I have an old laptop. It has Windows 95, but for the hell of it I would like to try to put Linux on it and then make it part of my music system by plugging it into my amp via one of these External Sound 'cards', so that I can play mp3 and perhaps listen to net radio stations.
The laptop isn't fast enough to run KDE (I've tried installing SUSE6.2 on it but it's far too slow). All I want is a minimal distribution that allows me to do what I describe above and looks reasonably pretty. Does such a thing exist? Any help would be appreciated.
Doesn't it bother you the least little bit that organizations--whether private or public--are trying so hard to convince us that mapping our genetic material will ultimately benefit the generations to come if we just trust them enough to do the right thing?
No, it doesn't bother me. You're paranoid. Really.
Perhaps there is reason for this level of paranoia in the US. Is there? What is this terrible thing that your government has done to make you Americans feel like this?
I know people who work on projects like the Human Genome project. I've worked on lots of government (UK and EU) funded projects myself. The intentions behind these projects are good. The people doing them are good people.
I'm not so naive as to think that everything governments do is good, but when it comes to things like the Human Genome project, I don't think we have any reason to be paranoid.
I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector.
[...]
The government should never be competing with the private sector.
Hhmm...
This type of view is often seen on Slashdot. It seems to be a common view in America. It is much less common over here in Europe. (But then we're a bunch of liberal losers, of course...)
Your government put a man on the Moon. Do you think that would have happened if it was left up to the private sector? Similarly with the Genome project. There is masses of work to be done, expensive work, a lot of which is not going to have any immediate financial payback. (Despite what most people think, the mapping of the genome is just a small part of the task ahead to actually understand the whole thing).
Just as the Moon landing would never have taken place without the government, neither would the complete mapping of the Human Genome, and Mankind would be poorer for it.
As a Slashdot reader you may appreciate another perspective. The Internet came out of US government funded work. The Web came out of the CERN project, which is funded by governments internationally. Many of the most commonly-used formats on the web (JPEG, MPEG, MP3) came from EU funded projects. If it was left up to private corporations, it might have taken another twenty years (or more?) before we had anything resembling the Web we have today.
I know a lot of you Americans hate paying taxes and distrust your government, but don't let that blind you to the fact that governments are often the driving force behind new technologies, not corporations.
When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life
Don't you think this is a tad, erm, extreme? You think that using StarOffice (or whatever) instead of MS Office is going to mean that they are going to have big problems when they start work? Is MS Word really that different to be "completely irrelevant".
Anyway, school is about learning, not training, at least not where I come from. If an employer is unwilling to send new young recruits on a course to learn MS Office (if that's what they use) then they will have badly trained staff - the employers fault, not the schools.
I never trust these kind of statistics. They can be so flawed as to be practically meaningless.
I saw an article in a UK paper a couple of days ago about the most popular web sites in the UK. About six of the top ten were Microsoft sites. But it included sites like passport.com - come on, who actually visits passport.com? The reason it scores so highly is of course that everytime someone, for instance, goes to read their hotmail email, it makes several accesses to the passport.com server (as well as others). This completely distorts the statistics, and makes them practically meaningless. If you ask a man on the street what are the most popular web sites in the UK he would say something like Friends Reunited (a site for finding old schoolfriends) and man on the street would be absolutely right. Friends Reunited (and loads of other popular sites) didn't even appear in the top ten.
Did you know that one in five new desktop computers have Linux? How do I know this? Well, Google tells us that 4% of its visitors use XP, 1% Linux. We can assume that all of these are relatively new users, so therefore 1 in five of new desktop computers are Linux. Of course this is crap too, but it shows you can distort stats to prove whatever you want, and I am sure that MS are a master of this.
LOL! Need I tell you what we call people like you in England?
Wilber is a philosopher and so has to deal with academic language.
I think you didn't understand my criticism of your post.
The mapping of your concept space onto mine pre-supposes my own post-contextual usage. In a very pre-evolutionary way, the multi-dimensional concept space in which our ideas move (what Glieber and Friesch define as the "Geshaltmorph") is defined by our own context, therefore your criticism of my post is invalid. Wiber's writing are, indeed, within the limitations of our own understanding of post-Gesthaltmorph contextualizations , "bollocks".
I suggest that before you bother reading this long post you take a look at the web site the poster recommends and about "Ken Wilber". Read his very interesting article "On the Nature of a Post-Metaphysical Spirituality". In England we call this type of stuff "bollocks".
My experience of psychology at university was that it was extremely unscientific. They would do completely crappy experiments that wouldn't last two minutes under the scrutiny of scientists from other fields. Psychology undergraduates would interview people about stuff and then draw conclusions about how the brain works! And they didn't even make a proper study of cell biology, genetics or evolution, or just had a trivial and often incorrect understanding of it. Everything would be wrapped in psychobabble - a sure sign to me of something that won't stand up to intellectual scrutiny.
I remember once having a long argument with a group of psychology undergraduates about an experiment they were proposing. They would take a puppy from an aggressive breed, such as a Doberman, and give it to a mother from a friendly one, such as a Golden Retriever. They said that the Doberman puppy would grow up to be docile and therefore the experiment would prove that behavior isn't genetic. They didn't seem to appreciate or understand my arguments as to why this wasn't a very good experiment.
I know that I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to operate the company in their best interests
Yes, in their best interests as defined by your company charter. Some companies choose to have ethical clauses in their charters. Some shareholders prefer these types of companies...
And then said company gets eaten alive by the competition.
Yep.
Of course, as a company director it would be ridiculous to say I'm not interested in maximising profits. I am. But maximising profits at the expense of all moral and ethical standards? Then no, I'm not interested in that. Nor are my employees. Nor my shareholders. And there are lots of other companies like mine, at least here in the UK.
QED -- you are allowed to run your business the way you do because it is good for shareholders (i.e. they're happy with your results from whatever angle they're viewing it from).
We're kind of having a circular argument here, but anyway, it is possible to have happy shareholders and stay ethical! Especially if you're shareholders are ethical people too! That's the kind of world I live in!
While that's a wonderful sentiment, I hope you understand that as Managing Director your responsibility is to your shareholders and, to a lesser extent, your employees.
Hey, guess what, my employees actually agree with our company policies. And I hope our shareholders do too, because if they've got our shares then I hope have found out a bit about the company.
Customers come first. Employees second. Shareholders third. Why? What's good for customers is good for our employees, and happy employees are good for profits which is good for shareholders.
Now, my company is small, but there are quite a few companies, even very big ones, who think the same way here in the UK. In fact I borrowed some of the wording of the above philosopy from Stelios Haji-loannou, currently one of the UK's most successful businessmen.
That is simply because success is totally based on financial standing in America. More money = more respect (because you are successful). The founding principle of capitalism is this: greed motivates people to produce and provide goods and services. If you plan on doing any business in America you should _never_ forget that. Greed motivates _all_ people. Don't suppress your greedy intentions or the system will work against you.
Sorry, I know this is going to be modded down as flamebait and troll or whatever, but I have to say this.
Americans have done a bit of soul searching recently. Many have been suprised to find strong negative reactions expressed towards them from people in other 'first world' countries. It is exactly the kind of opinions that are being expressed in this thread by Americans that cause some of those negative feelings.
No, capitalism does not excuse anyone from behaving in a moral and ethical way. No, greed does not motivate all people. No, capitalism isn't about "Getting other people to purchase something they don't need while paying more than it is worth". If you believe these things, then you have a value system that many people in the rest of the world would find very sad and hollow.
Also small businesses, especially where they face competition, rely a lot on keeping on good terms with their customers and personal recommendations.
This isn't just true of small businesses. It is also true of larger ones, at least in the UK. The most successful companies are very often the ones that "do the right thing." Virgin, The Body Shop, Easy Jet, The Co-op Bank, Marks & Spensers, John Lewis and many other large UK-based companies have been successful in part because they have strong ethical policies. In the UK (and even more so in other European countries) companies that do not "do the right thing" tend to be less successful and generally villified.
Re:Because so many people understand the real worl
on
Sunset Clauses in Software
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Think of a "group of people" brought together for one purpose. If that purpose is business, then making a profit is what they are all about. In the United States business schools probably teach as much ethics as they do in the computer science program I graduated from ( A 1 Semester hour course, as compared to 3 for normal classes ). Businesses do not exist to promote good ethics. They exist to make money.
This is so sad. "Hey, so we do bad things, we have no choice, we're a business!"
You do have a choice. Employees have a choice. Shareholders have a choice. Company managers have a choice.
I am Managing Director (that's CEO to you) of an IT company. A lot of my clients are reasonably ignorant about IT. It would be fairly easy for me to lie to them and sell them products and services that they don't really need, or deliberately lock them into solutions that it will be difficult for them to get out of again. It would probably make my company more profitable, and I know of companies that do it. But you know what? I don't do it. Why? Because it's wrong. When I deal with my clients, I am dealing with people. I don't think to myself "Hey, I can fuck these ignorant guys over and make lots of money." To me, and I would hope to most people, my personal values are more important than getting rich.
I imagine that Bill Gates rocks himself to sleep at night thinking "I've got all those suckers locked in and now I can raise prices and they can do nothing about it! What a bunch of losers! I'm the king of the world!" I know people like Bill Gates are highly respected in America, but they aren't so much in my corner of the world - they're seen as greedy, selfish ego-maniacs.
I can't blame them. It takes effort to continually support old versions. This affects the bottom line. Companies(especially public ones) are all about making money.
Why is it that so many people seem to believe that the only criteria that applies to anything is money? As if companies are complete independent of people, a force all unto themselves.
Remember that the basic dictionary definition of company is "a group of people". If a group of people want to screw you over because they can and it's profitable, they can choose to do that. Just because the group of people is acting as a "company" does not resolve them of moral and ethical responsibilities.
So if the police interviewed your co-workers, they wouldn't figure that out?
Yes, if you've got 50 people as suspects, the police can go interview your friends. But if you only know that the person probably lives in San Francisco...
And I doubt the police will have a case where the suspect "responds favorably to commercials that use humor"
That was just feeble humor - it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. However, what if the profile suggested a white man who had converted to Islam, living somewhere in San Francisco? And that's all you had to go on? Then you might be able to predict the suspects television preferences quite well, and they might be unusual, so Microsoft's records might suddenly become more interesting.
Do you get pulled over because you drive a Honda and a Honda was recently used in a bank robbery?
No, but if they know that it was a dark green Honda, and that the first letter of the number plate was X, and you have one of those, then you might find the police come knocking on your door.
As a poster to Slashdot, you might be interested to know that recently the Secret Service paid a visit to interview someone who had posted an opinion on kuro5hin, to see if they were a potential threat or not. Yes, they read kuro5hin - they probably read (albeit automatically) Slashdot too.
Police forces and intelligence agencies currently use psychological profiling when trying to hunt down serial killers, terrorists, etc.
Imagine a profile suggested the criminal in question would probably respond "favorably to commercials that use humor". Do you think that Microsoft has done a deal with the FBI to share the data they get from this?
Are we going to have to start to worry about our profiles if we start watching too many violent films or are obsessive fans of the X-Files?
However, I think you will understand that no serious professional programmer would use this type of programming in a professional context.
Of course, the above example is extreme, but it has to be said that many "perl gurus" enjoy this type of cleverness and cannot stop themselves even in situations where it is inappropriate.
Most professional programmers understand that "short and clever" is very often bad in a large software project. Read, for instance, Code complete by McConnel.
Why has this been modded as a troll? What he's saying makes absolute sense.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who is involved in professional web site development will know that Perl is becoming less and less important as a scripting language, I believe precisely because of its design and philosophy.
Unfortuately, "Perl gurus" like to write programs which are as short and "clever" as possible. That type of programming is not compatible with large, professional software development projects.
Of course this opinion will probably be modded as a troll as well by those very same "perl gurus".
Slashdot Mirror
I have an old laptop. It has Windows 95, but for the hell of it I would like to try to put Linux on it and then make it part of my music system by plugging it into my amp via one of these External Sound 'cards', so that I can play mp3 and perhaps listen to net radio stations.
The laptop isn't fast enough to run KDE (I've tried installing SUSE6.2 on it but it's far too slow). All I want is a minimal distribution that allows me to do what I describe above and looks reasonably pretty. Does such a thing exist? Any help would be appreciated.
Doesn't it bother you the least little bit that organizations--whether private or public--are trying so hard to convince us that mapping our genetic material will ultimately benefit the generations to come if we just trust them enough to do the right thing?
No, it doesn't bother me. You're paranoid. Really.
Perhaps there is reason for this level of paranoia in the US. Is there? What is this terrible thing that your government has done to make you Americans feel like this?
I know people who work on projects like the Human Genome project. I've worked on lots of government (UK and EU) funded projects myself. The intentions behind these projects are good. The people doing them are good people.
I'm not so naive as to think that everything governments do is good, but when it comes to things like the Human Genome project, I don't think we have any reason to be paranoid.
I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector.
[...]
The government should never be competing with the private sector.
Hhmm...
This type of view is often seen on Slashdot. It seems to be a common view in America. It is much less common over here in Europe. (But then we're a bunch of liberal losers, of course...)
Your government put a man on the Moon. Do you think that would have happened if it was left up to the private sector? Similarly with the Genome project. There is masses of work to be done, expensive work, a lot of which is not going to have any immediate financial payback. (Despite what most people think, the mapping of the genome is just a small part of the task ahead to actually understand the whole thing).
Just as the Moon landing would never have taken place without the government, neither would the complete mapping of the Human Genome, and Mankind would be poorer for it.
As a Slashdot reader you may appreciate another perspective. The Internet came out of US government funded work. The Web came out of the CERN project, which is funded by governments internationally. Many of the most commonly-used formats on the web (JPEG, MPEG, MP3) came from EU funded projects. If it was left up to private corporations, it might have taken another twenty years (or more?) before we had anything resembling the Web we have today.
I know a lot of you Americans hate paying taxes and distrust your government, but don't let that blind you to the fact that governments are often the driving force behind new technologies, not corporations.
When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life
Don't you think this is a tad, erm, extreme? You think that using StarOffice (or whatever) instead of MS Office is going to mean that they are going to have big problems when they start work? Is MS Word really that different to be "completely irrelevant".
Anyway, school is about learning, not training, at least not where I come from. If an employer is unwilling to send new young recruits on a course to learn MS Office (if that's what they use) then they will have badly trained staff - the employers fault, not the schools.
Well, the main reason it's crap is because you grossly misinterpreted it.
Well, that was the point I was trying to make. Doh!
I never trust these kind of statistics. They can be so flawed as to be practically meaningless.
I saw an article in a UK paper a couple of days ago about the most popular web sites in the UK. About six of the top ten were Microsoft sites. But it included sites like passport.com - come on, who actually visits passport.com? The reason it scores so highly is of course that everytime someone, for instance, goes to read their hotmail email, it makes several accesses to the passport.com server (as well as others). This completely distorts the statistics, and makes them practically meaningless. If you ask a man on the street what are the most popular web sites in the UK he would say something like Friends Reunited (a site for finding old schoolfriends) and man on the street would be absolutely right. Friends Reunited (and loads of other popular sites) didn't even appear in the top ten.
Did you know that one in five new desktop computers have Linux? How do I know this? Well, Google tells us that 4% of its visitors use XP, 1% Linux. We can assume that all of these are relatively new users, so therefore 1 in five of new desktop computers are Linux. Of course this is crap too, but it shows you can distort stats to prove whatever you want, and I am sure that MS are a master of this.
LOL! Need I tell you what we call people like you in England?
Wilber is a philosopher and so has to deal with academic language.
I think you didn't understand my criticism of your post.
The mapping of your concept space onto mine pre-supposes my own post-contextual usage. In a very pre-evolutionary way, the multi-dimensional concept space in which our ideas move (what Glieber and Friesch define as the "Geshaltmorph") is defined by our own context, therefore your criticism of my post is invalid. Wiber's writing are, indeed, within the limitations of our own understanding of post-Gesthaltmorph contextualizations , "bollocks".
I suggest that before you bother reading this long post you take a look at the web site the poster recommends and about "Ken Wilber". Read his very interesting article "On the Nature of a Post-Metaphysical Spirituality". In England we call this type of stuff "bollocks".
My experience of psychology at university was that it was extremely unscientific. They would do completely crappy experiments that wouldn't last two minutes under the scrutiny of scientists from other fields. Psychology undergraduates would interview people about stuff and then draw conclusions about how the brain works! And they didn't even make a proper study of cell biology, genetics or evolution, or just had a trivial and often incorrect understanding of it. Everything would be wrapped in psychobabble - a sure sign to me of something that won't stand up to intellectual scrutiny.
I remember once having a long argument with a group of psychology undergraduates about an experiment they were proposing. They would take a puppy from an aggressive breed, such as a Doberman, and give it to a mother from a friendly one, such as a Golden Retriever. They said that the Doberman puppy would grow up to be docile and therefore the experiment would prove that behavior isn't genetic. They didn't seem to appreciate or understand my arguments as to why this wasn't a very good experiment.
In other words, money is more important than ethics. This nicely sums up everything that's wrong with America.
Yes, it's really sad isn't it? The amazing thing is that so many Americans believe this.
I know that I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to operate the company in their best interests
Yes, in their best interests as defined by your company charter. Some companies choose to have ethical clauses in their charters. Some shareholders prefer these types of companies...
Sorry, I seem to have cut and pasted the wrong thing in the message above! Should have been:
Admittedly, one could argue that we're splitting hairs here...
Yep.
And then said company gets eaten alive by the competition.
Yep.
Of course, as a company director it would be ridiculous to say I'm not interested in maximising profits. I am. But maximising profits at the expense of all moral and ethical standards? Then no, I'm not interested in that. Nor are my employees. Nor my shareholders. And there are lots of other companies like mine, at least here in the UK.
And then said company gets eaten alive by the competition.
Customers have a choice too. At least here in Europe, unethical companies lose customers.
QED -- you are allowed to run your business the way you do because it is good for shareholders (i.e. they're happy with your results from whatever angle they're viewing it from).
We're kind of having a circular argument here, but anyway, it is possible to have happy shareholders and stay ethical! Especially if you're shareholders are ethical people too! That's the kind of world I live in!
While that's a wonderful sentiment, I hope you understand that as Managing Director your responsibility is to your shareholders and, to a lesser extent, your employees.
Hey, guess what, my employees actually agree with our company policies. And I hope our shareholders do too, because if they've got our shares then I hope have found out a bit about the company.
Customers come first. Employees second. Shareholders third. Why? What's good for customers is good for our employees, and happy employees are good for profits which is good for shareholders.
Now, my company is small, but there are quite a few companies, even very big ones, who think the same way here in the UK. In fact I borrowed some of the wording of the above philosopy from Stelios Haji-loannou, currently one of the UK's most successful businessmen.
That is simply because success is totally based on financial standing in America. More money = more respect (because you are successful). The founding principle of capitalism is this: greed motivates people to produce and provide goods and services. If you plan on doing any business in America you should _never_ forget that. Greed motivates _all_ people. Don't suppress your greedy intentions or the system will work against you.
Sorry, I know this is going to be modded down as flamebait and troll or whatever, but I have to say this.
Americans have done a bit of soul searching recently. Many have been suprised to find strong negative reactions expressed towards them from people in other 'first world' countries. It is exactly the kind of opinions that are being expressed in this thread by Americans that cause some of those negative feelings.
No, capitalism does not excuse anyone from behaving in a moral and ethical way. No, greed does not motivate all people. No, capitalism isn't about "Getting other people to purchase something they don't need while paying more than it is worth". If you believe these things, then you have a value system that many people in the rest of the world would find very sad and hollow.
Also small businesses, especially where they face competition, rely a lot on keeping on good terms with their customers and personal recommendations.
This isn't just true of small businesses. It is also true of larger ones, at least in the UK. The most successful companies are very often the ones that "do the right thing." Virgin, The Body Shop, Easy Jet, The Co-op Bank, Marks & Spensers, John Lewis and many other large UK-based companies have been successful in part because they have strong ethical policies. In the UK (and even more so in other European countries) companies that do not "do the right thing" tend to be less successful and generally villified.
Think of a "group of people" brought together for one purpose. If that purpose is business, then making a profit is what they are all about. In the United States business schools probably teach as much ethics as they do in the computer science program I graduated from ( A 1 Semester hour course, as compared to 3 for normal classes ). Businesses do not exist to promote good ethics. They exist to make money.
This is so sad. "Hey, so we do bad things, we have no choice, we're a business!"
You do have a choice. Employees have a choice. Shareholders have a choice. Company managers have a choice.
I am Managing Director (that's CEO to you) of an IT company. A lot of my clients are reasonably ignorant about IT. It would be fairly easy for me to lie to them and sell them products and services that they don't really need, or deliberately lock them into solutions that it will be difficult for them to get out of again. It would probably make my company more profitable, and I know of companies that do it. But you know what? I don't do it. Why? Because it's wrong. When I deal with my clients, I am dealing with people. I don't think to myself "Hey, I can fuck these ignorant guys over and make lots of money." To me, and I would hope to most people, my personal values are more important than getting rich.
I imagine that Bill Gates rocks himself to sleep at night thinking "I've got all those suckers locked in and now I can raise prices and they can do nothing about it! What a bunch of losers! I'm the king of the world!" I know people like Bill Gates are highly respected in America, but they aren't so much in my corner of the world - they're seen as greedy, selfish ego-maniacs.
I can't blame them. It takes effort to continually support old versions. This affects the bottom line. Companies(especially public ones) are all about making money.
Why is it that so many people seem to believe that the only criteria that applies to anything is money? As if companies are complete independent of people, a force all unto themselves.
Remember that the basic dictionary definition of company is "a group of people". If a group of people want to screw you over because they can and it's profitable, they can choose to do that. Just because the group of people is acting as a "company" does not resolve them of moral and ethical responsibilities.
Tin foil hat still firmly in place...
So if the police interviewed your co-workers, they wouldn't figure that out?
Yes, if you've got 50 people as suspects, the police can go interview your friends. But if you only know that the person probably lives in San Francisco...
And I doubt the police will have a case where the suspect "responds favorably to commercials that use humor"
That was just feeble humor - it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. However, what if the profile suggested a white man who had converted to Islam, living somewhere in San Francisco? And that's all you had to go on? Then you might be able to predict the suspects television preferences quite well, and they might be unusual, so Microsoft's records might suddenly become more interesting.
Do you get pulled over because you drive a Honda and a Honda was recently used in a bank robbery?
No, but if they know that it was a dark green Honda, and that the first letter of the number plate was X, and you have one of those, then you might find the police come knocking on your door.
As a poster to Slashdot, you might be interested to know that recently the Secret Service paid a visit to interview someone who had posted an opinion on kuro5hin, to see if they were a potential threat or not. Yes, they read kuro5hin - they probably read (albeit automatically) Slashdot too.
Tin foil helmet firmly on...
Police forces and intelligence agencies currently use psychological profiling when trying to hunt down serial killers, terrorists, etc.
Imagine a profile suggested the criminal in question would probably respond "favorably to commercials that use humor". Do you think that Microsoft has done a deal with the FBI to share the data they get from this?
Are we going to have to start to worry about our profiles if we start watching too many violent films or are obsessive fans of the X-Files?
Execution of ./shit.pl aborted due to compilation errors.
Nice try, but it doesn't work.
But isn't it obvious why it doesn't work? No?
Know you know what it feels like trying to edit a "Perl Guru's" code.
Also, what do you mean they like to write short and clever programs? Doesn't everyone?
= 2) +=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
[ P.]/&&
On a personal level, anyone who enjoys computer programming enjoys 'short and clever' programs.
On a personal level I appreciate that this is short and clever:
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print
However, I think you will understand that no serious professional programmer would use this type of programming in a professional context.
Of course, the above example is extreme, but it has to be said that many "perl gurus" enjoy this type of cleverness and cannot stop themselves even in situations where it is inappropriate.
Most professional programmers understand that "short and clever" is very often bad in a large software project. Read, for instance, Code complete by McConnel.
Why has this been modded as a troll? What he's saying makes absolute sense.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who is involved in professional web site development will know that Perl is becoming less and less important as a scripting language, I believe precisely because of its design and philosophy.
Unfortuately, "Perl gurus" like to write programs which are as short and "clever" as possible. That type of programming is not compatible with large, professional software development projects.
Of course this opinion will probably be modded as a troll as well by those very same "perl gurus".