Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
No, but I think that globalism is one of the things that brings him supporters. Get rid of the systemic problems and go after the terrorists. THat way more terrorists don't step in to fill the void.
The systemic problem is that after WWII a bunch of Europeans were given land in the Middle East and the people who were there are understandably pissed. If you have a solution to this problem that doesn't require the removal of either group, then I would love to hear it. Nobody else seems to. Globalization is irrelevant.
I was pretty careful to discuss "democractic capitalism" and not just capitalism. As you say: some of the benefit comes from democracy and some from capitalism. You need both. Robust capitalism is necessary for democracy because the flow of capital gives the middle class a voice. Robust democracy is really the end goal.
Yes, corporations can buy votes (and they do) but it is important to remember that the money they "spend" mostly goes to advertisments that try to influence the views of ordinary voters. This is somewhat self-limiting -- you can't too obviously do what the corporations want all of the time because then the advertising dollars become ineffective. "Vote for us. We inacted the law that abolished the weekend. We're going to advertise once an hour, every hour, until the elections"
Recently corporations have been beaten on big issues like the MAI and they have beaten us on some big issues like the DMCA. I think that is as it always was.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
But it is plausible to argue that the US is supporting the bombing of Iraq and the sanctions that murder so many innocent children, and the butchering of Palestinian innocents with US bought and made weapons and the torture, repression and murder in Central and South America precisely so that a crap, worthless product like McDonalds can be made cheap enough to be bought by gasoline-burning, wasteful consumers.
People go to war because they either have different beliefs or want each other's land. The Palestinians both have different beliefs than the Israelis and the two want the same land. I don't see what this has to do with globalization at all. Israel and Palestine could both drop off the face of the earth without affecting the United States' GDP. If the US was really interested in the money it would do well to side with the Arabs (with the oil) rather than the Israelis with their relatively worthless bit of desert. People went to war before there was globalization for the same reason they go to war now. What was the gross domestic product of Israel when the US became an ally. Probably $0
This is all of course a gross simplification. But it's closer to the truth than you are.
The rest of the world's "real problems" exist so that the US and its European client states can have slave populations that are better housed, fed and entertained than the majority of the world slaves.
Oh sure, the western world caused AIDs and globalization is the root of the constant infighting in Africa. It has nothing to do with the results of pre-globalization imperialism. It has nothing to do with the aftermath of the cold war. It has nothing to do with the arbitrary borders drawn by notorious "globalizers" like 1950s Belgium and Holland.
Get yourself a break. Construct falsifiable models of world economy and politics and then tell me that globalization is nothing to do with it.
Globalization has nothing to do with it. People have constructed excuses to kill each other for thousands of years. The killing reached its height years before globalization was a term or an idea. If you call any inter-state commerce "globalization" then okay, globalization has been around almost as long as war but if you use a more reasonable generation then you can't blame globalization for the world's fucked-up-ed-ness.
Yesterday people died horrifically because the US elite acting in their own interests only have done similar but larger scale things all over the world.
People died horribly yesterday because the US is involved in a fight with people who are very desperate. Globalization or not, that can only be avoided by withdrawing from the world stage. That withdrawl would be a license to monsters all over the world to follow in the footsteps of Rwanda and Cambodia. The US needs to be more engaged in the world, not less. But there may be blow-back. It's the price of getting involved.
I believe that this is wrong. I believe that capitalism is a gross, horrific abomination that produces this sort of terror. If you believe otherwise then I hold you accountable.
Go ahead. Even today, I would much rather live in New York city than in a city in any of the countries practicing alternatives to democratic capitalism: Havana, Beijing, Pyongyang. Do you have a proposed alternative or are you just "fighting the machine", "getting back at the man" and all that other stuff that is appropriate to rebellious youth?
Would you rather live in mainland China or Hong Kong/Taiwan? East Germany or West? South Korea or North?
You know what they need in Africa, and Afghanistan and every place in the world where people are oppressed? They need democractic capitalism. We've done the experiment over and over again and we know the results. You are just cruel if you want to subject some poor people to yet another alternate system. I'm a left leaning liberal but I'm not naive enough to still believe we should be pursuing some alternate system.
Maybe once we've wiped out poverty and AIDs we'll have the bandwidth to experiment with alternate systems but right now we need to get those people good jobs, good homes and enough purchasing power that they can buy some influence over their own governments.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
Why do you think we have bases in foreign countries? To proctect the interests of American civilians?
Not to protect the American civilians in the foreign country but to protect American interests in a geopolitical sense. Those bases were all over the world even before we had globalization as we know it. And before there were American bases all over the world there were European bases all over the world.
Countries like Japan, Germany, Saudia Arabia and Taiwan have essentially no native army. The US protects those countries because they are allies. They are allies because the share US values. Even socialist-ic (not socialist!) countries like Sweden can share US values.
The geopolitical relationship is typically more important than the fiscal one. Japan and Germany were not great trading partners when the US set up bases there. The US would kick the asses of anyone who invaded Finland -- not because of Nokia but because they have the same values as America.
All of these countries are also trading partners because the two tend to go hand in hand. And guess what: that's a good thing! People don't tend to go to war with their trading partners. Globalization prevents wars.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Reign in corporate greed and globalization. As long as our bottom line takes precendence over human rights, we will be a target of (quite justifiable) rage and (condemnable) violence.
Give me a break. Do you really think that Osama is angry about GLOBALIZATION? About the hegemony of McDonald's? He's pissed about American support for Israel. He's pissed about US bases in the Middle East. He's probably pissed about the decimation of Iraq. Globalization is something North American college students get pissy about. Most of the world has real problems (AIDS, oppression, genocide) and globalization doesn't even rank.
Yes, Parrot. But not that parrot.
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Parrot: For Real
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· Score: 3, Informative
It is the intent of the Perl 6 folks that Perl 6's VM be usable as an engine for interpreting multiple languages. This was always their intent. In order to make that wish a little more public they've decided to call their VM "parrot" (after the April fools joke). But at this point nobody has seriously looked at porting Python to parrot because it is not very mature yet. Furthermore, many Python people are skeptical that Perl 6 will live up to its long feature set so nobody is putting eggs in that basket yet.
There is no sense in which the languages will be merged. If moving to Parrot required a substantial change in Python it just wouldn't happen. If Python on Parrot was less efficient than the current Python interpreter, that would also be a major issue.
Going from here to the conclusion that it must be some turban-wearing, gun-toting radical Islamic militants is a huge leap to a conclusion, and symptomatic of some deep seated hatred.
Of course it is too early to make any judgement. But it is not racist to think first of those who have been loudest in calling for the destruction of the United States (both recently and historically). None of your other "suspects" really make any historical or contextual sense. Atheist suicide bombers? Racists who kill people of all races indescriminately? Are we so politically correct that we must abandon logic?
Another reason to believe (not conclude, but believe) that it might be Islamic militants is that they have a tradition of organized suicide bombing that most other radical organizations do not.
I'm not saying it was Islamic militants but I don't think that I am a racist because that was the first thing that popped into my mind. They followed the MO of those groups, not the MO of domestic terrorists or European terrorists etc.
I just read this: "Three Palestinian groups -- Hamas, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad -- deny responsibility for the attacks, but blame U.S. policies in the Mideast." I guess these guys are racist too...they also think it likely that it was someone from the Mideast.
As I said in another post, if your language doesn't know the difference between scalar types (which perl *does*) then never use it again.
Perl can be told that you mean to deal with strings as integers but it is stretching to say that Perl really knows the difference between strings and integers. It allows you to "add" "a"+"b" (and get 0 -- totally logical!) and it allows you to "concat" 7 and 53. Maybe Perl knows the difference but it doesn't tell you in time to help you find subtle type bugs....
I can't believe this guy was modded up to 4. You moderators are really showing off your lack of understanding of the issue. Here's the original problem report:
It uses strings of unix time to sort the messages in the message list by date.
Python sorts time_t's as integers, not strings. Perl sorts integers and strings the same unless you tell it otherwise. I saw my first report of this kind of Perl sorting bug within a few hours of the billenium. When I saw a second one on slashdot my "crappy software sucks" meter went past the "trashing other languages isn't politically correct" threshold. Perl is full of these little insecurities.
People have a naive faith that there is no real cost to Perl's short-cuts but here is some more anecdotal evidence as if we needed any..
As a Python bigot (flame-bait me!) I'll point out that Perl, PHP and a few other Unix-y scripting languages are especially prone to this problem because they don't distinguish between strings and integers. I always knew that there would be a payoff in Python requiring me to explicitly convert.
This seems like a cheap shot but really there is a systemic issue here. Perl trades robustness for succintness whereas Python tends to require you to say what you mean explicitly. With perfect programmers there would be no difference. In the real world, programmers are not perfect and a language that helps you to find potential problems can yield quantitatively more robust code.
XMetaL is the leader in the XML editing category (in North America, anyhow). They've been in the structured editing business for roughly 15 years. Another strong contender is Documentor.
ESR's writings on this topic are recommended reading for open source hackers no matter how you feel about ESR.
Homesteading the Noosphere
We relate that to an analysis of the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away.
What a crock. The slave system is purely a human one. How or why a machine would pick up one of the worst human behavoirs is simple called watching too much sci-fi and being paranoid.
Computers will pick up whatever behaviours we program that with. Maybe there will be beneficial AIs and malevalent AIs created to serve good people and bad people. I dunno. Either way, I'd rather not be in the crossfire of perfectly self-replicating consciousnesses with perfect memory and carefully engineered (as opposed to evolved) bodies.
Ambition is also a human drive, if the promise of a Lt. Com. Data type AI comes around it will have very different drives than your typical 17th century empire.
If we can't predict those drives, isn't that a cause for worry?
Moore's "Law" is not a physical constant, and it will hit the wall when circuit engineering goes to quantum level.
What makes you think that the rapid improvement of computers will halt when we hit the physical limits of circuit engineering? There are other techniques as you mention yourself:
When neural net theory and biocircuitry engineering starts to approach organism level performance, that's when you should start sh*tting in your pants...
Hawking is worrying about the problem in advance of it being a direct threat. Doesn't that seem wise?
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
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Shirky On P2P
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· Score: 2
Okay now we are converging.
"Web Services" don't necessarily have anything to do with "Web Sites" except insofar as most modern development is exposed through a website in one way or another.
Web services are called Web Services because they use Web standards like HTTP and XML. Plus it just gets the VCs excited to prefix anything with the word "Web" (or it did a couple of years ago when the term was coined). Essentially they are distributed computing protocols built on top of existing Internet protocols.
Even so, some web SITES do want to share structured information. Check out meerkat.oriellynet.com. Slashdot probably gets its slashbox content using a system similar to meerkat. Google gets XML content from the Open Directory Project.
Also, one point that Clay Shirky made is that there are some radicals who think that HTTP is the only protocol you need to do structured information interchange -- whether you are doing "Web site" stuff or not, they claim you should expose your structured data through HTTP(s). (even if you only give the password to your partners)
EDI is expensive partly because it doesn't run over the internet - let alone over HTTP. There are very good reasons for this...
Many people disagree with you. Most EDI people are running towards the Internet as quickly as possible. That's the whole point of ebXML. Maybe value added networks will survive for security and quality of service but non-IP protocols are dead.
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
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Shirky On P2P
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· Score: 2
There are good reasons for organizations to share structured data. My company does it. Slashdot does it (slashboxes). Yahoo does it (where do they get stock quotes and maps?). Google does it (ODP RDF dumps drive the Google Web directory). General Motors does it (EDI). That's what a purchase order is. Do you think that we'll still use primarily paper purchase orders in ten years?
The only question is whether we all hand-roll our own solutions or have standards for doing it. XML is the structured data specification and web services are about how to move the information from place to place.
VRML was totally different because it was about building customer demand for a new product (3D). Sharing structured information is not new. Most web-connected organizations do it in one way or another today. Just as the Internet glued together the disparate proprietary networks, the web services standards try to glue together disparate information sources.
If you want to argue against the necessity for particular standards, we could have an interesting discussion. But you seem to want to deny that organizizations need to share information in real time. Or that we need standards to lower the cost of doing that.
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
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Shirky On P2P
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· Score: 2
But... forgive me if I appear dense... why should we want web sites to be interoperable?
This reply is a little late but this question seemed so strange to me that I couldn't help but answer it.
First, you discredit single sign-on but if you are a typical end-user with a dozen subscriptions to a dozen sites, single sign-on is a big deal and a massive improvement over sticky notes on your monitor.
Second, if you are selling something, wouldn't you want your product specifications (and in some cases your price) disseminated as widely as possible? If you sell digital cameras, you would absolutely love it if digital camera sites can easily incorporate your product specifications into their site.
People already do this stuff. How do you think the non-Slashdot Slashboxes work? They are XML-based web services (not SOAP, but web services nevertheless). The hype around web services is just about standardizing the information sharing that organizations already do. One you standarize it, you build network effects and economies of scale.
Is this some sort of eCommerce thing? And if so, why should competitors want to share customer data?
Competitors don't. Partners do. Anyhow, you seem a little obsessed with single sign-on and user data. User data is just one kind of data worth sharing. There is also product data. Realtime product availability information.
When people say "SourceForge is the new ERP" they mean SourceForge is LIKE ERP. They mean it in the sense that "Grey is the new Black." Sourceforge will play the role in software development that ERP pays in purchasing/accounting/whatever.
VA Linux is not literally going to go into ERP.
It is important to understand that OASIS is more of a standards body framework than an ordinary standards body. In other words, any OASIS member can decide to start an OASIS group on any idea, no matter how strange it may seem and no other OASIS member may prevent that. Few OASIS resources are used per group so the only real cost is in keeping tabs on all of the groups that are created.
If C is the kind of language you DO NOT like, and SML is the kind of language you DO like, then I sincerely hope that you continue to dislike the scripting languages. C has proven itself perfectly adapted to solve a large an important set of real-world problems. Perl, Python and Ruby are similarly designed.
I don't really see "symbolic AI", "planning", "Dynabook, educational software" and "proof systems" as particularly representative of the programming most of us do in the real world.
"Text munging", "kernel hacking", "GUI and server application programming" etc. are more typical. Thank Guido there are "hacked" languages to let us do our jobs!
How do you think these experimental features are going to get into an ISO standardized language like C++?
Do you think some smart guy like Matz, or Guido Van Rossum or Larry Wall can just go up to the ISO committee and say: "I've got this set of cool ideas -- let's add them to your language."
Also, do you really think that all of the good ideas of Perl, SmallTalk, C++, Lisp and Icon can naturally fit together in a single language? It isn't always possible, nor advisable, to pile every possible feature into a language.
Most people dislike C++ because it has TOO MANY FEATURES. That may not bother you but it is a big part of why Java caught on so quickly. So if you make an uber-language with every feature, you will CAUSE the creation of competitive new languages with smaller feature-sets. Smaller languages are often a reaction AGAINST bigger ones.
I get the stronger sense that you don't know Ruby -- most Rubyists tend to be ex-Pythoners and not the other way around, but nevermind.
People do tend to progress from more well-known languages to less well-known ones. They don't go to a bookstore and pick up a K book and think: "this would be a good first language." I've played with Ruby enough to decide that it is neat but not appropriate for many of my projects and not a sufficient improvement over Python for the rest.
Python lacks metaclasses, lacks a true unified object hierarchy, and supports multiple inheritance (considered a very bad idea by most experts in OO. Like the "goto" statement, multiple inheritance may seem useful at times but it leads to unmaintainable code). All these are simple repeats of the mistakes of C++.
Python 2.2 has metaclasses, a unified object hierarchy and supports multiple inheritance which is quite useful and safe when used thoughtfully.
It is simply a matter of historical fact that Python was not based upon C++. If it shares features with C++, those would probably be traced back to Simula through Modula-3. Smalltalk is also based upon Simula.
Yes, Python is improving, but all these improvements (like allowing the subclassing of primitives) only serve to point out flaws in the design (why aren't primitives normal objects in the first place?)
Nobody would claim that Python 1.0 was perfect, nor that Python 2.2 is perfect. Nevertheless, you haven't yet mentioned a feature of Ruby that isn't in Python 2.2. There certainly are such features -- but they get increasingly esoteric as Python improves. If I have to choose between Bertrand Meyer-approved-OO-cleanliness and native threads that don't block when you do I/O, I would choose the solid threads. OO-cleanliness is about conceptual elegance and native threads are about getting the job done.
And how deep is Ruby's Unicode support? If you can please point me to documentation on using Ruby's regexp engine to match Unicode characters, I would appreciate it.
My current Python projects depend heavily on both threads and Unicode. Mixins, multiple inheritance and the ability subclass "integer" really don't matter one whit! I am mostly happy that Python is unifying its type system for rhetorical reasons. Practically it hardly matters at all!
If you want to impress the vast majority of programmers who are not language collectors, you'll have to show us some program that are hard to solve in (e.g.) Python and easy to solve in Ruby.
For this and other reasons, it is not accurate to paint Ruby as the next step after Python. It is another good language with strengths and weaknesses. One day it will have a superset of features that Python currently has...but Python will itself have evolved by then.
Python gets all of its object-orientness from C++, Ruby gets its from Smalltalk.
I have a strong sense that you don't know Python. Python gets *none* of its object-orientedness from C++.
Python has full dynamic dispatch, the ability to catch unknown method calls at runtime and so forth. In other words it is much more like Smalltalk than like C++.
Python's OO credentials are just as strong as Ruby's. This is especially true for Python 2.2 where you can subclass even primitive types.
I find it amusing that while the Pythoners mock the Perl-hackers that refuse to upgrade to Python, they themselves refuse to upgrade to the next level.
If Ruby were clearly the next level, you'd be right. But Ruby has as many weaknesses relative to Python as it has strengths. Python's threads are extremely robust (at least on single-processor machines). Ruby's are weak. Python's industry support is much better. Python has full multiple inheritance. Python has less "syntax".
So Ruby isn't more OO and it isn't more elegant. It is at best more "Ruby" -- that will be important for some people and not for others.
I think a developers productivity has less to do with the language hes using and more to do with how much experience he has with that language
If that were true, you could just as easily write a text processing system in raw assembly or in a scripting language. I don't believe that. Languages are tools. Different tools effect your productivity in different ways. A farmer's productivity does depend on his tools and so does a programmer's.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but I think that globalism is one of the things that brings him supporters. Get rid of the systemic problems and go after the terrorists. THat way more terrorists don't step in to fill the void.
The systemic problem is that after WWII a bunch of Europeans were given land in the Middle East and the people who were there are understandably pissed. If you have a solution to this problem that doesn't require the removal of either group, then I would love to hear it. Nobody else seems to. Globalization is irrelevant.
I was pretty careful to discuss "democractic capitalism" and not just capitalism. As you say: some of the benefit comes from democracy and some from capitalism. You need both. Robust capitalism is necessary for democracy because the flow of capital gives the middle class a voice. Robust democracy is really the end goal.
Yes, corporations can buy votes (and they do) but it is important to remember that the money they "spend" mostly goes to advertisments that try to influence the views of ordinary voters. This is somewhat self-limiting -- you can't too obviously do what the corporations want all of the time because then the advertising dollars become ineffective. "Vote for us. We inacted the law that abolished the weekend. We're going to advertise once an hour, every hour, until the elections"
Recently corporations have been beaten on big issues like the MAI and they have beaten us on some big issues like the DMCA. I think that is as it always was.
But it is plausible to argue that the US is supporting the bombing of Iraq and the sanctions that murder so many innocent children, and the butchering of Palestinian innocents with US bought and made weapons and the torture, repression and murder in Central and South America precisely so that a crap, worthless product like McDonalds can be made cheap enough to be bought by gasoline-burning, wasteful consumers.
People go to war because they either have different beliefs or want each other's land. The Palestinians both have different beliefs than the Israelis and the two want the same land. I don't see what this has to do with globalization at all. Israel and Palestine could both drop off the face of the earth without affecting the United States' GDP. If the US was really interested in the money it would do well to side with the Arabs (with the oil) rather than the Israelis with their relatively worthless bit of desert. People went to war before there was globalization for the same reason they go to war now. What was the gross domestic product of Israel when the US became an ally. Probably $0
This is all of course a gross simplification. But it's closer to the truth than you are. The rest of the world's "real problems" exist so that the US and its European client states can have slave populations that are better housed, fed and entertained than the majority of the world slaves.
Oh sure, the western world caused AIDs and globalization is the root of the constant infighting in Africa. It has nothing to do with the results of pre-globalization imperialism. It has nothing to do with the aftermath of the cold war. It has nothing to do with the arbitrary borders drawn by notorious "globalizers" like 1950s Belgium and Holland.
Get yourself a break. Construct falsifiable models of world economy and politics and then tell me that globalization is nothing to do with it.
Globalization has nothing to do with it. People have constructed excuses to kill each other for thousands of years. The killing reached its height years before globalization was a term or an idea. If you call any inter-state commerce "globalization" then okay, globalization has been around almost as long as war but if you use a more reasonable generation then you can't blame globalization for the world's fucked-up-ed-ness.
Yesterday people died horrifically because the US elite acting in their own interests only have done similar but larger scale things all over the world.
People died horribly yesterday because the US is involved in a fight with people who are very desperate. Globalization or not, that can only be avoided by withdrawing from the world stage. That withdrawl would be a license to monsters all over the world to follow in the footsteps of Rwanda and Cambodia. The US needs to be more engaged in the world, not less. But there may be blow-back. It's the price of getting involved.
I believe that this is wrong. I believe that capitalism is a gross, horrific abomination that produces this sort of terror. If you believe otherwise then I hold you accountable.
Go ahead. Even today, I would much rather live in New York city than in a city in any of the countries practicing alternatives to democratic capitalism: Havana, Beijing, Pyongyang. Do you have a proposed alternative or are you just "fighting the machine", "getting back at the man" and all that other stuff that is appropriate to rebellious youth?
Would you rather live in mainland China or Hong Kong/Taiwan? East Germany or West? South Korea or North?
You know what they need in Africa, and Afghanistan and every place in the world where people are oppressed? They need democractic capitalism. We've done the experiment over and over again and we know the results. You are just cruel if you want to subject some poor people to yet another alternate system. I'm a left leaning liberal but I'm not naive enough to still believe we should be pursuing some alternate system.
Maybe once we've wiped out poverty and AIDs we'll have the bandwidth to experiment with alternate systems but right now we need to get those people good jobs, good homes and enough purchasing power that they can buy some influence over their own governments.
Why do you think we have bases in foreign countries? To proctect the interests of American civilians?
Not to protect the American civilians in the foreign country but to protect American interests in a geopolitical sense. Those bases were all over the world even before we had globalization as we know it. And before there were American bases all over the world there were European bases all over the world.
Countries like Japan, Germany, Saudia Arabia and Taiwan have essentially no native army. The US protects those countries because they are allies. They are allies because the share US values. Even socialist-ic (not socialist!) countries like Sweden can share US values.
The geopolitical relationship is typically more important than the fiscal one. Japan and Germany were not great trading partners when the US set up bases there. The US would kick the asses of anyone who invaded Finland -- not because of Nokia but because they have the same values as America.
All of these countries are also trading partners because the two tend to go hand in hand. And guess what: that's a good thing! People don't tend to go to war with their trading partners. Globalization prevents wars.
Reign in corporate greed and globalization. As long as our bottom line takes precendence over human rights, we will be a target of (quite justifiable) rage and (condemnable) violence.
Give me a break. Do you really think that Osama is angry about GLOBALIZATION? About the hegemony of McDonald's? He's pissed about American support for Israel. He's pissed about US bases in the Middle East. He's probably pissed about the decimation of Iraq. Globalization is something North American college students get pissy about. Most of the world has real problems (AIDS, oppression, genocide) and globalization doesn't even rank.
There is no sense in which the languages will be merged. If moving to Parrot required a substantial change in Python it just wouldn't happen. If Python on Parrot was less efficient than the current Python interpreter, that would also be a major issue.
Going from here to the conclusion that it must be some turban-wearing, gun-toting radical Islamic militants is a huge leap to a conclusion, and symptomatic of some deep seated hatred.
Of course it is too early to make any judgement. But it is not racist to think first of those who have been loudest in calling for the destruction of the United States (both recently and historically). None of your other "suspects" really make any historical or contextual sense. Atheist suicide bombers? Racists who kill people of all races indescriminately? Are we so politically correct that we must abandon logic?
Another reason to believe (not conclude, but believe) that it might be Islamic militants is that they have a tradition of organized suicide bombing that most other radical organizations do not.
I'm not saying it was Islamic militants but I don't think that I am a racist because that was the first thing that popped into my mind. They followed the MO of those groups, not the MO of domestic terrorists or European terrorists etc.
I just read this: "Three Palestinian groups -- Hamas, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad -- deny responsibility for the attacks, but blame U.S. policies in the Mideast." I guess these guys are racist too...they also think it likely that it was someone from the Mideast.
As I said in another post, if your language doesn't know the difference between scalar types (which perl *does*) then never use it again.
Perl can be told that you mean to deal with strings as integers but it is stretching to say that Perl really knows the difference between strings and integers. It allows you to "add" "a"+"b" (and get 0 -- totally logical!) and it allows you to "concat" 7 and 53. Maybe Perl knows the difference but it doesn't tell you in time to help you find subtle type bugs....
I can't believe this guy was modded up to 4. You moderators are really showing off your lack of understanding of the issue. Here's the original problem report:
It uses strings of unix time to sort the messages in the message list by date.
Python sorts time_t's as integers, not strings. Perl sorts integers and strings the same unless you tell it otherwise. I saw my first report of this kind of Perl sorting bug within a few hours of the billenium. When I saw a second one on slashdot my "crappy software sucks" meter went past the "trashing other languages isn't politically correct" threshold. Perl is full of these little insecurities.
People have a naive faith that there is no real cost to Perl's short-cuts but here is some more anecdotal evidence as if we needed any..
As a Python bigot (flame-bait me!) I'll point out that Perl, PHP and a few other Unix-y scripting languages are especially prone to this problem because they don't distinguish between strings and integers. I always knew that there would be a payoff in Python requiring me to explicitly convert.
This seems like a cheap shot but really there is a systemic issue here. Perl trades robustness for succintness whereas Python tends to require you to say what you mean explicitly. With perfect programmers there would be no difference. In the real world, programmers are not perfect and a language that helps you to find potential problems can yield quantitatively more robust code.
XMetaL is the leader in the XML editing category (in North America, anyhow). They've been in the structured editing business for roughly 15 years. Another strong contender is Documentor.
We relate that to an analysis of the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away.
What a crock. The slave system is purely a human one. How or why a machine would pick up one of the worst human behavoirs is simple called watching too much sci-fi and being paranoid.
Computers will pick up whatever behaviours we program that with. Maybe there will be beneficial AIs and malevalent AIs created to serve good people and bad people. I dunno. Either way, I'd rather not be in the crossfire of perfectly self-replicating consciousnesses with perfect memory and carefully engineered (as opposed to evolved) bodies.
Ambition is also a human drive, if the promise of a Lt. Com. Data type AI comes around it will have very different drives than your typical 17th century empire.
If we can't predict those drives, isn't that a cause for worry?
Moore's "Law" is not a physical constant, and it will hit the wall when circuit engineering goes to quantum level.
What makes you think that the rapid improvement of computers will halt when we hit the physical limits of circuit engineering? There are other techniques as you mention yourself:
When neural net theory and biocircuitry engineering starts to approach organism level performance, that's when you should start sh*tting in your pants...
Hawking is worrying about the problem in advance of it being a direct threat. Doesn't that seem wise?
Okay now we are converging.
"Web Services" don't necessarily have anything to do with "Web Sites" except insofar as most modern development is exposed through a website in one way or another.
Web services are called Web Services because they use Web standards like HTTP and XML. Plus it just gets the VCs excited to prefix anything with the word "Web" (or it did a couple of years ago when the term was coined). Essentially they are distributed computing protocols built on top of existing Internet protocols.
Even so, some web SITES do want to share structured information. Check out meerkat.oriellynet.com. Slashdot probably gets its slashbox content using a system similar to meerkat. Google gets XML content from the Open Directory Project.
Also, one point that Clay Shirky made is that there are some radicals who think that HTTP is the only protocol you need to do structured information interchange -- whether you are doing "Web site" stuff or not, they claim you should expose your structured data through HTTP(s). (even if you only give the password to your partners)
EDI is expensive partly because it doesn't run over the internet - let alone over HTTP. There are very good reasons for this...
Many people disagree with you. Most EDI people are running towards the Internet as quickly as possible. That's the whole point of ebXML. Maybe value added networks will survive for security and quality of service but non-IP protocols are dead.
The only question is whether we all hand-roll our own solutions or have standards for doing it. XML is the structured data specification and web services are about how to move the information from place to place.
VRML was totally different because it was about building customer demand for a new product (3D). Sharing structured information is not new. Most web-connected organizations do it in one way or another today. Just as the Internet glued together the disparate proprietary networks, the web services standards try to glue together disparate information sources.
If you want to argue against the necessity for particular standards, we could have an interesting discussion. But you seem to want to deny that organizizations need to share information in real time. Or that we need standards to lower the cost of doing that.
This reply is a little late but this question seemed so strange to me that I couldn't help but answer it.
First, you discredit single sign-on but if you are a typical end-user with a dozen subscriptions to a dozen sites, single sign-on is a big deal and a massive improvement over sticky notes on your monitor.
Second, if you are selling something, wouldn't you want your product specifications (and in some cases your price) disseminated as widely as possible? If you sell digital cameras, you would absolutely love it if digital camera sites can easily incorporate your product specifications into their site.
People already do this stuff. How do you think the non-Slashdot Slashboxes work? They are XML-based web services (not SOAP, but web services nevertheless). The hype around web services is just about standardizing the information sharing that organizations already do. One you standarize it, you build network effects and economies of scale.
Is this some sort of eCommerce thing? And if so, why should competitors want to share customer data?
Competitors don't. Partners do. Anyhow, you seem a little obsessed with single sign-on and user data. User data is just one kind of data worth sharing. There is also product data. Realtime product availability information.
Damned by faint praise. :-)
When people say "SourceForge is the new ERP" they mean SourceForge is LIKE ERP. They mean it in the sense that "Grey is the new Black." Sourceforge will play the role in software development that ERP pays in purchasing/accounting/whatever. VA Linux is not literally going to go into ERP.
It is important to understand that OASIS is more of a standards body framework than an ordinary standards body. In other words, any OASIS member can decide to start an OASIS group on any idea, no matter how strange it may seem and no other OASIS member may prevent that. Few OASIS resources are used per group so the only real cost is in keeping tabs on all of the groups that are created.
If C is the kind of language you DO NOT like, and SML is the kind of language you DO like, then I sincerely hope that you continue to dislike the scripting languages. C has proven itself perfectly adapted to solve a large an important set of real-world problems. Perl, Python and Ruby are similarly designed.
I don't really see "symbolic AI", "planning", "Dynabook, educational software" and "proof systems" as particularly representative of the programming most of us do in the real world.
"Text munging", "kernel hacking", "GUI and server application programming" etc. are more typical. Thank Guido there are "hacked" languages to let us do our jobs!
How do you think these experimental features are going to get into an ISO standardized language like C++?
Do you think some smart guy like Matz, or Guido Van Rossum or Larry Wall can just go up to the ISO committee and say: "I've got this set of cool ideas -- let's add them to your language."
Also, do you really think that all of the good ideas of Perl, SmallTalk, C++, Lisp and Icon can naturally fit together in a single language? It isn't always possible, nor advisable, to pile every possible feature into a language.
Most people dislike C++ because it has TOO MANY FEATURES. That may not bother you but it is a big part of why Java caught on so quickly. So if you make an uber-language with every feature, you will CAUSE the creation of competitive new languages with smaller feature-sets. Smaller languages are often a reaction AGAINST bigger ones.
People do tend to progress from more well-known languages to less well-known ones. They don't go to a bookstore and pick up a K book and think: "this would be a good first language." I've played with Ruby enough to decide that it is neat but not appropriate for many of my projects and not a sufficient improvement over Python for the rest.
Python 2.2 has metaclasses, a unified object hierarchy and supports multiple inheritance which is quite useful and safe when used thoughtfully.
It is simply a matter of historical fact that Python was not based upon C++. If it shares features with C++, those would probably be traced back to Simula through Modula-3. Smalltalk is also based upon Simula.
Nobody would claim that Python 1.0 was perfect, nor that Python 2.2 is perfect. Nevertheless, you haven't yet mentioned a feature of Ruby that isn't in Python 2.2. There certainly are such features -- but they get increasingly esoteric as Python improves. If I have to choose between Bertrand Meyer-approved-OO-cleanliness and native threads that don't block when you do I/O, I would choose the solid threads. OO-cleanliness is about conceptual elegance and native threads are about getting the job done.
And how deep is Ruby's Unicode support? If you can please point me to documentation on using Ruby's regexp engine to match Unicode characters, I would appreciate it.
My current Python projects depend heavily on both threads and Unicode. Mixins, multiple inheritance and the ability subclass "integer" really don't matter one whit! I am mostly happy that Python is unifying its type system for rhetorical reasons. Practically it hardly matters at all!
If you want to impress the vast majority of programmers who are not language collectors, you'll have to show us some program that are hard to solve in (e.g.) Python and easy to solve in Ruby.
For this and other reasons, it is not accurate to paint Ruby as the next step after Python. It is another good language with strengths and weaknesses. One day it will have a superset of features that Python currently has...but Python will itself have evolved by then.
I think a developers productivity has less to do with the language hes using and more to do with how much experience he has with that language
If that were true, you could just as easily write a text processing system in raw assembly or in a scripting language. I don't believe that. Languages are tools. Different tools effect your productivity in different ways. A farmer's productivity does depend on his tools and so does a programmer's.