Drink water and, on occasion drink other things... and definitely not milk -- it feeds cancer and contains all kinds of hormones you don't want in your body.
Milk causes cancer? Why don't you back this up with some facts? And what does this have to do with caffeine? I think I'll wolf down a wedge of brie while I wait for the grille to heat up....
Re:From a project managers prospective ...
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 2
What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer?
Hogwash. Our project includes over 25,000 lines of perl, and more than a dozen people have worked on it. I've found that (in stark contrast to big C projects I've worked on) Perl is actually an outstanding language for large development teams.
The same features which make perl powerful for single-developer projects (dense syntax, "bug resistant" operators, loose types, etc.) also make it easy for many developers to work together. You don't have to be constantly checking the APIs to see if some function takes an int or a float, or what the restrictions on string length are, etc.
Perl has gotten a bad rap for being a write-only language. Well, that's entirely because so many programmers have used it as such. Perl is flexible. It won't stop you from writing really shitty code that only you can maintain. It also won't stop you from writing beautiful, easy-to-read code that a large team can manage with ease.
a rather interesting personage who was missing a chunk off one of his little fingers... for those of you familiar with Japan, that should immediately ring alarm bells
Let me just pick apart this statement and try to figure out which part is unreasonable:
Every song
This is the only bit where I really see a problem. 100% is probably impossible, but I would think you could get 90% of all songs ever made with the cooperation of just the top 5-6 labels.
in every format
No problem here whatsoever. Archive them all in a lossless codec, then if the customer wants a different format just encode on the fly. Disks and CPUs are dirt cheap.
at virtually no cost to you.
Why not? Look, they're competing with FREE trading networks, for chrissake. They're going to have to come down a bit. Per-download fees are fine, flat monthly fees are fine, just as long as it's considerably less than $20/CD.
I don't remember it that way, but perhaps I'm mistaken. I seem to remember that ftp.apple.com always had system software that was 1-2 years old. If you wanted the latest, you had to pay/pirate.
They utterly failed to realize that e-mail costs the recipient of the e-mail message time and money.
You don't understand. We have a civic *DUTY* to read these important messages, lest we go to the polls uninformed. Is this not the least we can do for our esteemed candidates?
I violently disagree. *rendering* speed may be comparable among browsers running on reasonably fast machines, but multitasking performance is a big problem for me. If a page is taking a long time to download in one window, I want to be able to go to a different window and do something else while I wait for it to download. IE currently seems to be the best browser on OSX, so that's what I use. Unfortunately it is horrible at handling multiple active windows. What's their excuse - this is UNIX for chrissake, just make a separate process per window if you can't figure out select().
Every once in a while I'll check out the other choices just to see if anyone else is doing a better job. Last month I tried Mozilla - automatically disqualified for not having font smoothing, but other than that it looks good.
Today I tried Opera after seeing this story. The rendering is indeed fast, but I was immediately irritated that every window I opened would take up 80% of my screen (I have a big screen so this is *really* annoying). So the first thing I did was choose "preferences" and the damn thing crashed.
I'll stick with IE for now. I hate MSFT as much as the next guy, but not enough to put up with an inferior browser. Sorry.
As an OEM, it's hard to turn down retailers who are asking to resell your product. Basically what it boils down to is whether or not the retailers are cannibalizing your own direct sales.
Dell has made an enormous investment in proving themselves to be a good online/catalog source for PCs. Direct sales are nice - you get fatter margins (my guess is 20 to 35% for Dell) and all you have to do is stick the labels on the boxes. Compared to the cost of manufacturing a PC, the cost of sticking labels on 100 invidual boxes vs shipping one big box of 100 pcs is negligible. The sales work is completely automated now.
What Dell needs to ensure is that their retailers are reaching *new* markets - people who would not have otherwise bought a Dell. The worst case scenario is that people browse their web site to get the technical specs and pricing, and then head down to their local retailer to actually buy it. Dell still sells the same number of units, but they make $200 apiece instead of $400.
My company makes *half* as much per-unit when we ship in qty to a reseller vs direct to a customer. We want out resellers to be happy so they'll promote the product, but at the same time we miss the margins for direct sales. You can't be greedy though. Sometimes a smaller piece of a bigger pie is better. Good luck Dell!
it's 10base T, which as they sort of acknowledge, only works if you use 160 kbps or less encoding. Since I (like many) use 320, this device would not work for me
WHA? 10 base T == 10,000,000 bits per second. MP3 at the highest quality == 320,000 bits per second.
Where, exactly, is the bottleneck? SliMP3 handles 320kbps, no prob whatsoever.
The SliMP3 (Slim-'pE-'thrE) is a revolutionary approach to music playback, which frees you from the hassles of fragile, expensive Compact Discs. (emphasis is mine)
Converting my CDs to mp3s has not made them cheaper for me - after all I have to spend the time and harddisk space in adition to the purchase price.
Hi. I'm the guy who wrote that sentence.
I don't know about you, but I have a large collection of CDs that I've amassed over the years. They are fragile, and they are expensive. Converting my music to MP3 (and listening to them on the SliMP3) has certainly saved me money.
Rather than having to replace a CD when it gets lost, scratched, or "pitted", I now have a permanent archive of all the music I own (mirrored onto a pair of cheap 120G IDE drives FWIW). I no longer need to lug my CDs back and forth between the car and my office, living room, and bed room. Now I just fire up the SliMP3 and listen to whatever I want. If I want to enjoy my music in more than one room (RIAA forfend!) then I can do it without having to duplicate my music or carry storage media around. Just plunk it all on a big HD and access it anywhere on the network.
I think it's obvious that for anyone with at least a moderately sized music collection, who listens in more than one place, you're going to save a LOT of money and headaches... especially if you have a propensity for losing and scratching things like I do.
I know they're getting at least $40 out of every person with a phone in the midwest... where the hell does all that money go?
If Qwest is anything like PacBell out here on the west coast, then much of that money pays for a team of about 75,000 monkeys to answer the phones - all of whom could be replaced by about six lines of perl.:)
The rest of the money is spent on cable maintenance personnel, who are out there day after day repairing 40+ year old copper wiring and switching equipment that should have been retired long ago.
Ah yes, the good old "mouth/digestive tract/anus would cut it in half" argument.
I agree - it's a very simplistic argument which makes a lot of assumptions about the definition of "life". I don't really agree with the assertion, since I have a very broad definition of what I would consider to be alive. But it's an interesting idea anyway.
As of now, HP has also only threatened to invoke it.
Uh, no, "invoking the DMCA" is precicely what HP is doing, though they haven't formally filed a complaint with the feds. How can you possibly defend these unscrupulous fucks? From dictionary.com.
invoke Pronunciation Key(n-vk) tr.v. invoked, invoking, invokes ... 2. To appeal to or cite in support or justification. ... 5. To resort to; use or apply: ...
He should have interleaved the mouse pads so they hold together better. Arranged in separate columns like that, it looks like the whole side would fall over if you sat on it wrong.
If you're just using Linux, or BSD or whatever, just because you want to destroy Microsoft, many you should re-evalute your belief system.
I use Linux, BSD, or whatever because I want to use the best tools for the job, whether free or commercial. I don't mind paying for software once in a while, though I'll always opt for the free software if it's of equal or better quality.
In the case of OSX, I use it because it's better than Windows, and yes, even Linux for my needs on my desktop. Some of us have got work to do, and we put our productivity needs ahead of our "belief systems".
Oh and in case you were wondering - I use OSX to write free software./me watches your head explode as you try to wrap your brain around this paradox!
Sorry if this is a stupid question - Why would 70kb/sec upstream utilization reduce downstream bandwidth by nearly 1Mb/sec? That makes absolutely no sense to me, but then again, I'm not a Network Engineer. Can anyone more knowledgable explain this?
IAANE... here's why: TCP is always transferring data in both directions, even if you're only downloading. When your upstream link is full, you can't send acknowledgements of the data you're receiving downstream. These lost "ACKs" tell the transmitting side that somewhere along the path there is a saturated link, but it doesn't know in which direction they're being dropped. The transmitter will back off his data rate to try and reduce the packet loss, and this is what causes your slower throughput.
Slashdot Mirror
Is something wrong with slashdot lately? My posts keep getting truncated.
I wonder if
Photoshop some hair onto that forehead. I'm blind!
They used a slide rule for addition.
Drink water and, on occasion drink other things... and definitely not milk -- it feeds cancer and contains all kinds of hormones you don't want in your body.
Milk causes cancer? Why don't you back this up with some facts? And what does this have to do with caffeine? I think I'll wolf down a wedge of brie while I wait for the grille to heat up....
What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer?
Hogwash. Our project includes over 25,000 lines of perl, and more than a dozen people have worked on it. I've found that (in stark contrast to big C projects I've worked on) Perl is actually an outstanding language for large development teams.
The same features which make perl powerful for single-developer projects (dense syntax, "bug resistant" operators, loose types, etc.) also make it easy for many developers to work together. You don't have to be constantly checking the APIs to see if some function takes an int or a float, or what the restrictions on string length are, etc.
Perl has gotten a bad rap for being a write-only language. Well, that's entirely because so many programmers have used it as such. Perl is flexible. It won't stop you from writing really shitty code that only you can maintain. It also won't stop you from writing beautiful, easy-to-read code that a large team can manage with ease.
a rather interesting personage who was missing a chunk off one of his little fingers... for those of you familiar with Japan, that should immediately ring alarm bells
Qua ki ser pi ni ku?
Let me just pick apart this statement and try to figure out which part is unreasonable:
Every song
This is the only bit where I really see a problem. 100% is probably impossible, but I would think you could get 90% of all songs ever made with the cooperation of just the top 5-6 labels.
in every format
No problem here whatsoever. Archive them all in a lossless codec, then if the customer wants a different format just encode on the fly. Disks and CPUs are dirt cheap.
at virtually no cost to you.
Why not? Look, they're competing with FREE trading networks, for chrissake. They're going to have to come down a bit. Per-download fees are fine, flat monthly fees are fine, just as long as it's considerably less than $20/CD.
I don't remember it that way, but perhaps I'm mistaken. I seem to remember that ftp.apple.com always had system software that was 1-2 years old. If you wanted the latest, you had to pay/pirate.
I guess I wasn't laying on the sarcasm heavy enough.
They utterly failed to realize that e-mail costs the recipient of the e-mail message time and money.
You don't understand. We have a civic *DUTY* to read these important messages, lest we go to the polls uninformed. Is this not the least we can do for our esteemed candidates?
I violently disagree. *rendering* speed may be comparable among browsers running on reasonably fast machines, but multitasking performance is a big problem for me. If a page is taking a long time to download in one window, I want to be able to go to a different window and do something else while I wait for it to download. IE currently seems to be the best browser on OSX, so that's what I use. Unfortunately it is horrible at handling multiple active windows. What's their excuse - this is UNIX for chrissake, just make a separate process per window if you can't figure out select().
Every once in a while I'll check out the other choices just to see if anyone else is doing a better job. Last month I tried Mozilla - automatically disqualified for not having font smoothing, but other than that it looks good.
Today I tried Opera after seeing this story. The rendering is indeed fast, but I was immediately irritated that every window I opened would take up 80% of my screen (I have a big screen so this is *really* annoying). So the first thing I did was choose "preferences" and the damn thing crashed.
I'll stick with IE for now. I hate MSFT as much as the next guy, but not enough to put up with an inferior browser. Sorry.
As an OEM, it's hard to turn down retailers who are asking to resell your product. Basically what it boils down to is whether or not the retailers are cannibalizing your own direct sales.
Dell has made an enormous investment in proving themselves to be a good online/catalog source for PCs. Direct sales are nice - you get fatter margins (my guess is 20 to 35% for Dell) and all you have to do is stick the labels on the boxes. Compared to the cost of manufacturing a PC, the cost of sticking labels on 100 invidual boxes vs shipping one big box of 100 pcs is negligible. The sales work is completely automated now.
What Dell needs to ensure is that their retailers are reaching *new* markets - people who would not have otherwise bought a Dell. The worst case scenario is that people browse their web site to get the technical specs and pricing, and then head down to their local retailer to actually buy it. Dell still sells the same number of units, but they make $200 apiece instead of $400.
My company makes *half* as much per-unit when we ship in qty to a reseller vs direct to a customer. We want out resellers to be happy so they'll promote the product, but at the same time we miss the margins for direct sales. You can't be greedy though. Sometimes a smaller piece of a bigger pie is better. Good luck Dell!
it's 10base T, which as they sort of acknowledge, only works if you use 160 kbps or less encoding. Since I (like many) use 320, this device would not work for me
WHA? 10 base T == 10,000,000 bits per second. MP3 at the highest quality == 320,000 bits per second.
Where, exactly, is the bottleneck? SliMP3 handles 320kbps, no prob whatsoever.
The SliMP3 (Slim-'pE-'thrE) is a revolutionary approach to music playback, which frees you from the hassles of fragile, expensive Compact Discs. (emphasis is mine)
Converting my CDs to mp3s has not made them cheaper for me - after all I have to spend the time and harddisk space in adition to the purchase price.
Hi. I'm the guy who wrote that sentence.
I don't know about you, but I have a large collection of CDs that I've amassed over the years. They are fragile, and they are expensive. Converting my music to MP3 (and listening to them on the SliMP3) has certainly saved me money.
Rather than having to replace a CD when it gets lost, scratched, or "pitted", I now have a permanent archive of all the music I own (mirrored onto a pair of cheap 120G IDE drives FWIW). I no longer need to lug my CDs back and forth between the car and my office, living room, and bed room. Now I just fire up the SliMP3 and listen to whatever I want. If I want to enjoy my music in more than one room (RIAA forfend!) then I can do it without having to duplicate my music or carry storage media around. Just plunk it all on a big HD and access it anywhere on the network.
I think it's obvious that for anyone with at least a moderately sized music collection, who listens in more than one place, you're going to save a LOT of money and headaches... especially if you have a propensity for losing and scratching things like I do.
There is no standard to use the Web to interact with my toaster
Perhaps you could adapt the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol to your needs.
I know they're getting at least $40 out of every person with a phone in the midwest... where the hell does all that money go?
:)
If Qwest is anything like PacBell out here on the west coast, then much of that money pays for a team of about 75,000 monkeys to answer the phones - all of whom could be replaced by about six lines of perl.
The rest of the money is spent on cable maintenance personnel, who are out there day after day repairing 40+ year old copper wiring and switching equipment that should have been retired long ago.
Ah yes, the good old "mouth/digestive tract/anus would cut it in half" argument.
I agree - it's a very simplistic argument which makes a lot of assumptions about the definition of "life". I don't really agree with the assertion, since I have a very broad definition of what I would consider to be alive. But it's an interesting idea anyway.
Why is 3 is the minumum number of dimensions to sustain life?
I can't answer this completely, but trying to draw a 2D animal with a digestive tract will give you an idea of what is meant by that statement.
I'm just saying they aren't the first "unscrupulous fucks".
Okay, I may have taken your sentence a little out of context - sorry. But I stand by the rest of my statement.
As of now, HP has also only threatened to invoke it.
...
...
...
Uh, no, "invoking the DMCA" is precicely what HP is doing, though they haven't formally filed a complaint with the feds. How can you possibly defend these unscrupulous fucks? From dictionary.com.
invoke Pronunciation Key(n-vk)
tr.v. invoked, invoking, invokes
2. To appeal to or cite in support or justification.
5. To resort to; use or apply:
He should have interleaved the mouse pads so they hold together better. Arranged in separate columns like that, it looks like the whole side would fall over if you sat on it wrong.
If you're just using Linux, or BSD or whatever, just because you want to destroy Microsoft, many you should re-evalute your belief system.
/me watches your head explode as you try to wrap your brain around this paradox!
I use Linux, BSD, or whatever because I want to use the best tools for the job, whether free or commercial. I don't mind paying for software once in a while, though I'll always opt for the free software if it's of equal or better quality.
In the case of OSX, I use it because it's better than Windows, and yes, even Linux for my needs on my desktop. Some of us have got work to do, and we put our productivity needs ahead of our "belief systems".
Oh and in case you were wondering - I use OSX to write free software.
So are you a giver or a taker? Speak up you homo!
pj & rc are married. Not everyone is such a homophobe that they're afraid to even share their thoughts on the topic. Grow up.
Sorry if this is a stupid question - Why would 70kb/sec upstream utilization reduce downstream bandwidth by nearly 1Mb/sec? That makes absolutely no sense to me, but then again, I'm not a Network Engineer. Can anyone more knowledgable explain this?
IAANE... here's why: TCP is always transferring data in both directions, even if you're only downloading. When your upstream link is full, you can't send acknowledgements of the data you're receiving downstream. These lost "ACKs" tell the transmitting side that somewhere along the path there is a saturated link, but it doesn't know in which direction they're being dropped. The transmitter will back off his data rate to try and reduce the packet loss, and this is what causes your slower throughput.