I see in the news that the android app store is now rejecting apps. The apps rejected were ones that downloaded other apps. Thus they were vectors for invasive software. Or at least potentially so. Likewise Moto is locking down droid with a re-incarnating system rom and apoptotic immune system. Apple has been heavily criticized for it's app store restrictions. But to me all these moves are a great idea. I don't want my phone to be so versatile that I have constantly be vigilent. Someday I might work up the nerve to let it function as a credit card. I defintely want to see years of virus/torjan free operation before I try that.
If I wanted a toy I could program as I wish I'd buy one of those. But please let there be some severly locked down phones before we all get telphonically transmitted diseases.
I felt exactly the opposite. I was ready to dump apple stock till I heard about the shareholder meeting. I think that him not announcing record sales is exactly the time to step out. Apple is going to have a huge profits on the verizon deal. Comdex showed the ipad has another year to advance without any viable competition. In a year, if they play their cards right, the app store may make this thing an unbeatable device like the ipod was once itunes came along. In fact I think apple is going to make so much money off the Verizon deal they will have to jigger the earnings to book them in future years.
Consider if steve jobs were exiting when it looked like apple was headed for a rough patch?
You want this shareholder meeting on the heir apparent's shoulders. it will be easy and he will shine.
It's a measurable fact that Apple's market cap grew under Tim Cooke more than under Steve Jobs. One can question if he kept the idea pipeline stocked or was just a steward of an existing process. But the former is fact and the latter is speculation.
It is likely that Steve has hired people who are great with ideas but not with the type-A self confidence he has. It's a common trait for uber egotists to drive other egotist out of their circle. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. I'm saying it is a common thing. It has been the dominant management style for most of human history.
Thus the trouble is not replacing steve jobs but imagining who in his inner circle is capable of stepping up to be him. THat person may in fact not be in his inner circle. But maybe they alos don't need to replace him with someone just like him. they need a new leader with a new style. THey just might not find it right away till steve is truly gone.
Who the hell cares. I mean whup tee doo. so someone has a larger address space . like wow. for all 12 people with such a bad design that they need 12 billion columns, I'm suite they already figured out how to do have Keyed indexes. why is this on slashdot?
I just implemented Google Chrome in Flash using Alchemy. Next I'm going to implement Flash in Flash using Alchemy. Then Alchemy in Flash using Alchemy. All on my Amiga console!
That anybody was waiting for Verizon? Almost nobody holds back on something they want for 3 years because of something as insubstantial as a moderate and geographically varied difference in network quality. Maybe the install base will increase, but double? Hah!
You must live in a city. Outside the city the difference in carriers is huge!!! AT+T won't support iphones in my area. (they actually cancel your contract if you use your iphone more than 50% of the usage in my zipcode) So yeah I've been struggling along with a jailbroken iphone on t-mobile, but that's cause I'm nerdy enough to jail break it. most people here can't do that and have been panting for a verizon iphone.
The article is missing the point here. Nintendo is making a self serving argument here. The Syndrome is question occurs only in stereoscopic 3D. it does not occur in the "point of view" 3D that the Nintendo implement with it's motion sensors. There both eyes see the same image. the 3D effect arriese because the images tracks the motion of the controller itself, as though you were looking through a window pane.
Second, I would suspect that the Wii does not have enough horse power to generate steroscopic 3D (compared to the Playstation).
Third, even if the Wii could do it there would be another problem for the Wii. Given a 3D world you'd want to move in it right? But the wii controllers are not like the Kinect or Sony wands. The Wii only knows how you are pointing the controller, it does nor know the detailed spatial position or orientation of your body. So the effect would likely be disorientingly awful.
your post is pure brilliance. It's short and funny. It even makes weird if whimsical sense. A billion would be cheap to apple if it could perpetuate steve jobs, and that's not an exaggeration.
From What I have read this process is currently comparably energy efficient to the cellulosic process and more scalable. However, it's not likely to improve in those areas by much since things are pretty much unalterable beyond modest improvements in the industrial design. Cellulosic ethanol could improve massively in both efficiency and scaling. But that requires some breakthroughs.
First the jury has been in for a long time that in terms of Energy per dollar Corn or sugar based ethanol are never going to be a good idea in the US for feedstocks that come from the food chain. However cellolosic ethanol (switch grass, poplar tree, cellulosic waste, etc...) may be quite a good idea. There are strong arguments for them that have yet to be defeated. They need less irrigation and can be grown on lands or seasons otherwise unsuited for crops.
The big bug-a-boo with these is that they are waiting for a scientific breaktrhough for a process to change cellulose into simple sugars or directly to ethanol or gasoline. There's lots of ways to approach this but all of them are not at the efficiency needed yet. It's not an easy proposal: if digesting cellulose was super easy then more bugs would do it already. It's actually not the cellulose that's the biggest problem, it's the lignose which is about 30%+ of the plant thats slightly harder to deal with biochemically.
It's likely that some breakthroughs will occur. Theres lots of irons in the fire. Some of them may scale. But if you had to do it tommorrow chances are you'd bet on the wrong pony if you went with one particular approach.
Thus the primary role that starch and sugar based ethanol plays now is that it seeds the pipeline with ethanol now, so the infrastructure will be in place when cellulosic ethanol comes on line.
Now why ethanol and not something else more energy efficient. Butanol for example. Or other liquid fuels. THe problem is that when you ad up the cost of replacing our fleet of existing internal combustion engines and fuel infrastructure it's a huge huge huge sum. You can't just pick the "optimal" fuel purely from an maximal energy standpoint. You have to have a way there that does not start with a non-starter like chucking out all the existing engines. Hence Ethanol looks like the common denominator. It's not bad. It's easier to produce ethanol from grains now than it is butanol or gasoline. and it works in the cars we have up to a point.
As long as we are comminting to cellulosic ethanol, some use of food crops to produce grain-based ethanol now is justifiable. It just can't continue in the long run.
Another route is commit to bio-diesel from algae. This too has some issues to solve to make it scalable. It can use lower quality water. it can use low grade lands. it is easier to "dry" than ethanol because it is not water soluble so there's less energy waste in turning it into fuels. And you might be able to think of some byproduct for the waste stream from algae (maybe animal feed or fertilizer). SOme of the challenges here are very simple sounding, though no one has entirely solved them yet: how do we quadruple the lipid yield, and how to we get enough CO2 into the water (without burning fuel to create it and pump it.). There is enough bad land to fuel the entire nation if we can solve those scaling products.
It has a path forward through the trucking system (diesel) and through aviation fuels and military fuels. The latter can pay premium prices to subsidize the product effectively since those fuels are more expensive than consume fuels.
Eventually however that path requires replacing the automobile fleet. But given the path forward in the near term this may not be a non-starter.
If you don't know what perl golf is, time to treat yourself to some mind blowing perl. Perl golf is a challenge to complete a give set of algorithms in the fewest (key) strokes. Consider the Buroughs Wheeler algorithm, which is what bzip uses. How many keystrokes should that take to write? how about 55? http://perlgolf.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/PGAS/post_mortem.cgi?id=11
Mind blowing. Also informative as well.
I love perl. It has it's problems but I love how it's such a mutable language and how simple the core language is. It has one of the thinnest O-reily guides for a language that has Regex, Databases, and hashes built into it.
I never actually understood how objects actually work or the difference between a column and row database stucturce till I wrote in perl objects. The mind blowing thing to me is that to go from non-onject oriented perl to objected oriented perl, only two changes were made to the language: bless() and @ISA. it's uncanny that that's actually true for all languages. add those and your object oriented. This means for example, that you can start tommorrow writing object oriented fortran 77 just by implementing those two functions. If you don't believe me then you are like I was: you don't understand how object oriented programming actually works. And For those of you wondering: a row data base is the same as a perl object based on a blessed hash (how python does it behind the scenes) and a column database is a perl object based on a blessed scalar.
CRC RCA HP Zenith, Magnavox. Once great companies built on top of legendary innovations and engineer. Now hollow shells with only their names to sell products-- usually products distant from their original expertise.
(Anyone even realize that CRC means chemical rubber company-- yet the main product is integral tables)
et TU Byte.
Will they have program listing in Basic, or teach me handshaking on a RS232 port. I suspect not. it's just a gadget review mag.
It's not a choice: one is not "handing it over control to political appointees". It is simply saying not packet dicrimination. So yes there will be regulators but they do not have fiat control, just enforcement responsibilities.
Thus this discussion is starting out on a false premise.
But not for the reasons given. If you go to light in a box and browse all the android 2.1 pads for sale, all of them warn you not to attempt to re-install or change the OS. this warning is not given for some propriatary reason but simply because there is no assure path to a perfectly safe re-install of the android software and drivers.
Thus there are going to ba a gazillion android pads walking around that cannot be patched. It's a safe bet there are security holes to be discovered in this. Once that happens it's going to be like windows has been with the sea of mobile zombies.
The iphones are different. You are constantly offered updates. (which brings up the problem with jailbreaking-- you can't update easily for fear of busting the jailbreak.)
Now phones may be a different matter. If the phone companies are able to push updates it may be a lot safer.
Consider Nokia who dominates europe. They are spinning their wheels trying to make a go of it with their own OS but this will fail in the face of the growing coupling of desktops and smart phones. There is no Nokia Desktop computer. So what are they going to do? They could go with Android but the problem is that then they compete directly with HTC and Samsung and eventually some not yet known "Dell"-like company from China. SO Nokia will eventually choose Win 7 to be able to have a premium system. And Microsoft will be happy to be entering the market in a more tightly controlled hardware system where they can more easily offer special features unique to Win7.
Likewise for HP and the WebOS. I don't think HP wants to be an Android house. Otherwise why did they buy WebOS? But it too will fail for the same reason as Nokia's OS.
Win7 will be like apple and offer a work-alike eco system for desktop and mobile platforms. innovations and developers will more easily target both directly rather than having to write for some cross platform API that works at the lowest common demoninator. Chrome OS will be a niche for a long time. (Perfect for my mom and millions of other people who only use web and e-mail and the occasional infrequent document.) It will be a long time before desktops are kaput. So Google has no real answer to Win7 and OSX on the desktop (yet...anyhow).
Thus android will do hansomly for a while while the market itself is expanding. But when Nokia and HP finally give up, Win 7 stands a huge chance of eating the android quite suddenly with an alternative with the advantages of the iPhone and an unfragmented distribution channel.
Back in the days of print media, graduate students used to remark that the ever expanding bound volumes of the Journal of chemical physics were enlarging so fast that in a few years they would be spreading across library shelves faster than the speed of light. But this did not violate einstein's principle because they contained no information.
If you compare older perl libs with more modern python and ruby libs you fins a lot of object oriented bloat and dependencies in the latter. It's the modern way of programming for the general case. perl tended to have more self contained solution sets, to over generalize a bit. I think this means that there's a lot of layered foam and filler in those general libraries.
After detouring in to python I've found myself going back to perl a lot. Why? well when python was young I admired it's clean lines and one way to do one thing. It made everyone elses code easy to read. the white space idea forced every one to indent the same, again making everyone elses code as easy to read as mine. loved it. But then it bloated and things depricated. Meanwhile perl just went along without changing much at all.
if you pick up an O-reily quick reference for perl it is half as thick as the one for python. Moreover it actually contains all of perl where as useful stuff in python (like regex and ties and math) is farmed out to includes. You can memorize perl and the parts you memorize are not deprecated. Whereas the includes in python are being depricated quickly.
No doubt this is the evolution of many languages. when you come in early it's clean but perhaps is missing stuff or has idiosyncrasies that need removing to extend it. Then it bloats and something new like Groovy is more sexy looking.
Perl mean while keeps simple things simple be hard things possible in the main trunk of the language.
I'd still rather write a large complex program in python. But perl has stayed suprisingly relevant, not to mention being a much better system admin language. In my dream, all shell languages would be replaced by perl.
Okay let's see, we combine the terror of OCR with mangled language translation and the pit fall of cropped or intersecting text patches and variable fonts and multiple contexts? My hovercraft is indeed full of eels.
Great for human readability. Terrible (due to some python-like indent rules) for humans to add content to.
Oh come on man. This is like the ancient discarded whitespace lament about python. I was once like you before I started writing python. Then I saw the huge huge light of why white space indenting is so great. I could explain but I'm not sure I could have convinced even myself before trying it.
Bottom line. it's freakin easy to get the white space right and any decent editor with context sensitive tabs does it for you. emacs, vim, bbedit, eclipse. Is there any that don't?
This is a NON ISSUE
Meanwhile, XML might not be quite as nice as YAML for reading, but it is easier to figure out where you made a mistake, assuming you're pretty printing it (but the best thing is that pretty printing it is unnecessary).
Ha! you make me laugh. So now we need special editors and printers for XML reading. Were we not just complaining about white space. Now you pretty print to put perfect white space in XML?
To see how clean YAML is to reads for humans and to parse by machine look at a Sample Document. And here's something truly impressive, a Yaml Quick reference card written entirely in YAML itself. Not only is it a marvelously short card, it's human and machine readable. It's a superset of JSON too.
I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.
First, that was a nice insightful post. long long ago microsoft was in the same exact position when it was trying to make the jump from the non-mouse world to the WIMP world. Boy did that transition period suck. All sorts of kludge drivers to try to get mice to emulate key strokes to move a cursor like it was a mouse pointer. Different programs had different drivers or even different input modes (one frame might only take text input and the drapwing pane only mouse, or moving the mlouse over a text area might fill it up with control characters for left arrows, etc...) Even after they got the drivers sorted out the human interface still sucked. Cut and paste with the mouse was different than cut and paste with key-strokes. And some menus were only available from the mouse and some only from the menu itself. Different programs put different kinds of menus on different mouse buttons.
just complete suck..
But eventually by windows 95 it was all sorted out at the WIMP level (now the file system and multi tasking was another story). And MS ate everyone's lunch after that.
I suspect Win7 will win out because ChomeOS being cloud only is just too radical a jump for people who need local apps. they will stay in the windows ecosystem. eventually by win 9, microsoft will have all the bugs out.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers can sign and install apps on their iphones as well.
I see in the news that the android app store is now rejecting apps. The apps rejected were ones that downloaded other apps. Thus they were vectors for invasive software. Or at least potentially so. Likewise Moto is locking down droid with a re-incarnating system rom and apoptotic immune system. Apple has been heavily criticized for it's app store restrictions. But to me all these moves are a great idea. I don't want my phone to be so versatile that I have constantly be vigilent. Someday I might work up the nerve to let it function as a credit card. I defintely want to see years of virus/torjan free operation before I try that.
If I wanted a toy I could program as I wish I'd buy one of those. But please let there be some severly locked down phones before we all get telphonically transmitted diseases.
I felt exactly the opposite. I was ready to dump apple stock till I heard about the shareholder meeting. I think that him not announcing record sales is exactly the time to step out. Apple is going to have a huge profits on the verizon deal. Comdex showed the ipad has another year to advance without any viable competition. In a year, if they play their cards right, the app store may make this thing an unbeatable device like the ipod was once itunes came along. In fact I think apple is going to make so much money off the Verizon deal they will have to jigger the earnings to book them in future years.
Consider if steve jobs were exiting when it looked like apple was headed for a rough patch?
You want this shareholder meeting on the heir apparent's shoulders. it will be easy and he will shine.
It's a measurable fact that Apple's market cap grew under Tim Cooke more than under Steve Jobs. One can question if he kept the idea pipeline stocked or was just a steward of an existing process. But the former is fact and the latter is speculation.
It is likely that Steve has hired people who are great with ideas but not with the type-A self confidence he has. It's a common trait for uber egotists to drive other egotist out of their circle. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. I'm saying it is a common thing. It has been the dominant management style for most of human history.
Thus the trouble is not replacing steve jobs but imagining who in his inner circle is capable of stepping up to be him. THat person may in fact not be in his inner circle. But maybe they alos don't need to replace him with someone just like him. they need a new leader with a new style. THey just might not find it right away till steve is truly gone.
Reminds me of teledildonics which actually was/is a serious proposal as well. But maybe not a good one.
Who the hell cares. I mean whup tee doo. so someone has a larger address space . like wow. for all 12 people with such a bad design that they need 12 billion columns, I'm suite they already figured out how to do have Keyed indexes. why is this on slashdot?
I just use my scratched pair of glasses when I read it. problem solved.
I just implemented Google Chrome in Flash using Alchemy. Next I'm going to implement Flash in Flash using Alchemy. Then Alchemy in Flash using Alchemy. All on my Amiga console!
That anybody was waiting for Verizon? Almost nobody holds back on something they want for 3 years because of something as insubstantial as a moderate and geographically varied difference in network quality. Maybe the install base will increase, but double? Hah!
You must live in a city. Outside the city the difference in carriers is huge!!! AT+T won't support iphones in my area. (they actually cancel your contract if you use your iphone more than 50% of the usage in my zipcode) So yeah I've been struggling along with a jailbroken iphone on t-mobile, but that's cause I'm nerdy enough to jail break it. most people here can't do that and have been panting for a verizon iphone.
The article is missing the point here. Nintendo is making a self serving argument here. The Syndrome is question occurs only in stereoscopic 3D. it does not occur in the "point of view" 3D that the Nintendo implement with it's motion sensors. There both eyes see the same image. the 3D effect arriese because the images tracks the motion of the controller itself, as though you were looking through a window pane.
Second, I would suspect that the Wii does not have enough horse power to generate steroscopic 3D (compared to the Playstation).
Third, even if the Wii could do it there would be another problem for the Wii. Given a 3D world you'd want to move in it right? But the wii controllers are not like the Kinect or Sony wands. The Wii only knows how you are pointing the controller, it does nor know the detailed spatial position or orientation of your body. So the effect would likely be disorientingly awful.
Hence Nintendo is playing this up.
It is however a supposedly real effect.
your post is pure brilliance. It's short and funny. It even makes weird if whimsical sense. A billion would be cheap to apple if it could perpetuate steve jobs, and that's not an exaggeration.
From What I have read this process is currently comparably energy efficient to the cellulosic process and more scalable. However, it's not likely to improve in those areas by much since things are pretty much unalterable beyond modest improvements in the industrial design. Cellulosic ethanol could improve massively in both efficiency and scaling. But that requires some breakthroughs.
But I think you are right about diesel.
First the jury has been in for a long time that in terms of Energy per dollar Corn or sugar based ethanol are never going to be a good idea in the US for feedstocks that come from the food chain. However cellolosic ethanol (switch grass, poplar tree, cellulosic waste, etc...) may be quite a good idea. There are strong arguments for them that have yet to be defeated. They need less irrigation and can be grown on lands or seasons otherwise unsuited for crops.
The big bug-a-boo with these is that they are waiting for a scientific breaktrhough for a process to change cellulose into simple sugars or directly to ethanol or gasoline. There's lots of ways to approach this but all of them are not at the efficiency needed yet. It's not an easy proposal: if digesting cellulose was super easy then more bugs would do it already. It's actually not the cellulose that's the biggest problem, it's the lignose which is about 30%+ of the plant thats slightly harder to deal with biochemically.
It's likely that some breakthroughs will occur. Theres lots of irons in the fire. Some of them may scale. But if you had to do it tommorrow chances are you'd bet on the wrong pony if you went with one particular approach.
Thus the primary role that starch and sugar based ethanol plays now is that it seeds the pipeline with ethanol now, so the infrastructure will be in place when cellulosic ethanol comes on line.
Now why ethanol and not something else more energy efficient. Butanol for example. Or other liquid fuels. THe problem is that when you ad up the cost of replacing our fleet of existing internal combustion engines and fuel infrastructure it's a huge huge huge sum. You can't just pick the "optimal" fuel purely from an maximal energy standpoint. You have to have a way there that does not start with a non-starter like chucking out all the existing engines. Hence Ethanol looks like the common denominator. It's not bad. It's easier to produce ethanol from grains now than it is butanol or gasoline. and it works in the cars we have up to a point.
As long as we are comminting to cellulosic ethanol, some use of food crops to produce grain-based ethanol now is justifiable. It just can't continue in the long run.
Another route is commit to bio-diesel from algae. This too has some issues to solve to make it scalable. It can use lower quality water. it can use low grade lands. it is easier to "dry" than ethanol because it is not water soluble so there's less energy waste in turning it into fuels. And you might be able to think of some byproduct for the waste stream from algae (maybe animal feed or fertilizer). SOme of the challenges here are very simple sounding, though no one has entirely solved them yet: how do we quadruple the lipid yield, and how to we get enough CO2 into the water (without burning fuel to create it and pump it.).
There is enough bad land to fuel the entire nation if we can solve those scaling products.
It has a path forward through the trucking system (diesel) and through aviation fuels and military fuels. The latter can pay premium prices to subsidize the product effectively since those fuels are more expensive than consume fuels.
Eventually however that path requires replacing the automobile fleet. But given the path forward in the near term this may not be a non-starter.
If you don't know what perl golf is, time to treat yourself to some mind blowing perl. Perl golf is a challenge to complete a give set of algorithms in the fewest (key) strokes. Consider the Buroughs Wheeler algorithm, which is what bzip uses. How many keystrokes should that take to write? how about 55?
http://perlgolf.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/PGAS/post_mortem.cgi?id=11
Mind blowing. Also informative as well.
I love perl. It has it's problems but I love how it's such a mutable language and how simple the core language is. It has one of the thinnest O-reily guides for a language that has Regex, Databases, and hashes built into it.
I never actually understood how objects actually work or the difference between a column and row database stucturce till I wrote in perl objects. The mind blowing thing to me is that to go from non-onject oriented perl to objected oriented perl, only two changes were made to the language: bless() and @ISA. it's uncanny that that's actually true for all languages. add those and your object oriented. This means for example, that you can start tommorrow writing object oriented fortran 77 just by implementing those two functions. If you don't believe me then you are like I was: you don't understand how object oriented programming actually works. And For those of you wondering: a row data base is the same as a perl object based on a blessed hash (how python does it behind the scenes) and a column database is a perl object based on a blessed scalar.
CRC RCA HP Zenith, Magnavox. Once great companies built on top of legendary innovations and engineer. Now hollow shells with only their names to sell products-- usually products distant from their original expertise.
(Anyone even realize that CRC means chemical rubber company-- yet the main product is integral tables)
et TU Byte.
Will they have program listing in Basic, or teach me handshaking on a RS232 port. I suspect not. it's just a gadget review mag.
It's not a choice: one is not "handing it over control to political appointees". It is simply saying not packet dicrimination. So yes there will be regulators but they do not have fiat control, just enforcement responsibilities.
Thus this discussion is starting out on a false premise.
But not for the reasons given. If you go to light in a box and browse all the android 2.1 pads for sale, all of them warn you not to attempt to re-install or change the OS. this warning is not given for some propriatary reason but simply because there is no assure path to a perfectly safe re-install of the android software and drivers.
Thus there are going to ba a gazillion android pads walking around that cannot be patched. It's a safe bet there are security holes to be discovered in this. Once that happens it's going to be like windows has been with the sea of mobile zombies.
The iphones are different. You are constantly offered updates. (which brings up the problem with jailbreaking-- you can't update easily for fear of busting the jailbreak.)
Now phones may be a different matter. If the phone companies are able to push updates it may be a lot safer.
Consider Nokia who dominates europe. They are spinning their wheels trying to make a go of it with their own OS but this will fail in the face of the growing coupling of desktops and smart phones. There is no Nokia Desktop computer. So what are they going to do? They could go with Android but the problem is that then they compete directly with HTC and Samsung and eventually some not yet known "Dell"-like company from China. SO Nokia will eventually choose Win 7 to be able to have a premium system. And Microsoft will be happy to be entering the market in a more tightly controlled hardware system where they can more easily offer special features unique to Win7.
Likewise for HP and the WebOS. I don't think HP wants to be an Android house. Otherwise why did they buy WebOS? But it too will fail for the same reason as Nokia's OS.
Win7 will be like apple and offer a work-alike eco system for desktop and mobile platforms. innovations and developers will more easily target both directly rather than having to write for some cross platform API that works at the lowest common demoninator. Chrome OS will be a niche for a long time. (Perfect for my mom and millions of other people who only use web and e-mail and the occasional infrequent document.) It will be a long time before desktops are kaput. So Google has no real answer to Win7 and OSX on the desktop (yet...anyhow).
Thus android will do hansomly for a while while the market itself is expanding. But when Nokia and HP finally give up, Win 7 stands a huge chance of eating the android quite suddenly with an alternative with the advantages of the iPhone and an unfragmented distribution channel.
Back in the days of print media, graduate students used to remark that the ever expanding bound volumes of the Journal of chemical physics were enlarging so fast that in a few years they would be spreading across library shelves faster than the speed of light. But this did not violate einstein's principle because they contained no information.
If you compare older perl libs with more modern python and ruby libs you fins a lot of object oriented bloat and dependencies in the latter. It's the modern way of programming for the general case. perl tended to have more self contained solution sets, to over generalize a bit. I think this means that there's a lot of layered foam and filler in those general libraries.
After detouring in to python I've found myself going back to perl a lot. Why? well when python was young I admired it's clean lines and one way to do one thing. It made everyone elses code easy to read. the white space idea forced every one to indent the same, again making everyone elses code as easy to read as mine. loved it. But then it bloated and things depricated. Meanwhile perl just went along without changing much at all.
if you pick up an O-reily quick reference for perl it is half as thick as the one for python. Moreover it actually contains all of perl where as useful stuff in python (like regex and ties and math) is farmed out to includes. You can memorize perl and the parts you memorize are not deprecated. Whereas the includes in python are being depricated quickly.
No doubt this is the evolution of many languages. when you come in early it's clean but perhaps is missing stuff or has idiosyncrasies that need removing to extend it. Then it bloats and something new like Groovy is more sexy looking.
Perl mean while keeps simple things simple be hard things possible in the main trunk of the language.
I'd still rather write a large complex program in python. But perl has stayed suprisingly relevant, not to mention being a much better system admin language. In my dream, all shell languages would be replaced by perl.
Will you please fondle my bum?
Okay let's see, we combine the terror of OCR with mangled language translation and the pit fall of cropped or intersecting text patches and variable fonts and multiple contexts? My hovercraft is indeed full of eels.
Great for human readability. Terrible (due to some python-like indent rules) for humans to add content to.
Oh come on man. This is like the ancient discarded whitespace lament about python. I was once like you before I started writing python. Then I saw the huge huge light of why white space indenting is so great. I could explain but I'm not sure I could have convinced even myself before trying it.
Bottom line. it's freakin easy to get the white space right and any decent editor with context sensitive tabs does it for you. emacs, vim, bbedit, eclipse. Is there any that don't?
This is a NON ISSUE
Meanwhile, XML might not be quite as nice as YAML for reading, but it is easier to figure out where you made a mistake, assuming you're pretty printing it (but the best thing is that pretty printing it is unnecessary).
Ha! you make me laugh. So now we need special editors and printers for XML reading. Were we not just complaining about white space. Now you pretty print to put perfect white space in XML?
To see how clean YAML is to reads for humans and to parse by machine look at a Sample Document. And here's something truly impressive, a Yaml Quick reference card written entirely in YAML itself. Not only is it a marvelously short card, it's human and machine readable. It's a superset of JSON too.
I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.
First, that was a nice insightful post.
long long ago microsoft was in the same exact position when it was trying to make the jump from the non-mouse world to the WIMP world. Boy did that transition period suck. All sorts of kludge drivers to try to get mice to emulate key strokes to move a cursor like it was a mouse pointer. Different programs had different drivers or even different input modes (one frame might only take text input and the drapwing pane only mouse, or moving the mlouse over a text area might fill it up with control characters for left arrows, etc...) Even after they got the drivers sorted out the human interface still sucked. Cut and paste with the mouse was different than cut and paste with key-strokes. And some menus were only available from the mouse and some only from the menu itself. Different programs put different kinds of menus on different mouse buttons.
just complete suck..
But eventually by windows 95 it was all sorted out at the WIMP level (now the file system and multi tasking was another story). And MS ate everyone's lunch after that.
I suspect Win7 will win out because ChomeOS being cloud only is just too radical a jump for people who need local apps. they will stay in the windows ecosystem. eventually by win 9, microsoft will have all the bugs out.