> If you let them run through their idiot scrips and are polite the whole time they're much > more likely to just escalate your problem to someone that can actually help you
In some cases you can pre-empt their scripts and get escalated sooner, without being impolite. My general technique is to go ahead and describe, briefly, what I've already tried, and what the results were. This usually covers at least three quarters of their script, so (unless they're exceptionally dim, which does *occasionally* happen) they find themselves skipping over a lot of stuff, trying to get to something I haven't just described trying.
On several occasions I've managed to get escalated in under thirty seconds. One particular instance I remember was with a dead hard drive in a Dell system. Describing how I'd tried booting from CD and the drive was not seen, and the BIOS setup screen didn't list it as present, and I'd tried unplugging and replugging the power and data cables at both ends was apparently enough to convince the tier 1 guy that I was beyond his script. A minute later I was speaking with the next guy, and I think the whole call clear through to RMA number and shipping tag was under five minutes.
> Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Right, because it would be a terrible disaster if people decided to go into fields they were actually interested in becoming *proficient* in. That would lead to cultural dividing lines between different fields, where the programmers are all people who are interested in programming, and the doctors and nurses are all people who are interested in medical stuff, and so forth. How aweful!
Instead we should all draw computer-generated numbers to determine what field we can go into. That way we can ensure that each profession has an even balance of men and women, jocks and nerds, recent immigrants and multi-generation nationals, and so on and so forth. A nice, smooth, homogenous society.
Eh.
I'm not against having women go into computers, if it's what they want to do, but if most of them are more interested in other things, deliberately de-emphasizing important proficiencies in order to wheedle and cajole them into going into a field they're not really that interested in is not doing them any favors. When they get out into the workforce and discover that the skills they were told they didn't need to learn are, in fact, important in their chosen field, they're going to be pretty frustrated.
> The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible > or reliable source of information for schools.
Thing is, that's true. Wikipedia is not a *reliable* source of information. (No tertiary source is ever really reliable.) Neither is Google. Do they block that? Textbooks are *terribly* unreliable -- have they banned those from school yet? I suspect not. As far as that goes, the schools aren't really a reliable source of information, either. I'm pretty sure at least a third of the stuff I learned in elementary school turned out to be untrue.
The thing is, unreliable sources of information can nonetheless be very, very *useful*, due to their tremendous convenience and, in particular, their availability. If we had to track down primary sources for everything, we'd spend our whole lives and never learn enough to finish third grade.
You're missing that I want to be able to put just ANY block-level element inside a paragraph. Say, for instance, an ordered list. Or a div, of a certain class. Or a table. Or whatever.
The workaround I currently use is <div class="p"> instead of just <p>, but it's annoying to have to do that, and it's contrary to the principle of semantic markup. I have never heard any explanation why block-level elements inside of paragraphs were ever disallowed in the first place. In non-web contexts, people put things like bulleted lists and indented addresses and so forth in the middle of paragraphs all the time, and have done for decades.
I've heard that XHTML 2 is planning to fix this, but it's been a long time in coming, and XHTML 2 also dorks around unnecessarily with a lot of other things, e.g., re-introduces the concept of frames, which I was hoping we'd done away with for good, makes unnecessary and not-backward-compatible changes to the handling of forms, and I don't know what all else. It's a lot of changes, and browsers will take years and years to implement it, even once it *is* made a formal recommendation, which at the current rate of progress could be a while. So it will be years and years before we can actually use it on the web.
What I really want is just an XHTML 1.5, which should allow block-level elements inside of paragraphs, with very minimal (if any) other changes from the previous version. I'd like to have it be made a formal W3C recommendation a couple of years ago, if possible, so that browsers could get it implemented soon and we could all get on with actually using it.
The other thing I want is the ability to use SVG in img elements, something like this: <img src="foo.svg" alt="Foo" title="Dig that foo!" width="50%" class="floatright"/>
But that doesn't require any changes to HTML (except maybe to allow inches or whatnot as units on the image width and height, but that could be added later). Browsers could add support for using SVG images like this *now*, if only they would.
And yes, I understand the theoretical advantages of embedding the image markup straight into the XML document using namespaces, but in many cases they're largely theoretical. In practice, that *usually* isn't what I want to do.
... is to be able to put block-level elements inside of paragraphs. That's it. Apart from that, XHTML 1.0 is good. That's the only change I want.
CSS is another matter. I can think of a few dozen improvements I'd like to have there. OTOH, even the best browsers are still trying to catch up with what's already specified, so having anything more specified is unlikely to have an immediate impact.
> So it's not me then? All new tunes DO sound the same?
Pretty much. Hardly any musicians are writing any actual counterpoint anymore, and the principle of contrary motion has been largely disregarded these last two hundred and fifty years.
I think it's Bach's fault. New musicians take one look at his later works, particularly Art of Fugue, and immediately say to themselves, "I'll never be able to write anything that good in a billion years, so why try?" So then they just string some notes together into a basic melody, throw in a couple or three harmony parts, and let it go at that. It's so much easier, and at least two thirds of the population doesn't have enough musical training to know the difference anyway.
Javascript does have some good uses, though. For instance, it's nice in some cases to load small bits of additional content into the page without re-downloading the whole page.
I always browsed ("surfed" we called it back then) with JavaScript disabled, until capability policies were introduced, at which point I started selectively disabling certain *features* of Javascript (most notably, the ability to open new windows, but also various other schenanighans like fiddling with the browser UI). That's what I still do, and for now it meets my needs pretty well.
I don't mess with it on a per-site basis (with one minor exception). All scripts on all sites are subject to the same restrictions.
I freely admit that this is not conceptually a robust solution. If it were a widespread practice, the dorkiest 10% or so of webmasters would find ways to abuse the capabilities that other sites genuinely need (such as the ability to add new content into the page and change CSS styles, which *could* be abused to perpetrate such atrocities as endlessly looping animated ads, given a sufficiently perverse webmaster). If that happens, then yeah, I'd probably go to a whitelist system like NoScript or some equivalent. (NoScript, incidentally, just adds convenience. The ability in principle to restrict Javascript on a per-site basis goes back at least to the 0.9.x releases of the Mozilla suite, if not earlier, albeit you had to edit a config file and restart the browser to add a site to the list.) If that becomes necessary, it's what I'll do.
On the other hand, I believe I know how to neuter the language so that it can't do most of the really truly annoying things, but could still do a lot of useful things. It involves removing several forms of flow control, including all looping constructs, and prohibiting recursion. The resulting subset of the language would not be Turing complete, but I can't think of a single legitimately useful (to the user) thing that Javascript on the web is used for that really needs the ability to loop or recurse in order to work. (Very limited looping might be able to be allowed for convenience, along the lines of, do x to all the y elements that meet z criterion, e.g., uncheck all the check boxes in such-and-such a form. I *think* that could be permitted in a way that would still not allow unlimited looping forever, although I'd have to spend some time actually working out the details to be certain.)
Because, frankly, there are two major types of Javascript annoyance. The first is dorking with stuff outside the page content area that the webmaster has no business fooling around with (e.g., opening new windows, taking away the toolbars, changing the contents of the status bar,...). The other is continuing to do stuff endlessly without provocation while the user is trying to read. Capability policies have addressed the former, and doing away with looping and recursion should largely address the latter, I would hope.
I tried to learn Python, but after a while I discovered that I didn't always want to do things Guido's Way, so I picked up a copy of Effective Perl Programming and have never looked back.
> Are you saying that in Perl you never type "boiler" plate code?
Not in anything like the hundred-lines-at-a-time quantities the other poster was talking about. The closest I've ever come to doing that in Perl is writing the POD for a module, and that's documentation.
> Isn't defining a new function or variable almost identical?
Defining a new function is mostly about what the function does, so, no.
Defining lexical variables is pretty much the same every time, but we're talking here about *one* line.
There are, of course, idioms in Perl, things an experienced programmer types automatically, but they're *short*, usually on the order of one line, two counting the use statement if the function you need isn't in core. The lengthiest Perl idiom I can think of off the top of my head is the Schwartzian Transform, and Perl6 is introducing a method for that.
> Any programmer knows that for every "algorithm" line that you must ponder and twist and turn this and that > way to make it work there are a hundred lines of "boiler plate" that you type automatically after a few > years experience.
Actually, in the Perl community, we call this "re-inventing the wheel" and encourage fledgeling programmers to stop doing it. Linux is written in C, of course, so your point is valid in the instance you were talking about. I merely wanted to point out that not *all* programming is necessarily that way. The code that reads a config file does not *have* to be dozens of lines long, for instance. Half a dozen lines of nice clear legible Perl will do the job, or, if you want to play golf, twenty or thirty characters of not-so-legible Perl.
RMS opposes proprietary software, the GOP opposes the election of Hillary Clinton to the US presidency, and the PLO opposes Israel's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. security council.
> Is it normal in the US legal system to hold the parties in court indefinitely?
Only if the defense can afford to keep a fleet of lawyers on the case indefinitely, and even then only if they also determine that they'd rather do that than give in and settle. IBM can and has, but this is not universally the case. Some court battles do actually end.
> the SCO lawsuit against IBM is probably the BEST thing that could have happened for the linux > community and Free Software at large.
This may be true, but you've left out the major reason why.
It was inevitable, given the nature of our society, that at some point somebody was going to try using the court system in much the way SCO did, in order to thwart a competitor that happened to be using open source software. There are lot of ways that could have turned out, depending on the exact nature of the situation, and who knows what precedents it might have set.
As it stands, though, the first major high profile anti-open-source lawsuit was one where the plaintiff didn't have a case and the defendant didn't have a mind to settle. Any other intellectual property lawsuits that get filed in the future against members of the open-source community regarding their participation in the software community will have to stand on the individual merits of the situation, because the precedent from SCO vs IBM, which for the forseeable future will be the big important piece of case law related to open source software, is clearly not going to do anything much for the plaintiffs.
In other words, it's not good that people file lawsuits, in fact that's categorically bad, but it IS good, given that lawsuits were *going* to be filed, that this particular one was the *first* major suit against someone for stuff they did in relation to open source software. Because the first suit will find strongly in favor of the defendents, future suits will have to have actual merit to have any real hope of succeeding. That's good.
Most computer users do not upgrade the operating system or applications voluntarily, EVER.
They do eventually feel the need for new hardware, because the old system becomes too slow. (It's the same speed it always was, but expectations for its performance change, websites and games demand more, et cetera. And sometimes various dragging influences reduce the available resources, most notably IM and similar apps that run in the background all the time even when not in use. And malware.) But if the new hardware comes with a significantly different OS, they typically put it off until they absolutely can't stand the old system any longer, or it breaks.
My family has a PC in the living room that has Windows 98 SE, which of course is EOL now. And they've been feeling the limits of the hardware, most notably that it's maxed out at $notreallyenough RAM. I've been dropping hints here and there that it'll be time to get a new computer soon, and that the new computer will not run Windows 98. None of them are pleased about this, and mom is particularly apprehensive. (And the fan is making funny noises...) Now that she finally has some idea how to use the computer, she does *not* want it changed. It's tempting to just *add* a new computer and leave the old one in place until it breaks, but that means buying a second monitor, not to mention finding space for a second PC. It's also tempting to switch them over to something easier to service (Debian perhaps). With KDE, it would scarcely be more different from Windows 98, in terms of user-noticeable surface UI things, than Vista will be. I was going to keep them on Windows so they could keep using Pegasus Mail, but since that has been discontinued, perhaps it's time to move them over.
The only people who upgrade the OS and apps voluntarily are people who want more features. Power users. Heck, *I* don't even usually want the hassle of a full OS upgrade except when I'm doing a fresh install on new hardware.
> The GPLv2 is one of the simplest, straightforward software licenses I've ever seen.
That doesn't mean it isn't too complicated. It only means most of the *other* software licenses you've seen are even worse.
I do consider the GPL v2 to be really too complicated, driven by the complicated goals it's trying to achieve. The GPL v3 is still trying to achieve (more or less) those same goals, but it's trying to do it more robustly in the face of various complicated situations. So it's still *more* complicated.
I'm inclined to agree with Theo de Raadt: putting more stuff in licenses is bad. (Even the BSD license is too complicated, really.) It's bad for programmers, because it causes them to have to figure out complex legal issues to figure out what code they can safely use or not -- and whether they can link against thing A and thing B from the same code. So they spend more time messing with licenses and reinventing wheels, and less time writing code. It's bad for distributors, because it forces them to work out complex legal issues to figure out what's compatible with what. It's bad for users, because most of them have no hope of understanding the complex legal mumbo-jumbo anyway, and because the programmers and distributors, busy figuring out licensing issues, spent less time doing anything useful, resulting ultimately in a worse overall product for everyone.
The only ones who benefit from a lot of gratuitously complicated legal verbiage are lawyers. Mortal humans suffer.
> This hexagonal structure was BUILT by intelligent life.
Did you read the article? It's not a stationary solid structure. It's a long-term atmospheric feature, like Jupiter's great red spot, only shaped like a hexagon.
> A large organization, even without guns, which can freely assemble, communicate, plan, > and share vital pieces of information... is a danger to the government.
Only if the government behaves very badly. If it behaves at *all* well, it's too hard to motivate enough people to seriously work against it. Which is good, because frankly a government has to be pretty bad before it's worse than a revolution.
> First off, it doesn't say the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not > be infringed, but rather the right of the people.
Yes, but in context it *is* talking about state militias, and the need for them is specifically stated as the *reason* why the people shall have the right in question. There are two possible interpretations, depending on whether you read the words "the people shall" as singular or plural, i.e., whether you think it's talking about the American people as a group or about individual persons. To resolve this, you really have to look at the case law, i.e., how it has been interpreted, historically.
All of which has squat to do with marijuana. If there is anything in there about the right to smoke hallucinogenic drugs, I seem to have missed it entirely, despite having read the ammendment on several occasions. Also, the idea of a large number of dope smokers, whatever weapons they might be allowed to own, forming up a militia and behaving in an organized, military fashion to effect political change, is on the whole more amusing than scary.
Even if the prior poster's interpretation were correct, it wouldn't necessarily have to mean that women are not permitted to be armed. It would only mean their right to be armed is not guaranteed by the ammendment in question.
The rest of your post may be valid, but "rent" is definitely not a fair description of the business model surrounding OS X. Like with automobiles, you can continue using the model you have as long as you like, without paying Apple another dime. Of course, if you want to trade in for next year's model, that's going to cost you something.
Granted, this differs from the Ubuntu business model. And granted, there are significant incentives to get the new model (not least that new software, if you should happen to want any, is frequently only available for recent versions of the OS). Nonetheless, it's not renting.
Renting would be if they had something like WGA or activation, and then on top of that set it up to fail and disable the OS once the product version goes end-of-life. Even Microsoft does not go that far (though I imagine the thought may have crossed their mind).
I'm not saying I entirely agree with the way Apple does things. I tend to think every year is too often for a paid update, at least on my budget. Nonetheless, if you pay any attention at all, you know what the product lifecycle looks like when you make your purchase decision, and, as noted, there's nothing preventing you from continuing to use the version you've got for several years after Apple quits selling it -- nothing, that is, besides your own desire to have the latest and greatest. (And if you really want to live on the true bleeding edge, you'd be running CVS versions of everything anyhow, right?)
And no, I'm not a Mac user, though I've worked with Macs from time to time over the years (two words: "Mac Plus"). Currently my main workstation at home runs FreeBSD, and at work Ubuntu, and most of the other systems I administer are either Debian stable (servers and kiosks and a couple of firewalls) or XP Pro (staff workstations, which have to run Windows-only line-of-business software).
According to Wikipedia, I was a little off. Apparently FoxPro was contemporary with (and presumably a competitor to) dBASE, sold during approximately the same timeframe as Lotus 123 and WordPerfect for DOS. So I was off by as much as five years in my estimate.
Still, what in the name of the Wayback Archive is it doing in the news in 2007?
I could be getting it confused with something else, so correct me if I'm misremembering (it *has* been a while), but wasn't FoxPro what people used before Lotus 123, dBase came along and snapped up the market for DOS-based business applications (apart from word processing, which had belonged to WordStar and was in the process of being taken over by various hotshot newcomers, WordPerfect being chief among them)?
Umm, not very familiar with the legal system, are you. You don't have to prove *anything* to sue somebody. Once you have already filed the lawsuit, then the court asks you to present evidence, but if you don't have any, you can just drag your feet until the defense runs out of money to pay their lawyers, and then you can force them to settle or, if they refuse, drive them to bankruptcy with legal expenses.
The only time this doesn't work is if the defense can actually afford *more* money for lawyers than you can (see, for instance, SCO versus IBM).
> But if you have unrestricted, quality MP3s available for a simple download (like Anders Manga, > The Low, etc) I will gladly pay $10 or $12 an album and - quite recently - have a number of times.
You pay money for music that's been lossily compressed? Man, that's one place I won't go.
I just buy the CD, rip to wav files, import them into my music database, make sure the metadata are what I want them to be, and then encode to FLAC for scrobbling purposes. (If I didn't use the Last.fm service, I'd just leave them in WAV format, like I used to do. It's not like hard drive space is prohibitively expensive, when an entire CD is less than a gigabyte.)
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> If you let them run through their idiot scrips and are polite the whole time they're much
> more likely to just escalate your problem to someone that can actually help you
In some cases you can pre-empt their scripts and get escalated sooner, without being impolite. My general technique is to go ahead and describe, briefly, what I've already tried, and what the results were. This usually covers at least three quarters of their script, so (unless they're exceptionally dim, which does *occasionally* happen) they find themselves skipping over a lot of stuff, trying to get to something I haven't just described trying.
On several occasions I've managed to get escalated in under thirty seconds. One particular instance I remember was with a dead hard drive in a Dell system. Describing how I'd tried booting from CD and the drive was not seen, and the BIOS setup screen didn't list it as present, and I'd tried unplugging and replugging the power and data cables at both ends was apparently enough to convince the tier 1 guy that I was beyond his script. A minute later I was speaking with the next guy, and I think the whole call clear through to RMA number and shipping tag was under five minutes.
> Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Right, because it would be a terrible disaster if people decided to go into fields they were actually interested in becoming *proficient* in. That would lead to cultural dividing lines between different fields, where the programmers are all people who are interested in programming, and the doctors and nurses are all people who are interested in medical stuff, and so forth. How aweful!
Instead we should all draw computer-generated numbers to determine what field we can go into. That way we can ensure that each profession has an even balance of men and women, jocks and nerds, recent immigrants and multi-generation nationals, and so on and so forth. A nice, smooth, homogenous society.
Eh.
I'm not against having women go into computers, if it's what they want to do, but if most of them are more interested in other things, deliberately de-emphasizing important proficiencies in order to wheedle and cajole them into going into a field they're not really that interested in is not doing them any favors. When they get out into the workforce and discover that the skills they were told they didn't need to learn are, in fact, important in their chosen field, they're going to be pretty frustrated.
> The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible
> or reliable source of information for schools.
Thing is, that's true. Wikipedia is not a *reliable* source of information. (No tertiary source is ever really reliable.) Neither is Google. Do they block that? Textbooks are *terribly* unreliable -- have they banned those from school yet? I suspect not. As far as that goes, the schools aren't really a reliable source of information, either. I'm pretty sure at least a third of the stuff I learned in elementary school turned out to be untrue.
The thing is, unreliable sources of information can nonetheless be very, very *useful*, due to their tremendous convenience and, in particular, their availability. If we had to track down primary sources for everything, we'd spend our whole lives and never learn enough to finish third grade.
You're missing that I want to be able to put just ANY block-level element inside a paragraph. Say, for instance, an ordered list. Or a div, of a certain class. Or a table. Or whatever.
/>
The workaround I currently use is <div class="p"> instead of just <p>, but it's annoying to have to do that, and it's contrary to the principle of semantic markup. I have never heard any explanation why block-level elements inside of paragraphs were ever disallowed in the first place. In non-web contexts, people put things like bulleted lists and indented addresses and so forth in the middle of paragraphs all the time, and have done for decades.
I've heard that XHTML 2 is planning to fix this, but it's been a long time in coming, and XHTML 2 also dorks around unnecessarily with a lot of other things, e.g., re-introduces the concept of frames, which I was hoping we'd done away with for good, makes unnecessary and not-backward-compatible changes to the handling of forms, and I don't know what all else. It's a lot of changes, and browsers will take years and years to implement it, even once it *is* made a formal recommendation, which at the current rate of progress could be a while. So it will be years and years before we can actually use it on the web.
What I really want is just an XHTML 1.5, which should allow block-level elements inside of paragraphs, with very minimal (if any) other changes from the previous version. I'd like to have it be made a formal W3C recommendation a couple of years ago, if possible, so that browsers could get it implemented soon and we could all get on with actually using it.
The other thing I want is the ability to use SVG in img elements, something like this:
<img src="foo.svg" alt="Foo" title="Dig that foo!" width="50%" class="floatright"
But that doesn't require any changes to HTML (except maybe to allow inches or whatnot as units on the image width and height, but that could be added later). Browsers could add support for using SVG images like this *now*, if only they would.
And yes, I understand the theoretical advantages of embedding the image markup straight into the XML document using namespaces, but in many cases they're largely theoretical. In practice, that *usually* isn't what I want to do.
... is to be able to put block-level elements inside of paragraphs. That's it. Apart from that, XHTML 1.0 is good. That's the only change I want.
CSS is another matter. I can think of a few dozen improvements I'd like to have there. OTOH, even the best browsers are still trying to catch up with what's already specified, so having anything more specified is unlikely to have an immediate impact.
> So it's not me then? All new tunes DO sound the same?
Pretty much. Hardly any musicians are writing any actual counterpoint anymore, and the principle of contrary motion has been largely disregarded these last two hundred and fifty years.
I think it's Bach's fault. New musicians take one look at his later works, particularly Art of Fugue, and immediately say to themselves, "I'll never be able to write anything that good in a billion years, so why try?" So then they just string some notes together into a basic melody, throw in a couple or three harmony parts, and let it go at that. It's so much easier, and at least two thirds of the population doesn't have enough musical training to know the difference anyway.
Javascript does have some good uses, though. For instance, it's nice in some cases to load small bits of additional content into the page without re-downloading the whole page.
...). The other is continuing to do stuff endlessly without provocation while the user is trying to read. Capability policies have addressed the former, and doing away with looping and recursion should largely address the latter, I would hope.
I always browsed ("surfed" we called it back then) with JavaScript disabled, until capability policies were introduced, at which point I started selectively disabling certain *features* of Javascript (most notably, the ability to open new windows, but also various other schenanighans like fiddling with the browser UI). That's what I still do, and for now it meets my needs pretty well.
I don't mess with it on a per-site basis (with one minor exception). All scripts on all sites are subject to the same restrictions.
I freely admit that this is not conceptually a robust solution. If it were a widespread practice, the dorkiest 10% or so of webmasters would find ways to abuse the capabilities that other sites genuinely need (such as the ability to add new content into the page and change CSS styles, which *could* be abused to perpetrate such atrocities as endlessly looping animated ads, given a sufficiently perverse webmaster). If that happens, then yeah, I'd probably go to a whitelist system like NoScript or some equivalent. (NoScript, incidentally, just adds convenience. The ability in principle to restrict Javascript on a per-site basis goes back at least to the 0.9.x releases of the Mozilla suite, if not earlier, albeit you had to edit a config file and restart the browser to add a site to the list.) If that becomes necessary, it's what I'll do.
On the other hand, I believe I know how to neuter the language so that it can't do most of the really truly annoying things, but could still do a lot of useful things. It involves removing several forms of flow control, including all looping constructs, and prohibiting recursion. The resulting subset of the language would not be Turing complete, but I can't think of a single legitimately useful (to the user) thing that Javascript on the web is used for that really needs the ability to loop or recurse in order to work. (Very limited looping might be able to be allowed for convenience, along the lines of, do x to all the y elements that meet z criterion, e.g., uncheck all the check boxes in such-and-such a form. I *think* that could be permitted in a way that would still not allow unlimited looping forever, although I'd have to spend some time actually working out the details to be certain.)
Because, frankly, there are two major types of Javascript annoyance. The first is dorking with stuff outside the page content area that the webmaster has no business fooling around with (e.g., opening new windows, taking away the toolbars, changing the contents of the status bar,
I tried to learn Python, but after a while I discovered that I didn't always want to do things Guido's Way, so I picked up a copy of Effective Perl Programming and have never looked back.
> Are you saying that in Perl you never type "boiler" plate code?
Not in anything like the hundred-lines-at-a-time quantities the other poster was talking about.
The closest I've ever come to doing that in Perl is writing the POD for a module, and that's documentation.
> Isn't defining a new function or variable almost identical?
Defining a new function is mostly about what the function does, so, no.
Defining lexical variables is pretty much the same every time, but we're talking here about *one* line.
There are, of course, idioms in Perl, things an experienced programmer types automatically, but they're *short*, usually on the order of one line, two counting the use statement if the function you need isn't in core. The lengthiest Perl idiom I can think of off the top of my head is the Schwartzian Transform, and Perl6 is introducing a method for that.
> Any programmer knows that for every "algorithm" line that you must ponder and twist and turn this and that
> way to make it work there are a hundred lines of "boiler plate" that you type automatically after a few
> years experience.
Actually, in the Perl community, we call this "re-inventing the wheel" and encourage fledgeling programmers to stop doing it. Linux is written in C, of course, so your point is valid in the instance you were talking about. I merely wanted to point out that not *all* programming is necessarily that way. The code that reads a config file does not *have* to be dozens of lines long, for instance. Half a dozen lines of nice clear legible Perl will do the job, or, if you want to play golf, twenty or thirty characters of not-so-legible Perl.
RMS opposes proprietary software, the GOP opposes the election of Hillary Clinton to the US presidency, and the PLO opposes Israel's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. security council.
> Is it normal in the US legal system to hold the parties in court indefinitely?
Only if the defense can afford to keep a fleet of lawyers on the case indefinitely, and even then only if they also determine that they'd rather do that than give in and settle. IBM can and has, but this is not universally the case. Some court battles do actually end.
> the SCO lawsuit against IBM is probably the BEST thing that could have happened for the linux
> community and Free Software at large.
This may be true, but you've left out the major reason why.
It was inevitable, given the nature of our society, that at some point somebody was going to try using the court system in much the way SCO did, in order to thwart a competitor that happened to be using open source software. There are lot of ways that could have turned out, depending on the exact nature of the situation, and who knows what precedents it might have set.
As it stands, though, the first major high profile anti-open-source lawsuit was one where the plaintiff didn't have a case and the defendant didn't have a mind to settle. Any other intellectual property lawsuits that get filed in the future against members of the open-source community regarding their participation in the software community will have to stand on the individual merits of the situation, because the precedent from SCO vs IBM, which for the forseeable future will be the big important piece of case law related to open source software, is clearly not going to do anything much for the plaintiffs.
In other words, it's not good that people file lawsuits, in fact that's categorically bad, but it IS good, given that lawsuits were *going* to be filed, that this particular one was the *first* major suit against someone for stuff they did in relation to open source software. Because the first suit will find strongly in favor of the defendents, future suits will have to have actual merit to have any real hope of succeeding. That's good.
Most computer users do not upgrade the operating system or applications voluntarily, EVER.
They do eventually feel the need for new hardware, because the old system becomes too slow. (It's the same speed it always was, but expectations for its performance change, websites and games demand more, et cetera. And sometimes various dragging influences reduce the available resources, most notably IM and similar apps that run in the background all the time even when not in use. And malware.) But if the new hardware comes with a significantly different OS, they typically put it off until they absolutely can't stand the old system any longer, or it breaks.
My family has a PC in the living room that has Windows 98 SE, which of course is EOL now. And they've been feeling the limits of the hardware, most notably that it's maxed out at $notreallyenough RAM. I've been dropping hints here and there that it'll be time to get a new computer soon, and that the new computer will not run Windows 98. None of them are pleased about this, and mom is particularly apprehensive. (And the fan is making funny noises...) Now that she finally has some idea how to use the computer, she does *not* want it changed. It's tempting to just *add* a new computer and leave the old one in place until it breaks, but that means buying a second monitor, not to mention finding space for a second PC. It's also tempting to switch them over to something easier to service (Debian perhaps). With KDE, it would scarcely be more different from Windows 98, in terms of user-noticeable surface UI things, than Vista will be. I was going to keep them on Windows so they could keep using Pegasus Mail, but since that has been discontinued, perhaps it's time to move them over.
The only people who upgrade the OS and apps voluntarily are people who want more features. Power users. Heck, *I* don't even usually want the hassle of a full OS upgrade except when I'm doing a fresh install on new hardware.
That doesn't mean it isn't too complicated. It only means most of the *other* software licenses you've seen are even worse.
I do consider the GPL v2 to be really too complicated, driven by the complicated goals it's trying to achieve. The GPL v3 is still trying to achieve (more or less) those same goals, but it's trying to do it more robustly in the face of various complicated situations. So it's still *more* complicated.
I'm inclined to agree with Theo de Raadt: putting more stuff in licenses is bad. (Even the BSD license is too complicated, really.) It's bad for programmers, because it causes them to have to figure out complex legal issues to figure out what code they can safely use or not -- and whether they can link against thing A and thing B from the same code. So they spend more time messing with licenses and reinventing wheels, and less time writing code. It's bad for distributors, because it forces them to work out complex legal issues to figure out what's compatible with what. It's bad for users, because most of them have no hope of understanding the complex legal mumbo-jumbo anyway, and because the programmers and distributors, busy figuring out licensing issues, spent less time doing anything useful, resulting ultimately in a worse overall product for everyone.
The only ones who benefit from a lot of gratuitously complicated legal verbiage are lawyers. Mortal humans suffer.
> This hexagonal structure was BUILT by intelligent life.
Did you read the article? It's not a stationary solid structure. It's a long-term atmospheric feature, like Jupiter's great red spot, only shaped like a hexagon.
> Hey, it's my goddamn Constitutional RIGHT to have 150mm artillery shells lying around the house!
;-)
If you get 150mm artillery shells, I want ICBMs and a couple pounds of Pu239
Either that or a couple big tanks of liquid nitrogen and a bunch of magnesium rods...
> A large organization, even without guns, which can freely assemble, communicate, plan, ... is a danger to the government.
> and share vital pieces of information
Only if the government behaves very badly. If it behaves at *all* well, it's too hard to motivate enough people to seriously work against it. Which is good, because frankly a government has to be pretty bad before it's worse than a revolution.
> First off, it doesn't say the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not
> be infringed, but rather the right of the people.
Yes, but in context it *is* talking about state militias, and the need for them is specifically stated as the *reason* why the people shall have the right in question. There are two possible interpretations, depending on whether you read the words "the people shall" as singular or plural, i.e., whether you think it's talking about the American people as a group or about individual persons. To resolve this, you really have to look at the case law, i.e., how it has been interpreted, historically.
All of which has squat to do with marijuana. If there is anything in there about the right to smoke hallucinogenic drugs, I seem to have missed it entirely, despite having read the ammendment on several occasions. Also, the idea of a large number of dope smokers, whatever weapons they might be allowed to own, forming up a militia and behaving in an organized, military fashion to effect political change, is on the whole more amusing than scary.
> So I guess women aren't allowed to be armed?
Even if the prior poster's interpretation were correct, it wouldn't necessarily have to mean that women are not permitted to be armed. It would only mean their right to be armed is not guaranteed by the ammendment in question.
> I don't want to rent my OS
The rest of your post may be valid, but "rent" is definitely not a fair description of the business model surrounding OS X. Like with automobiles, you can continue using the model you have as long as you like, without paying Apple another dime. Of course, if you want to trade in for next year's model, that's going to cost you something.
Granted, this differs from the Ubuntu business model. And granted, there are significant incentives to get the new model (not least that new software, if you should happen to want any, is frequently only available for recent versions of the OS). Nonetheless, it's not renting.
Renting would be if they had something like WGA or activation, and then on top of that set it up to fail and disable the OS once the product version goes end-of-life. Even Microsoft does not go that far (though I imagine the thought may have crossed their mind).
I'm not saying I entirely agree with the way Apple does things. I tend to think every year is too often for a paid update, at least on my budget. Nonetheless, if you pay any attention at all, you know what the product lifecycle looks like when you make your purchase decision, and, as noted, there's nothing preventing you from continuing to use the version you've got for several years after Apple quits selling it -- nothing, that is, besides your own desire to have the latest and greatest. (And if you really want to live on the true bleeding edge, you'd be running CVS versions of everything anyhow, right?)
And no, I'm not a Mac user, though I've worked with Macs from time to time over the years (two words: "Mac Plus"). Currently my main workstation at home runs FreeBSD, and at work Ubuntu, and most of the other systems I administer are either Debian stable (servers and kiosks and a couple of firewalls) or XP Pro (staff workstations, which have to run Windows-only line-of-business software).
According to Wikipedia, I was a little off. Apparently FoxPro was contemporary with (and presumably a competitor to) dBASE, sold during approximately the same timeframe as Lotus 123 and WordPerfect for DOS. So I was off by as much as five years in my estimate.
Still, what in the name of the Wayback Archive is it doing in the news in 2007?
I could be getting it confused with something else, so correct me if I'm misremembering (it *has* been a while), but wasn't FoxPro what people used before Lotus 123, dBase came along and snapped up the market for DOS-based business applications (apart from word processing, which had belonged to WordStar and was in the process of being taken over by various hotshot newcomers, WordPerfect being chief among them)?
> Which they still have to prove to sue people.
Umm, not very familiar with the legal system, are you. You don't have to prove *anything* to sue somebody. Once you have already filed the lawsuit, then the court asks you to present evidence, but if you don't have any, you can just drag your feet until the defense runs out of money to pay their lawyers, and then you can force them to settle or, if they refuse, drive them to bankruptcy with legal expenses.
The only time this doesn't work is if the defense can actually afford *more* money for lawyers than you can (see, for instance, SCO versus IBM).
> But if you have unrestricted, quality MP3s available for a simple download (like Anders Manga,
> The Low, etc) I will gladly pay $10 or $12 an album and - quite recently - have a number of times.
You pay money for music that's been lossily compressed? Man, that's one place I won't go.
I just buy the CD, rip to wav files, import them into my music database, make sure the metadata are what I want them to be, and then encode to FLAC for scrobbling purposes. (If I didn't use the Last.fm service, I'd just leave them in WAV format, like I used to do. It's not like hard drive space is prohibitively expensive, when an entire CD is less than a gigabyte.)