Do we work for less? Do we (dare I say it) unionize? Pass laws? Comments, please.
Seems a good way to improve your chances is to become a "value added" programmer - there's a big difference between a quality programmer and someone who has "learned a programming laguage", but there many (excellent) jobs where the difference between those and a programmer with a masters in microbiology (for example). Incidentally, while not necessarily more secure than any other job right now, these will just not move to India.
No, you are wrong. Everything is awful, and it will only get worse. There will be no improvement, ever. Oh, and "technology" was just a passing fad, it's over now.
There is a fundamental distinction between programmatically scraping someone else's site and posting it as your own and an individual drawing down the website via a browser: fair use.
Here's my problem with this - for some reason when this distinction is made, "programmatically scraping someone else's site for your own legitimate use" gets lumped in with the former, while it clearly belongs with the latter.
It's bad enough that so many companies out there can't seem to wrap their collective heads around the concept of functional web design, but now they are trying to stop me from improving on it? That's a little much.
Insightful? Let's look at this - the patent office gets money for granting patents. They don't have an incentive not to grant patents. Why is anyone surprised when patents are granted?
Try it yourself - dual 2.0GHz CPUs, 4 Gigs of ram, dual fibre HBAs (optic), 3 years silver support, RH AS with support, and other junk you'd want/need (2 36GB 15K drives, rails, etc.)
It goes over $20K very quickly. I did just notice that they add a 24-port switch in there, which no one asked them to, so that's a couple hundred bucks.
On the low end Sun servers cost $250,000 (unless you cut a deal), while IBM Linux servers that can accomplish much of the same tasks as the Sun equivalent run you roughly $4,000 (unless again, you cut a deal)
Whaa? I recently bought a SunFire 480 (definitely the "low end") for work, came out to about $23K, just for shits and giggles I just went over to dell.com and priced out a similarly configured (more or less the same, the processors probably have a bit more horse power to them) PowerEdge 6650, which came out to $22,780.
Oh sure, I could've gotten a 2650 with considerably faster CPUs and 50% more RAM dirt cheap (and in fact, we just purchased a couple of those as well), but for some reason if I need it to be expandable beyond 2 processors and six gigs of RAM it's just nowhere as thrifty all of a sudden. Not to mention that with the 26XX's the thinking is pretty much: "If it breaks - we chuck it and get a new one." and you can't really afford that for all applications.
as Linux tends to make huge leaps and bounds in a short time while Sun usually just tweaks a few interest points at a time
You do realize that you've just made the case for Sun (hands down) for anyone who is actually in a position to make purchasing decisions for a company? Explain to me the difference between "improves daily" and "has a long way to go".
Mind you, I love Linux and use it extensively (at work and at home), but that is no reason to just make things up about Sun's software or hardware.
Right, of course it's conceivable that the word 'Windows' is used to describe something other than Microsoft's Windows, like let's say, windows. Whereas for Linux, you just pretty much get linux... oh, and this thing (and I doubt it generates a lot of the hits)
The simple fact of the matter is that Osama Bin Laden has declared a Jihad against the United States and its interests. That man has a large following of fundamentalists that believe in his words and will stop at nothing to carry out this 'Holy War' against a people that generally enjoy a peaceful existence.
You give Osama a little more credit than he deserves here, he personally is not single handedly driving any religion or any of it's more fundamentalist offshoot's. I am not going to go into 'generally enjoy a peaceful existence' - that's either true of everyone, or no one, depending on how you look at it.
Granted, this was brought on by years upon years of terrible foreign policy and a reliance on oil products. If we could have sworn off oil decades ago, we likely wouldn't be experiencing the terrible reality that we are experiencing now.
I am not certain it's as simple as that, but sure, why not.
When before in history has a group allying itself with no country just their religous beliefs gone to such lengths to murder and cause mass destruction?
You have got to be kidding! History is nothing but religious groups trying to anhialate each other, it would even be silly to go into specific examples here - I don't think you can find a 10 year stretch in history where one religious sect did not commit some sort of atrocity against another, somewhere in the world.
Your statements make it seem as though you think it is alright that they committed those acts of murder.
I was not aware of that. In fact, I don't believe my statements mentioned anything at all about my opinion of these acts.
Furthermore, like its okay for a fundamentalist religous group to target and murder a nation of people simply because of the policies of a government body that most of those people disagree with.
There is an odd parallel here, but nevermind...
All of this disagreeing, leading to mass murder crap is getting the human race nowhere. We all generally have the same needs. We all generally laugh the same, cry the same and bleed the same.
Very true, however Mr. Bush is pushing an agenda that describes the world as being composed of "good" people and "evil" people, and that we are going to make the world a better place by killing all the "evil" people. Anyone who says this with a straight face is either six years old, an imbecile or is hoping to exploit others behaving like the previous two.
The wholesale slaughter of any people, regardless of the reasons, is never justified.
Well, as far as ethics goes, I would say that's an easy one. What about the regrettable killing of any people in the name Righteous Justice?
I believe the FSF's stance on this is, the later that the first GPL case goes to court, the better. The thinking is that there is the potential of the judges (and the media, and the public in general) becoming more tech savvy as time goes on; as well as the hope that traditional copyright laws will be adapted to software issues more fully by then.
You're basically trying to parse data out a string that you can at best only *assume* is going to be in a predetermined format. All the target has to do, in a lot of cases, is change a tag, comment, or what-have-you here or there (assuming that the response is a string of HTML) and it can throw the whole thing out of whack.
If you are doing it the very wrong way, then yes, you are correct. If you need to do this for real, then use use modules like HTML::TokeParser and HTML::TreeBuilder, so you are not parsing a string but traversing a tree. And this, while not perfect, is reliable enough to be very useful.
Incidentally, here's why I have rely on "screen scrapping" heavily: In the scintific communitites a lot of data and services are provided via the web (and are in the public domain, here at least, when they say that they want you to have access to the data, they do mean it). They don't however have the resources (time, technical expertise, etc) to provide these as web services, or (in case of software) as local installations (various reasons for this).
In any case, regardless of what these companies think the web is and how they can limit their clients' use of their sites, I find it absolutely infuriating that they would demand the removal of modules from CPAN. This whole "it can potentially be used in a displeasing way for a company, so it must be banned and destroyed" mode of thinking is really loosing all semblance of propriety.
I haven't tried IRC for warez or music, but I do use it to get tv shows (both old and new), and it's far better than any p2p system. Basically it's the whole "community" approach - you have a channel centered around a specific show, you'll have maybe half a dozen fserves that have the complete series and are almost always on, many others will have random bits and (in case of currently airing shows) when a new episode comes out a bunch of people will jump on and just mirror that. (Incidentally, on some channels new episodes show up hours after being aired).
Also the qulity is a lot higher than the p2p's, the encodings are better, far fewer files are broken, etc. usually you will have several resident rippers on the channel, who take a certain amount of pride in their work.
As for queing, it does take some time and effort to keep up with the queues, but I can keep my DSL more or less saturated.
All in all, IRC is (well, was) the fastest and most reliable way to either get the newest episode or the copmlete series.
Oh, and Kazza is a spyware-ridden piece of shit.
(PS I will certainly appreciate a lecture on how stealing is wrong)
Fascinating concept... but, aren't most people who hang out on IRC just staggeringly disinteresting?
Face it - bars are for chatting, IRC is for new Farscape episodes.
Besides, does anyone else think that DALnet's terms of use are somewhat irrelevant since you can't connect to the damn thing? The IRC state of affairs is sad indeed.
Re:XML frees us from Perl
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
how do you tell when a regexp has a false positive match?
A what? You (or rather the brilliant person being quoted) either mean that it matches a string that the expression isn't supposed to, which would be a serious bug in the language (and I am not aware of any such bugs); or you mean that it matches correctly, but matches things you didn't expect it to, in which case you tell, by (gasp!) testing your code. In any case, how do you tell a "false positive" regexp match in Java?
but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an asset to both you and your employer
"Man I just don't get this English language. I think I'll try physics instead."
They don't say it, but this choice is made constantly. Many people I know who make a living in the "hard" sciences have no aptitude whatsoever for English language, or literature, etc. and would simply not be able to make any meaningful contributions in those fields.
It's two very different talents and mind-sets, I wouldn't call one 'easier' than the other.
the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language
Obviously, you've never programmed Perl:)
Seriously though, you make a good point, and this comparison of computer and "human" languages often irks me. Sure they are similar in that both use words to designate both abstract concepts and specific objects (in the English sense), and both combine these according to predetermined rules to produces a coherent end-product that has some function. But, that similarity doesn't really help compare the two. What matters is how you learn the language and how you use it - and in this respect there is just no similarity at all between the two.
For example, the vocabulary of any programming language is miniscule compared to any human language, and the rule-set that the language employs, even more so. When you come down to it, a piece of code will always do a very specific thing, you can, if you want, drill down to what the compiler/assembler (or interpreter/runtime) is doing, and see exactly what the effect of your particular arrangements of tokens is; while with a real language there is a plethora of ambiguities, connotations, nuances and innuendos which make the end result a lot more complex and also dependent on the recepient.
All in all, the expressive power of programming languages is simply very poor when compared with real languages.
(Incidentally, I am a software developer and also an avid student of humanities)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to be fair, life didn't actually get better during their lifetime for most people living in the 14th century.
That's just silly - why not? Are they waiting to see if Iraq maybe wins?
Seems a good way to improve your chances is to become a "value added" programmer - there's a big difference between a quality programmer and someone who has "learned a programming laguage", but there many (excellent) jobs where the difference between those and a programmer with a masters in microbiology (for example). Incidentally, while not necessarily more secure than any other job right now, these will just not move to India.
No, you are wrong. Everything is awful, and it will only get worse. There will be no improvement, ever. Oh, and "technology" was just a passing fad, it's over now.
Holy shit! You can do that??
;) just kidding - I love my job, wouldn't go home if they made me.
Here's my problem with this - for some reason when this distinction is made, "programmatically scraping someone else's site for your own legitimate use" gets lumped in with the former, while it clearly belongs with the latter.
It's bad enough that so many companies out there can't seem to wrap their collective heads around the concept of functional web design, but now they are trying to stop me from improving on it? That's a little much.
I'd really like to know more about Gollum, but I just can't seem to find a link to a page about it - anyone know of one?
Insightful? Let's look at this - the patent office gets money for granting patents. They don't have an incentive not to grant patents. Why is anyone surprised when patents are granted?
It goes over $20K very quickly. I did just notice that they add a 24-port switch in there, which no one asked them to, so that's a couple hundred bucks.
Yeah, they've been almost as good at dying in the last 5 years as Apple and BSD.
Whaa? I recently bought a SunFire 480 (definitely the "low end") for work, came out to about $23K, just for shits and giggles I just went over to dell.com and priced out a similarly configured (more or less the same, the processors probably have a bit more horse power to them) PowerEdge 6650, which came out to $22,780.
Oh sure, I could've gotten a 2650 with considerably faster CPUs and 50% more RAM dirt cheap (and in fact, we just purchased a couple of those as well), but for some reason if I need it to be expandable beyond 2 processors and six gigs of RAM it's just nowhere as thrifty all of a sudden. Not to mention that with the 26XX's the thinking is pretty much: "If it breaks - we chuck it and get a new one." and you can't really afford that for all applications.
as Linux tends to make huge leaps and bounds in a short time while Sun usually just tweaks a few interest points at a time
You do realize that you've just made the case for Sun (hands down) for anyone who is actually in a position to make purchasing decisions for a company? Explain to me the difference between "improves daily" and "has a long way to go".
Mind you, I love Linux and use it extensively (at work and at home), but that is no reason to just make things up about Sun's software or hardware.
Was that an example?
Right, of course it's conceivable that the word 'Windows' is used to describe something other than Microsoft's Windows, like let's say, windows. Whereas for Linux, you just pretty much get linux... oh, and this thing (and I doubt it generates a lot of the hits)
You give Osama a little more credit than he deserves here, he personally is not single handedly driving any religion or any of it's more fundamentalist offshoot's. I am not going to go into 'generally enjoy a peaceful existence' - that's either true of everyone, or no one, depending on how you look at it.
Granted, this was brought on by years upon years of terrible foreign policy and a reliance on oil products. If we could have sworn off oil decades ago, we likely wouldn't be experiencing the terrible reality that we are experiencing now.
I am not certain it's as simple as that, but sure, why not.
When before in history has a group allying itself with no country just their religous beliefs gone to such lengths to murder and cause mass destruction?
You have got to be kidding! History is nothing but religious groups trying to anhialate each other, it would even be silly to go into specific examples here - I don't think you can find a 10 year stretch in history where one religious sect did not commit some sort of atrocity against another, somewhere in the world.
Your statements make it seem as though you think it is alright that they committed those acts of murder.
I was not aware of that. In fact, I don't believe my statements mentioned anything at all about my opinion of these acts.
Furthermore, like its okay for a fundamentalist religous group to target and murder a nation of people simply because of the policies of a government body that most of those people disagree with.
There is an odd parallel here, but nevermind...
All of this disagreeing, leading to mass murder crap is getting the human race nowhere. We all generally have the same needs. We all generally laugh the same, cry the same and bleed the same.
Very true, however Mr. Bush is pushing an agenda that describes the world as being composed of "good" people and "evil" people, and that we are going to make the world a better place by killing all the "evil" people. Anyone who says this with a straight face is either six years old, an imbecile or is hoping to exploit others behaving like the previous two.
The wholesale slaughter of any people, regardless of the reasons, is never justified.
Well, as far as ethics goes, I would say that's an easy one. What about the regrettable killing of any people in the name Righteous Justice?
"Our times are extraordinary" and "never has anything like this happened before" are the oldest lines in the book.
I believe the FSF's stance on this is, the later that the first GPL case goes to court, the better. The thinking is that there is the potential of the judges (and the media, and the public in general) becoming more tech savvy as time goes on; as well as the hope that traditional copyright laws will be adapted to software issues more fully by then.
If you are doing it the very wrong way, then yes, you are correct. If you need to do this for real, then use use modules like HTML::TokeParser and HTML::TreeBuilder, so you are not parsing a string but traversing a tree. And this, while not perfect, is reliable enough to be very useful.
Incidentally, here's why I have rely on "screen scrapping" heavily: In the scintific communitites a lot of data and services are provided via the web (and are in the public domain, here at least, when they say that they want you to have access to the data, they do mean it). They don't however have the resources (time, technical expertise, etc) to provide these as web services, or (in case of software) as local installations (various reasons for this).
In any case, regardless of what these companies think the web is and how they can limit their clients' use of their sites, I find it absolutely infuriating that they would demand the removal of modules from CPAN. This whole "it can potentially be used in a displeasing way for a company, so it must be banned and destroyed" mode of thinking is really loosing all semblance of propriety.
Was I the first to catch it? The world needs to know!
How can they keep insulting us with this irresponsible journalism day after day is beyond me.
Eh? It takes about 15 seconds. And requiring registered nicks for a channel seems to keep the spam out.
Also the qulity is a lot higher than the p2p's, the encodings are better, far fewer files are broken, etc. usually you will have several resident rippers on the channel, who take a certain amount of pride in their work.
As for queing, it does take some time and effort to keep up with the queues, but I can keep my DSL more or less saturated.
All in all, IRC is (well, was) the fastest and most reliable way to either get the newest episode or the copmlete series.
Oh, and Kazza is a spyware-ridden piece of shit.
(PS I will certainly appreciate a lecture on how stealing is wrong)
Face it - bars are for chatting, IRC is for new Farscape episodes.
Besides, does anyone else think that DALnet's terms of use are somewhat irrelevant since you can't connect to the damn thing? The IRC state of affairs is sad indeed.
A what? You (or rather the brilliant person being quoted) either mean that it matches a string that the expression isn't supposed to, which would be a serious bug in the language (and I am not aware of any such bugs); or you mean that it matches correctly, but matches things you didn't expect it to, in which case you tell, by (gasp!) testing your code. In any case, how do you tell a "false positive" regexp match in Java?
but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an asset to both you and your employer
Perhaps you can't. I have, and I do.
They don't say it, but this choice is made constantly. Many people I know who make a living in the "hard" sciences have no aptitude whatsoever for English language, or literature, etc. and would simply not be able to make any meaningful contributions in those fields.
It's two very different talents and mind-sets, I wouldn't call one 'easier' than the other.
Obviously, you've never programmed Perl :)
Seriously though, you make a good point, and this comparison of computer and "human" languages often irks me. Sure they are similar in that both use words to designate both abstract concepts and specific objects (in the English sense), and both combine these according to predetermined rules to produces a coherent end-product that has some function. But, that similarity doesn't really help compare the two. What matters is how you learn the language and how you use it - and in this respect there is just no similarity at all between the two.
For example, the vocabulary of any programming language is miniscule compared to any human language, and the rule-set that the language employs, even more so. When you come down to it, a piece of code will always do a very specific thing, you can, if you want, drill down to what the compiler/assembler (or interpreter/runtime) is doing, and see exactly what the effect of your particular arrangements of tokens is; while with a real language there is a plethora of ambiguities, connotations, nuances and innuendos which make the end result a lot more complex and also dependent on the recepient.
All in all, the expressive power of programming languages is simply very poor when compared with real languages.
(Incidentally, I am a software developer and also an avid student of humanities)
The whatnow? Nowadays if I manage to come across a site using those things I generally just point and laugh.