myself I think that it still looks like noise different noise from Perl5 but still hard to read and to maintain.
One of the features of Perl6 that I really like is custom syntax. That helps a lot.
I like a lot of Ruby syntax, some of it Perl-inspired -- the optional brackets are beautiful. I like Python's indentation, and if I could, I'd probably be using Lazibi in Ruby. I like Javascript's object notation, and its treating of hashes as objects.
A lot of these, though, are mostly cosmetic. Certainly it's possible to abuse things, but by making the syntax separate, it means we can stop arguing about what syntax makes a good language, and start focusing on other features.
For beginners, there's Python,
I don't know, I've yet to see an environment beat Try Ruby for sheer beginner accessibility.
Surely she hits it just right when she says, "You know, don't be afraid of information."
Taken out of context, that's a great sentiment.
I just don't agree with what she's saying in context -- that "both" views should be taught (there are only two?), rather than that science should be taught.
If she was advocating taking macro-evolution out of science class (while leaving micro-evolution), that would be worth considering. That, we could have a discussion about.
Assume for a moment that Microsoft is actually trying to move in the direction of standards-compliance.
By not adopting it, you send Microsoft the message that no one cares -- or worse, that they can't possibly get it right, and may as well not try.
yet another half baked browser which complicates the code, adds to the dev cost & diminishes the resources available to move to standards compliant HTML.
I'm not sure a browser exists that doesn't have bugs in its adherence to that standard.
I'm not suggesting we expend tremendous resources to support IE7, either. What I'm suggesting is that if, as a developer, I choose to ignore IE6 and support IE7, it's going to take far less effort, given that I'm already going to be supporting browsers that mostly get it right, like Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
Given that, why would I want anyone to make my job harder?
You called someone who refuses to update to IE7 part of the problem.
And in what way is that counseling them to "support" it? Certainly not moreso than they already "support" IE6.
You do know that IE7 breaks many sites that were coded for IE6, right?
None of the ones I need, fortunately. But by deliberately using a browser that doesn't work with those sites, I'm hopefully helping to encourage the admins to move towards standards compliance.
When would this be, pray tell? Even on completely locked down corporate PCs, Portable Firefox makes avoiding IE possible.
Well, you said it yourself. The choice isn't that you can't install Firefox, it's that some websites won't actually work on Firefox.
Another example would be places that embed the IE engine via ActiveX -- Steam, for instance, or many EA games.
The most common example, for me, is a simple Windows Update on XP. I can do that from an IETab, but that's the same problem -- it'll be using the IE rendering engine.
Thanks for providing an object lesson for why we need more science in our schools.
Because you obviously didn't get it.
Science doesn't prove things. It disproves things.
So if you say one is a theory by your own logic you should say the other is also,
Mostly because you are ignorant of what the word "theory" means in a scientific context.
You see, evolution qualifies as a well-tested scientific theory.
The other doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis.
Because, you see, one requirement for a hypothesis -- or a theory -- is that it be falsifiable. The claim that the Earth is six thousand years old has quite a lot of evidence against it -- nearly as much as the claim that the Earth is flat.
So, of course, modern Creationists claim that everything was placed just so by God to fool us scientists -- that he is tricking our instruments, or that he put the carbon there, and the dinosaur bones in the ground, to make us think the world is older than it is. (Pretty devious for a purely-good being, but I'll let it slide.)
But that claim is not falsifiable -- we can never disprove it, because for any evidence we find against it, some lunatic can say "Oh, God put that there to fool you."
Which puts it strictly in the realm of fantasy -- I can make up crazy shit all day that isn't falsifiable. Take the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for example. You can't disprove it -- therefore, it must be given time in the classroom!
In fact several places it's mentioned that God doesn't have any concept of Time.
Citation, please? There are several public-domain translations of the Good Book online; give me a book, a chapter, and a verse number, and I can go check for myself.
Unless, of course, this is just your interpretation.
That's because you don't have to use @_ or shift. Perl can support named parameters, optional parameters,
Really? I've never seen it, not directly. All I ever see is:
my ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_;
Or:
my $params = shift; if ($params->{whatever}) {... }
Does it have more than this?
I do know that with Ruby, I can specify a "splat" argument, or I can use the positional arguments directly. And with Javascript, I can either use positional arguments, or the "arguments" array, or both. But Perl only ever seemed to support @_.
I'm sure the CPAN has modules for all this.
Ah. That explains it.
It's interesting how that works -- when a language like Perl stagnates, people extend it with modules. Not necessarily bad, just strange.
Neither Python nor Ruby have a code repository with the depth and breadth of CPAN. Rubygems has promise, but CPAN has at least a 10 year head start on it.
Depth and breadth means nothing at all when I can find exactly what I need in Rubygems.
It's a bit like Google. What do I care what the other few hundred million (or billion) results are? I'm probably not going to read past the first page.
...more mature and IMHO more productive.
I would agree with you, but only because of CPAN. And given the above...
No, I don't think Perl is "write-only", and I know it isn't horrible. I know it's possible to write ugly Ruby code.
I do, however, find that on the occasion I have to do more than simply glue components together -- that is, when I have to actually write something new -- I can do so much more easily in Ruby than in Perl.
Storing addresses means writing a couple more bytes to an inode or allocation table.
Take a multi-gigabyte file, with, say, 4k blocks. For each gigabyte, that's 262,144 addresses.
Store it as mostly-contiguous extents, and you spend a few bytes. Store it as individual addresses, and you're up to a megabyte or two, depending on the size of your address.
The "250% more space" was talking about the metadata, not the data itself. I'm not implying that one-gig file now takes 2.5 gigs.
Flash natively does this anyways, due to wear leveling.
Which means that if the filesystem itself is fragmented, you've got overhead on top of that overhead.
And that's assuming it does the wear-leveling itself. There's always jffs2 -- Linux filesystem which natively does wear-leveling -- but it requires lower-level access to the Flash than most interfaces provide.
There's absolutely ZERO perceivable performance penalty in random access on memory cells.
No, what I'm talking about is the performance penalty caused by an OS assuming it's dealing with a hard drive. Given that assumption, it might do something stupid like wait for each read to complete before sending another -- which would be reasonable, given a slow disk, but is quite unreasonable, given Flash.
With an OS like that, one optimization is for the hardware to anticipate the filesystem wanting the next megabyte, or hundred megabytes, and reading them all simultaneously into its own cache, ready and waiting for the OS. But for it to do this, they need to at least be logically contiguous (as far as the OS knows).
the criteria you are using to call it 2.5D is INVALID.
What criteria would you use? Or are you arguing there's no such thing as 2.5D?
As to the rest of your post, saying the same exact thing all over again, but more insulting, isn't going to make me agree with you. Hopefully it made you feel better -- otherwise, it was a waste of time.
Why Modern, Western Marriage Has Become A Bad Business Decision For Men
If you think it's about business, you're already so out of touch with the concept that it's hardly worth reading the rest of it.
Of course, I did anyway. It seems to be a scathing indictment of a certain type of traditional marriage -- probably one the author was in -- but can't possibly cover all marriage. For example:
If a married man cheats, he's the scum of the earth.... However, when the woman cheats, she's portrayed as the victim of an insensitive and inattentive husband.
Yeah... it's called an open marriage. Not all marriages even have a concept of "cheating".
Oh, and your web design sucks. Seriously, who makes all links point nowhere, and only be useful to spawn Javascript popup windows? If I want to go back to your site, I'll use the back button, or open the link in a new tab... Oh wait, I can't, because they aren't actually links.
If you haven't even popped the question, think of it as a geeky engagement ring -- certainly, you'll want her to be apart of the decision of what eventually becomes a wedding band, for two reasons:
First, "popping the question" implies that you don't know if she'll say yes. It's going to really suck if you go to all this trouble and she says "no", or "I'm not ready".
Second, and more importantly: Assume she does say yes. (You're probably assuming that anyway.) Shouldn't she be a part of a decision about something she'll wear every day for the rest of her life?
Perl 5 is near perfect: it does many things very efficiently, especially in coding effort department.
As a former Perl hacker who's been converted to Ruby, I must politely disagree. Perl5 is nowhere near perfect.
Perl 6 is a standard. Whatever implements standard can be called Perl 6.
Since that's "nothing", so far, it's pretty much vaporware.
CLR is not interpreter.
Again, in short: Yes, CLR is an interpreter. At least, it's every bit as much an interpreter as Perl is -- and every bit as much an interpreter as the JVM is.
There's another important difference: I can run Ruby and Python on.NET, and on the JVM. I can't run them on Parrot, which was supposed to be the one scripting VM to rule them all.
Ruby's going through its own somewhat painful transition right now, what with 1.8.7 and 1.9. Hopefully that'll work itself out fairly soon, though.
The difference is, 1.8.6 doesn't suck. Most of the difference is that 1.8.6 is slower, due to being on a slower VM. Most of what breaks (now, anyway) in the transition to 1.9 are various native extensions.
However, Perl5 does suck, compared to Ruby or Python. Perl6 looks very, very good -- but is nowhere near ready.
I could reasonably expect to pick up Ruby 1.8.6 (or 1.8.7), and have most of my existing code and coding style still work in 1.9. Or I could pick up 1.9, and backport some features to 1.8.6 (which is what 1.8.7 is, mostly).
I don't think I could reasonably expect to pick up Perl5, and know anything at all about Perl6. The best I could hope for is that most of my old code would still work in Ponie, which is Perl5 on the Perl6 engine -- implying that yes, they are completely different languages.
You see, you can argue about Creationism. You can make very good philosophical arguments for and against Creationism in all its forms -- Intelligent Design being one of them. And you can make very good philosophical and scientific arguments for and against Evolution.
What is clear, however, is that Evolution is a scientific theory. Creationism isn't.
In other words: Right or wrong, Evolution is science. Creationism isn't. That's not an opinion, it's a fact -- by definition, "I think the Earth is six thousand years old because an old book told me so" is not science.
The only place Creationism has in a science classroom is as an object lesson of something that is not science.
However, it seems like almost every politician who has been around for a while has had a corruption scandal.
That could as easily be an indication of a problem with our system, and not a problem with fundamental human nature.
I think it runs a bit deeper. A Dune quote: "Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."
There are other ways to tell that you aren't incorruptible. Have you ever lied to someone? This is an abuse of your power to control the perception of others for personal gain.
Not necessarily for personal gain.
I can't remember lying recently. I don't know that I could say I've never lied.
Stealing is much the same, as is cheating.
And these, I don't do.
It's worth considering that no such principle is absolute -- there can be mitigating circumstances. That would tend to support this:
We expect and demand perfection from imperfect people, and then when our unreasonable expectations are not met, we are let down.
But to that, I would say that often, such circumstances don't constitute an excuse -- Frank Lucas (American Gangster) wasn't a particularly bad person, and we can understand his motivations. In the same circumstances, we might have done the same.
But when caught, he had to face the consequences. Our empathy doesn't excuse him.
It's not that I am particularly surprised that politicians are corrupt. What bothers me is that it's accepted, and not challenged -- that however much we might empathize with them (or demonize them), we don't often actually impeach them, and make them answer for their abuse of power.
Thing is though, most casual users don't know about plugins, and they don't care.
That's unlikely.
Most users who install Firefox inevitably learn about Adblock Plus, which is trivial to install. But it would be insane to suggest that Adblock Plus (with all the filtersets) should be included with Firefox.
I actually agree with this - having it as a prominent button in the UI helps convince people that privacy is imporant.
Well, at a price -- people use cookies for convenience, too.
I bet a similar integrated feature will appear in Firefox and Opera very soon now.
I hope not. I would almost certainly never use it. If I need privacy that badly, I'll use a livecd.
So please don't bloat my already-bloated "lightweight" browser with yet another feature I didn't ask for, and won't use.
Instead of slavishly following MS's lead as you suggest, we would all be better off ignoring all MS's new incompatible web implementations.
So we're better off using their old ones?
By counseling people to support a gratuitously non-standard browser
Where have I done so?
No, I counsel people that, if they must have IE installed at all, or if they must use it at all, it would be better to have a more recent version. Given the choice between IE6 and IE7, are you actually encouraging people to choose IE6?
I also counsel people to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, or anything but IE, given the choice. But there isn't always that choice -- it's still the sanest way to get Windows Updates on XP, if you want to pick and choose, for example.
You're either a MS troll
Because if I was an MS troll, I would totally use "non-standards-compliant flavor-of-the-week" to refer to their browser (even if it was your term). Instead of, maybe, defending said browser.
I'm writing this in Konqueror, on Ubuntu, from work, where I write Ruby on Rails. Doesn't that just scream "MS troll" to you?
That's easy enough to fix. You just patch the OS. It shouldn't take more than a few days if you have the source.
Which is why I explicitly mentioned Windows.
You would have to convince the vendor to support the change.
And if they didn't?
Right, you would work around it. BIOS-based fakeraid is one example of this. Hardware wear-leveling in flash media is another.
Some of these workarounds would work well, and would make sense. My worry is that some of them might actually prevent OSes from solving the problem more elegantly, when they finally do.
That's why I've suggested we allow both.
Yes. I'm going to leave the answer to this question as an exercise for the readers.
Or, in other words, you don't have an argument, so you've left your argument as an "exercise for the reader" -- nice.
"Human" is not a fixed integer; it's a range. Is a crack-whore sub-human in some way?
I'd like to think that the crack-whore is human, and that the politician is human. But I would hold the politician to a higher standard than I would hold the crack-whore.
I don't mean "higher standard" as in "higher than the human range; superhuman" -- I mean it as in "higher than the minimum requirement of being human."
Because that's what you seem to be implying -- that the only standard we should hold them to is that they are human.
And do you deliver perfection?
No, but I don't deliver corruption, either.
It's not reasonable to expect someone else to be uncorrnptable when you yourself are not.
Am I corruptible? Show me how.
No, my only blind spot here is that, having not had many positions of power, I don't know what it would take to corrupt me, if it's possible. So I honestly don't know what I'd do as a politician. I'd like to think I'd be every bit as honest as I am now.
But that doesn't make me a hypocrite. It just makes me naive.
IDE media already lies to the controller about where the content is on the drive to compensate for densities beyond the original design and bad sectors.
Bad sectors can be handled in software, but that's a valid point. The rest of it is legacy crap.
There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
Is there a reason for it not to?
I'd say, the reason for it to be honest is, you can always use things like a BIOS and drivers to add the same functionality back in with software -- to lie to an OS which doesn't know better. But if you don't provide that kind of direct access, you also prevent any optimization by an OS that knows what it's doing.
Kind of like, say, a video driver. No reason to speak OpenGL at the silicon layer.
So, given an infinite interface, how much data can you pull out of a properly designed SSD in a millisecond? All of it.
Indeed -- though remember that the interface, too, costs money. So faster media will cost you more. (I like to explain it as RAID1 with (storage/blocksize) nodes -- but often, the two 512 gig drives do cost more than one terabyte drive.)
Problem is, of course, that the OS probably isn't ready for "all of it".
What would worry me is if the SSD decided to pull as much as it could into some sort of RAM buffer, anticipating more reads -- and anticipating a stupid OS. And it would worry me if it hid this behind some physical abstraction layer, and passed itself off as just another SATA hard drive.
Which means that we're stuck with whatever optimizations the SSD manufacturer made (even if they don't apply to our OS, or even if they're worse on all OSes), and we're stuck paying for extra hardware to compensate for shortcomings in Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
myself I think that it still looks like noise different noise from Perl5 but still hard to read and to maintain.
One of the features of Perl6 that I really like is custom syntax. That helps a lot.
I like a lot of Ruby syntax, some of it Perl-inspired -- the optional brackets are beautiful. I like Python's indentation, and if I could, I'd probably be using Lazibi in Ruby. I like Javascript's object notation, and its treating of hashes as objects.
A lot of these, though, are mostly cosmetic. Certainly it's possible to abuse things, but by making the syntax separate, it means we can stop arguing about what syntax makes a good language, and start focusing on other features.
For beginners, there's Python,
I don't know, I've yet to see an environment beat Try Ruby for sheer beginner accessibility.
Surely she hits it just right when she says, "You know, don't be afraid of information."
Taken out of context, that's a great sentiment.
I just don't agree with what she's saying in context -- that "both" views should be taught (there are only two?), rather than that science should be taught.
If she was advocating taking macro-evolution out of science class (while leaving micro-evolution), that would be worth considering. That, we could have a discussion about.
Evolution is philosophy, it is not science.
Evolution is a testable, falsifiable theory, with extensive evidence supporting it. That's science.
Christians readily admit that Creation is not science, either. It is faith.
Obviously these aren't the same Christians who want it taught in science class.
Well, she's not... anymore. She very quickly backpedaled when confronted.
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/10/27/intelligent_design_and_the_ala/
Assume for a moment that Microsoft is actually trying to move in the direction of standards-compliance.
By not adopting it, you send Microsoft the message that no one cares -- or worse, that they can't possibly get it right, and may as well not try.
yet another half baked browser which complicates the code, adds to the dev cost & diminishes the resources available to move to standards compliant HTML.
I'm not sure a browser exists that doesn't have bugs in its adherence to that standard.
I'm not suggesting we expend tremendous resources to support IE7, either. What I'm suggesting is that if, as a developer, I choose to ignore IE6 and support IE7, it's going to take far less effort, given that I'm already going to be supporting browsers that mostly get it right, like Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
Given that, why would I want anyone to make my job harder?
You called someone who refuses to update to IE7 part of the problem.
And in what way is that counseling them to "support" it? Certainly not moreso than they already "support" IE6.
You do know that IE7 breaks many sites that were coded for IE6, right?
None of the ones I need, fortunately. But by deliberately using a browser that doesn't work with those sites, I'm hopefully helping to encourage the admins to move towards standards compliance.
When would this be, pray tell? Even on completely locked down corporate PCs, Portable Firefox makes avoiding IE possible.
Well, you said it yourself. The choice isn't that you can't install Firefox, it's that some websites won't actually work on Firefox.
Another example would be places that embed the IE engine via ActiveX -- Steam, for instance, or many EA games.
The most common example, for me, is a simple Windows Update on XP. I can do that from an IETab, but that's the same problem -- it'll be using the IE rendering engine.
Neither argument has been proven correct.
Thanks for providing an object lesson for why we need more science in our schools.
Because you obviously didn't get it.
Science doesn't prove things. It disproves things.
So if you say one is a theory by your own logic you should say the other is also,
Mostly because you are ignorant of what the word "theory" means in a scientific context.
You see, evolution qualifies as a well-tested scientific theory.
The other doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis.
Because, you see, one requirement for a hypothesis -- or a theory -- is that it be falsifiable. The claim that the Earth is six thousand years old has quite a lot of evidence against it -- nearly as much as the claim that the Earth is flat.
So, of course, modern Creationists claim that everything was placed just so by God to fool us scientists -- that he is tricking our instruments, or that he put the carbon there, and the dinosaur bones in the ground, to make us think the world is older than it is. (Pretty devious for a purely-good being, but I'll let it slide.)
But that claim is not falsifiable -- we can never disprove it, because for any evidence we find against it, some lunatic can say "Oh, God put that there to fool you."
Which puts it strictly in the realm of fantasy -- I can make up crazy shit all day that isn't falsifiable. Take the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for example. You can't disprove it -- therefore, it must be given time in the classroom!
In fact several places it's mentioned that God doesn't have any concept of Time.
Citation, please? There are several public-domain translations of the Good Book online; give me a book, a chapter, and a verse number, and I can go check for myself.
Unless, of course, this is just your interpretation.
That's because you don't have to use @_ or shift. Perl can support named parameters, optional parameters,
Really? I've never seen it, not directly. All I ever see is:
my ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_;
Or:
my $params = shift; ... }
if ($params->{whatever}) {
Does it have more than this?
I do know that with Ruby, I can specify a "splat" argument, or I can use the positional arguments directly. And with Javascript, I can either use positional arguments, or the "arguments" array, or both. But Perl only ever seemed to support @_.
I'm sure the CPAN has modules for all this.
Ah. That explains it.
It's interesting how that works -- when a language like Perl stagnates, people extend it with modules. Not necessarily bad, just strange.
Neither Python nor Ruby have a code repository with the depth and breadth of CPAN. Rubygems has promise, but CPAN has at least a 10 year head start on it.
Depth and breadth means nothing at all when I can find exactly what I need in Rubygems.
It's a bit like Google. What do I care what the other few hundred million (or billion) results are? I'm probably not going to read past the first page.
...more mature and IMHO more productive.
I would agree with you, but only because of CPAN. And given the above...
No, I don't think Perl is "write-only", and I know it isn't horrible. I know it's possible to write ugly Ruby code.
I do, however, find that on the occasion I have to do more than simply glue components together -- that is, when I have to actually write something new -- I can do so much more easily in Ruby than in Perl.
Given that your comment predates mine, I'm pretty much assuming that the progression was like this:
Guy likes Lisp, because it's elegant.
Guy finds that Perl gets stuff done, but it's a lot uglier.
Guy finds that Python gets stuff done faster and more easily than Perl, and isn't as ugly. Nowhere near as beautiful as Lisp, though.
Storing addresses means writing a couple more bytes to an inode or allocation table.
Take a multi-gigabyte file, with, say, 4k blocks. For each gigabyte, that's 262,144 addresses.
Store it as mostly-contiguous extents, and you spend a few bytes. Store it as individual addresses, and you're up to a megabyte or two, depending on the size of your address.
The "250% more space" was talking about the metadata, not the data itself. I'm not implying that one-gig file now takes 2.5 gigs.
Flash natively does this anyways, due to wear leveling.
Which means that if the filesystem itself is fragmented, you've got overhead on top of that overhead.
And that's assuming it does the wear-leveling itself. There's always jffs2 -- Linux filesystem which natively does wear-leveling -- but it requires lower-level access to the Flash than most interfaces provide.
There's absolutely ZERO perceivable performance penalty in random access on memory cells.
No, what I'm talking about is the performance penalty caused by an OS assuming it's dealing with a hard drive. Given that assumption, it might do something stupid like wait for each read to complete before sending another -- which would be reasonable, given a slow disk, but is quite unreasonable, given Flash.
With an OS like that, one optimization is for the hardware to anticipate the filesystem wanting the next megabyte, or hundred megabytes, and reading them all simultaneously into its own cache, ready and waiting for the OS. But for it to do this, they need to at least be logically contiguous (as far as the OS knows).
I hope we don't do that.
the criteria you are using to call it 2.5D is INVALID.
What criteria would you use? Or are you arguing there's no such thing as 2.5D?
As to the rest of your post, saying the same exact thing all over again, but more insulting, isn't going to make me agree with you. Hopefully it made you feel better -- otherwise, it was a waste of time.
Interesting. Also very apparently wrong.
After all, it starts with this little gem:
Why Modern, Western Marriage Has Become A Bad Business Decision For Men
If you think it's about business, you're already so out of touch with the concept that it's hardly worth reading the rest of it.
Of course, I did anyway. It seems to be a scathing indictment of a certain type of traditional marriage -- probably one the author was in -- but can't possibly cover all marriage. For example:
If a married man cheats, he's the scum of the earth.... However, when the woman cheats, she's portrayed as the victim of an insensitive and inattentive husband.
Yeah... it's called an open marriage. Not all marriages even have a concept of "cheating".
Oh, and your web design sucks. Seriously, who makes all links point nowhere, and only be useful to spawn Javascript popup windows? If I want to go back to your site, I'll use the back button, or open the link in a new tab... Oh wait, I can't, because they aren't actually links.
If you haven't even popped the question, think of it as a geeky engagement ring -- certainly, you'll want her to be apart of the decision of what eventually becomes a wedding band, for two reasons:
First, "popping the question" implies that you don't know if she'll say yes. It's going to really suck if you go to all this trouble and she says "no", or "I'm not ready".
Second, and more importantly: Assume she does say yes. (You're probably assuming that anyway.) Shouldn't she be a part of a decision about something she'll wear every day for the rest of her life?
Perl 5 is near perfect: it does many things very efficiently, especially in coding effort department.
As a former Perl hacker who's been converted to Ruby, I must politely disagree. Perl5 is nowhere near perfect.
Perl 6 is a standard. Whatever implements standard can be called Perl 6.
Since that's "nothing", so far, it's pretty much vaporware.
CLR is not interpreter.
Again, in short: Yes, CLR is an interpreter. At least, it's every bit as much an interpreter as Perl is -- and every bit as much an interpreter as the JVM is.
There's another important difference: I can run Ruby and Python on .NET, and on the JVM. I can't run them on Parrot, which was supposed to be the one scripting VM to rule them all.
Ruby's going through its own somewhat painful transition right now, what with 1.8.7 and 1.9. Hopefully that'll work itself out fairly soon, though.
The difference is, 1.8.6 doesn't suck. Most of the difference is that 1.8.6 is slower, due to being on a slower VM. Most of what breaks (now, anyway) in the transition to 1.9 are various native extensions.
However, Perl5 does suck, compared to Ruby or Python. Perl6 looks very, very good -- but is nowhere near ready.
I could reasonably expect to pick up Ruby 1.8.6 (or 1.8.7), and have most of my existing code and coding style still work in 1.9. Or I could pick up 1.9, and backport some features to 1.8.6 (which is what 1.8.7 is, mostly).
I don't think I could reasonably expect to pick up Perl5, and know anything at all about Perl6. The best I could hope for is that most of my old code would still work in Ponie, which is Perl5 on the Perl6 engine -- implying that yes, they are completely different languages.
You see, you can argue about Creationism. You can make very good philosophical arguments for and against Creationism in all its forms -- Intelligent Design being one of them. And you can make very good philosophical and scientific arguments for and against Evolution.
What is clear, however, is that Evolution is a scientific theory. Creationism isn't.
In other words: Right or wrong, Evolution is science. Creationism isn't. That's not an opinion, it's a fact -- by definition, "I think the Earth is six thousand years old because an old book told me so" is not science.
The only place Creationism has in a science classroom is as an object lesson of something that is not science.
Pffft, Perl is perfectly good for anything that needs string manipulation and such.
Unfortunately for Perl, so is Python.
(Well, and Ruby. I'm partial to Ruby, but there's no XKCD for me to link to.)
However, it seems like almost every politician who has been around for a while has had a corruption scandal.
That could as easily be an indication of a problem with our system, and not a problem with fundamental human nature.
I think it runs a bit deeper. A Dune quote: "Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."
There are other ways to tell that you aren't incorruptible. Have you ever lied to someone? This is an abuse of your power to control the perception of others for personal gain.
Not necessarily for personal gain.
I can't remember lying recently. I don't know that I could say I've never lied.
Stealing is much the same, as is cheating.
And these, I don't do.
It's worth considering that no such principle is absolute -- there can be mitigating circumstances. That would tend to support this:
We expect and demand perfection from imperfect people, and then when our unreasonable expectations are not met, we are let down.
But to that, I would say that often, such circumstances don't constitute an excuse -- Frank Lucas (American Gangster) wasn't a particularly bad person, and we can understand his motivations. In the same circumstances, we might have done the same.
But when caught, he had to face the consequences. Our empathy doesn't excuse him.
It's not that I am particularly surprised that politicians are corrupt. What bothers me is that it's accepted, and not challenged -- that however much we might empathize with them (or demonize them), we don't often actually impeach them, and make them answer for their abuse of power.
Thing is though, most casual users don't know about plugins, and they don't care.
That's unlikely.
Most users who install Firefox inevitably learn about Adblock Plus, which is trivial to install. But it would be insane to suggest that Adblock Plus (with all the filtersets) should be included with Firefox.
I actually agree with this - having it as a prominent button in the UI helps convince people that privacy is imporant.
Well, at a price -- people use cookies for convenience, too.
I bet a similar integrated feature will appear in Firefox and Opera very soon now.
I hope not. I would almost certainly never use it. If I need privacy that badly, I'll use a livecd.
So please don't bloat my already-bloated "lightweight" browser with yet another feature I didn't ask for, and won't use.
Instead of slavishly following MS's lead as you suggest, we would all be better off ignoring all MS's new incompatible web implementations.
So we're better off using their old ones?
By counseling people to support a gratuitously non-standard browser
Where have I done so?
No, I counsel people that, if they must have IE installed at all, or if they must use it at all, it would be better to have a more recent version. Given the choice between IE6 and IE7, are you actually encouraging people to choose IE6?
I also counsel people to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, or anything but IE, given the choice. But there isn't always that choice -- it's still the sanest way to get Windows Updates on XP, if you want to pick and choose, for example.
You're either a MS troll
Because if I was an MS troll, I would totally use "non-standards-compliant flavor-of-the-week" to refer to their browser (even if it was your term). Instead of, maybe, defending said browser.
I'm writing this in Konqueror, on Ubuntu, from work, where I write Ruby on Rails. Doesn't that just scream "MS troll" to you?
That's easy enough to fix. You just patch the OS. It shouldn't take more than a few days if you have the source.
Which is why I explicitly mentioned Windows.
You would have to convince the vendor to support the change.
And if they didn't?
Right, you would work around it. BIOS-based fakeraid is one example of this. Hardware wear-leveling in flash media is another.
Some of these workarounds would work well, and would make sense. My worry is that some of them might actually prevent OSes from solving the problem more elegantly, when they finally do.
That's why I've suggested we allow both.
Yes. I'm going to leave the answer to this question as an exercise for the readers.
Or, in other words, you don't have an argument, so you've left your argument as an "exercise for the reader" -- nice.
Do you *really* want solid state disks that all require a different driver?
I don't know. Do I really want SATA interfaces that all require a different driver?
Fact is, they don't -- you can always use the BIOS. The fact is that you can write a different driver, and there are benefits to doing so.
Sort of like current video hardware, which is plagued by buggy drivers, missing specs of the chip, missing open source drivers...
Because they screwed up that second part, and the lowest common denominator that the BIOS will give you is unaccelerated VESA.
I don't have a problem with OpenGL being implemented in the BIOS. But I don't think it should be implemented in hardware.
Frankly, given Google's record, I refuse to host any of my projects on Google Code, or to participate in the development of any projects hosted there.
...Why? What part of Google's record?
Most of the bad things I hear about Google are privacy-related... what part of your open source project needs to be private?
Are they super-human in some way?
"Human" is not a fixed integer; it's a range. Is a crack-whore sub-human in some way?
I'd like to think that the crack-whore is human, and that the politician is human. But I would hold the politician to a higher standard than I would hold the crack-whore.
I don't mean "higher standard" as in "higher than the human range; superhuman" -- I mean it as in "higher than the minimum requirement of being human."
Because that's what you seem to be implying -- that the only standard we should hold them to is that they are human.
And do you deliver perfection?
No, but I don't deliver corruption, either.
It's not reasonable to expect someone else to be uncorrnptable when you yourself are not.
Am I corruptible? Show me how.
No, my only blind spot here is that, having not had many positions of power, I don't know what it would take to corrupt me, if it's possible. So I honestly don't know what I'd do as a politician. I'd like to think I'd be every bit as honest as I am now.
But that doesn't make me a hypocrite. It just makes me naive.
IDE media already lies to the controller about where the content is on the drive to compensate for densities beyond the original design and bad sectors.
Bad sectors can be handled in software, but that's a valid point. The rest of it is legacy crap.
There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
Is there a reason for it not to?
I'd say, the reason for it to be honest is, you can always use things like a BIOS and drivers to add the same functionality back in with software -- to lie to an OS which doesn't know better. But if you don't provide that kind of direct access, you also prevent any optimization by an OS that knows what it's doing.
Kind of like, say, a video driver. No reason to speak OpenGL at the silicon layer.
So, given an infinite interface, how much data can you pull out of a properly designed SSD in a millisecond? All of it.
Indeed -- though remember that the interface, too, costs money. So faster media will cost you more. (I like to explain it as RAID1 with (storage/blocksize) nodes -- but often, the two 512 gig drives do cost more than one terabyte drive.)
Problem is, of course, that the OS probably isn't ready for "all of it".
What would worry me is if the SSD decided to pull as much as it could into some sort of RAM buffer, anticipating more reads -- and anticipating a stupid OS. And it would worry me if it hid this behind some physical abstraction layer, and passed itself off as just another SATA hard drive.
Which means that we're stuck with whatever optimizations the SSD manufacturer made (even if they don't apply to our OS, or even if they're worse on all OSes), and we're stuck paying for extra hardware to compensate for shortcomings in Windows.