The most surprising thing in an article like this is the fact that it is getting written at all. It used to be that only MS would get this kind of rah-rah journalism, but the tide seems to be turning.
Now, stuff like this seems to be showing up all the time. I wonder what single thing tripped off this new trend.
The term "legacy system" is now used to describe any piece of technology which actually works as opposed to "modern system" which describes things that might work.
Exactly. 93% (to be precise) of non-gaming computer users don't even know what to do with the speed/performance of their "legacy" machines. Except possibly upgrading to a new version of Windows.
This is just another spin on the marketing logic that makes us think we would be a lot better off with faster machines.
And that makes me wonder: the commodity PC is something of a marketing anomaly. How long will it take before the marketing bozos start trying to reverse that trend? Or is it really unthinkable? Is this legacy BS a sign of things to come?
Inertia does matter among web users, yet people can change really quickly. I'm sure that within 6 months, some upstart search engine could take the world by storm. However, I doubt that Yahoo will be that search engine, since whatever they do will be bogged down by their other commercial strategies. I guess you could call that corporate inertia.
The other big question is whether people will start using the Google spinoff services or not. I'm not sure that many people will get beyond the initial main Google search page.
People love causes that are black and white. If they don't have one then they will invent one. It might manifest as a religion, a Cold War, a football rivalry, or an anti-war movement. The simpler it is, the less thinking is involved.
Terr'rism has become the new Red Scare. We'll probably have to go through a McCarthy-like phase before things get better.
If they do ever get better.
Also, I am convinced that this is all much more political than technological. Technology is making it easier to spy on people, but you can do it w/o technology too. Remember Soviet Russia, or the German Democratic Republic?
So don't let 'em fool you with this technology stuff. It's political! It is deliberate, it is a choice
A few dozen netarati with popular blogs can make the original hard news article that coined the term to be dropped from the first page of the search results. This is in fact proof that google sometimes doesn't work.
Nobody ever promised us that Google would be an accurate representation of society, of the language, or anything else. It's just a way of finding stuff on the internet.
We have started giving Google these almost God-like qualities. Google is still "working" just fine. It might turn out that it is not a sure source of universal wisdom, however.
Most PHP books out there tend to spin the mantra of PHP and MySQL or Postgresql without taking the time to show how to use PHP in a modern context where it deserves to be. Thus much PHP programming gets scoffed at because it tends to be unmaintainable.
I agree 100% with this. I started with php but have moved on to mod_perl, mostly because php books encourage lazy, one shot coding. I've got hundreds of lines of code I am rewriting right now because I have to switch from MySQL to Postrges. If only I wouldda known!
Today I need a modularized setup that is easy to maintain, and it seems like most of the php books don't really encourage this kind of approach. I probably don't need most of the stuff that mod_perl has over php, but the basic idea of separating out modules, packages, or whatever, is going to make my life a lot simpler in the long run.
26 % really ain't that bad, coming from the Panel. That means that 26% of the panel thinks "decimate" is A-OK for produce or servers. I'll bet that is good enough for/.
I think this guy has a Perl script that automatically posts the same troll each time a php related story comes up. This is at least the third time I've seen this exact same text. At least it is posted as AC this time, usually it is posted by egg_troll or something like that.
The astonishing thing is that it continues to work!
It sounds like the book isn't too centered around a single distro. That was the single most annoying thing with certain books, back when I was a n00b: books that only dealt with one distro, usually RedHat. Since details are what cause problems when you don't know what you are doing, the subtle differences between Debian and RH made some books (that I had already purchased) useless as time went by.
By interceding in the Ivory Coast when no one asked them to? I don't recall UN approval of that action. Where is the diplomacy there?
Yes, there was UN approval. The entire Security Council, including the US, voted in favor of French action in the Ivory Coast. France was widely praised by the Security Council for its intervention, possibly preventing Rwanda style massacres.
People never get this, and it is mostly the fault of the mainstream press coverage of the GPL. They get to the part where they explain that "you can modify the source code as long as you give the changes back to the community." Is it really too complicated to say "you can modify and distribute the source code, if..."?
No, I guess that is really just too complicated...
Thanks for the detailed explanation. You obviously have a point, in that the complexity of XML is tough to deal with using regexes.
However, if the particular problem that you mention is really the problem, then there might be hope for my idea;-)...
If the input stream can be parsed for regexes on the way in, then it could be taught to do count the number of nested <b> tags so that it would end at the right level of nesting.
If that was the only problem, then it seems like it could be surmounted. The real obstacle would be if this thing just kept getting more and more complex in order to deal with all kinds of other complications.
I don't know what's going on in Perl 6, but it seems like Perl needs some kind of built-in way of running through an xml file by tags, in a way similar to the standard line by line file reading operator. Rather than grabbing a single line at a time, or having to slurp in the whole file before whacking it up, you should be able to pass a regex to the input operator so that it will stop when it gets to the end of a chunk of text defined by an end tag.
Obviously, there are ways of getting around this by using a line-by-line approach, but I'm pretty sure that if such a thing existed and was easy to implement, it would get used a lot and would make Perl far more xml friendly.
This is what people usually say. However, I had a problem (using MS Access XML exports -- granted it's pretty simple XML) where a quick regex solution was a lot faster than learning how to use some other tool. Just chop up your different elements, get your tags and get out... Probably (definitely) not a universal solution, but in my case it saved me a lot of time and got the job done.
Google's role in society is no longer one of profit, it has become the navigator for millions of people to access free information. With great power comes great responsiblity.
I totally agree with this. After all, Google has become a monopoly of sorts, and so one would hope that they become a benevolent dictator, rather than taking the road of some other recent monopolies...
I realize that as a multinational, Google has to deal with a lot of different governments who have different ideas about the Web's role in society, and I'm sure that it ain't that easy to make everybody happy.
There needs to be a kind of consensus, however, that Google is not a content provider, but rather a description of what is out there. It's a pretty fine line to walk, I'm sure. (Yahoo got in trouble in France because someone was using one of their marketplace forums to sell Nazi gear...)
If I were running a company (which I am not!), I think I would rather spend money on people than on software. This seems like a selling point for OSS. You don't pay for a fancy box, a licence, advertising, and all the other horseshit, you just pay people who are going to solve your problems.
You have to pay for people anyway, with Closed Source (r), so why not only pay for that. IT should be thought of as a service, and not as a product.
Anyway, if I was running a company (which I am not!), this is the kind of thinking that would convince me.
Yes, version 4 will be an improvement, BUT it is still missing many key features like views, triggers, full outer joins, update with subselect, that are already present in Postgres, and the fact is I've been using the features that MySQL is promising for the future for a year and a half now.
One thing that probably keeps a lot of users (esp. web people) loyal to MySQL, is the fact that they learned SQL on MySQL and don't really know what else it should be doing for them.
In fact, that is where I am right now: just realizing the limits of what MySQL can do and tired of writing various hacks via PHP or Perl to get around certain weaknesses.
But I think that a lack of SQL culture could keep many users locked into MySQL when other DBs might be better for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I was still using A = 1 B = 2... Now my stuff is really going to be secure.
The most surprising thing in an article like this is the fact that it is getting written at all. It used to be that only MS would get this kind of rah-rah journalism, but the tide seems to be turning.
Now, stuff like this seems to be showing up all the time. I wonder what single thing tripped off this new trend.
Exactly. 93% (to be precise) of non-gaming computer users don't even know what to do with the speed/performance of their "legacy" machines. Except possibly upgrading to a new version of Windows.
This is just another spin on the marketing logic that makes us think we would be a lot better off with faster machines.
And that makes me wonder: the commodity PC is something of a marketing anomaly. How long will it take before the marketing bozos start trying to reverse that trend? Or is it really unthinkable? Is this legacy BS a sign of things to come?
The other big question is whether people will start using the Google spinoff services or not. I'm not sure that many people will get beyond the initial main Google search page.
Qwest will always be an exception to any kind of rule like this.
But no! Hang on! The sixties are coming soon!
When the 60's doc get on line, that's when the revolution is going to happen!
Otherwise I'm going to trade them in.
Terr'rism has become the new Red Scare. We'll probably have to go through a McCarthy-like phase before things get better.
If they do ever get better.
Also, I am convinced that this is all much more political than technological. Technology is making it easier to spy on people, but you can do it w/o technology too. Remember Soviet Russia, or the German Democratic Republic?
So don't let 'em fool you with this technology stuff. It's political! It is deliberate, it is a choice
Nobody ever promised us that Google would be an accurate representation of society, of the language, or anything else. It's just a way of finding stuff on the internet.
We have started giving Google these almost God-like qualities. Google is still "working" just fine. It might turn out that it is not a sure source of universal wisdom, however.
It's a search engine. Get over it.
I agree 100% with this. I started with php but have moved on to mod_perl, mostly because php books encourage lazy, one shot coding. I've got hundreds of lines of code I am rewriting right now because I have to switch from MySQL to Postrges. If only I wouldda known!
Today I need a modularized setup that is easy to maintain, and it seems like most of the php books don't really encourage this kind of approach. I probably don't need most of the stuff that mod_perl has over php, but the basic idea of separating out modules, packages, or whatever, is going to make my life a lot simpler in the long run.
Links are always good. Period. No matter what they link to. In any text, the more shit you have underlined, or in color, the better.
26 % really ain't that bad, coming from the Panel. That means that 26% of the panel thinks "decimate" is A-OK for produce or servers. I'll bet that is good enough for /.
The astonishing thing is that it continues to work!
What about good porn? Can that be compressed more efficiently?
Yes, that is good.
It sounds like the book isn't too centered around a single distro. That was the single most annoying thing with certain books, back when I was a n00b: books that only dealt with one distro, usually RedHat. Since details are what cause problems when you don't know what you are doing, the subtle differences between Debian and RH made some books (that I had already purchased) useless as time went by.
Running Linux was a good exception to this.
Yes, there was UN approval. The entire Security Council, including the US, voted in favor of French action in the Ivory Coast. France was widely praised by the Security Council for its intervention, possibly preventing Rwanda style massacres.
Don't sweat it... we're already there.
Free and Open are not really the keys to the licence, per se. They are part of the ideas that go along with the GPL.
No, I guess that is really just too complicated...
Thanks for the detailed explanation. You obviously have a point, in that the complexity of XML is tough to deal with using regexes.
However, if the particular problem that you mention is really the problem, then there might be hope for my idea ;-)...
If the input stream can be parsed for regexes on the way in, then it could be taught to do count the number of nested <b> tags so that it would end at the right level of nesting.
If that was the only problem, then it seems like it could be surmounted. The real obstacle would be if this thing just kept getting more and more complex in order to deal with all kinds of other complications.
I don't know what's going on in Perl 6, but it seems like Perl needs some kind of built-in way of running through an xml file by tags, in a way similar to the standard line by line file reading operator. Rather than grabbing a single line at a time, or having to slurp in the whole file before whacking it up, you should be able to pass a regex to the input operator so that it will stop when it gets to the end of a chunk of text defined by an end tag.
Obviously, there are ways of getting around this by using a line-by-line approach, but I'm pretty sure that if such a thing existed and was easy to implement, it would get used a lot and would make Perl far more xml friendly.
This is what people usually say. However, I had a problem (using MS Access XML exports -- granted it's pretty simple XML) where a quick regex solution was a lot faster than learning how to use some other tool. Just chop up your different elements, get your tags and get out... Probably (definitely) not a universal solution, but in my case it saved me a lot of time and got the job done.
I totally agree with this. After all, Google has become a monopoly of sorts, and so one would hope that they become a benevolent dictator, rather than taking the road of some other recent monopolies...
I realize that as a multinational, Google has to deal with a lot of different governments who have different ideas about the Web's role in society, and I'm sure that it ain't that easy to make everybody happy.
There needs to be a kind of consensus, however, that Google is not a content provider, but rather a description of what is out there. It's a pretty fine line to walk, I'm sure. (Yahoo got in trouble in France because someone was using one of their marketplace forums to sell Nazi gear...)
If I were running a company (which I am not!), I think I would rather spend money on people than on software. This seems like a selling point for OSS. You don't pay for a fancy box, a licence, advertising, and all the other horseshit, you just pay people who are going to solve your problems.
You have to pay for people anyway, with Closed Source (r), so why not only pay for that. IT should be thought of as a service, and not as a product.
Anyway, if I was running a company (which I am not!), this is the kind of thinking that would convince me.
One thing that probably keeps a lot of users (esp. web people) loyal to MySQL, is the fact that they learned SQL on MySQL and don't really know what else it should be doing for them.
In fact, that is where I am right now: just realizing the limits of what MySQL can do and tired of writing various hacks via PHP or Perl to get around certain weaknesses.
But I think that a lack of SQL culture could keep many users locked into MySQL when other DBs might be better for them.