If you mean "basically x86 PCs" as in "basically PPC machines like the second age of Macintosh" then sure. All those "there's no gaming on PPC" folks always forget three little things: PS3, Wii, and XBox 360. Yup, they're all based on some derivative of IBM/Motorola/Apple PowerPC. Even that fancy Cell chip has a PPC main core and then the eight SPCs.
2400bps: a whole megabyte an hour on a good day. I could log into a BBS, check my mail, read the message boards, and download a whole bunch of 256-color porn before getting time-locked for the rest of the day.
There's this legal concept called promissory estoppel. If someone sells you a product bundled to an included service, they are essentially promising to provide the service for as long as you own the product unless there's a contract that states otherwise. I'm sure they're usually smart enough to put something about an end to service in the fine print somewhere, but if not that may be actionable. IANAL, consult one if you're really interested.
Yeah, in eleven years he went from clean as a whistle to embezzling a million dollars from one of his businesses. He did at least despise Daley, which is a good thing.
Yeah, I guess Jesse White really suffers from his massive popularity because of "downstate racism". For that matter, you know Alexi Giannoulias and Rod Blagojevich aren't exactly WASPs, right? And if "downstate racism" is such a problem, how did Barack Obama fair so well in the Senate race? You say he would have won either way... Oh, and I guess you're next going to say it's all Republicans that are racist, what with Alan Keyes being the replacement candidate and all. Please. Stop your bigotry calling everyone else but you a bigot.
Ronald Reagan was president of a nationwide labor guild before he was ever governor of California, and governor is more executive experience than Obama ever had before he was in the White House.
I'd like to see your numbers for who supported Barack Obama since 2000. As I recall things, he was barely known outside of Illinois until about 2006.
Who exactly did vote for him in the primary? The Democrats who listened to the same corrupt party machine that got him elected to the US Senate in the first place? These are the same people who got Blagojevich elected to the governor's mansion -- oops, he never stayed in the governor's mansion, instead bilking the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in commuting costs from Chicago to Springfield. They're the same people who back Roland Burris.
Honestly, if you knew anything about Illinois you'd know that nobody trusts a Chicago politician, not even other Chicago politicians. Michael Madigan and Radomich Blagojevich hardly spoke while Madigan was Speaker of the Illinois House (and state party chair) and Blagojevich was Governor, and refused to even meet with one another to discuss budgets.
The trash and recycling get picked up at the same time, and as I said we pay per bag for the trash. The city has a contract to sell all the recyclables to a single company, and from the public records they are coming fairly close. The combined pickup does lose a small amount of money, but it's much cheaper for me to pay $1 a week for trash and subsidize recycling through our low property taxes or our sales taxes than to pay $20 a month for trash pickup to a private company like people must in some towns around here.
So put out a soda can in your recycling can every week.
Seriously, I recycle for three reasons. I like my city selling the stuff and almost breaking even on picking it up. It really does seem to be better for the environment. Our recycling pickup is free, while we pay $0.50 per bag for trash pickup, so we have a small individual economic incentive.
Well, it all started with Jack Ryan (no relation to George Ryan, the disgraced and convicted former governor). You see, Jack was running for US Senate from Illinois.
You see, Jack Ryan used to be married to the actress Jeri Ryan. They got divorced. Their divorce papers were sealed by the courts because Jack was kinky in certain ways Jeri didn't necessarily like. Jeri had cheated on Jack with one of the production team for the series Star Trek: Voyager on which she was a regular. While that all was relevant to the divorce, it really didn't need to be embarrassing public knowledge. All parties involved agreed, husband, wife, and the court.
When Jack Ryan was running for senator, the Democratic Party decided they didn't have much chance to win the seat. They had this young guy Barack Obama who had barely served much time in the state General Assembly. Jack Ryan was a former Goldman Sachs finance guy who left that high-paying career to teach history and English at a Catholic high school. Jack graduated from Dartmouth summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, then went on to get both his JD and his MBA from Harvard. He was a Republican running to replace the popular Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald who had decided not to run.
So, the Chicago Democratic machine started turning. The LA Times, the big-name paper in the movie capital where Jack and Jeri got divorced (LA County Superior Court) is owned by the Tribune Company, based in Chicago with a flagship paper called the Chicago Tribune. The Democrats decided suddenly that sealed documents about a divorce in 1999 were suddenly very relevant to the senatorial race for the election of 2004. They sued to get the documents unsealed, and published private facts about the couple's breakup as front-page news.
After 18 months of suit, the same judge who had ordered the documents sealed opened them to the public. Both he and former wife Jeri gave public statements that the allegations made against him in the previously sealed documents held no bearing on his abilities as a father or as a Senator. Jack denied the allegations altogether and said they were merely foul play by his wife's legal team to win custody of their son.
Jack eventually pulled out of the Senate race in June 2004, with the election less than five months away. Alan Keyes, who would have to move into Illinois from out of state if he had won, replaced Jack on the ballot. Obama won his senate seat basically by default.
Then, this young, "popular" US Senator who had supposedly overcome age and experience to get his seat was pushed forward as a dark-horse candidate by portions of the Democratic party to run for President. America loves an underdog, but somehow doesn't always back one. Obama and his team somehow got past Clinton and then McCain and the parodies of Palin despite never serving a full term in the US Senate.
So that's how you got a Chicago machine President. Happy politics, America.
He was not found not guilty. He was convicted on one of 24 counts and the jury deadlocked on 23 counts. A deadlocked jury doesn't count as an acquittal or a conviction, and he can (and most likely will) be retried on 23 counts.
Nah. We should make it an all-convicted-governors bash. George Ryan, Rod Blagojevich, Dan Walker, and Otto Kerner (except Otto Kerner already died and so needs to be disqualified).
Corruption in Chicago area politics is nothing new, and it making its way into the governor's office is nothing new, either.
It's Chicago. It's one corrupt political machine vs. another corrupt political machine. The last governor of Illinois before Blagojevich served federal time for corruption himself and was a Republican.
Yeah, a former state employee from Chicago voted not to convict the former state governor from Chicago. Shocking? No. This is Chicago we're talking about. She probably also voted for him four times in each of his two elections for governor in the first place.
If they want a truly fair trial for him, they need to move it to another federal district. If they want a sure conviction, they should move it somewhere in Illinois south of Interstate 80.
Well, for one thing, there's this feature called group calling. For another, there is probably a many-to-many over IP voice chat application for your phone if you look hard enough.
Incremental, gradual change is not radical change. The problem is that incremental, gradual, and radical have definitions, and those definitions are not synonymous.
I don't think it'd be the same, either. I think it would be sufficient to start discussion. Some students are going to, for whatever physical or mental limitation, be unable to play the game to completion. There have to be accommodations for them. The better experience would be for everyone in the class to master the game, but that's not realistic since this is a required class for all students.
I think we're agreed, then. Science is important, but not as an isolated venture apart from all other considerations. Just because an experiment must isolate outside factors and eliminate as many as possible doesn't mean that scientists need to isolate themselves from the world. Everyone should be initiated into scientific thinking for its benefits, but other parts of life have validity and sometimes necessity, too.
I get very tired of the science vs. religion and lab science vs. social science debates. The idea that you can't make some general statement about a complex system just because you can't control all inputs makes astronomers look kind of silly dismissing sociologists. The value one places on empiricism and objectivism as a scientist is often taken as an absolute necessity for all ventures and anything subjective or unprovable is not just seen as unscientific but as entirely ludicrous. Untestability doesn't mean something's wrong, and it doesn't mean it's right, either. It means it's untestable and outside the realm of science. The nutjobs on the religious side swear scientists are wrong and the nutjobs on the scientific side swear the religionists are wrong, but they're all just talking past each other from entirely different philosophical frames. The social sciences can absolutely try to infer and deduce even though their results will never be fully free of biases.
Lab scientists and engineers are important to most people, whether they think scientifically themselves or not. Only ascetics or the truly isolated don't either benefit or suffer (or both) from technology daily, and global environmental concerns touch even them. Still, economists, sociologists, medical doctors (who practice some hard science, some engineering, some social science, and some art), ethicists, political scientists, marketers (who work with many social sciences), and more are also important.
Anyone who can't see that we can and probably should shift our thinking from one frame of reference to another once in a while isn't a whole person.
The same thing that could go wrong by sending it in Base64 in the first place? It's an encoding, not encryption. Oh, and there are already Perl modules to do Base64 encoding, but I guess importing another module and calling it for something you can calculate once would have just ballooned his line count a whole two lines.
There's this other application on mobile phones that lets people selectively contact those they want at a particular moment and communicate arbitrary information including that and a bunch more via simultaneous two-way voice.
If they did have Linux on the desktop, they'd have a couple of Windows machines around just in case anyway. I understand your points fully, and I'm typing this from a Linux desktop.
My point ultimately is that "good enough to replace Windows for many people" is entirely the wrong mindset. If people really want Linux on the desktop to be a huge player, they need to start thinking of Linux as a great desktop in its own right and cleaning up spots where it fails as a great desktop.
I don't think it really matters to Joe Sixpack what packaging format an application uses, or whether he's using a Debian-derived distro with RPM or a RedHat-derived distro with Apt grafted on. I think it matters that he has an outlet that provides him with the applications he wants to run, period. He certainly doesn't care if it's WISE v. InstallShield or.msi v..exe for his Windows apps.
What is necessary is a well-known marketplace carrying quality applications. Whether that be brick-and-mortar stores carrying boxed products, a single-point market like Android and the iPhone have, Amazon and NewEgg selling downloadable content, or whatever doesn't really matter.
Most people don't want to work for their software to run. They want software that does what they want and gets installed easily. Most Linux distros do a pretty good job of this for large sets of applications, but people who've never used them don't know that. They should be doing an even better job of it and make commercial application repositories available, too. Then they should market those assets.
I like different aspects of different Linux distros. I use Mandriva mostly on the desktop because the hardware support, hardware detection, application repositories, support systems, and everything make it a solid contender on many different systems. I use mostly CentOS on servers because that's where the serious server code often gets written and tested. I use Puppy for disaster recovery sometimes when its "everything is root" is not a hindrance. Ubuntu is nice and Debian is too. I've used RedHat, Fedora, Xandros, Slackware, SLS, DSL, Yggdrasil, Gentoo, Suse, Caldera, and probably a dozen others from time to time over the years. I don't really care, as long as it does what I need without a lot of hassle.
If Canonical put together an easily used repository of over 50,000 commercial applications starting around $2 and going up in addition to everything they have now, they'd probably skyrocket in market share on the desktop. If Mandriva did the same, they'd probably regain a lot of what they've lost to Ubuntu and Fedora in the last few years.
#!/usr/bin/perl -W use IO::Socket; srand; sleep(rand()*600); my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die; $ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005; $ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005; my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]"; print $sock "POST/v1/checkin HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.foursquare.com\r\nUser-Agent:"." Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ "."(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3\r\nContent"."-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nAuthorization: Basic "."XXXXXX\r\nContent-length: ", length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n"; $_=;
The author didn't really even try, so it'll be easy to shorten it. Shortening it a lot is left as further exercise. I'll just get rid of some low-hanging fruit. I'm sure Perlmonks will pick up the challenge if they haven't already.
The random number generator is automatically seeded, so get rid of that line.
The results from the socket are assigned to a variable, but that variable is not printed or otherwise used. There's a whole line. It might be friendly to read the data waiting, but it's not necessary to the task.
Rather than assigning to the command-line arguments, the assignment to $str could have included the random perturbations, so there's two more lines.
#!/usr/bin/perl -W use IO::Socket; sleep(rand()*600); my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die; my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=" . ($ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005)
. "&geolong=" . ($ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005); print $sock "POST/v1/checkin HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.foursquare.com\r\nUser-Agent:"
. " Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ "."(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3\r\nContent"."-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nAuthorization: Basic "."XXXXXX\r\nContent-length: ", length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";
Five logical lines. Actual display lines may of course be different depending upon several factors like attempting to break long lines for viewing and the vagaries of the textual mangling on Slashdot.
Well, you'll never get rid of wishful thinking. Even a 10% speedup of some code takes weeks of programmer time, let alone 200% or 3000%. Yet hearing that a great speedup has taken place is always nice, even if only for a subset of an application.
It comes to mind that data centers are often a target for derision among green activists, who usually don't understand as much of the ecological issues as they should before they speak, let alone IT issues. We should really start pointing out to them that Google and Yahoo are much more efficient than everyone getting into their cars and going to the library or to Barnes and Noble to read trees that have been pulped and smeared with petroleum then trucked to a central location, only to be transported back out to decentralized locations. The we should point out that it's really rare outside of IT for a couple of talented people to make a 10% or 50% efficiency improvement in a few weeks' time. After all, a program with a 10% general speedup which completes 10% more processing of data on the same equipment in the same amount of time saves around 10% of the power used to run the system. Let's put IT up against most other industries based on those sorts of improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean "basically x86 PCs" as in "basically PPC machines like the second age of Macintosh" then sure. All those "there's no gaming on PPC" folks always forget three little things: PS3, Wii, and XBox 360. Yup, they're all based on some derivative of IBM/Motorola/Apple PowerPC. Even that fancy Cell chip has a PPC main core and then the eight SPCs.
2400bps: a whole megabyte an hour on a good day. I could log into a BBS, check my mail, read the message boards, and download a whole bunch of 256-color porn before getting time-locked for the rest of the day.
There's this legal concept called promissory estoppel. If someone sells you a product bundled to an included service, they are essentially promising to provide the service for as long as you own the product unless there's a contract that states otherwise. I'm sure they're usually smart enough to put something about an end to service in the fine print somewhere, but if not that may be actionable. IANAL, consult one if you're really interested.
Yeah, in eleven years he went from clean as a whistle to embezzling a million dollars from one of his businesses. He did at least despise Daley, which is a good thing.
Yeah, I guess Jesse White really suffers from his massive popularity because of "downstate racism". For that matter, you know Alexi Giannoulias and Rod Blagojevich aren't exactly WASPs, right? And if "downstate racism" is such a problem, how did Barack Obama fair so well in the Senate race? You say he would have won either way... Oh, and I guess you're next going to say it's all Republicans that are racist, what with Alan Keyes being the replacement candidate and all. Please. Stop your bigotry calling everyone else but you a bigot.
Ronald Reagan was president of a nationwide labor guild before he was ever governor of California, and governor is more executive experience than Obama ever had before he was in the White House.
I'd like to see your numbers for who supported Barack Obama since 2000. As I recall things, he was barely known outside of Illinois until about 2006.
Who exactly did vote for him in the primary? The Democrats who listened to the same corrupt party machine that got him elected to the US Senate in the first place? These are the same people who got Blagojevich elected to the governor's mansion -- oops, he never stayed in the governor's mansion, instead bilking the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in commuting costs from Chicago to Springfield. They're the same people who back Roland Burris.
Honestly, if you knew anything about Illinois you'd know that nobody trusts a Chicago politician, not even other Chicago politicians. Michael Madigan and Radomich Blagojevich hardly spoke while Madigan was Speaker of the Illinois House (and state party chair) and Blagojevich was Governor, and refused to even meet with one another to discuss budgets.
The trash and recycling get picked up at the same time, and as I said we pay per bag for the trash. The city has a contract to sell all the recyclables to a single company, and from the public records they are coming fairly close. The combined pickup does lose a small amount of money, but it's much cheaper for me to pay $1 a week for trash and subsidize recycling through our low property taxes or our sales taxes than to pay $20 a month for trash pickup to a private company like people must in some towns around here.
So put out a soda can in your recycling can every week.
Seriously, I recycle for three reasons. I like my city selling the stuff and almost breaking even on picking it up. It really does seem to be better for the environment. Our recycling pickup is free, while we pay $0.50 per bag for trash pickup, so we have a small individual economic incentive.
Well, it all started with Jack Ryan (no relation to George Ryan, the disgraced and convicted former governor). You see, Jack was running for US Senate from Illinois.
You see, Jack Ryan used to be married to the actress Jeri Ryan. They got divorced. Their divorce papers were sealed by the courts because Jack was kinky in certain ways Jeri didn't necessarily like. Jeri had cheated on Jack with one of the production team for the series Star Trek: Voyager on which she was a regular. While that all was relevant to the divorce, it really didn't need to be embarrassing public knowledge. All parties involved agreed, husband, wife, and the court.
When Jack Ryan was running for senator, the Democratic Party decided they didn't have much chance to win the seat. They had this young guy Barack Obama who had barely served much time in the state General Assembly. Jack Ryan was a former Goldman Sachs finance guy who left that high-paying career to teach history and English at a Catholic high school. Jack graduated from Dartmouth summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, then went on to get both his JD and his MBA from Harvard. He was a Republican running to replace the popular Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald who had decided not to run.
So, the Chicago Democratic machine started turning. The LA Times, the big-name paper in the movie capital where Jack and Jeri got divorced (LA County Superior Court) is owned by the Tribune Company, based in Chicago with a flagship paper called the Chicago Tribune. The Democrats decided suddenly that sealed documents about a divorce in 1999 were suddenly very relevant to the senatorial race for the election of 2004. They sued to get the documents unsealed, and published private facts about the couple's breakup as front-page news.
After 18 months of suit, the same judge who had ordered the documents sealed opened them to the public. Both he and former wife Jeri gave public statements that the allegations made against him in the previously sealed documents held no bearing on his abilities as a father or as a Senator. Jack denied the allegations altogether and said they were merely foul play by his wife's legal team to win custody of their son.
Jack eventually pulled out of the Senate race in June 2004, with the election less than five months away. Alan Keyes, who would have to move into Illinois from out of state if he had won, replaced Jack on the ballot. Obama won his senate seat basically by default.
Then, this young, "popular" US Senator who had supposedly overcome age and experience to get his seat was pushed forward as a dark-horse candidate by portions of the Democratic party to run for President. America loves an underdog, but somehow doesn't always back one. Obama and his team somehow got past Clinton and then McCain and the parodies of Palin despite never serving a full term in the US Senate.
So that's how you got a Chicago machine President. Happy politics, America.
He was not found not guilty. He was convicted on one of 24 counts and the jury deadlocked on 23 counts. A deadlocked jury doesn't count as an acquittal or a conviction, and he can (and most likely will) be retried on 23 counts.
Nah. We should make it an all-convicted-governors bash. George Ryan, Rod Blagojevich, Dan Walker, and Otto Kerner (except Otto Kerner already died and so needs to be disqualified).
Corruption in Chicago area politics is nothing new, and it making its way into the governor's office is nothing new, either.
It's Chicago. It's one corrupt political machine vs. another corrupt political machine. The last governor of Illinois before Blagojevich served federal time for corruption himself and was a Republican.
Yeah, a former state employee from Chicago voted not to convict the former state governor from Chicago. Shocking? No. This is Chicago we're talking about. She probably also voted for him four times in each of his two elections for governor in the first place.
If they want a truly fair trial for him, they need to move it to another federal district. If they want a sure conviction, they should move it somewhere in Illinois south of Interstate 80.
Well, for one thing, there's this feature called group calling. For another, there is probably a many-to-many over IP voice chat application for your phone if you look hard enough.
And finally... WOOSH!
So "rape" in Sweden means anything from "rape" through "sexual assault" to "he broke up with me afterwards and I'm pissed".
There's not one case where the accused should be presumed innocent. There are all cases of accusation until a fair trial has shown otherwise.
Incremental, gradual change is not radical change. The problem is that incremental, gradual, and radical have definitions, and those definitions are not synonymous.
I don't think it'd be the same, either. I think it would be sufficient to start discussion. Some students are going to, for whatever physical or mental limitation, be unable to play the game to completion. There have to be accommodations for them. The better experience would be for everyone in the class to master the game, but that's not realistic since this is a required class for all students.
I think we're agreed, then. Science is important, but not as an isolated venture apart from all other considerations. Just because an experiment must isolate outside factors and eliminate as many as possible doesn't mean that scientists need to isolate themselves from the world. Everyone should be initiated into scientific thinking for its benefits, but other parts of life have validity and sometimes necessity, too.
I get very tired of the science vs. religion and lab science vs. social science debates. The idea that you can't make some general statement about a complex system just because you can't control all inputs makes astronomers look kind of silly dismissing sociologists. The value one places on empiricism and objectivism as a scientist is often taken as an absolute necessity for all ventures and anything subjective or unprovable is not just seen as unscientific but as entirely ludicrous. Untestability doesn't mean something's wrong, and it doesn't mean it's right, either. It means it's untestable and outside the realm of science. The nutjobs on the religious side swear scientists are wrong and the nutjobs on the scientific side swear the religionists are wrong, but they're all just talking past each other from entirely different philosophical frames. The social sciences can absolutely try to infer and deduce even though their results will never be fully free of biases.
Lab scientists and engineers are important to most people, whether they think scientifically themselves or not. Only ascetics or the truly isolated don't either benefit or suffer (or both) from technology daily, and global environmental concerns touch even them. Still, economists, sociologists, medical doctors (who practice some hard science, some engineering, some social science, and some art), ethicists, political scientists, marketers (who work with many social sciences), and more are also important.
Anyone who can't see that we can and probably should shift our thinking from one frame of reference to another once in a while isn't a whole person.
The same thing that could go wrong by sending it in Base64 in the first place? It's an encoding, not encryption. Oh, and there are already Perl modules to do Base64 encoding, but I guess importing another module and calling it for something you can calculate once would have just ballooned his line count a whole two lines.
There's this other application on mobile phones that lets people selectively contact those they want at a particular moment and communicate arbitrary information including that and a bunch more via simultaneous two-way voice.
If they did have Linux on the desktop, they'd have a couple of Windows machines around just in case anyway. I understand your points fully, and I'm typing this from a Linux desktop.
My point ultimately is that "good enough to replace Windows for many people" is entirely the wrong mindset. If people really want Linux on the desktop to be a huge player, they need to start thinking of Linux as a great desktop in its own right and cleaning up spots where it fails as a great desktop.
I don't think it really matters to Joe Sixpack what packaging format an application uses, or whether he's using a Debian-derived distro with RPM or a RedHat-derived distro with Apt grafted on. I think it matters that he has an outlet that provides him with the applications he wants to run, period. He certainly doesn't care if it's WISE v. InstallShield or .msi v. .exe for his Windows apps.
What is necessary is a well-known marketplace carrying quality applications. Whether that be brick-and-mortar stores carrying boxed products, a single-point market like Android and the iPhone have, Amazon and NewEgg selling downloadable content, or whatever doesn't really matter.
Most people don't want to work for their software to run. They want software that does what they want and gets installed easily. Most Linux distros do a pretty good job of this for large sets of applications, but people who've never used them don't know that. They should be doing an even better job of it and make commercial application repositories available, too. Then they should market those assets.
I like different aspects of different Linux distros. I use Mandriva mostly on the desktop because the hardware support, hardware detection, application repositories, support systems, and everything make it a solid contender on many different systems. I use mostly CentOS on servers because that's where the serious server code often gets written and tested. I use Puppy for disaster recovery sometimes when its "everything is root" is not a hindrance. Ubuntu is nice and Debian is too. I've used RedHat, Fedora, Xandros, Slackware, SLS, DSL, Yggdrasil, Gentoo, Suse, Caldera, and probably a dozen others from time to time over the years. I don't really care, as long as it does what I need without a lot of hassle.
If Canonical put together an easily used repository of over 50,000 commercial applications starting around $2 and going up in addition to everything they have now, they'd probably skyrocket in market share on the desktop. If Mandriva did the same, they'd probably regain a lot of what they've lost to Ubuntu and Fedora in the last few years.
Ummm... already done. Do I get a cookie?
#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use IO::Socket;
srand;
sleep(rand()*600);
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
$ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
$ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]";
print $sock "POST
length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";
$_=;
The author didn't really even try, so it'll be easy to shorten it. Shortening it a lot is left as further exercise. I'll just get rid of some low-hanging fruit. I'm sure Perlmonks will pick up the challenge if they haven't already.
#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use IO::Socket;
sleep(rand()*600);
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=" . ($ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005)
. "&geolong=" . ($ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005);
print $sock "POST
. " Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ "
length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";
Five logical lines. Actual display lines may of course be different depending upon several factors like attempting to break long lines for viewing and the vagaries of the textual mangling on Slashdot.
Well, you'll never get rid of wishful thinking. Even a 10% speedup of some code takes weeks of programmer time, let alone 200% or 3000%. Yet hearing that a great speedup has taken place is always nice, even if only for a subset of an application.
It comes to mind that data centers are often a target for derision among green activists, who usually don't understand as much of the ecological issues as they should before they speak, let alone IT issues. We should really start pointing out to them that Google and Yahoo are much more efficient than everyone getting into their cars and going to the library or to Barnes and Noble to read trees that have been pulped and smeared with petroleum then trucked to a central location, only to be transported back out to decentralized locations. The we should point out that it's really rare outside of IT for a couple of talented people to make a 10% or 50% efficiency improvement in a few weeks' time. After all, a program with a 10% general speedup which completes 10% more processing of data on the same equipment in the same amount of time saves around 10% of the power used to run the system. Let's put IT up against most other industries based on those sorts of improvements.