> The basic problem is that URLs are being sent to devices that don't cut, paste, and bookmark.
Devices, in other words, that are nowhere near capable enough to be useful for browsing the web.
You know, back when Juno offered text-only email only, no attachments, no web, no nothing, just plain old email, people who didn't know better sometimes sent URLs in their email messages to Juno users. I didn't see anyone suggesting then that the URLs were the problem.
Actually, you can call me old-fashioned if you like, but I've always considered it best to keep most URLs under 78 characters, so they can be put in a single line in a usenet post or email message, be quoted once, and still not cause wrapping and/or horizontal scrolling when read on a terminal.
However, many URLs that result from filling out a form are exceptions to this, if it's not useful to give the URL for the results, though of course that depends on the nature of the form.
> how about we just kill all twitter users instead?
I vote we only kill the ones who have ever posted Twitter updates less than an hour apart, or covering a topic more mundane than what they ate for lunch. Best I figure, that's about 97% of all Twitter users, but still.
> I have no formal IT training, [...] But I understood every word.
I understood every *word*, but I have to admit I couldn't make much out of the paragraph. For instance, I know what a URL is, and what URL shortening is, and what it means to hurt something, and what the internet is... but my immediate response to "URL shortening that doesn't hurt the Internet" is along the lines of, "What, as opposed to URL shortening that *does* hurt the internet? How would *that* work, exactly? Is some cretinous losing shortening service somewhere still using framesets instead of proper redirects? How 1997."
And then it talks about the idea of specifying short URLs for our own pages being a "fresh" idea. I can't decide whether that's just ignorant or deliberately surreal, but either way it makes no sense at all.
As for "great linkrot apocalypse", I can't see how any URL-related proposal can have any significant impact on that, given that almost all linkrot happens when old pages, for various reasons, cease to be available at *any* URL.
Tinyurl itself is a relative newcomer, but I'm pretty sure URL-shortening services in general have been around since the late nineties. xrl.us, for instance, has 1999 in its copyright notice, which jives pretty well with my memory, and I am not at all sure that it was the first URL-shortener, either.
Although I am tempted to propose that admitting that even 1999, much less 2002, is far enough back to cover "the whole time I've been on the internet" should perhaps cause automatic permanent banning from slashdot. I mean, seriously, what the heck are you doing on a site for computer nerds, if you didn't even get online until *after* the average end users off the street started getting dialup accounts in the mid nineties? Do you even know what DOS is? Get off my lawn.
Jazz Jackrabbit was fun to play. It was zippy, on the hardware of the day. (First time I saw it, my immediate reaction was, "I didn't know a 386 could *do* that." On a 486 it *flew*.) It has interesting music. The characters and artwork were well-drawn. I don't know if it was _innovative_, but it was a good, fun game.
So then what did they do for the sequel? They decided that they just had to make it *different*. It used DirectX and ran on Windows 95, so it was *not* particularly zippy -- slower on a Pentium II / 233 than the previous game had been on a 386 SX / 16. The artwork and characters, if you compare them side-by-side, look like they probably took more effort to create (more shading, TrueColor, twinkle effects, blah, blah -- higher technical quality), but if you just sit down to play the game, the art in JJ2 doesn't look as cheery and fun (it uses duller colors), isn't in at all the same visual style, and, generally, fails to impress. It's not innovative, it's not particularly interesting, it doesn't bring anything particularly worthwhile to the table, and on the whole it's not as *fun* as the original.
Descent was a really fun game, addictive even. It was innovative -- the first truly 3D game. Not 3D as in flat sprites in a flat maze seen from an internal perspective, like Wolfenstein and Doom, but *actually* 3D: three-dimensional maps, three-dimensional robot enemies, three-dimensional controls, the works. And it was fun to play. Descent II was more of the same. A few new weapons, a bunch of new robots, some new textures for the mine walls, and now you could shoot out lights and darken a room, but basically it was the same game. And lo, it was a good, fun game.
Then they sat down to make Descent 3, and they said unto themselves, "We must not make another game like the first two. We must make this one New and Better and Different and Innovative." So they abandoned the efficient level architecture and rendering engine that made the first two games play smoothly on the hardware of the day, and they built an entirely new game engine that required a high-end (for the day) graphics card, with 3D acceleration. They introduced new weapons again, but they also introduced an entirely new look and feel, and it fundamentally no longer felt like the same game. When fans of the series complained about the onerous new system requirements, they were told, "If your hardware doesn't meet these standards, you are not part of the target audience." Apparently the "target audience" consisted of hardcore gamers only. And behold, Descent 3 flopped.
These are old stories now. Today you can buy hardware that will run Descent 3 smoothly for a beggar's pocket lint, plus shipping, on ebay. I suppose you can probably also get Descent 3 on ebay for $notmuch, but who would want to?
Okay, but if all you want to do is turn the DVD into an.iso image of the DVD, what do you need ripping software for? Most Unix systems come with this nifty little command called dd that will do just as well.
> No, what he really should do is run Vista in [deeply nested emulation on underpowered hardware]
And then try to edit poster-size 1200dpi multi-layer images in Gimp while keeping 60+ tabs open in a web browser and cross-compiling the entire FreeBSD ports tree in the background.
> Man, you should run a vista vm, inside a vista vm, on vista!
No, what he really should do is run Vista in the Windows version of VMWare via WINE on KDE4 on Yellow Dog Linux on PearPC on Vista in VirtualPC on Mac OS X on QEMU for Windows on Vista running in bochs on Windows Me, preferably on an old Pentium II system with 32 MB of physical RAM and a really big swapfile on a FAT32 filesystem!
> As for Inkscape, it's the best graphics editor I've yet found
The best _vector_ graphics editor I've yet found, I mean. Obviously there are raster graphics editors that are more feature-complete and mature, but sometimes you really need to work with shapes rather than pixels.
> the four most bloated applications I know are also written in java
I guess it depends how you define bloat.
The application with the highest ratio of features-implemented to features-actually-needed... well, the highest *defined* ratio; the undefined not-a-number value you get when an application doesn't serve any useful purpose shouldn't count, because you can just not use or install the app then... so, as I was saying, the highest defined ratio of features-implemented to features-needed probably belongs to Emacs, which is written mostly in elisp, with a bit of C at the foundational level.
On the other hand, if you measure bloat by system resources used, I've probably have to vote for Inkscape, which, as far as I can tell, isn't written in Java either.
And lest anyone jump all over me, these are both applications that I use on a regular basis and find undeniably useful. Emacs is just plain indispensable, the closest thing that exists to a text editor that does everything I really need. But it also does a lot of *other* stuff that I personally *don't* need. As for Inkscape, it's the best graphics editor I've yet found, but it sure does soak up a lot of RAM, ho boy. Makes OpenOffice.org look like a lightweight app.
Not that there aren't some fairly bloated Java apps out there, too. There are, I'll grant that.
> In my book the reason we invaded is that Saddam wouldn't let us "have" the oil.
This is one of the most off-the-wall conspiracy theories I have yet to encounter. I'd have an easier time believing that the moon landings were faked.
In the first place, Iraq doesn't export that much oil.
I mean, yes, it's enough that all their other exports are insignificant in comparison (see also: Dutch disease), but compared to *other* oil-exporting countries, it's not that much. It's *NOT* enough to give them any significant degree of control over the global market. The US has a *LOT* more control over the commodity price of crude petroleum than Iraq. Not only do we *produce* more of the stuff than Iraq and Iran combined, but we're also by far the largest importer (and the market is an oligopsony).
But quite aside from that, the list of counties with more influence on the oil market than Iraq is longer than you may think. Mexico produces more petroleum than Iraq. So does Canada. Venezuela. Norway. Nigeria. Not to mention of course the big players (Saudi Arabia, the US, and Russia), each of which produces more than four times as much petroleum as Iraq. Iraq's oil just isn't that big a deal. (Yes, okay, they have a lot of proven reserves. But they don't have the infrastructure to develop them in proportion, so the proven reserves are pretty much just good for meaningless boasting.)
Indeed, if it had been possible on the commodities market to tell the difference between Iraqi oil and oil from any other country, we probably would have tried boycotting Iraqi oil in the nineties.
We didn't want Saddam out of power because of anything to do with oil.
We wanted Saddam out of power because we had believed for years (not entirely without justification) that he was dangerous, not just to his own country (as is the case with e.g. the aforementioned regime in Zimbabwe) but also and more importantly to the political stability of the whole region -- the Middle East, substantially the most controversial region in the world and the most likely geographical region for the start of World War III.
When he invaded Kuwait, what went through the heads of people who pay any attention at all to geopolitical history was not, "Oh, now he'll control their oil too" but something more along the lines of "Of course Hitler wants peace. A piece of Austria, a piece of Czechoslovakia..." Not that Iraq was as dangerous as Germany. It wasn't. Germany going into WWII was a first-world power, and Iraq is, in a word, not.
Nonetheless, there aren't a whole lot of major world powers in the Middle East, so the stability of the region wouldn't be that hard to upset. Frankly, Israel could take on the rest of the countries in the region and scarcely break a sweat if they chose to do so and provided the rest of the world would stand by and let them do it, and Israel is not usually considered to be a major world power. Of course, that's not the danger. The danger stems from the fact that, this being the Middle East (rather than, say, sub-Saharan Africa), the rest of the world would most assuredly *not* be content to stand by and watch a major conflict in the region unfold without intervention. And once countries from outside the region start intervening, there's the risk that they'll start taking sides, and then you've got the makings of a world war.
Also, George W. Bush probably felt that invading Iraq and then letting Saddam stay in power was his father's largest foreign-policy failure. (I'm not sure I'd agree, but I also would not want to try to defend the contrary position.) The opportunity to do what dad couldn't (or didn't) manage was probably fairly compelling.
> Actually, no. If at any point in recorded history, you > proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming > majority of people thought you were a nutjob.
The overwhelming majority of _educated_ people. But yeah.
> Columbus' opposition said that if the diameter of the earth > was what they calculated it to be
More what Eratosthenes calculated it to be...
> Columbus and his crewmen would run out of fresh water
Or all die of scurvy, or any number of other problems...
> before they reached East Asia.
But yeah. To fund Columbus, you either had to be crazy or desperate, OR...
> there is reason to believe that there were Europeans who did know,
There probably were a few, but they didn't really publicize the matter, and in any case their knowledge was based on the (much shorter) northern route across the Atlantic, so they presumably didn't know anything much about the latitudes Columbus was aiming for.
The thing about Columbus is that he was an insufferable loudmouth, in a way that worked out pretty well for European history. First thing he did when he got back to Europe (after finding Haiti or Cuba or wherever it was exactly that he landed) was to talk about it, as often as possible, to anyone who would listen, and I don't mean just within his own community. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, the French, the English, they all heard about Columbus' voyage and that there was, indeed, land within reach across the Atlantic. Not only did they here that it was there, but they heard plenty too about how big a deal it was and what a fabulous financial opportunity and how important Columbus was for finding it and so on and so forth. Columbus was a braggart.
And, actually, in hindsight, it kind of *was* that important.
> Yeah... hung, something you think we'd have given up a loong time ago.
For reasons involving both international politics and local perception in Iraq, his execution needed to be performed according to Iraqi custom and law, *not* according to US custom and law. What Americans would think of the method of his execution was never a very important issue.
> At this stage in XPs life, I highly doubt any end user or consuming business > will actually come across any non-security related bug that they need fixing
I could name a couple, if I thought Microsoft were listening and might consider fixing them.
But the reality is, unless you're one of Microsoft's BIG customers (the ones who have Redmond's ear because they spend 8+ figures a year on software) this is largely irrelevant. For the rest of us, Microsoft has *never* provided meaningful bug-fix support. We consider ourselves fortunate if they get security updates out within a month after the vulnerability is made public.
There *have* been some worthwhile fixes put out, but most of them were pretty early in the XP lifecycle. Since SP2 came out, the only meaningful update I can think of that was about more than just a security fix, is IE7.
Speaking of that, as a web developer, I *REALLY* hope IE8 makes the cut and goes out via Windows Update to XP users. Because I categorically refuse to continue supporting IE7 until everyone finally upgrades from Windows XP, probably a year or more after Windows 7 SP2 finally comes out.
> the stock photo site hired lawyers, who have contacted the original designer's > clients. The lawyers told them the designer is being investigated for copyright > infringement and their logos might be copied, thus damaging his reputation.
Isn't that, like, slander, or libel, or legally actionable, or something? Couldn't you start by going after them for that?
I know a nuke-free world *sounds* like a good idea, but it's not.
Why do you think it is that for the first time in over a thousand years we have just gone, since the conclusion of WWII, more than sixty years without a major serious all-out war between any of the major world powers? Do you think human nature has suddenly improved, and everyone now feels so strongly that war is bad, so nobody would ever start one? Haha. No.
It is because the threat of nuclear war has constrained us. Why didn't we go to war with the Soviet Union in the sixties, seventies, or eighties? We *wanted* to. We believed we were right, and they were wrong, and they deserved to be chastened militarily. And they believed all those things about us. In any other era we would have gone to war with one another, but in the nuclear era, we did not. We did not go to war, because we knew that we could all be annihilated in a matter of hours if we did. We boycotted the Olympics. We spent millions of dollars a year developing and stockpiling weapons. We encouraged our young people to go into math and science. We launched rockets into space and put satellites in orbit and landed on the moon. But we DID NOT GO TO WAR, because that would be suicide.
Nuclear weapons are dangerous, and you have to be very careful with them. You want triple secret launch codes and double keys and blah, blah, blah, and you do NOT want anyone with "nothing to lose" to have them (like, for instance, a third-world dictator with his back against the wall). And it's not necessary for every major world power to have them; five or six countries is probably enough, and a dozen is more than plenty. But *somebody* should have them. Have them and never use them.
You can *try* to design systems for that kind of lifespan, but it's not cost effective. You end up with so much redundancy (redundant UPS, redundant power supply, redundant backplane, redundant hot-swappable hard drives with online spares,...) that the cost is unnecessarily high. If high-availability were a major concern, because, say, an hour of downtime would cost you millions of dollars, then you would do it. But for a small veterinary practice, that's just not the case.
Set up a system for daily offsite backups and be happy. It's so much cheaper, that if your hardware fails every three years, you still save money. Hopefully it won't fail quite that often most of the time, so then you save even more.
While the strict pragma is undeniably useful, ESPECIALLY for modules that are called by other people's code, it is not the same thing as strict typing.
Strict typing means that a variable has a specific data type (like integer, for instance), and if you try to put anything ELSE in it, you get an error.
However, this is really only useful, IMO, if you can get the error at compile time -- which implies that your language can't have certain fairly powerful and undeniably useful constructs, several of which Perl does have, such as, for instance, the/e switch on the substitution operator. So there's a trade-off between the guarantees that strict typing can give you, and the power and convenience that loose typing can give you. Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems. And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
IMO, Perl makes good sense for the web-based front end (i.e., the UI), but it should probably be getting the financial details from a back-end process...
> I seem to remember there was a reason we moved away from doing all the processing on the server
Because microcomputers benefit from the economies of scale.
But these days we use basically the same hardware in the server room that we use on the desktop. A typical server probably has cheap onboard video, no sound card, more RAM, multiple hard drives instead of one, and so on and so forth, so the exact configuration is different. But it's made out of basically the same components. Used to be desktops used cheap IDE hard drives, and servers used SCSI or something even more expensive; these days almost everything new is SATA, on the server, on the desktop, and possibly in your portable music player as well. Even if put a solid-state drive in your server, it's made out of the same Flash memory chips they put in those keychain things everyone carries around.
So now the servers benefit from economies of scale almost as much as the desktop.
Out of the numbered ones I would take STII:TWOK, STIII:TSFS, STIV:TVH, and STVI:TFF. That's four. Of the ones without numbers, I particularly like ST:FC, ST:I, and ST:N, which would make a total of seven, but I think I'm just about alone on that last one, so we'll say six.
If you number the unnumbered ones according to release order, I guess that makes the good ones 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9.
Of course, even the bad ones have redeeming qualities for fans.
ST:TMP for instance is on the whole a fairly terrible movie, with a thin plot and some of the most egregiously overdone special effects in the history of moviedom (long, long scenes of pretty much nothing BUT special effects strung together by lame "oh, look at that" dialog), but on the other hand it features some of the best acting in Leonard Nimoy's career up to that point.
STIV:TFF seems to go out of its way to create as many continuity problems for the franchise as possible and also has a pretty hokey basic premise (the whole "take away your pain" thing), but the opening scenes are very well done (up to about the point where they get sent to investigate the crisis), and the brig/jailbreak scenes are nicely done, and also Spock's use of the jet boots in the turbolift shaft is pretty cool.
Generations has its problems (internally inconsistent continuity, undesirable changes to Data's character that have to be worked around in all the subsequent movies (though First Contact does a reasonably good job with that), and too much time spent on the wrong things (e.g., they pour time into further developing Kirk's character, which is entirely unnecessary at that point; the viewer either KNOWS who Kirk is by now, or never will and doesn't care), but on the other hand it shows off Spiner's considerable acting skill in new ways, and the main villain is compelling, and also you get to see Lursa look at an image of Dr. Crusher and say to B'Etor, "Ugg! Human females are so repulsive!", and that right there makes it all worthwhile.
As for Nemesis, I know a lot of people don't like it, but personally I find the villain compelling, and also his name is really fun to say, and the female Romulan commander is also very well portrayed, and I think what happens to Data at this point, as much as it does bother me (and as lame as the whole B4 thing was), was nonetheless really the only acceptable way to deal with the changes to Data's character that were introduced in Generations.
> In my Perl example, you have to recognize that ~ is actually part of > the =~ operator, and that s is part of the s/// operator
Okay, yeah, but that's extremely basic stuff, covered in the very first chapter of every Perl book or tutorial I've ever seen (except, of course, for books that assume you already know the basics, e.g., Effective Perl Programming or Higher Order Perl).
I don't understand the complaint that Perl is "hard to read". I think people are just being lazy and not bothering to learn even the most basic parts of the language before trying to read stuff written in it, the equivalent of trying to read Russian without bothering to learn the Cyrillic alphabet first. Get a life.
Perl is not hard to read. Perl is *easy* to read. It's clear, concise, and expressive.
Slashdot Mirror
> The basic problem is that URLs are being sent to devices that don't cut, paste, and bookmark.
Devices, in other words, that are nowhere near capable enough to be useful for browsing the web.
You know, back when Juno offered text-only email only, no attachments, no web, no nothing, just plain old email, people who didn't know better sometimes sent URLs in their email messages to Juno users. I didn't see anyone suggesting then that the URLs were the problem.
> I suppose it matters if you're on an absurdly high-latency connection.
You mean like the anonymizing proxy I'm setting up on Pluto to keep Earthbound governments from interfering?
Actually, you can call me old-fashioned if you like, but I've always considered it best to keep most URLs under 78 characters, so they can be put in a single line in a usenet post or email message, be quoted once, and still not cause wrapping and/or horizontal scrolling when read on a terminal.
However, many URLs that result from filling out a form are exceptions to this, if it's not useful to give the URL for the results, though of course that depends on the nature of the form.
> how about we just kill all twitter users instead?
I vote we only kill the ones who have ever posted Twitter updates less than an hour apart, or covering a topic more mundane than what they ate for lunch. Best I figure, that's about 97% of all Twitter users, but still.
> I have no formal IT training, [...] But I understood every word.
I understood every *word*, but I have to admit I couldn't make much out of the paragraph. For instance, I know what a URL is, and what URL shortening is, and what it means to hurt something, and what the internet is... but my immediate response to "URL shortening that doesn't hurt the Internet" is along the lines of, "What, as opposed to URL shortening that *does* hurt the internet? How would *that* work, exactly? Is some cretinous losing shortening service somewhere still using framesets instead of proper redirects? How 1997."
And then it talks about the idea of specifying short URLs for our own pages being a "fresh" idea. I can't decide whether that's just ignorant or deliberately surreal, but either way it makes no sense at all.
As for "great linkrot apocalypse", I can't see how any URL-related proposal can have any significant impact on that, given that almost all linkrot happens when old pages, for various reasons, cease to be available at *any* URL.
Tinyurl itself is a relative newcomer, but I'm pretty sure URL-shortening services in general have been around since the late nineties. xrl.us, for instance, has 1999 in its copyright notice, which jives pretty well with my memory, and I am not at all sure that it was the first URL-shortener, either.
Although I am tempted to propose that admitting that even 1999, much less 2002, is far enough back to cover "the whole time I've been on the internet" should perhaps cause automatic permanent banning from slashdot. I mean, seriously, what the heck are you doing on a site for computer nerds, if you didn't even get online until *after* the average end users off the street started getting dialup accounts in the mid nineties? Do you even know what DOS is? Get off my lawn.
Jazz Jackrabbit was fun to play. It was zippy, on the hardware of the day. (First time I saw it, my immediate reaction was, "I didn't know a 386 could *do* that." On a 486 it *flew*.) It has interesting music. The characters and artwork were well-drawn. I don't know if it was _innovative_, but it was a good, fun game.
So then what did they do for the sequel? They decided that they just had to make it *different*. It used DirectX and ran on Windows 95, so it was *not* particularly zippy -- slower on a Pentium II / 233 than the previous game had been on a 386 SX / 16. The artwork and characters, if you compare them side-by-side, look like they probably took more effort to create (more shading, TrueColor, twinkle effects, blah, blah -- higher technical quality), but if you just sit down to play the game, the art in JJ2 doesn't look as cheery and fun (it uses duller colors), isn't in at all the same visual style, and, generally, fails to impress. It's not innovative, it's not particularly interesting, it doesn't bring anything particularly worthwhile to the table, and on the whole it's not as *fun* as the original.
Descent was a really fun game, addictive even. It was innovative -- the first truly 3D game. Not 3D as in flat sprites in a flat maze seen from an internal perspective, like Wolfenstein and Doom, but *actually* 3D: three-dimensional maps, three-dimensional robot enemies, three-dimensional controls, the works. And it was fun to play. Descent II was more of the same. A few new weapons, a bunch of new robots, some new textures for the mine walls, and now you could shoot out lights and darken a room, but basically it was the same game. And lo, it was a good, fun game.
Then they sat down to make Descent 3, and they said unto themselves, "We must not make another game like the first two. We must make this one New and Better and Different and Innovative." So they abandoned the efficient level architecture and rendering engine that made the first two games play smoothly on the hardware of the day, and they built an entirely new game engine that required a high-end (for the day) graphics card, with 3D acceleration. They introduced new weapons again, but they also introduced an entirely new look and feel, and it fundamentally no longer felt like the same game. When fans of the series complained about the onerous new system requirements, they were told, "If your hardware doesn't meet these standards, you are not part of the target audience." Apparently the "target audience" consisted of hardcore gamers only. And behold, Descent 3 flopped.
These are old stories now. Today you can buy hardware that will run Descent 3 smoothly for a beggar's pocket lint, plus shipping, on ebay. I suppose you can probably also get Descent 3 on ebay for $notmuch, but who would want to?
Okay, but if all you want to do is turn the DVD into an .iso image of the DVD, what do you need ripping software for? Most Unix systems come with this nifty little command called dd that will do just as well.
> No, what he really should do is run Vista in [deeply nested emulation on underpowered hardware]
And then try to edit poster-size 1200dpi multi-layer images in Gimp while keeping 60+ tabs open in a web browser and cross-compiling the entire FreeBSD ports tree in the background.
> Man, you should run a vista vm, inside a vista vm, on vista!
No, what he really should do is run Vista in the Windows version of VMWare via WINE on KDE4 on Yellow Dog Linux on PearPC on Vista in VirtualPC on Mac OS X on QEMU for Windows on Vista running in bochs on Windows Me, preferably on an old Pentium II system with 32 MB of physical RAM and a really big swapfile on a FAT32 filesystem!
> As for Inkscape, it's the best graphics editor I've yet found
The best _vector_ graphics editor I've yet found, I mean. Obviously there are raster graphics editors that are more feature-complete and mature, but sometimes you really need to work with shapes rather than pixels.
> the four most bloated applications I know are also written in java
I guess it depends how you define bloat.
The application with the highest ratio of features-implemented to features-actually-needed... well, the highest *defined* ratio; the undefined not-a-number value you get when an application doesn't serve any useful purpose shouldn't count, because you can just not use or install the app then... so, as I was saying, the highest defined ratio of features-implemented to features-needed probably belongs to Emacs, which is written mostly in elisp, with a bit of C at the foundational level.
On the other hand, if you measure bloat by system resources used, I've probably have to vote for Inkscape, which, as far as I can tell, isn't written in Java either.
And lest anyone jump all over me, these are both applications that I use on a regular basis and find undeniably useful. Emacs is just plain indispensable, the closest thing that exists to a text editor that does everything I really need. But it also does a lot of *other* stuff that I personally *don't* need. As for Inkscape, it's the best graphics editor I've yet found, but it sure does soak up a lot of RAM, ho boy. Makes OpenOffice.org look like a lightweight app.
Not that there aren't some fairly bloated Java apps out there, too. There are, I'll grant that.
> In my book the reason we invaded is that Saddam wouldn't let us "have" the oil.
This is one of the most off-the-wall conspiracy theories I have yet to encounter. I'd have an easier time believing that the moon landings were faked.
In the first place, Iraq doesn't export that much oil.
I mean, yes, it's enough that all their other exports are insignificant in comparison (see also: Dutch disease), but compared to *other* oil-exporting countries, it's not that much. It's *NOT* enough to give them any significant degree of control over the global market. The US has a *LOT* more control over the commodity price of crude petroleum than Iraq. Not only do we *produce* more of the stuff than Iraq and Iran combined, but we're also by far the largest importer (and the market is an oligopsony).
But quite aside from that, the list of counties with more influence on the oil market than Iraq is longer than you may think. Mexico produces more petroleum than Iraq. So does Canada. Venezuela. Norway. Nigeria. Not to mention of course the big players (Saudi Arabia, the US, and Russia), each of which produces more than four times as much petroleum as Iraq. Iraq's oil just isn't that big a deal. (Yes, okay, they have a lot of proven reserves. But they don't have the infrastructure to develop them in proportion, so the proven reserves are pretty much just good for meaningless boasting.)
Indeed, if it had been possible on the commodities market to tell the difference between Iraqi oil and oil from any other country, we probably would have tried boycotting Iraqi oil in the nineties.
We didn't want Saddam out of power because of anything to do with oil.
We wanted Saddam out of power because we had believed for years (not entirely without justification) that he was dangerous, not just to his own country (as is the case with e.g. the aforementioned regime in Zimbabwe) but also and more importantly to the political stability of the whole region -- the Middle East, substantially the most controversial region in the world and the most likely geographical region for the start of World War III.
When he invaded Kuwait, what went through the heads of people who pay any attention at all to geopolitical history was not, "Oh, now he'll control their oil too" but something more along the lines of "Of course Hitler wants peace. A piece of Austria, a piece of Czechoslovakia..." Not that Iraq was as dangerous as Germany. It wasn't. Germany going into WWII was a first-world power, and Iraq is, in a word, not.
Nonetheless, there aren't a whole lot of major world powers in the Middle East, so the stability of the region wouldn't be that hard to upset. Frankly, Israel could take on the rest of the countries in the region and scarcely break a sweat if they chose to do so and provided the rest of the world would stand by and let them do it, and Israel is not usually considered to be a major world power. Of course, that's not the danger. The danger stems from the fact that, this being the Middle East (rather than, say, sub-Saharan Africa), the rest of the world would most assuredly *not* be content to stand by and watch a major conflict in the region unfold without intervention. And once countries from outside the region start intervening, there's the risk that they'll start taking sides, and then you've got the makings of a world war.
Also, George W. Bush probably felt that invading Iraq and then letting Saddam stay in power was his father's largest foreign-policy failure. (I'm not sure I'd agree, but I also would not want to try to defend the contrary position.) The opportunity to do what dad couldn't (or didn't) manage was probably fairly compelling.
> Actually, no. If at any point in recorded history, you
> proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming
> majority of people thought you were a nutjob.
The overwhelming majority of _educated_ people. But yeah.
> Columbus' opposition said that if the diameter of the earth
> was what they calculated it to be
More what Eratosthenes calculated it to be...
> Columbus and his crewmen would run out of fresh water
Or all die of scurvy, or any number of other problems...
> before they reached East Asia.
But yeah. To fund Columbus, you either had to be crazy or desperate, OR...
> there is reason to believe that there were Europeans who did know,
There probably were a few, but they didn't really publicize the matter, and in any case their knowledge was based on the (much shorter) northern route across the Atlantic, so they presumably didn't know anything much about the latitudes Columbus was aiming for.
The thing about Columbus is that he was an insufferable loudmouth, in a way that worked out pretty well for European history. First thing he did when he got back to Europe (after finding Haiti or Cuba or wherever it was exactly that he landed) was to talk about it, as often as possible, to anyone who would listen, and I don't mean just within his own community. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, the French, the English, they all heard about Columbus' voyage and that there was, indeed, land within reach across the Atlantic. Not only did they here that it was there, but they heard plenty too about how big a deal it was and what a fabulous financial opportunity and how important Columbus was for finding it and so on and so forth. Columbus was a braggart.
And, actually, in hindsight, it kind of *was* that important.
> One day doesn't form a statistically significant sample, 365 days do.
Actually, in terms of the total history of the sun, they're both too short to tell us much about the sun's future.
> Yeah... hung, something you think we'd have given up a loong time ago.
For reasons involving both international politics and local perception in Iraq, his execution needed to be performed according to Iraqi custom and law, *not* according to US custom and law. What Americans would think of the method of his execution was never a very important issue.
> At this stage in XPs life, I highly doubt any end user or consuming business
> will actually come across any non-security related bug that they need fixing
I could name a couple, if I thought Microsoft were listening and might consider fixing them.
But the reality is, unless you're one of Microsoft's BIG customers (the ones who have Redmond's ear because they spend 8+ figures a year on software) this is largely irrelevant. For the rest of us, Microsoft has *never* provided meaningful bug-fix support. We consider ourselves fortunate if they get security updates out within a month after the vulnerability is made public.
There *have* been some worthwhile fixes put out, but most of them were pretty early in the XP lifecycle. Since SP2 came out, the only meaningful update I can think of that was about more than just a security fix, is IE7.
Speaking of that, as a web developer, I *REALLY* hope IE8 makes the cut and goes out via Windows Update to XP users. Because I categorically refuse to continue supporting IE7 until everyone finally upgrades from Windows XP, probably a year or more after Windows 7 SP2 finally comes out.
> the stock photo site hired lawyers, who have contacted the original designer's
> clients. The lawyers told them the designer is being investigated for copyright
> infringement and their logos might be copied, thus damaging his reputation.
Isn't that, like, slander, or libel, or legally actionable, or something? Couldn't you start by going after them for that?
I know a nuke-free world *sounds* like a good idea, but it's not.
Why do you think it is that for the first time in over a thousand years we have just gone, since the conclusion of WWII, more than sixty years without a major serious all-out war between any of the major world powers? Do you think human nature has suddenly improved, and everyone now feels so strongly that war is bad, so nobody would ever start one? Haha. No.
It is because the threat of nuclear war has constrained us. Why didn't we go to war with the Soviet Union in the sixties, seventies, or eighties? We *wanted* to. We believed we were right, and they were wrong, and they deserved to be chastened militarily. And they believed all those things about us. In any other era we would have gone to war with one another, but in the nuclear era, we did not. We did not go to war, because we knew that we could all be annihilated in a matter of hours if we did. We boycotted the Olympics. We spent millions of dollars a year developing and stockpiling weapons. We encouraged our young people to go into math and science. We launched rockets into space and put satellites in orbit and landed on the moon. But we DID NOT GO TO WAR, because that would be suicide.
Nuclear weapons are dangerous, and you have to be very careful with them. You want triple secret launch codes and double keys and blah, blah, blah, and you do NOT want anyone with "nothing to lose" to have them (like, for instance, a third-world dictator with his back against the wall). And it's not necessary for every major world power to have them; five or six countries is probably enough, and a dozen is more than plenty. But *somebody* should have them. Have them and never use them.
Nukes are a deterrent against major wars.
You can *try* to design systems for that kind of lifespan, but it's not cost effective. You end up with so much redundancy (redundant UPS, redundant power supply, redundant backplane, redundant hot-swappable hard drives with online spares, ...) that the cost is unnecessarily high. If high-availability were a major concern, because, say, an hour of downtime would cost you millions of dollars, then you would do it. But for a small veterinary practice, that's just not the case.
Set up a system for daily offsite backups and be happy. It's so much cheaper, that if your hardware fails every three years, you still save money. Hopefully it won't fail quite that often most of the time, so then you save even more.
> use strict;
/e switch on the substitution operator. So there's a trade-off between the guarantees that strict typing can give you, and the power and convenience that loose typing can give you. Actually, come to that, the ability to store any of several things in a variable is in itself fairly powerful and if used well can *enormously* simplify the code for certain kinds of problems. And as any decent programmer knows, simpler code is easier to maintain.
While the strict pragma is undeniably useful, ESPECIALLY for modules that are called by other people's code, it is not the same thing as strict typing.
Strict typing means that a variable has a specific data type (like integer, for instance), and if you try to put anything ELSE in it, you get an error.
However, this is really only useful, IMO, if you can get the error at compile time -- which implies that your language can't have certain fairly powerful and undeniably useful constructs, several of which Perl does have, such as, for instance, the
IMO, Perl makes good sense for the web-based front end (i.e., the UI), but it should probably be getting the financial details from a back-end process...
> I seem to remember there was a reason we moved away from doing all the processing on the server
Because microcomputers benefit from the economies of scale.
But these days we use basically the same hardware in the server room that we use on the desktop. A typical server probably has cheap onboard video, no sound card, more RAM, multiple hard drives instead of one, and so on and so forth, so the exact configuration is different. But it's made out of basically the same components. Used to be desktops used cheap IDE hard drives, and servers used SCSI or something even more expensive; these days almost everything new is SATA, on the server, on the desktop, and possibly in your portable music player as well. Even if put a solid-state drive in your server, it's made out of the same Flash memory chips they put in those keychain things everyone carries around.
So now the servers benefit from economies of scale almost as much as the desktop.
Out of the numbered ones I would take STII:TWOK, STIII:TSFS, STIV:TVH, and STVI:TFF. That's four. Of the ones without numbers, I particularly like ST:FC, ST:I, and ST:N, which would make a total of seven, but I think I'm just about alone on that last one, so we'll say six.
If you number the unnumbered ones according to release order, I guess that makes the good ones 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9.
Of course, even the bad ones have redeeming qualities for fans.
ST:TMP for instance is on the whole a fairly terrible movie, with a thin plot and some of the most egregiously overdone special effects in the history of moviedom (long, long scenes of pretty much nothing BUT special effects strung together by lame "oh, look at that" dialog), but on the other hand it features some of the best acting in Leonard Nimoy's career up to that point.
STIV:TFF seems to go out of its way to create as many continuity problems for the franchise as possible and also has a pretty hokey basic premise (the whole "take away your pain" thing), but the opening scenes are very well done (up to about the point where they get sent to investigate the crisis), and the brig/jailbreak scenes are nicely done, and also Spock's use of the jet boots in the turbolift shaft is pretty cool.
Generations has its problems (internally inconsistent continuity, undesirable changes to Data's character that have to be worked around in all the subsequent movies (though First Contact does a reasonably good job with that), and too much time spent on the wrong things (e.g., they pour time into further developing Kirk's character, which is entirely unnecessary at that point; the viewer either KNOWS who Kirk is by now, or never will and doesn't care), but on the other hand it shows off Spiner's considerable acting skill in new ways, and the main villain is compelling, and also you get to see Lursa look at an image of Dr. Crusher and say to B'Etor, "Ugg! Human females are so repulsive!", and that right there makes it all worthwhile.
As for Nemesis, I know a lot of people don't like it, but personally I find the villain compelling, and also his name is really fun to say, and the female Romulan commander is also very well portrayed, and I think what happens to Data at this point, as much as it does bother me (and as lame as the whole B4 thing was), was nonetheless really the only acceptable way to deal with the changes to Data's character that were introduced in Generations.
> Is there a compiler for Perl, that is not based on bytecode, and therefore is difficult to decompile?
I'm pretty sure this is an explicit non-goal for the entire Perl community.
> In my Perl example, you have to recognize that ~ is actually part of
> the =~ operator, and that s is part of the s/// operator
Okay, yeah, but that's extremely basic stuff, covered in the very first chapter of every Perl book or tutorial I've ever seen (except, of course, for books that assume you already know the basics, e.g., Effective Perl Programming or Higher Order Perl).
I don't understand the complaint that Perl is "hard to read". I think people are just being lazy and not bothering to learn even the most basic parts of the language before trying to read stuff written in it, the equivalent of trying to read Russian without bothering to learn the Cyrillic alphabet first. Get a life.
Perl is not hard to read. Perl is *easy* to read. It's clear, concise, and expressive.
Lisp is harder to read than Perl.