I can't believe I'm even commenting on this but here goes...
My impression is that the judge based her decision on the appearance of the toy, and speculation on the nature of what they saw based on their own experience. Wolf had prosthetic hands. A man could have these things, but wait, he has exaggerated muscles. Monster.
Imagine a line of toys similar to the X-Men, where the backstory is that they were smart and genetically altered themselves (minor) and added lots of prosthetics and cool weapons. Kind of like your average soldier who takes steroids. Obviously human right?
Imagine an identical line of toys where the backstory is that the super features evolved based on their origin being from another planet and all the materials for the prosthetics, while metallic, actually grew right out of their skin.
Identical toys, different backstories. One is clearly monsters according to the judge's method, the other humans.
The flaw is obviously using the appearance and guesses on the backstory to make the judgment.
Ask any kid what "Doll" vs. "Toy" is. A "Doll" is any item targeted to Girls Only. Boys don't play with dolls, they play with action figures. A toy that is geared toward boys OR girls, is a "toy" not a doll.
Barbie? Girls only, doll. Gi-Joe, Xmen? Toys.
But what about the infamous Glo-Worm? I recall my kid brother had one and loved it. That thing looked as much like a doll than anything - it was plush for crissakes.
I guess at this point you just realize it's good that they abolished those doll vs toy categories. It doesn't solve the issue of back-duties though for Toy Biz.
I think the solution is to declare the very existence of the higher 12% tax unfair based on the method of categorization and thus, the gov't owes Toy Biz the difference between the 12% and the lower duty tax.
Aren't these tax programs the kinds of things you install and use once, file, then throw away and re-purchase it next year?
I'm sure the data files are persistent across installations, so this problem doesn't result in you losing your data.
Therefore, it's not different than MS Activation. They've set an example with XP that this kind of thing is an OK way to enforce license terms.
Should we be harassing MS about this technology, since they are higher profile and would set an example for the rest of the industry if they were to change their ways? Or should we be harassing Intuit, to give MS case studies to see the error of their ways? Or should we all just give up?
I think we all knew something like this was coming years ago, as license agreements have always said "for use on one computer." I agree that these companies, in an attempt to enforce it, may not be considering system crashes and other situations.
Slashdotters sometimes like to believe that companies are completely heartless and Intuit would introduce an ill-planned technology to enforce one-computer-per-box of their software. But fortunately we live in a capitalist, competitive world and customer satification is generally considered an important thing by most intelligent companies.
If I worked at Intuit, I would make damn sure my engineers somehow took into consideration system crashes and the like. And, if I had to release and still wasn't very confident with it, I'd instruct the Customer Service team to be very lenient and forgiving when people call with a problem linked to this technology.
$10/year which works out to a micropayment per day - sounds like a $10/year subscription that's refundable for the days not used. Why not just use that model? Refund the user's money when they unsubscribe for the unused days. They're a bit of an administrative nightmare but it might be easier to deal with that than it would be to deal with micropayments.
Similar to buying advance cellphone minutes, another simple model would be to sell the user a certain number of bytes transferrable from your site, then have a script check each day which cuts them off if they're over, and they have to buy more minutes...err, bytes. The hard part is finding the right value that doesn't prompt the user too much for payments, but doesn't cost too much. Let them type in the number of MB they want. They'll type a bigger number if they use it too fast and it bugs them too much to buy more. Offer to refund any unused bytes (rollover bytes!).
A micropayment subscription to view a website should keep a running counter in the corner to inform you of what your bill is as you click each link. With the system above, it would tell you how many bytes you have remaining.
This task could even be offloaded to a client application which tallies the bytes for a given site, therefore relieving the server of these duties.
OTOH...
I know unlimited bandwidth is a myth, but I have two servers on CIHost at less than $100/mo and they offer unlimited bandwidth. I have countless sites on them, and have never had a problem. Sure, it's unlimited with caveats (no warez/mp3s/massive binary downloads) but if you're just hosting a content site with a few downloads it should be fine.
Put a sticker on that says "Hamster Inside". People will laugh and you could say "no, really, there is." You remove the side casing to reveal a hamster turning a wheel! The rest of the parts conceal easily.
Replace hamsters frequently. I doubt they'd live long due to heat without some serious cooling, but the noise would probably stress them to death anyway.
Users can circumvent everything... except Palladium! That's right, our patented DRM technology is the ONLY thing that our report indicates will be immune to these devilish file-sharing schemes! Sign your record label up today before your business goes to pot, and recieve a free Microsoft Toaster! (Requires MS Bread and an MS Power Converter, best served on MS Plates with MS Utensils.)
Lee hopes a judge will intervene and make sure he gets a percentage of profits from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil," based on another of his creations, scheduled for release in February.
HAHAHA! Has anyone seen the previews? This movie won't make a nickel! HAHAHAHAHHAA! PROFITS FROM DAREDEVIL! AHAHAHAHAH!
Interesting, thanks. Just wanted to say that, if $ is no object, the PPCs have a PCMCIA addon, and a PCMCIA-based 120mb+ drive you can buy. Great for MP3s, but a regular player would be more expensive.
when you want to do anything that doesn't require too much typing (browsing the web, reading, listening to music, whatching DVD's, most graphic design/3d/video related apps etc).
Well, PPCs and Palms already do this. If these things aren't really cheap, who will want to pay a laptop price for the ability to do what their palm and PPC already does, plus DVD?
I'm not flaming this cuz it came from MS, I think it's not something the market wants, no matter who makes it. But hey, I could be wrong, we'll see. Gates is smarter than me, right?
It's an actual Windows XP laptop, compared to the Pocket PC which is only a PDA. The difference should be obvious.
My point is that I've owned a PPC and use XP, and while standing up, holding a tablet with one hand, and using a pen with the other, there's nothing that the XP tablet will do that's significantly better than what the Pocket PCs can already do. My Pocket PC played videos, MP3s, did Outlook over Wifi, and that's pretty much all you need. Some of the integration features will improve with XP but I don't think the bloat is worth it.
About 20%. And it's still falling. New PDA sales lean towards the Pocket PC because it has many features that Palm simply doesn't. As for Palm, their customers are so happy with the devices they bought, they aren't buying new devices to replace them. Funny how that works.
Yeah it is funny, and kind of my point. If the Pocket PCs were significantly better, people would replace them. I think the difference between existing Pocket PCs and these XP tablets is even LESS than the difference between Palms and Pocket PCs, which are significant but not what people want.
Pop quiz: What's the difference between Microsoft's future XP tablets and their existing Pocket PCs, aside from more horsepower you don't need and larger screens, which you also don't need?
Answer: Nothing.
Pop quiz: How much market share did Palm lose when Pocket PCs were introduced?
Answer: Not much.
Palms are very focused little devices, and Pocket PCs are overkill, tablets more so. You don't need PC power to do what a Palm is good at, even including basic handwriting recognition. Microsoft as usual is throwing bloat at a solved problem.
Give me a tiny, rollable (like saran wrap) keyboard (or even better - a projected holographic keyboard that I poke at in the air) and a very small PC (Vaio) and I'm rockin'.
Besides, my PC lifestyle has utterly ruined my handwriting skills anyway. I can't remember the last time I picked up a pen to write much more than my signature.
I learned years ago that it's faster to jot a number into a text file than it is to write it on a post-it note stuck to my monitor. Thus I laugh at all the post-it usage I see, when someone can just echo 000-111-2222 > bobsphone.txt.
These things might be godsends to verticals like Fedex who use this kind of stuff daily... but it'll be a long, hard sell as they've already deployed an existing solution that seems to work well for them.
Hopefully MS will lose fortunes on this endeavor and it will be known as Microsoft's Newton (if their Pocket PC doesn't already have that title.)
Though I must admit, running emulated Nintendo games on my Pocket PC was pretty awesome. Of course, MS (or perhaps Compaq) had to screw even this up: The OS or Hardware would not allow me to press a directional arrow key (to move little Mario) and press an A/B key at the same time, making basic gameplay impossible (no running and jumping at the same time, ever.) For things like Tetris it was great, but you had to pick and choose your games due to this drawback.
If someone fixed that problem alone, I'd buy another Pocket PC just for the nintendo games.
(Note: I only played backups of games I already owned. Fair use!:)
Practically speaking, IT managers are a cautions conservative bunch, and when they rollout a product to the desktop they
* want,
* are willing,
* expect, * and are suspicious if they don't have to
pay money for a deep bench of support.
I think you're right about them being conservative, but OSS has proven itself as viable without having a support phone number attached to it. This view is outdated to all but the most sheltered of IT people, and they suck.
Also, Redhat has proven that if there is enough demand for a supported OSS product, a company will appear to do it. If people need Mozilla phone support, someone will step up.
I've found that the Bugzilla for Mozilla, Newsgroup usefulness, and general web resources are better, or at least equal to, that of Microsoft. Microsoft has an edge with phone support but, I run 10 servers and 50 workstations, all running Microsoft with SQL, Exchange, NT, 2000, and more - and I've never had to call them. I won't.
I dread calling them. It costs money, immense amounts of time, and I would sit on hold just knowing I'd end up with a moron who would suggest that I try rebooting.
This notion that a software company must be responsible for it's software, so that someone can be held liable and can be counted on to help, is really just dependency and lack of personal responsiblity, and ultimately a crutch. MCSE means Must Consult Someone Else.
Perhaps Fortune 500 companies ARE Fortune 500 companies because they pass the task of software support and maintanence off to the companies that make the software, and focus on their core business.
But they're also the ones spending obscene amounts of money and time trying to understand Microsofts insane licensing policies.
They're spending time and money evaluating Microsoft's DRM moves, preparing to deal with the inevitable (some would say immediate) consequences of Microsoft's negative, condescending attitude toward it's customers.
They're the ones who woke up one day and realized they were renting software, not buying it, and that they have an evil landlord and can't do anything about it. They're just happy their investors also like Microsoft so that they percieve this dependency as a "strategic relationship". They're the ones subject to the whip hand.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla. I've also never let the public see me having sex. Neither of those means that it doesn't happen.
The first day the Patent Office opened, my great-grandfather patented the idea of inventing new products and introducing them into the marketplace for purchase and use by consumers. I inherited it all.
I plan to sue every company in the United States next year for infringement.
When I win and own every company in the United States, I will immediately dissolve them all and liquidate everything to cash and move to Fiji. All that will be left is non-profit and free software.
Actually, I just looked closer at TT (which I've never really looked at before), and notice that one (of many) ways to use it is pretty much identical to my method. So yes, you're right, I use a rudimentary implementation of TT.
I should probably switch to TT since it has the benefit of mod_perl enhancement and is definitely faster, and is basically more mature.
One thing I do like about mine is that it's literally a dozen or so lines of code with a very basic interface. Perl sends a hash of variable data to a sub which prints the page and inserts the data. Simple simple simple. TT is big and complex and unless it is WAY faster than my few lines of the same thing, I wonder if I need it. Time to run some tests! Thanks for pointing this out to me.
I was referring to the forward-moving choice between MS and PHP, not the existing implementation. I should have been clearer. The choice to avoid MS is good (they mention $$ as a major factor in the presentation.
TIMTOWDI, and one of those ways is inventing the wheel, if you so choose. So pbbbbtttt.:)
I tend to prefer reinventing the wheel on projects that I'm the only person working on, and will ever work on - if it will greatly shorten and simplify my script, which makes it easier for me to maintain later.
It's actually far, far more rudimentary than TT. It separates it better, but it's not as powerful as TT, there are many limitations.
For most of what I do, this works fine - IE, a script that recieves input from a form, does some work, and outputs an HTML page with a few variables inserted into it. As long as the content of the variables is simple (IE text, not too many things like OPTION tags to dynamically generate a SELECT list) it works great.
From what I can tell of TT, it really is mixing HTML and code. I don't like that, but it's really a personal preference.
I say that it helps entry into perl for newcomers because the experience of newcomers will vary based on their prior experience. They can learn how to do things in whatever way is comfortable to them.
If you have NO experience programming at all, I actually think Perl is a bad choice as it will promote bad habits. Structured languages are good for the newcomer to learn good habits.
Perl is like a Dodge Viper. Raw, powerful, and can get you killed if you don't know what you're doing. But if you're experienced, careful, and think ahead, you can maintain control, reap all the benefits of the power, enjoy it, and stay safe. More structured languages are like Volvos - trying to keep YOU safe but robbing you of the experience of driving.
Actually, I didn't mean at all what language they WERE using, since this article is all about new choices and moving forward.
What I meant was, in their current position they had the opportunity to choose closed-source MS software for their new site. They didn't. This is good.
You can be an open-source cheerleader by simply choosing to use PHP, even if you don't participate in the community at all. Kind of a mute cheerleader. You don't make any noise, but you're wearing the uniform.
Slashdot Mirror
Erik's Revised HTML Specification
1. All sites start and end with and have no other tags.
-eof-
I can't believe I'm even commenting on this but here goes...
My impression is that the judge based her decision on the appearance of the toy, and speculation on the nature of what they saw based on their own experience. Wolf had prosthetic hands. A man could have these things, but wait, he has exaggerated muscles. Monster.
Imagine a line of toys similar to the X-Men, where the backstory is that they were smart and genetically altered themselves (minor) and added lots of prosthetics and cool weapons. Kind of like your average soldier who takes steroids. Obviously human right?
Imagine an identical line of toys where the backstory is that the super features evolved based on their origin being from another planet and all the materials for the prosthetics, while metallic, actually grew right out of their skin.
Identical toys, different backstories. One is clearly monsters according to the judge's method, the other humans.
The flaw is obviously using the appearance and guesses on the backstory to make the judgment.
Ask any kid what "Doll" vs. "Toy" is. A "Doll" is any item targeted to Girls Only. Boys don't play with dolls, they play with action figures. A toy that is geared toward boys OR girls, is a "toy" not a doll.
Barbie? Girls only, doll.
Gi-Joe, Xmen? Toys.
But what about the infamous Glo-Worm? I recall my kid brother had one and loved it. That thing looked as much like a doll than anything - it was plush for crissakes.
I guess at this point you just realize it's good that they abolished those doll vs toy categories. It doesn't solve the issue of back-duties though for Toy Biz.
I think the solution is to declare the very existence of the higher 12% tax unfair based on the method of categorization and thus, the gov't owes Toy Biz the difference between the 12% and the lower duty tax.
Aren't these tax programs the kinds of things you install and use once, file, then throw away and re-purchase it next year?
I'm sure the data files are persistent across installations, so this problem doesn't result in you losing your data.
Therefore, it's not different than MS Activation. They've set an example with XP that this kind of thing is an OK way to enforce license terms.
Should we be harassing MS about this technology, since they are higher profile and would set an example for the rest of the industry if they were to change their ways? Or should we be harassing Intuit, to give MS case studies to see the error of their ways? Or should we all just give up?
I think we all knew something like this was coming years ago, as license agreements have always said "for use on one computer." I agree that these companies, in an attempt to enforce it, may not be considering system crashes and other situations.
Slashdotters sometimes like to believe that companies are completely heartless and Intuit would introduce an ill-planned technology to enforce one-computer-per-box of their software. But fortunately we live in a capitalist, competitive world and customer satification is generally considered an important thing by most intelligent companies.
If I worked at Intuit, I would make damn sure my engineers somehow took into consideration system crashes and the like. And, if I had to release and still wasn't very confident with it, I'd instruct the Customer Service team to be very lenient and forgiving when people call with a problem linked to this technology.
$10/year which works out to a micropayment per day - sounds like a $10/year subscription that's refundable for the days not used. Why not just use that model? Refund the user's money when they unsubscribe for the unused days. They're a bit of an administrative nightmare but it might be easier to deal with that than it would be to deal with micropayments.
.
Similar to buying advance cellphone minutes, another simple model would be to sell the user a certain number of bytes transferrable from your site, then have a script check each day which cuts them off if they're over, and they have to buy more minutes...err, bytes. The hard part is finding the right value that doesn't prompt the user too much for payments, but doesn't cost too much. Let them type in the number of MB they want. They'll type a bigger number if they use it too fast and it bugs them too much to buy more. Offer to refund any unused bytes (rollover bytes!)
A micropayment subscription to view a website should keep a running counter in the corner to inform you of what your bill is as you click each link. With the system above, it would tell you how many bytes you have remaining.
This task could even be offloaded to a client application which tallies the bytes for a given site, therefore relieving the server of these duties.
OTOH...
I know unlimited bandwidth is a myth, but I have two servers on CIHost at less than $100/mo and they offer unlimited bandwidth. I have countless sites on them, and have never had a problem. Sure, it's unlimited with caveats (no warez/mp3s/massive binary downloads) but if you're just hosting a content site with a few downloads it should be fine.
What an excellent idea!
Put a sticker on that says "Hamster Inside". People will laugh and you could say "no, really, there is." You remove the side casing to reveal a hamster turning a wheel! The rest of the parts conceal easily.
Replace hamsters frequently. I doubt they'd live long due to heat without some serious cooling, but the noise would probably stress them to death anyway.
"Sympathetic, the new system of comment, Ca will avoid the comment of twisted which spends their time insulting:p "
Easily the best post to a message forum anywhere on the Internet.
Users can circumvent everything... except Palladium! That's right, our patented DRM technology is the ONLY thing that our report indicates will be immune to these devilish file-sharing schemes! Sign your record label up today before your business goes to pot, and recieve a free Microsoft Toaster! (Requires MS Bread and an MS Power Converter, best served on MS Plates with MS Utensils.)
AOL welcomes these guys because they'll recycle and resend the CDs. Congrats for helping AOL send out more CDs and save money doing it.
A solution is to hold them until the version on the CDs becomes obsolete, and then deliver them, guaranteeing they won't recycle & resend them.
Lee hopes a judge will intervene and make sure he gets a percentage of profits from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil," based on another of his creations, scheduled for release in February.
HAHAHA! Has anyone seen the previews? This movie won't make a nickel! HAHAHAHAHHAA! PROFITS FROM DAREDEVIL! AHAHAHAHAH!
Reuters isn't a big enough news service?
n ne ws&StoryID=1715112
http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=huma
LOL oops, I meant a regular MP3 player would probably be less expensive (i'm tired. I never got that hug.)
Interesting, thanks. Just wanted to say that, if $ is no object, the PPCs have a PCMCIA addon, and a PCMCIA-based 120mb+ drive you can buy. Great for MP3s, but a regular player would be more expensive.
when you want to do anything that doesn't require too much typing (browsing the web, reading, listening to music, whatching DVD's, most graphic design/3d/video related apps etc).
Well, PPCs and Palms already do this. If these things aren't really cheap, who will want to pay a laptop price for the ability to do what their palm and PPC already does, plus DVD?
I'm not flaming this cuz it came from MS, I think it's not something the market wants, no matter who makes it. But hey, I could be wrong, we'll see. Gates is smarter than me, right?
It's an actual Windows XP laptop, compared to the Pocket PC which is only a PDA. The difference should be obvious.
My point is that I've owned a PPC and use XP, and while standing up, holding a tablet with one hand, and using a pen with the other, there's nothing that the XP tablet will do that's significantly better than what the Pocket PCs can already do. My Pocket PC played videos, MP3s, did Outlook over Wifi, and that's pretty much all you need. Some of the integration features will improve with XP but I don't think the bloat is worth it.
About 20%. And it's still falling. New PDA sales lean towards the Pocket PC because it has many features that Palm simply doesn't. As for Palm, their customers are so happy with the devices they bought, they aren't buying new devices to replace them. Funny how that works.
Yeah it is funny, and kind of my point. If the Pocket PCs were significantly better, people would replace them. I think the difference between existing Pocket PCs and these XP tablets is even LESS than the difference between Palms and Pocket PCs, which are significant but not what people want.
Pop quiz: What's the difference between Microsoft's future XP tablets and their existing Pocket PCs, aside from more horsepower you don't need and larger screens, which you also don't need?
:)
Answer: Nothing.
Pop quiz: How much market share did Palm lose when Pocket PCs were introduced?
Answer: Not much.
Palms are very focused little devices, and Pocket PCs are overkill, tablets more so. You don't need PC power to do what a Palm is good at, even including basic handwriting recognition. Microsoft as usual is throwing bloat at a solved problem.
Give me a tiny, rollable (like saran wrap) keyboard (or even better - a projected holographic keyboard that I poke at in the air) and a very small PC (Vaio) and I'm rockin'.
Besides, my PC lifestyle has utterly ruined my handwriting skills anyway. I can't remember the last time I picked up a pen to write much more than my signature.
I learned years ago that it's faster to jot a number into a text file than it is to write it on a post-it note stuck to my monitor. Thus I laugh at all the post-it usage I see, when someone can just echo 000-111-2222 > bobsphone.txt.
These things might be godsends to verticals like Fedex who use this kind of stuff daily... but it'll be a long, hard sell as they've already deployed an existing solution that seems to work well for them.
Hopefully MS will lose fortunes on this endeavor and it will be known as Microsoft's Newton (if their Pocket PC doesn't already have that title.)
Though I must admit, running emulated Nintendo games on my Pocket PC was pretty awesome. Of course, MS (or perhaps Compaq) had to screw even this up: The OS or Hardware would not allow me to press a directional arrow key (to move little Mario) and press an A/B key at the same time, making basic gameplay impossible (no running and jumping at the same time, ever.) For things like Tetris it was great, but you had to pick and choose your games due to this drawback.
If someone fixed that problem alone, I'd buy another Pocket PC just for the nintendo games.
(Note: I only played backups of games I already owned. Fair use!
Practically speaking, IT managers are a cautions conservative bunch, and when they rollout a product to the desktop they
* want,
* are willing,
* expect,
* and are suspicious if they don't have to
pay money for a deep bench of support.
I think you're right about them being conservative, but OSS has proven itself as viable without having a support phone number attached to it. This view is outdated to all but the most sheltered of IT people, and they suck.
Also, Redhat has proven that if there is enough demand for a supported OSS product, a company will appear to do it. If people need Mozilla phone support, someone will step up.
I've found that the Bugzilla for Mozilla, Newsgroup usefulness, and general web resources are better, or at least equal to, that of Microsoft. Microsoft has an edge with phone support but, I run 10 servers and 50 workstations, all running Microsoft with SQL, Exchange, NT, 2000, and more - and I've never had to call them. I won't.
I dread calling them. It costs money, immense amounts of time, and I would sit on hold just knowing I'd end up with a moron who would suggest that I try rebooting.
This notion that a software company must be responsible for it's software, so that someone can be held liable and can be counted on to help, is really just dependency and lack of personal responsiblity, and ultimately a crutch. MCSE means Must Consult Someone Else.
Perhaps Fortune 500 companies ARE Fortune 500 companies because they pass the task of software support and maintanence off to the companies that make the software, and focus on their core business.
But they're also the ones spending obscene amounts of money and time trying to understand Microsofts insane licensing policies.
They're spending time and money evaluating Microsoft's DRM moves, preparing to deal with the inevitable (some would say immediate) consequences of Microsoft's negative, condescending attitude toward it's customers.
They're the ones who woke up one day and realized they were renting software, not buying it, and that they have an evil landlord and can't do anything about it. They're just happy their investors also like Microsoft so that they percieve this dependency as a "strategic relationship". They're the ones subject to the whip hand.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla. I've also never let the public see me having sex. Neither of those means that it doesn't happen.
Change your regional settings to "Limey Brit Time" and you'll see how they format their date :)
The first day the Patent Office opened, my great-grandfather patented the idea of inventing new products and introducing them into the marketplace for purchase and use by consumers. I inherited it all.
I plan to sue every company in the United States next year for infringement.
When I win and own every company in the United States, I will immediately dissolve them all and liquidate everything to cash and move to Fiji. All that will be left is non-profit and free software.
Actually, I just looked closer at TT (which I've never really looked at before), and notice that one (of many) ways to use it is pretty much identical to my method. So yes, you're right, I use a rudimentary implementation of TT.
I should probably switch to TT since it has the benefit of mod_perl enhancement and is definitely faster, and is basically more mature.
One thing I do like about mine is that it's literally a dozen or so lines of code with a very basic interface. Perl sends a hash of variable data to a sub which prints the page and inserts the data. Simple simple simple. TT is big and complex and unless it is WAY faster than my few lines of the same thing, I wonder if I need it. Time to run some tests! Thanks for pointing this out to me.
I was referring to the forward-moving choice between MS and PHP, not the existing implementation. I should have been clearer. The choice to avoid MS is good (they mention $$ as a major factor in the presentation.
TIMTOWDI, and one of those ways is inventing the wheel, if you so choose. So pbbbbtttt. :)
I tend to prefer reinventing the wheel on projects that I'm the only person working on, and will ever work on - if it will greatly shorten and simplify my script, which makes it easier for me to maintain later.
It's actually far, far more rudimentary than TT. It separates it better, but it's not as powerful as TT, there are many limitations.
For most of what I do, this works fine - IE, a script that recieves input from a form, does some work, and outputs an HTML page with a few variables inserted into it. As long as the content of the variables is simple (IE text, not too many things like OPTION tags to dynamically generate a SELECT list) it works great.
From what I can tell of TT, it really is mixing HTML and code. I don't like that, but it's really a personal preference.
I have to disagree strongly here.
I say that it helps entry into perl for newcomers because the experience of newcomers will vary based on their prior experience. They can learn how to do things in whatever way is comfortable to them.
If you have NO experience programming at all, I actually think Perl is a bad choice as it will promote bad habits. Structured languages are good for the newcomer to learn good habits.
Perl is like a Dodge Viper. Raw, powerful, and can get you killed if you don't know what you're doing. But if you're experienced, careful, and think ahead, you can maintain control, reap all the benefits of the power, enjoy it, and stay safe. More structured languages are like Volvos - trying to keep YOU safe but robbing you of the experience of driving.
Actually, I didn't mean at all what language they WERE using, since this article is all about new choices and moving forward.
What I meant was, in their current position they had the opportunity to choose closed-source MS software for their new site. They didn't. This is good.
You can be an open-source cheerleader by simply choosing to use PHP, even if you don't participate in the community at all. Kind of a mute cheerleader. You don't make any noise, but you're wearing the uniform.