Functions can return one value, subs don't return a value at all.
If you want to return *multiple* values from a function, you have to use the pass-by-reference capability and have the function modify its arguments.
As a style thing, I use functions when I want to return one parameter and subs if I'm going to modify several variables. That way a function that modifies it's caller's values doesn't surprise me, nor do I have to decide which of the return values the function should actually return, and which it should modify through it's arguments.
If people want to write bad code with lots of globals they can do that in any language.
For my bit of the Parrot project I'm tackling BASIC. The version of BASIC that now runs under Parrot will run many QBASIC programs -- I uploaded a colorful chess program yesterday that required almost no "porting". And of course, Parrot runs under a wide variety of platforms.
My goal is to have it eventually run all QBASIC programs, less stuff that *can't* be done outside of MS-DOS.
Or from the electronics geeks, for resistor values: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly. (Black 0, Brown 1, Red 2, Orange 3, Yellow 4, Green 5, Blue 6, Violet 7, Grey 8, White 9).
Boy did my HS Physics teacher get some weird looks for that mnemonic.
You can't just kill the pests, you have to kill them and send a message to the others. I suggest making little crosses and crucifying the mice and leaving those aroung the attic. (Hint, use staples.) Also leaving squirrel heads on small metal pikes seems effective. Keeps other people from snooping around in your attic as well.
The first [negative aspects of traditional approaches to producing Quality] is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the
physical stuckness of whatever it is you're working on. The same thing
Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover
assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special
cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is ``Remove
side cover plate'' in that wonderful terse technical style that never
tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left
undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.
If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an
impact driver at this point. But suppose you're inexperienced and you
attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver
and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the
past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the
screw.
Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the
cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that
this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just
irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's
absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the
commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance
this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even
thinking about it before you come to it.
The book's no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't
need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious
what's wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you're going to
get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't
provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're
around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked.
Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time.
You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be
ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic
who knows how to figure these things out.
It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and
make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it
off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you
think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a
high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little
slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.
What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western
thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific
method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly
where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific
method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good
for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what
you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go,
unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going
in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition,
imagination...``unstuckness,'' in other words...are completely outside
its domain.
[...]
My favorite portion of ensuing discussion about the limits of the scientific method and some traditional modes of thought is the statement that
[...] as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you
realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap
nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the
selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is
actually valueless until you get the screw out.
.
Excellent book, every programmer should read it. At least to be able to laugh when their boss uses the word "Quality".:)
Bender from Futurama of course, is powered by alcohol (the cigars are just to make him look cool). From www.fox.co.uk/futurama/bender_interview.html:
Alcohol
What is the attraction of alcohol for a robot?
Bender: Alcohol fuels my power cells, lubricates my personality piston, and makes me a better dancer. It's the reason I'm alive. And from what I understand about human mating, it's probably the reason you're alive too.
Do robots get frisky when they've had a few drinks?
Bender:Who doesn't get frisky when under the spell of liquor's magic? Again, though, I remind you that robots need alcohol for fuel. As for any humans reading this: I do not endorse wholesome, delicious liquor, available at your local store. Tell 'em Bender sent ya!
How does a robot feel when drunk?
Bender: They feel like not answering a bunch of dumb questions , jerkbag.
Have you ever drunk anything prohibited by your operation manual?
Bender: Yeah, one time I drank some weird eggnog at an office Xmas party. I got woozy and ended up making out with a fax machine. The same thing happened to Fry.
. What's your favorite cocktail?
Bender: Anything you drink using a funnel. Or the neck-cone of an injured pet.
Perhaps you should ask for the credit history of the COO and CEO. After all, you are putting your financial future into their hands, and it should be within your rights to monitor their financial abilities.
You can do this now. Whip out your credit card and head over to D&B and get a financial report on your potential employer. We do this to vendors and partners all of the time just to make sure things are on the level -- and sometimes they're not.
I work in the financial industry (as a programmer) and wouldn't DREAM of hiring an employee without a credit check (and criminal background check). If someone's seriously overextended, bankrupcy prone, tends to run out on loans, and avoids judgements I don't want him near my company's money much less that of my company's clients. Too tempting. Programmers with better histories are easy to find.
I submitted to one without blinking an eye, and my privacy-conscious friend did as well. Sometimes it just makes sense.
Mainly because he limited himself to RPM's and didnt specify what WM he was using
You missed his point spectacularly then! He doesn't want to hack at installation of his video apps, he just wants to be a user of them. And if the WM was to blame, then a pox on their developers as well.
If he wants to wade through README's, kernel patch, compile, tinker, collect libraries, and fiddle with installations he can go off and do that with his own applications (and he does!). He apparently just wants a video player that installs and runs sanely.
My gripes were similar which is now why I use WinXP as a desktop environment (for the creature comforts) and Linux as a pseudo-unix development environment (through ssh and mounted filesystems).
I predict that population will increase, technology will become more refined, space travel will become more of a focus as the result of both of those. Oh yeah, and I firmly predict an ice age in the next 10K years.
Okay. Predictions are in. It's *your* job to prove me wrong. Good luck.:)
History proves over and over that single individuals can make a world-changing difference.
If you were to read carefully, Hari makes the point that an individual does make no difference in the history of the Empire. The role that the indivudal plays in history can be predicted, but the individual to fill it (and when it's filled) doesn't really matter.
Even Hari was just filling a role. In Hari's case he was selectively bred for over a millenia by the Robots. His role was important but exactly why and what effect he would have, Daneel couldn't fathom. They bred him because long-term planning for humanity was just beyond the grasp of Robots.
Had Hitler never arrived, maybe Stalin would have gone rampaging through Europe. If Lincoln had not been president, another Unionist might have fallen into his place. If Lee Harvey Oswald had missed, maybe JFK would have died of drug overdoses. If Caesar hadn't been born, perhaps another with his ambition would have eventually become Dictator and Emperor. And so on.
Hari's larger point being that Stalin, Hitler, Lincoln, and Gandhi would all have been unimportant anyway. Even a figure whose impact was as dramatic as The Mule didn't really throw off the predictions of psychohistory by much. The Plan compensated even for him -- and he was completely unforseen.
100 or 200 years is a myopic view of history. Larger factors like nationalism, resource pressures, population expansion, steady trends in technology, industrialism, and so on drive history -- not individuals. Taking the longer view, psychohistory (acting in hindsight) may have predicted that near 100 BCE a large seafaring empire covering the entire Mediterranian, with effective military technology, efficient government structure, rigid social classes, and a strong military influence over government would have risen. It might not have been Roman, but should have happened anyway. It might have predicted factors which would cause the Empire to fall, and the feudalism which took hold shortly thereafter; inevitably the nation-states that arose out of the fuedalism would colonize to relief resource pressures; and so on...
No, fittest refers to the evolutionary niche it evolved in. Humans can enter just about any evolutionary niche at will and destroy anything in it, so we're somewhat outside of the model at this point.
Certainly not! A lot of lifeforms have adapted and thrived because of humans. Rats (genus Rattus), lice (order Phthiraptera), certain kinds of bacteria (Escherichia coli), dogs (Canis familiaris), cats (Felis catus domesticus), viruses (HIV, rhinoviruses), certain kinds of sea life (spiny water flea, zebra mussels), and cereal grasses (grains, wheat, rice, barley) are just a sampling. We're not "outside of the model" at all, humans are just providing new niches and taking others away.
Some toys always resurface again and again.
on
Low Tech Toys?
·
· Score: 2
Yo-yos. Still around and companies like Duncan make money on marketing alone. Green army men. Those little plastic guys. They got a resurgance with Toy Story but any big toy store carries these all the time.
No. Wesley does still make a credited appearance.
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 2
[No significant spoilers]
After having just seen it, I can tell you he is still in the movie. He's not doing anything special -- he's a guest at a reception, sitting among the rest of the bridge crew. Wil Wheaton is also listed in the closing credits of the movie. There are no small parts, right?
I think he'd be miscast as R. Daneel Olivaw, but as plainclothesman Elija Baley he'd be fine.
Remember, while the rest of earth society was freaking out at robots, Elija accepted them and found them useful (if inconvenient at times). He was also a bit of a rebel (having to always be "fetched", reprimanded, and ultimately accepting the Outdoors) and stood out from everyone else. He was very good at skipping around the transit system (moving walkways), and was pretty good with his fists.
He also has strong emotional reactions to things like Spacer culture (revulsion and admiration). Smith has no problem with this at all. He even went as far as to have an affair with a Spacer (gasp! horrors!).
Preface: I have a 9-year old who's just discovered the web as a resource for game cheats, lego, and pokemon crap. I'm up to my eyeballs in work trying to keep up. Thank god he's not allowed to chat...
This idea is simple to implement for parents and easy to understand for everyone involved (but a pain for NeuStar).
The various objections raised here seem silly, and not very well thought out.
Kids need to learn to avoid this stuff on their own. It's censorship! Damn right it is censorship, and you're an irresponsible parent if you don't practice it. Kids get enough chances at avoiding (or seeking out) this stuff at school and around their peers. They don't need things handed to them on a silver platter. Parents need to be ever-vigilant, but they need a break too.
Someone else is going to decide what's okay, and what's not! Their morals might not be your own! I'm willing to let someone else make the decisions, and check in occasionally to make sure they make sense. There may be material that's a little too mature (ever see some of the teenage girls on Nickleodeon?) or a out of whack politically (PBS kids programming chaps my ass some days with this), but I'm willing to trade a little boundary-pushing for a much safer experience.
Parents will never figure out how to set this up! FUD & bullshit. They won't need to. If the US adopts this how long will it take for AOL 9.0 to come out with a button that locks down the system? Or Internet Explorer 7.0? Plugins galore that do the same thing? Not long and every software resaler will fall all over themselves to help parents remove this objection to letting the kids use the Net. Remember, *kids* drive a HUGE portion of the US economy.
It's a US-only thing! Yup. Too bad. (For you or for us, depending on your viewpoint.)
Why not just have a.XXX or.SEX domain? Two problems, first is that not every bad thing for children is porn -- I don't want my kid spending time at the Illinois Nazi website either. Second is that the genie's out of the bottle already. It's going to be impossible to legislatively corral it back in. Better to set up a sandbox where the genie's not allowed to go and defend that spot rigorously.
Re:I dont understand how they could have missed th
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
Don't be smug about it. Having a diverse skillset is a necessary condition for continued employment but not a sufficient condition. [...] Yeah, but you best extend that strategy outside IT.
I'm allowed a bit of personal smugness. My diversification includes careers (and jobs) not related directly to the IT industry. There's quite a few things I can fall back on if one industry goes sour.
Re:I dont understand how they could have missed th
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree completely. This notion that the GenX'ers are getting screwed from the outside and have no hope is just bullshit.
My story in brief: At this point in my life (b. 1969), I'm doing very well and in a stable situation. I'm earning a very comfortable salary for this area, have a wife and child, live well within my means. My house is appropriately priced for the salary I earn, I have no credit debt to speak of other than my mortgage. My parents didn't give me a financial boost, as they were always middle class and lived in a poor city (Flint, MI).
However, my job could evaporate and I'd be fine because of a diverse skillset which I'm always improving and savings. I'm well insured so if something happens to me my family will be fine. It's all a matter of having good survival skills. I have friends in the same age group that are doing just as well. As I look around those that are doing badly, they've almost always made poor choices. The themes are similar:
They overextended themselves. It doesn't matter if it's credit card debt or college loans. When you take on debt you have to realistically think about how you're going to pay it back.
Trusted their employer. The age of Corporate Loyalty has been over with for 30 years. Get over it. And the personal word of a company officer is wasted breath.
Trusted the government to rescue them. The best you can hope for is that the government will get out of your way and let you do your business.
Planned their careers poorly. The IT industry is cyclical, always has been. Over the long curve it's grown since the 50's, but it has downtimes. The only defense against cycles is diversification, and if you're a 1-trick pony (open source or proprietary) you're vulnerable.
Stayed in school too long. There is a point at which it's better to bail from school, get into an entry-level job, and start clawing your way up than to stay in school and hope for a better job later. Thinking that "the market is really good, but if I just take another 18 months to finish this 4-year degree I'll be all set with a better salary" is just stupid, especially if you're piling up debt to do it (see previous point).
To the rest of my generation: take care of your own business and stop yer whining. Please. I'm sick of hearing about it.
To be honest, the only thing I resent the Boomers for is eating up Social Security at an alarming rate. Every time I look at my paycheck stub I resent the elderly and their voting block -- and despise GenX's fake politics (all talk and slack, no votes). For now I pay the tax, expect no returns, and vote for anyone willing to change the system to my pesonal benefit.
use Perl2exe to obfuscate and hide my source code. Generally, I'll give it out to whoever asks for it.
use Perl2exe to speed up my code. That doesn't work. And if I wanted fast, I'd write in C.
I know Perl isn't *terribly* difficult to install. But it's a helluva lot simpler to drop an exe file and maybe a DLL or two onto someone's system than the (ever growing) Perl distribution and the required modules. Heaven forbid I need to update Perl too. The software I distribute matches the version of Perl I've distributed with it. Always, and without hassle.
The disk-space argument against perl2exe isn't holding much water lately either. I can distribute a perl2exe'd Perl program for about 2-3MB. My Perl installation (Activestate, including Tk) is about 40MB. So my tradeoff point on disk space is about 12 programs before I start "wasting" disk space. With 5.8 and 5.10 I'm sure that break-even point will be even higher.
In the long run it makes support and distribution so much easier to people who have *zero* interest in using Perl, just my applications.
I've distributed large (several thousand line) scripts using a lot of modules with lots of prerequisites (think Tk!) without problems. The *only* problem I run into are modules that aren't use'd until runtime need to be included manually before "compilation" into the exe (Tk is especially bad about this). That just means I need to test everything before I distribute it to make sure I've picked up all of the component modules.
My kid has some of this stuff.
on
Magic Sand
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· Score: 2, Informative
My kid got some of this stuff for Christmas a few years ago. It's sold under the name "Squand."
When was the last time you saw a phone that would let you dial a number? I mean just dial a number, without redial, memory, flash, hold, speakerphone, caller ID, flashing lights or any of that peripheral junk? When was the last time you actually heard a telephone RING? With an actual brass bell that went "ding-a-ling-a-ling?"
I have an ancient AT&T phone, a very early touch-tone model. It was my parents', and now it's mine and is at least 30 years old. Built like a rock. Fallen from 3-4ft heights I dunno how many times, with very little damage. Nice sound and a very loud bell ringer. It's in my garage (because it can be heard all over the yard) and oftentimes I hear it even when all of the electronic phones in the house can't be heard. 12 buttons and I can dial it without looking. The handset is the proper size, good for holding between the ear and the shoulder handsfree *without* accidentally pressing buttons.
And you want a quick fix, stop by the Parrot project. This is the runtime engine for Perl 6.
If you want you can code directly in PASM (Parrot Assembler) or help write some of the tools that parse real languages and emit PASM. It's not a particularly small assembler like 6502 (but it can be if you really want!) but still has that small-system feel.
I got my Assembler fix this past spring with Parrot BASIC (link is PDF).
Way back when in the nooks and crannies of memory, a quarter century ago... I was having cable gender problems. I'd pre-wire something and have the device show up only to find out I'd used the wrong connector and need a gender-bender or to cut off the cable end and have to re-pin it.
And some old guy explained that, given two devices always try to put the *female* end on the expensive part of the equipment, *male* on the cheap side (or the cable). In the event that the pins broke, the expensive piece of equipment wasn't the one crippled.
(Unless, horror of horrors, the pin broke off *in* the female connector...)
Slashdot Mirror
Functions can return one value, subs don't return a value at all.
If you want to return *multiple* values from a function, you have to use the pass-by-reference capability and have the function modify its arguments.
As a style thing, I use functions when I want to return one parameter and subs if I'm going to modify several variables. That way a function that modifies it's caller's values doesn't surprise me, nor do I have to decide which of the return values the function should actually return, and which it should modify through it's arguments.
If people want to write bad code with lots of globals they can do that in any language.
For my bit of the Parrot project I'm tackling BASIC. The version of BASIC that now runs under Parrot will run many QBASIC programs -- I uploaded a colorful chess program yesterday that required almost no "porting". And of course, Parrot runs under a wide variety of platforms.
My goal is to have it eventually run all QBASIC programs, less stuff that *can't* be done outside of MS-DOS.
Or from the electronics geeks, for resistor values: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly. (Black 0, Brown 1, Red 2, Orange 3, Yellow 4, Green 5, Blue 6, Violet 7, Grey 8, White 9).
Boy did my HS Physics teacher get some weird looks for that mnemonic.
You can't just kill the pests, you have to kill them and send a message to the others. I suggest making little crosses and crucifying the mice and leaving those aroung the attic. (Hint, use staples.) Also leaving squirrel heads on small metal pikes seems effective. Keeps other people from snooping around in your attic as well.
Excellent book, every programmer should read it. At least to be able to laugh when their boss uses the word "Quality". :)
You can do this now. Whip out your credit card and head over to D&B and get a financial report on your potential employer. We do this to vendors and partners all of the time just to make sure things are on the level -- and sometimes they're not.
I work in the financial industry (as a programmer) and wouldn't DREAM of hiring an employee without a credit check (and criminal background check). If someone's seriously overextended, bankrupcy prone, tends to run out on loans, and avoids judgements I don't want him near my company's money much less that of my company's clients. Too tempting. Programmers with better histories are easy to find.
I submitted to one without blinking an eye, and my privacy-conscious friend did as well. Sometimes it just makes sense.
If he wants to wade through README's, kernel patch, compile, tinker, collect libraries, and fiddle with installations he can go off and do that with his own applications (and he does!). He apparently just wants a video player that installs and runs sanely.
My gripes were similar which is now why I use WinXP as a desktop environment (for the creature comforts) and Linux as a pseudo-unix development environment (through ssh and mounted filesystems).
I predict that population will increase, technology will become more refined, space travel will become more of a focus as the result of both of those. Oh yeah, and I firmly predict an ice age in the next 10K years.
:)
Okay. Predictions are in. It's *your* job to prove me wrong. Good luck.
If you were to read carefully, Hari makes the point that an individual does make no difference in the history of the Empire. The role that the indivudal plays in history can be predicted, but the individual to fill it (and when it's filled) doesn't really matter.
Even Hari was just filling a role. In Hari's case he was selectively bred for over a millenia by the Robots. His role was important but exactly why and what effect he would have, Daneel couldn't fathom. They bred him because long-term planning for humanity was just beyond the grasp of Robots.
Had Hitler never arrived, maybe Stalin would have gone rampaging through Europe. If Lincoln had not been president, another Unionist might have fallen into his place. If Lee Harvey Oswald had missed, maybe JFK would have died of drug overdoses. If Caesar hadn't been born, perhaps another with his ambition would have eventually become Dictator and Emperor. And so on.
Hari's larger point being that Stalin, Hitler, Lincoln, and Gandhi would all have been unimportant anyway. Even a figure whose impact was as dramatic as The Mule didn't really throw off the predictions of psychohistory by much. The Plan compensated even for him -- and he was completely unforseen.
100 or 200 years is a myopic view of history. Larger factors like nationalism, resource pressures, population expansion, steady trends in technology, industrialism, and so on drive history -- not individuals. Taking the longer view, psychohistory (acting in hindsight) may have predicted that near 100 BCE a large seafaring empire covering the entire Mediterranian, with effective military technology, efficient government structure, rigid social classes, and a strong military influence over government would have risen. It might not have been Roman, but should have happened anyway. It might have predicted factors which would cause the Empire to fall, and the feudalism which took hold shortly thereafter; inevitably the nation-states that arose out of the fuedalism would colonize to relief resource pressures; and so on...
Yo-yos. Still around and companies like Duncan make money on marketing alone. Green army men. Those little plastic guys. They got a resurgance with Toy Story but any big toy store carries these all the time.
After having just seen it, I can tell you he is still in the movie. He's not doing anything special -- he's a guest at a reception, sitting among the rest of the bridge crew. Wil Wheaton is also listed in the closing credits of the movie. There are no small parts, right?
I think he'd be miscast as R. Daneel Olivaw, but as plainclothesman Elija Baley he'd be fine.
Remember, while the rest of earth society was freaking out at robots, Elija accepted them and found them useful (if inconvenient at times). He was also a bit of a rebel (having to always be "fetched", reprimanded, and ultimately accepting the Outdoors) and stood out from everyone else. He was very good at skipping around the transit system (moving walkways), and was pretty good with his fists.
He also has strong emotional reactions to things like Spacer culture (revulsion and admiration). Smith has no problem with this at all. He even went as far as to have an affair with a Spacer (gasp! horrors!).
This idea is simple to implement for parents and easy to understand for everyone involved (but a pain for NeuStar).
The various objections raised here seem silly, and not very well thought out.
Kids need to learn to avoid this stuff on their own. It's censorship! Damn right it is censorship, and you're an irresponsible parent if you don't practice it. Kids get enough chances at avoiding (or seeking out) this stuff at school and around their peers. They don't need things handed to them on a silver platter. Parents need to be ever-vigilant, but they need a break too.
Someone else is going to decide what's okay, and what's not! Their morals might not be your own! I'm willing to let someone else make the decisions, and check in occasionally to make sure they make sense. There may be material that's a little too mature (ever see some of the teenage girls on Nickleodeon?) or a out of whack politically (PBS kids programming chaps my ass some days with this), but I'm willing to trade a little boundary-pushing for a much safer experience.
Parents will never figure out how to set this up! FUD & bullshit. They won't need to. If the US adopts this how long will it take for AOL 9.0 to come out with a button that locks down the system? Or Internet Explorer 7.0? Plugins galore that do the same thing? Not long and every software resaler will fall all over themselves to help parents remove this objection to letting the kids use the Net. Remember, *kids* drive a HUGE portion of the US economy.
It's a US-only thing! Yup. Too bad. (For you or for us, depending on your viewpoint.)
Why not just have a .XXX or .SEX domain? Two problems, first is that not every bad thing for children is porn -- I don't want my kid spending time at the Illinois Nazi website either. Second is that the genie's out of the bottle already. It's going to be impossible to legislatively corral it back in. Better to set up a sandbox where the genie's not allowed to go and defend that spot rigorously.
I'm allowed a bit of personal smugness. My diversification includes careers (and jobs) not related directly to the IT industry. There's quite a few things I can fall back on if one industry goes sour.
My story in brief: At this point in my life (b. 1969), I'm doing very well and in a stable situation. I'm earning a very comfortable salary for this area, have a wife and child, live well within my means. My house is appropriately priced for the salary I earn, I have no credit debt to speak of other than my mortgage. My parents didn't give me a financial boost, as they were always middle class and lived in a poor city (Flint, MI).
However, my job could evaporate and I'd be fine because of a diverse skillset which I'm always improving and savings. I'm well insured so if something happens to me my family will be fine. It's all a matter of having good survival skills. I have friends in the same age group that are doing just as well. As I look around those that are doing badly, they've almost always made poor choices. The themes are similar:
- They overextended themselves. It doesn't matter if it's credit card debt or college loans. When you take on debt you have to realistically think about how you're going to pay it back.
- Trusted their employer. The age of Corporate Loyalty has been over with for 30 years. Get over it. And the personal word of a company officer is wasted breath.
- Trusted the government to rescue them. The best you can hope for is that the government will get out of your way and let you do your business.
- Planned their careers poorly. The IT industry is cyclical, always has been. Over the long curve it's grown since the 50's, but it has downtimes. The only defense against cycles is diversification, and if you're a 1-trick pony (open source or proprietary) you're vulnerable.
- Stayed in school too long. There is a point at which it's better to bail from school, get into an entry-level job, and start clawing your way up than to stay in school and hope for a better job later. Thinking that "the market is really good, but if I just take another 18 months to finish this 4-year degree I'll be all set with a better salary" is just stupid, especially if you're piling up debt to do it (see previous point).
To the rest of my generation: take care of your own business and stop yer whining. Please. I'm sick of hearing about it.To be honest, the only thing I resent the Boomers for is eating up Social Security at an alarming rate. Every time I look at my paycheck stub I resent the elderly and their voting block -- and despise GenX's fake politics (all talk and slack, no votes). For now I pay the tax, expect no returns, and vote for anyone willing to change the system to my pesonal benefit.
- use Perl2exe to obfuscate and hide my source code. Generally, I'll give it out to whoever asks for it.
- use Perl2exe to speed up my code. That doesn't work. And if I wanted fast, I'd write in C.
I know Perl isn't *terribly* difficult to install. But it's a helluva lot simpler to drop an exe file and maybe a DLL or two onto someone's system than the (ever growing) Perl distribution and the required modules. Heaven forbid I need to update Perl too. The software I distribute matches the version of Perl I've distributed with it. Always, and without hassle.The disk-space argument against perl2exe isn't holding much water lately either. I can distribute a perl2exe'd Perl program for about 2-3MB. My Perl installation (Activestate, including Tk) is about 40MB. So my tradeoff point on disk space is about 12 programs before I start "wasting" disk space. With 5.8 and 5.10 I'm sure that break-even point will be even higher.
In the long run it makes support and distribution so much easier to people who have *zero* interest in using Perl, just my applications.
I've distributed large (several thousand line) scripts using a lot of modules with lots of prerequisites (think Tk!) without problems. The *only* problem I run into are modules that aren't use'd until runtime need to be included manually before "compilation" into the exe (Tk is especially bad about this). That just means I need to test everything before I distribute it to make sure I've picked up all of the component modules.
My kid got some of this stuff for Christmas a few years ago. It's sold under the name "Squand."
90% of everything is crap. Including Slashdot comments!
Actually, the phone was *purchased* from AT&T in the early 80's. Saved us the charge on the bill, saves them the trouble of in-house repairs.
I wish I had two more of them...
If you want you can code directly in PASM (Parrot Assembler) or help write some of the tools that parse real languages and emit PASM. It's not a particularly small assembler like 6502 (but it can be if you really want!) but still has that small-system feel.
I got my Assembler fix this past spring with Parrot BASIC (link is PDF).
Way back when in the nooks and crannies of memory, a quarter century ago... I was having cable gender problems. I'd pre-wire something and have the device show up only to find out I'd used the wrong connector and need a gender-bender or to cut off the cable end and have to re-pin it.
And some old guy explained that, given two devices always try to put the *female* end on the expensive part of the equipment, *male* on the cheap side (or the cable). In the event that the pins broke, the expensive piece of equipment wasn't the one crippled.
(Unless, horror of horrors, the pin broke off *in* the female connector...)
That's fairly apparent. Especially as his name is Sean. :)