumers have over that is to lobby other consumers to make the platform more attractive for game studios and to lobby the game studios directly. Either way could be interpreted as confirmation bias, or confirmation bias could be interpreted as attempting to protect one's investment. They could even coincide between an unconscious (or semiconscious) decision and a conscious decision which reinforce one another.
Go ahead and call Bush "George". I don't care, and he likely doesn't either. In the Middle East, a famous person being called by his first name isn't an insult at all from what my friends who have served there tell me. That's cultural transferrance from people in the West. Please call GWB "Mr. President" when addressing him directly in person, though, as to respect the office. I would have paid Hussein the same honor when in his country while he was in power, but now he's dead.
The US was in Somalia, but Bill was getting blow jobs in the Oval Office and there was a movie called "Wag the Dog" implying that military involvement there was to take our minds off the scandal. That was a no-win situation.
The Russians are very tense over the US doing anything in Uzbekistan.
The US has even less support for doing anything in Sudan, Rwanda, Burma, or the DR Congo than we had to go into Iraq. Don't think that Sudan is militarly mightier than Iraq. Don't even suspect it, because it's simply not true.
Let me tell you what I think of Iraq, since you are asking me what I think about the situation. Iraq was not, as far as I can tell, directly nor indirectly tied to 9/11. They were in contact with Al Qaeda, but neither one trusted the other enough to even meet face to face, let alone work together. They did pay off families of suidice bombers in the "Palestinian resistence". They did evade, lie to, and interfere with the UN weapons inspectors. They did keep key WMD scientists employed and idle even while they weren't actively working on WMD projects. They repeatedly violated the no-fly zones. They had a history of gassing people internally and while at war with Iran. They invaded Kuwait over alleged slant drilling rather than going to the UN. They tortured their people and claimed 100% voter turnout and 100% votes for Saddam. The president's sons regularly raped women and girls then killed their families if there were any complaints. The US was at war with Iraq which ended in a ceasefire, and Saddam Hussein and his military for 11 years repeatedly violated the terms of that ceasefire. Which of the other countries you listed fit those criteria, most importantly the ceasefire?
Right now, GWB and his administration are the executive branch of the US federal government. That means that, other than nebulous private market pressures or the very specific Congressional action of a new declared war, they are all of the US that projects power outside US borders until the end of the current presidential term. Your "GWB is the whole US" question is a strawman. I never claimed that. This is specifically what I said, and it very clearly makes the distinctions you claim I did not make:
"Regardless of your feelings about the US in general, the US federal government in particular, or specifically the George W. Bush administration, if you're going to argue against a tactic (in this case empty repetition) don't turn around and use it in the same post. If you have a gripe, gripe. Don't just repeat your conclusion."
This thread relates to the method of discourse being used by Microsoft, satirized by George Orwell in 1984, pointed out by the parent of my original post, then utilized in the parent of my original post. That is, namely, that if you repeat a falsehood enough that people will begin to believe it based on the repitition.
I merely asked for some reason the parent was trashing the US government rather than a repitition about how bad the government is supposed to be. Apparently that's too much to ask of some Slashdot posters.
That's aninteresting distinction which may or may not need to be made.
I've seen "Change Management" and "Configuration Management" used interchangeably as "CM" in "SC/CM" quite a bit. I think it makes sense, because versioning of config files in some environments can be as useful as versioning of source code./source code|configuration) management/ vs./source code change management/
I support the interchangeable use based on the grounds that depending on your perspective there's not much difference and that people generally understand the system can be used either way anyway.
It also explains, I think, why I've seen it as "SC/CM", "SC-CM", and "SCCM". I usually use the "VCS" generic or even the "CVS" specifically when talking about an unknown or hypothetical versioning system. For clarity, I try to say, "RCS", "CVS", "SCCS", "Perforce", "git", or "Subversion" specifically when discussing a specific project's repoistory. Yes, I realize that conflicts with sometimes using "CVS" in place of the generic "VCS" or "SCCM". I think it's engrained in me that way because CVS is named for what it is -- a concurrent versioning system.
Noone seems offended if you say, "I'll grab it from CVS and take a look" and they say, "Well, it's actually Subversion." In fact they normally don't, IME, make the distinction unless the repository address isn't published. They just take the point that you're going to go locate the repository and grab a copy of the code. If they think you can locate and access the repository on your own, people normally don't care that you know beforehand which of the more recent solutions is being used. Of course, they might be offended if you seem to assume they're using SCCS, but that's another matter entirely.
As anything in the field, though, some people will paint the shed at the expense of stalling or killing the project itself. Those are the people who should be tasked with making a project logo or menu buttons, because those are the places most OS projects need people to be more picky anyway. Which VCS to use is usually a faily minor thing as long as people actually use it.
That's the kind of boneheaded support that makes me doubt them even as a hardware company. Supporting the hardware they sell under the warranty they offer is a requisite part of their agreement with their customers. This was either an "out", or shows a serious lack of understanding aboutcomputer hardware vs.software. Now, if there was some fancy APM or APCI-style stuff that required a particular driver to keep frombeing cycled incorrectly, they should state that in the documentation. If they can't even get that right, then software support is moot.
Source Code/Change Management. It's a generic term like Version Control System. Basically, at the level of discussion, the poster didn't want to be tied to the specifics of RCS, CVS, SCCS, Subversion, Git, Perforce, or some other package.
That's one of the great things about SourceForge, though. CVS and Subversion are part of the repository they provide to projects hosted there, so your developers only have to be users and not worry about administration of a version control system. They also provide a bug tracker which is maybe not the best I've seen but is nice, well-featured, and quite usable. Any open source project's team can elect to host their source code at SourceForge if they want, and it's likely that the project will be accepted. They probably reserve the right to turn down projects based on legal, ethical, or miscellaneous reasons. I've never heard of a legitimate, general-use project getting turned away.
I mention all this about SourceForge because as some others have already said, SquirrelMail's source code repository is at SourceForge. That means they have CVS or Subversion to choose from without tying up any resources other than the people commiting changes to the code familiarizing themselves with the use of the system and someone granting commit bits to those people.
That will probably help if the problem's been discovered already. It won't help much if it comes up with legit download sites and no news about the breach. Still, it's another thing to check.
I see. Someone makes a hypocritical post trashing a country, and that's not flamebait. Calling them on it is. I'll be sure to update my dictionary, because I'd always though it was the other way around.
Yeah, Dell does some consulting and integration. Mitsubishi makes canned Mandarin oranges, too. I still don't think of Mitsubishi when I think of oranges. In the US at least, that's not what they're (widely) known for doing. I've had Mitsubishi (under the name of Three Diamond, which is a subsidiary) canned Mandarin oranges, and they're tasty. I still don't think of them first when I think of oranges. I think of Sunkist or maybe Indian River. I think of Tropicana, Coca-Cola (Minute Maid), Prairie Farms, or Dean's for orange juice (Dean's and Prairie Farms both being primarily dairy brands, even). I don't think of Dell as a systems integrator or a consulting company. I think of them as a hardware vendor. I think of Mitsubishi as a car, TV, and PC drive manufacturer. I think of Hitachi, which is another company with hundreds of product lines, as a power tool, consumer electronics, and PC parts manufacturer. I know they make cranes, earth movers, medical equipment, and more. They might be very good at it, and may be known as well as Hil-Rom in the medical field and as well as Caterpillar in the construction field. These companies don't promote themselves as doing these things the way the big names do in the US. I imagine in Japan and possibly elsewhere they are the big names.
I'm in the computer field, and although I'm no longer in hardware and general IT, I think I have a pretty good idea of a difference between companies who "do consulting and integration" and companies who have consulting and integration as a core part of their business. Dell's general support has always felt tacked on to me. The fact that they employ some people to do integration or consulting makes little difference to me in what kind of company they are. It's not necessarily the marketing, but that might be part of it. Dell has yet to produce an OS (like IBM, HP, Sun, and SGI have). They have yet to, as far as I know, land an order for a four-rack cluster preconfigured for MPI, Beowulf, or LVS (like Microway does). They don't sell specialty laptops built around support for hardware and an OS noone else supports on laptops (like Tadpole does). They haven't designed or modernized whole processor families (like Sun, IBM, HP, SGI (well, MIPS, which SGI bought), Toshiba, Sony, Motorola, and Mitsubishi have). They haven't made significant contributions to the OSes they support (like IBM, HP, Sun, VA, SGI, and Linuxcare have done). They don't, as far as I'm aware, offer expert on-site or remote contract workers to actively manage your systems for you full-time (as IBM, Linuxcare, and lots of smaller consulting companies will do).
So, yeah, Dell offers some consulting and support. General Motors is one of the world's leading vendors of upholstered seating. I'm certainly not going to call GM to get a couch for my living room. I'm not going to call Dell to offer me consulting services when I tell them the drive in their Optiplex business desktop has a controller so dead that WD Diag won't find the drive, and they want to know the error code WD Diag gives before I can get an RMA. I feel like I'm in a Monty Python sketch whenever I have to call Dell's basic hardware support (including when I was working in a Dell authorized service center, and they still gave us the run-around about RMAs). This hard drive is no more. It wouldn't "voom" if you shot four thousand volts through it. This hard drive has ceased to be...
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Sorry if that's not inflammatory enough. I could try harder. I must say, though, this is good news and I'm glad the IE 8 team is working on this. Better late than never. Oh, and I can't get Firefox 2 or the beta of 3 to pass Acid2 either.
While we're on the subject of Firefox, whose bright idea was it to solve the memory leaks in 2.0.0.8 or so by making 2.0.0.11 use more and more processor time instead of more memory? Seriously, it's easy enough to kill a 200 MB Firefox instance and reopen the browser, but this 97% processor usage is just a pain in the ass. Infinite loops are not progress. I don't have to worry about that particular problem in any version of IE I've ever seen from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive.
It's more expressive in that it takes less syntax to achieve the same result than most other languages. I think that's a fairly common definition. Python and Ruby have the advantage of coming after Perl, and Ruby is actually the designer's idea of re-imagining Perl to be more regular and better at OO. They are more expressive than many other languages, too. C and C++ are not nearly as expressive as Perl. They can express the same programs, but it takes much more syntax to do so.
The flexibility isn't just CPAN, although that's a good thing. It's in the ability to express the same program in more than one way, too. That flies in the face of orthogonality, but orthogonality is a means and not an end. In Perl one can write a functional program, a procedural program, an OO program, or a largely declarative program. One can even use an OO module in a procedural program or a procedural module in an OO program with little hassle.
Perl has bindings into OpenGL, SDL, Qt, GTK, Tk, WxWidgets, and Motif. That is doesn't have a standard GUI binding is kind of sad, but it has lots of bindings from which to choose.
The language being more flexible and the end product of a program written in the language being more flexible are two very different things. A program written in Perl can be very rigid and inflexible, while a program written in RPG could be, at great difficulty to the programmer, fairly flexible. The difference is that Perl makes it easy to make the program you're writing either rigid or flexible.
While it's true that any Turing-complete language can in theory produce the same program as any other Turing-complete language, you've got to be kidding if you think 70 lines of COBOL vs. 10 lines of C vs. 3 lines of Perl means they're all equally expressive. Expressibility and expressiveness are not the same thing.
There's another tipping point, though. If you and everyone else nearly never needed the charging stations, they'd be rare and expensive. It's true to a point that lower demand lowers prices, but with low demand there's low margin, so there will be low supply.
I just have to ask... how long exactly have you been waiting to make that one even remotely on topic?
Some languages are more suitable to certain developers. Perl is suitable mostly to those who are willing to learn lots of idiomatic usage and can restrain themselves from certain bad habits without the language enforcing a style. It's great to be able to bend the rules when it provides a real gain, but abusing the language is not a good idea in production code. Abusing Perl is quite easy to do. Those who have a team prone to pushing a language out of shape would be wise to use a language a little more rigid. It's good to see a reasoned decision to use a different language based on that understanding.
Perl6 will change parts of this, but it will still be designed for a great deal of expressiveness and flexibility. For those who value other things over what's in Perl's list of goals, it's still going to be the wrong language. For those who like Perl5 but want lots of the advantages of other languages that Perl5 lacks, Perl6 I think will be a great thing.
I'm glad you've come to a conclusion based on weighing costs and benefits. My conclusion, based on different needs and preferences, leads me to Perl more often than not. Other languages can often be a better choice, though, depending on the project and the developers.
Why cause the cost of interpolation when you don't have to?
It's not exactly a new concept. Pascal had write() and writeln(). Java has print() and println(). Perl's keywords, standard variables, and operators are chosen for making common things take fewer characters before orthogonality.
### from
print "Hello, World!\n";
### or from
print 'Hello, World!' . "\n";
### to
say 'Hello, World!';
### and not to
println "Hello, World!\n";
It's not necessary, and you can still print a newline with print or printf if you like.
As for threading, people have been using it in production for some time now. You do know the original threads implementation was trashed and replaced? The new one's not perfect, but it's much better than it was.
That's certainly one way to do it. I prefer a hash of sub references. I find the control flow much clearer that way, but YMMV. BTW, you mention you can use regexps with your method in your post, but your example doesn't show any. You could also use regexps with this type of construct, but not as easily as with yours. You have the option of easily having equality in one place, a regexp in another, and some other condition in another.
/($match)/ and exists $choices{ $1 } ) {
#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
my %choices = (
'foo' => sub {
### foo stuff
print "foo!\n";
},
123 => \&one23,
'bar' => \&bar
);
sub one23 {
### 123 stuff
print "123\n";
}
sub bar {
### bar stuff
print "bar!\n";
}
my $checkme = 'bar';
if ( exists $choices{ $checkme } ) {
&{ $choices{ $checkme } };
} else {
### default stuff
}
If you really need regexps with this, one way (which forces every condition to be a regexp match) is this:
my $match = join '|', ( keys %choices );
if ( $checkme =~
&{ $choices{ $1 } };
} else {
### default stuff
}
Just because you can write unreadable slop in Perl doesn't mean you have to. Just like the idea that you can write an accounting package in COBOL doesn't mean any non-masochist would do so by choice.
Is that some sort of ultimatum to the compiler?
There is an 'elsif' keyword, in case you were being at all serious.
According to CPAN, 5.10.0 is a "release version", and 5.8.8 is still listed as the "stable version". This could be confusing, but generally a "release version" is stable, given the standard caveat about anything with a ".0" version. The 5.8.8 could still be considered "more stable", as a trusted version for conservative production environments.
Perl has, since 5.6.0, followed the Linux-style numbering system. Anything with an even-numbered middle section is a stable release. The development branch leading to 5.10.0 was the 5.9.x branch.
The Python community doesn't have to adopt it. There's a considerable overlap of community members among Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Haskell, and other languages. So long as Pirate keeps close enough to the official Python stuff, people who want to use Python and Perl together will be able to put their Python code into a project using Pirate instead of Jython or whatever.
Larry has said that he went too simple for the object model in Perl5. It's different in Perl6.
You might want to check it out once there's something a little closer to the final Perl6 available. Right now, you can try it out but count on updating your kit quite often, as the language is still in quite a bit of flux. For those willing to live on that cutting edge, most of them prefer it to Perl5. They're mostly people who really liked Perl5 but wanted more Lisp, Prolog, Haskell, Ruby, Python, D, or Java niceties.
There's multiple dispatch in Perl6, optional static typing, a full grammar system instead of source filters, proper prototypes, a clearer idea of exceptions, a native switch statement (which there is in 5.10), and more. A large part of Perl6's default object system is available in Perl5 via the Moose packages on CPAN if anyone's interested.
One of the interesting things about Perl5's objects is that, like the language motto says, There's More Than One Way To Do It (often abbreviated TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWDI in the Perl community). There are half a dozen object systems for Perl5 as modules and it's quite possible to write even more. The Perl6 default object model is based on the strengths of some of the more popular Perl5 ones with nice touches from other languages. It'll still be possible to make an alternative object system for Perl6, but it'll probably be a lot more rare that someone does.
The specific niche for Parrot is as a VM for a register machine which works well with dynamic languages. Java is a very statically typed language, and the JVM is written to suit that (and I believe it's a stack machine, but don't quote me on that). Forth is a stack machine. CLR is a stack machine and mostly suited to statically typed languages.
.Net to PIR translator, a couple of Scheme implementations, a Forth interpreter, Lua, Perl5, an Infocom ZMachine, and more are in different states of readiness at the moment. The goal is to standardize how to implement dynamic languages on Parrot and to standardize how to call into and out of languages on Parrot. Those will allow Perl6 and other languages to interact more cleanly than is possible with Perl5. Two languages implemented on Parrot will even be able to call subroutines written in each other.
Plus, Parrot and Perl6 aren't as tightly bound together as some may think. Perl6 runs on Pugs, which is written in Haskell. It's going to run on Parrot. It should also run on the JVM and CLR, but probably not as well as on Parrot. It may even run on top of Neko some day, as there's been talk of targeting that VM. It'll also be able to be compiled down to machine language, which is quite difficult to do with Perl5.
Parrot can be the target for more than Perl6. As Parrot is written and refined, several language implementations are being written and refined along with it as test cases. This helps iron out edge cases and corner cases, and helps drive the selection of features necessary to properly support those languages without a lot of extra fluff.
ABC, Tcl, brainfuck (called "bf"), a subset of Python, a subset of PHP, APL, a C compiler, Ruby, a subset of Common Lisp, a
ParrotCode has far more information about the Parrot project.
So we're on the same page, actually. I placed the 'may' in that first sentence very carefully.
My post was a purposely over-the-top response to your purposely over-the-top assertions. I'm sure you realize that a semester of CS is not necessary to spot the fallacies in the article, yet a PhD in CS is not sufficient to spot them. It's the critical thinking skills you mention that are most important, and some simple understanding of bug reports helps. I don't think a person really even needs to know how to create a diff file to understand how wrong the article is.
Technically, of course, a post which drops the "fanboi" label might still contain some logically valid points. It may, though doubtfully, start from a decent premise. The question, I think, is whether a post which sinks so low can be redeemed. I'm of the opinion that a post in which the author sinks to ad hominem attacks like derogatory labeling should be considered for their lowest level of discourse, and aren't worth searching for nuggets of wisdom even if any are to be found. (Yes, I realize that my previous post in the thread can be read that way, and it really is entirely worth passing over if the reader interprets it that way. It was, truthfully, tongue-in-cheek, but not so clearly translated into text as I see upon re-reading it and reading your response.) There are too many intelligently and rationally (even if sometimes subjectively) argued points on Slashdot to worry about the ones that aren't.
For what it's worth, I'm a CS dropout myself, due to illness. I never went back because I found I enjoyed working at the margins of the industry more enjoyable than studying to be a star theoretical programmer somewhere. I'm considering going back to school, but it probably wouldn't be for CS. What I really want to study, in case it's not apparent, is philosophy. It's not that I'd do much with the degree professionally, but it's what intrigues me.
Frankly, it may make you a pompous egotist, but not a fanboi or unintelligent at all.
It doesn't take an Associate's in Underwater Basket Weaving to understand that the reporting is flawed, but you used it as an opportunity to discount the opinions of everyone who doesn't have a post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree.
Firstly, this has more to do with statistics than theoretical C.S. Secondly, it has to do more with logic and rhetoric than theoretical C.S. Thirdly, nobody on Slashdot cares that you, personally, have an M.S., M.A., or Ph.D. in Computer Science nor any reasonable way to confirm that's actually the case.
You have committed the opposite of an ad hominem attack on another person. You have attempted to invoke "proof by expert opinion" in a forum in which people tend to value a valid assertion over the user ID of the poster, and you have used yourself as the alleged expert. It might be useful to note your qualifications in addition to a reasoned response, but it just doesn't stand on its own that you're so well educated and say something is indeed so.
You should be proud of your advanced degree, and I hope it and your actual ability bring you much success. However, Slashdot isn't a job recruiting board, and blowing your horn to hear the sound isn't that useful here.
In a product field like game consoles, confirmation bias can coincide with enlightened self-interest or can fill the same logical need. The more people think Console A is great and represents the future direction of all consoles, the more content gets targeted to Console A. If this is in addition to another console or in place of another console that would have been the exclusive target for that content, then it's a win for the owner of Console A. It's one of the few instances in which a format war or platform war actually benefits people.
Unfortunately, the people often pick the technically inferior platform or format. Beta was superior to VHS but was more expensive. In the short term, VHS was more suitable because of its price. It became a shorter-term solution than Beta could have been, because Beta is (a bit) closer to DVD quality with video and closer to DVD in audio quality. The IBM PC was in many ways inferior to the MicroVax, the Alpha, the Sun workstations, the SGI workstations, the Apollo, the Amiga, the Mac,and even the Color Computer 3. It has caught up pretty well, and surpassed the older systems that never got established or that were allowed to die. It's difficult to argue that the Intel x86 line was originally an elegant design, but it was made primarily to run 8080 and 8085 code with minimal porting effort and was not a fresh design like the Motorola 68000. It won based on its business case, so it's difficult to blame Intel for it.
So yeah, confirmation bias is one part of it. People really do want to own the platform that gets the best games, though. The little control consumers have over that is to lobby other consumers to make the platform more attractive for game studios and to lobby the game studios directly. Either way could be interpreted as confirmation bias, or confirmation bias could be interpreted as attempting to protect one's investment. They could even coincide between an unconscious (or semiconscious) decision and a conscious decision which reinforce one another.
Go ahead and call Bush "George". I don't care, and he likely doesn't either. In the Middle East, a famous person being called by his first name isn't an insult at all from what my friends who have served there tell me. That's cultural transferrance from people in the West. Please call GWB "Mr. President" when addressing him directly in person, though, as to respect the office. I would have paid Hussein the same honor when in his country while he was in power, but now he's dead.
The US was in Somalia, but Bill was getting blow jobs in the Oval Office and there was a movie called "Wag the Dog" implying that military involvement there was to take our minds off the scandal. That was a no-win situation.
The Russians are very tense over the US doing anything in Uzbekistan.
The US has even less support for doing anything in Sudan, Rwanda, Burma, or the DR Congo than we had to go into Iraq. Don't think that Sudan is militarly mightier than Iraq. Don't even suspect it, because it's simply not true.
Let me tell you what I think of Iraq, since you are asking me what I think about the situation. Iraq was not, as far as I can tell, directly nor indirectly tied to 9/11. They were in contact with Al Qaeda, but neither one trusted the other enough to even meet face to face, let alone work together. They did pay off families of suidice bombers in the "Palestinian resistence". They did evade, lie to, and interfere with the UN weapons inspectors. They did keep key WMD scientists employed and idle even while they weren't actively working on WMD projects. They repeatedly violated the no-fly zones. They had a history of gassing people internally and while at war with Iran. They invaded Kuwait over alleged slant drilling rather than going to the UN. They tortured their people and claimed 100% voter turnout and 100% votes for Saddam. The president's sons regularly raped women and girls then killed their families if there were any complaints. The US was at war with Iraq which ended in a ceasefire, and Saddam Hussein and his military for 11 years repeatedly violated the terms of that ceasefire. Which of the other countries you listed fit those criteria, most importantly the ceasefire?
Right now, GWB and his administration are the executive branch of the US federal government. That means that, other than nebulous private market pressures or the very specific Congressional action of a new declared war, they are all of the US that projects power outside US borders until the end of the current presidential term. Your "GWB is the whole US" question is a strawman. I never claimed that. This is specifically what I said, and it very clearly makes the distinctions you claim I did not make:
"Regardless of your feelings about the US in general, the US federal government in particular, or specifically the George W. Bush administration, if you're going to argue against a tactic (in this case empty repetition) don't turn around and use it in the same post. If you have a gripe, gripe. Don't just repeat your conclusion."
This thread relates to the method of discourse being used by Microsoft, satirized by George Orwell in 1984, pointed out by the parent of my original post, then utilized in the parent of my original post. That is, namely, that if you repeat a falsehood enough that people will begin to believe it based on the repitition.
I merely asked for some reason the parent was trashing the US government rather than a repitition about how bad the government is supposed to be. Apparently that's too much to ask of some Slashdot posters.
That's aninteresting distinction which may or may not need to be made.
/source code|configuration) management/ vs. /source code change management/
I've seen "Change Management" and "Configuration Management" used interchangeably as "CM" in "SC/CM" quite a bit. I think it makes sense, because versioning of config files in some environments can be as useful as versioning of source code.
I support the interchangeable use based on the grounds that depending on your perspective there's not much difference and that people generally understand the system can be used either way anyway.
It also explains, I think, why I've seen it as "SC/CM", "SC-CM", and "SCCM". I usually use the "VCS" generic or even the "CVS" specifically when talking about an unknown or hypothetical versioning system. For clarity, I try to say, "RCS", "CVS", "SCCS", "Perforce", "git", or "Subversion" specifically when discussing a specific project's repoistory. Yes, I realize that conflicts with sometimes using "CVS" in place of the generic "VCS" or "SCCM". I think it's engrained in me that way because CVS is named for what it is -- a concurrent versioning system.
Noone seems offended if you say, "I'll grab it from CVS and take a look" and they say, "Well, it's actually Subversion." In fact they normally don't, IME, make the distinction unless the repository address isn't published. They just take the point that you're going to go locate the repository and grab a copy of the code. If they think you can locate and access the repository on your own, people normally don't care that you know beforehand which of the more recent solutions is being used. Of course, they might be offended if you seem to assume they're using SCCS, but that's another matter entirely.
As anything in the field, though, some people will paint the shed at the expense of stalling or killing the project itself. Those are the people who should be tasked with making a project logo or menu buttons, because those are the places most OS projects need people to be more picky anyway. Which VCS to use is usually a faily minor thing as long as people actually use it.
That's the kind of boneheaded support that makes me doubt them even as a hardware company. Supporting the hardware they sell under the warranty they offer is a requisite part of their agreement with their customers. This was either an "out", or shows a serious lack of understanding aboutcomputer hardware vs.software. Now, if there was some fancy APM or APCI-style stuff that required a particular driver to keep frombeing cycled incorrectly, they should state that in the documentation. If they can't even get that right, then software support is moot.
Source Code/Change Management. It's a generic term like Version Control System. Basically, at the level of discussion, the poster didn't want to be tied to the specifics of RCS, CVS, SCCS, Subversion, Git, Perforce, or some other package.
That's one of the great things about SourceForge, though. CVS and Subversion are part of the repository they provide to projects hosted there, so your developers only have to be users and not worry about administration of a version control system. They also provide a bug tracker which is maybe not the best I've seen but is nice, well-featured, and quite usable. Any open source project's team can elect to host their source code at SourceForge if they want, and it's likely that the project will be accepted. They probably reserve the right to turn down projects based on legal, ethical, or miscellaneous reasons. I've never heard of a legitimate, general-use project getting turned away.
I mention all this about SourceForge because as some others have already said, SquirrelMail's source code repository is at SourceForge. That means they have CVS or Subversion to choose from without tying up any resources other than the people commiting changes to the code familiarizing themselves with the use of the system and someone granting commit bits to those people.
That will probably help if the problem's been discovered already. It won't help much if it comes up with legit download sites and no news about the breach. Still, it's another thing to check.
I see. Someone makes a hypocritical post trashing a country, and that's not flamebait. Calling them on it is. I'll be sure to update my dictionary, because I'd always though it was the other way around.
Yeah, Dell does some consulting and integration. Mitsubishi makes canned Mandarin oranges, too. I still don't think of Mitsubishi when I think of oranges. In the US at least, that's not what they're (widely) known for doing. I've had Mitsubishi (under the name of Three Diamond, which is a subsidiary) canned Mandarin oranges, and they're tasty. I still don't think of them first when I think of oranges. I think of Sunkist or maybe Indian River. I think of Tropicana, Coca-Cola (Minute Maid), Prairie Farms, or Dean's for orange juice (Dean's and Prairie Farms both being primarily dairy brands, even). I don't think of Dell as a systems integrator or a consulting company. I think of them as a hardware vendor. I think of Mitsubishi as a car, TV, and PC drive manufacturer. I think of Hitachi, which is another company with hundreds of product lines, as a power tool, consumer electronics, and PC parts manufacturer. I know they make cranes, earth movers, medical equipment, and more. They might be very good at it, and may be known as well as Hil-Rom in the medical field and as well as Caterpillar in the construction field. These companies don't promote themselves as doing these things the way the big names do in the US. I imagine in Japan and possibly elsewhere they are the big names.
I'm in the computer field, and although I'm no longer in hardware and general IT, I think I have a pretty good idea of a difference between companies who "do consulting and integration" and companies who have consulting and integration as a core part of their business. Dell's general support has always felt tacked on to me. The fact that they employ some people to do integration or consulting makes little difference to me in what kind of company they are. It's not necessarily the marketing, but that might be part of it. Dell has yet to produce an OS (like IBM, HP, Sun, and SGI have). They have yet to, as far as I know, land an order for a four-rack cluster preconfigured for MPI, Beowulf, or LVS (like Microway does). They don't sell specialty laptops built around support for hardware and an OS noone else supports on laptops (like Tadpole does). They haven't designed or modernized whole processor families (like Sun, IBM, HP, SGI (well, MIPS, which SGI bought), Toshiba, Sony, Motorola, and Mitsubishi have). They haven't made significant contributions to the OSes they support (like IBM, HP, Sun, VA, SGI, and Linuxcare have done). They don't, as far as I'm aware, offer expert on-site or remote contract workers to actively manage your systems for you full-time (as IBM, Linuxcare, and lots of smaller consulting companies will do).
So, yeah, Dell offers some consulting and support. General Motors is one of the world's leading vendors of upholstered seating. I'm certainly not going to call GM to get a couch for my living room. I'm not going to call Dell to offer me consulting services when I tell them the drive in their Optiplex business desktop has a controller so dead that WD Diag won't find the drive, and they want to know the error code WD Diag gives before I can get an RMA. I feel like I'm in a Monty Python sketch whenever I have to call Dell's basic hardware support (including when I was working in a Dell authorized service center, and they still gave us the run-around about RMAs). This hard drive is no more. It wouldn't "voom" if you shot four thousand volts through it. This hard drive has ceased to be...