"Something having been stamped by a standards orginasation does not have much practical impact compared to a well-documented standard from a company at any rate."
Do you really believe that? The whole point of the standards process is to create a practical impact by ensuring at least the opportunity for interoperability and that no single vendor can arbitrarily control future modifications. One of the things MS has very successfully done in the past is to take a "standard" format then continuously release modifications to it (typically branded as 'enhancements') at a high rate and with sub-standard externally released documentation, such that 3rd party implementors are stuck always playing catch-up to MSs own products. Good business sense for MS, but not good for competition or consumers. Standards allow more people to successfully create products that use those standards... see also TCP/IP, Ethernet, railroad tracks, 120V AC current, DTMF signaling, FM radio, VHS, etc etc etc.
And besides, if there's two formats of near identical functionality... one of which has even the remote possibility of restrictions and prohibits an entire large group from creating interoperable software and another that has no restrictions and permits anyone to create interoperable software, the choice should be a no-brainer. Whether or not MS's XML format is 'almost' free or 'almost' a standard is nice on their part, but we can do better, and Mass is requesting better.
"See, here the FUD is showing."
Even -if- there are no weird restrictions on whether a particular implementation can write files in their format (or only read them), or whether a program would be allowed to implement both their format and other formats (both of which legal reviews have put question marks on), it's still not a standard.
"OpenOffice is a piece of crap..."
It's not about OpenOffice. Period. It's about the format, not the programs that exist (or will exist) that support that format. What _should_ happen as a result of all this is that MS will simply add the ability to read and write the OpenDocument format into MS Office (just like they already support ASCII and RTF and plan to support PDF). Then we will be able to meaningfully compare the features of various ODF supporting Office suites, what support they have for disabled persons, etc etc, and the best product will get the most market share. All of those arguments are MEANINGLESS when discussing the merits of document formats.
"...for one OpenDocument's only complete implementation is relativly obscure."
Last I heard there were currently 3 implementations with several more in the works. Massachusetts goal was to pick a standard format to require and publically announce that requirement so that software vendors of all ilks can start adding support for that format into their roadmaps. The search for which ODF supporting software they'll use won't even come up until 2007 or so... and they may not even have to standardize on one ODF supporting product, but might use different products for different purposes.
It's actually a crusade about State Sovereignty. The point is that OpenDocument, like ASCII and certain forms of PDF, is a international standard that is freely available for any programmer, company, or government to create software to read, write, or otherwise mangle documents that were stored in that format.
Microsoft's XML, aside from not being in an international standards track (something MASS requested and MS didn't do), can only be legally implemented by people MS decides to allow to implement it, for the purposes MS decides to allow. In the future it is even possible that they could remove previously granted permissions.
It is the responsibility of government to make many of these documents available to their constituents for as long as neccessary, no matter what computer OSs they may or may not run and what software companies may or may not exist. To do that you need a standard format that anyone can implement. OpenDocument is that format.
My point was more that you're unlikely to increase any understanding of your data by generating said 10,000 point graph, as only about a tenth of them would actually be visible in the output. Similarly, you're probably not going to learn anything useful by looking at a 10,000 row spreadsheet with your eyeballs either. That's too much data to absorb at once, it needs more cooking before it's ready to be displayed in a useful manner.
I'm not making any excuses for OOo. It -is- noticeably slower and it shouldn't be. I haven't thrown a profiler at it yet to help determine -why- it's slow, but we should.
My curiosity was piqued by this, so I went to try it. Indeed, Excel can plot and manipulate 10,000 point graphs with relative ease, while OOo had to do some chugging (about 2 minutes for me rather than the OPs 30).
I wonder a little at why anyone would ever plot a 10,000 point graph in either program... all the applications I can think of are better served by graphing or scientific programs rather than a spreadsheet.
Useful tip for the OP: If you've specified your labels correctly (in an initial column for example) OOo will use those to label the X axis instead of the default "Row 1, Row 2,...". By simply specifying a blank column you can get a nice blank X axis if that suits your data better. You can also change the font to something more appealing, if the default appears "ugly" to you.
IGNPC: One aspect of the cultural game in Civilization 3 that really aggravated players was the lack of respect the AI showed for your borders. Are you planning to address this issue at all?
Barry Caudill: In Civilization 4, the AI will have to respect your borders or declare war but you will be able to negotiate Open Borders to allow travel.
Ideally, our questions shouldn't overlap too much with what they've already answered elsewhere.
If they mean it to be a wildcard substitution you'd be completely correct.
If, however, they are treating the acronym in question as an expletive, it is standard procedure to blank out multiple letters with the '*' character. (Ex: Those s**tty suits) If that's the case, however, it should more properly be 'R**A'... so they more likely did intend it as a wildcard.
Still, not inappropriate to consider them as expletives given their behavior of late...
I think I'll start using 'Random Evil Media Or Recording Association', REMORA.
Interestingly, alumni from the California Institute of Technology (and the school itself) generally always spell it "Caltech" and not "CalTech" or "Cal Tech".
"Unless you have every single machine plugged into a GPS/radio time unit - or syncronizing every minute... there is just no way to be sure that every machine in a mixed hardware enviroment is exactly the same time."
Actually there is... a properly set up NTP infrastructure. The NTP server on each host not only periodically resynchronizes to known good time sources, but uses the results of those synchronizations to track the drift of it's own internal clock, which then allows it to compensate (generally quite well) for it's own unique flaws.
"For the most part, you can't sell Linux desktop users much of anything (except distros, and barely that) but you might be able to sell a decent number of games like this at $5, but not $20."
I can only speak for myself, but I spend $5 per month on Transgaming and then go out and buy $50 shrinkwrapped games on a semi-regular basis. $20 seems like a great price for a reasonable game, and his sounds pretty interesting.
You can't even get a movie ticket in most countries for $5 (try $10)... why would it be too much for a game offering more than a movie's worth of entertainment.
I believe the quoted OP intended the "it" in "does it matter" to refer to "someone's work if devoid of common rules of grammar and usage", not to "you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing", although both are possible legitimate parsings.
Even if a highly misspelt and ungrammatical post/email/letter is completely unambiguous and can be completely and correctly understood, it usually takes more effort for the reader to get to that point of comprehension than it would without the errors. We are wonderful error-correcting devices, but it's not a zero-cost implementation.
By purposefully ignoring grammar and/or spelling when communicating, you're making things easier for yourself at the expense of requiring more effort from your readers. That's at the very least impolite and quite possibly arrogant and downright rude.
It's especially so in a forum like a news post, where you only need to write once, but what you write will be read many many times. Just making some attempt at reasonable grammar and spelling should greatly improve the overall efficiency of communication at a relatively small cost to the author. Just because something works doesn't mean it works well...
Here's what I can remember of a parody I did around '95...
I'm a sysadmin and I'm ok, I work all night and I work all day. (He's our sysadmin and he's ok, he works all night and he works all day.)
I hack my code, I dump my core, I load up gdb. On Wednesdays I read netnews and flame everyone I see.
(He hacks his code, he dumps his core, he loads up gdb. On Wednesdays he reads netnews and flames everyone he sees.) (He's our sysadmin and he's ok, he works all night and he works all day.)
I hack my code, I MUL and JUMP, I love to read your mail. I reformat your hard drives and fill them up with porn. (He hacks his code...)
For this one, you should be person B... a basic knowledge of vector operations is required.
A: "What's up?" B: "Right Cross Forward."
For a longer joke, I like to go back to my old Applied Math days...
An airplane leaves Warsaw for London. Some crippling illness (take your pick) renders the pilot and co-pilot inoperative. The stewardess goes out among the passengers looking for anyone with flying experience to help make an emergency landing and finds two cropduster pilots. They get up to the cockpit and get on the radio with the landing tower, who is going to help talk them down. As the instructions start coming in, however, they end up helplessly gazing across the vast expanse of lights, switches and controls in a modern passenger airplane, infinitely more complicated than their old cropduster. "I don't think we can handle this." one of says. "Why not?" asks the radio tower. "Well, you see, we're just two simple Poles in a complex plane."
Also don't forget all the people that are working on open-source projects not just becuase they want to, but because the end result is something they _need_.
That's one of the real strengths of this whole free software thing that flys directly against McVoy's confused assault. If no one is selling software to solve a particular problem that I have, I'm likely to try to write it myself, not to make money on the software, but to solve my problem.
If other people also have the same problem, there are two approaches I can take...
1) I can "productize" it, create a company around it, and try to sell it to these other people. More benefit to me in the form of income, but a lot of work...
2) I can turn it into free software and share it with the others (and the world). My benefit here isn't from cash, but from the useful fixes and modifications that the other users make to the software.
Money isn't the only benefit one can get from writing software, nor is doing it because you enjoy it, remember that software programs are invariably tools, and tools are useful and neccessary to have in their own right.
I'm afraid I must agree, although the term "RPG" is really way too broad to be defined by any one single game.
Wasteland helped define the post-apocalyptic party-based RPG "genre".
Bard's Tale defined the standard form for many party-based RPGs for quite some time.
Ultima IV was a defining game for RPGs where your in-game choices changed your character, and where certain situations would have no "correct" solution.
Ultima VII showed that you could create a surprisingly living world.
FF6 may be genre defining for it's little niche of the RPG landscape... I haven't played it myself and can't really say.
Well, I can tell you have some pretty strong feelings on this subject. I'd just like to add a few comments from my perspective as another long time Perl user...
Let me start by saying that I've read all of the perl6 documents with great interest and have almost universally been pleased with the changes that are being made. In all cases, I appreciate how most of the decisions are being made and that the concepts of useability and clarity are taken as important overarching goals. As an example, if you actually read apoc 5 which you linked to as an example of "smoking crack", you'll see that one of the main goals is "better huffman coding" - ie: making frequent tasks easier to express than infrequent tasks and that another is to make regular expressions more readable and maintainable and less like line noise. These, to me, are eminantly admirable goals in a scripting language.
On OO, Note that Perl6, unlike Perl5, is being rewritten with OO at its core, not as an expansion to the previous "nasty hack".
Note also that the perl6 team shares many of your issues with perl5's OO implementation and wants perl6 to be better: Apocalypse 12.
Similarly, when you complain about $,@,% and how confusing they are, you seem to be complaining about perl5isms that perl6 is dedicated to addressing...
In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length. In your specific case, because the hash in inside another hash, you're looking at something like (keys $hash{"key"}).length;... which doesn't seem particularly brain melting to me, especially compared to perl5. I also don't see this threatened horde of new datatypes you seem so angry about. I really recommend that people interested in what these differences will bring read the Exegesises, where equivalent perl5 and perl6 code is usually compared.
"const int $var = 27;" ?
Did you mean something like "my int $var is constant = 27;"? What specifically do you mean when you say that it isn't entirely constant or entirely an integer, and why does it matter?
I completely have no understanding of why perl6 would please "the managers" or what this "one thing that makes perl5 special" is that you think is being lost. As far as I can tell, perl6 keeps everything that I thought made perl5 special and aims to clean up many of the things that make it a PITA.
"It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess." Isn't that why perl6 is a complete rewrite? What unholy mess are you referring to? From your post, I don't believe that you're one to be swayed from your beliefs, but many of your arguments appear on the surface to be based more on emotional response than factual backing...
It reads digital information encoded into the image... it doesn't look at the actual image itself. It's still quite cool, but no good for what you are thinking.
I already explained more about this to a comment Here
The technology is that they can embed arbitrary digital information into arbitrary images, and do it in such a way that it's resistant to errors, damage, blurriness and other rigors of the real world.
If you have a jigsaw made using this technology where the embedded data indicates the location within the original image, you can use this software to decode that data and display where the piece should go. It doesn't look at the actual image at all, and thus wouldn't help you solve any 'normal' jigsaws, or do any sort of general image recognition.
It does use some similar techniques to facial recognition to identify the intersection points and enable the glyph decoding, but that's all.
...now that I think about it, so could just obtain a hobbyist DC power supply of sufficient amperage and hook all your devices up to the appropriate voltages.
It's possible that a spare PC power supply might even suffice, but be careful that you get one that doesn't detect and auto-off when a motherboard isn't plugged in.
Lots of power supplies from somewhere like this: http://www.kepcopower.com/prodmod.htm
It's designed for large scale server rooms, and as such won't particularly adapt to what you want, but this does show that others have had the same thoughts and are applying them to various niches. They do also explain what they see as the benefits of this arrangement.
I just bought a few 16GB Opterons a few months ago (and ordered more last week).
The 2GB DIMMs ran us around $880 each (registered ECC).
You can also get 4GB DIMMs now, but they'll run you about $2500 a pop. (yow!)
The company I'm dealing with (rackable.com) also offers a quad opteron system that has 16 slots, so you can get 16GB with 1GB DIMMs or 64GB with 4GB DIMMs (and 40 grand).
These systems are replacing a Sun V880 that previously provided our large memory support, and run the tools we have much faster.
What they really want to do is find out what your licensing goals are and encourage you to use a pre-existing license that fits those goals, rather than creating your own possibly incompatible license.
Why they want to do this is because the fewer number of licenses that are in use, the more likely it will be that your software's license is compatible with another piece of software's license... permitting both of you to benefit from each other's work and allowing all of your end-users, in turn, to benefit.
Keeping a small number of licenses also makes it easier for people to regularly review them and make sure that, legally, they are doing what they are intended to do. This can be a much more difficult endeavor than you think, especially when we want licenses to work across international and legal boundaries.
Sure, you can always roll your own, and no one can stop you from offering your copyrighted work under whatever license you choose, but if you pick from a limited set of known and tested licenses, you benefit from knowing that it's solid, you benefit from knowing that it's compatible with all the other software released under the same license, and we all benefit from having fewer 'license glitches' get in the way of what we care about... making better software (some us want to charge for it, some don't, that's not really relevant).
The skewing you mantion is referred to as "keystoning" (because it turns your nice rectangle into a keystone-shaped trapezoid).
Most projectors (decent ones at least) will have a 'keystone adjustment' in their menu that you can use to correct this to a reasonable extent (they are limited as to how much of an angle they can correct for).
Check the specifications on a specific projector to make sure it includes keystone correction if you plan to use it at a non-trivial angle.
Slashdot Mirror
"Something having been stamped by a standards orginasation does not have much practical impact compared to a well-documented standard from a company at any rate."
Do you really believe that? The whole point of the standards process is to create a practical impact by ensuring at least the opportunity for interoperability and that no single vendor can arbitrarily control future modifications. One of the things MS has very successfully done in the past is to take a "standard" format then continuously release modifications to it (typically branded as 'enhancements') at a high rate and with sub-standard externally released documentation, such that 3rd party implementors are stuck always playing catch-up to MSs own products. Good business sense for MS, but not good for competition or consumers. Standards allow more people to successfully create products that use those standards... see also TCP/IP, Ethernet, railroad tracks, 120V AC current, DTMF signaling, FM radio, VHS, etc etc etc.
And besides, if there's two formats of near identical functionality... one of which has even the remote possibility of restrictions and prohibits an entire large group from creating interoperable software and another that has no restrictions and permits anyone to create interoperable software, the choice should be a no-brainer. Whether or not MS's XML format is 'almost' free or 'almost' a standard is nice on their part, but we can do better, and Mass is requesting better.
"See, here the FUD is showing."
Even -if- there are no weird restrictions on whether a particular implementation can write files in their format (or only read them), or whether a program would be allowed to implement both their format and other formats (both of which legal reviews have put question marks on), it's still not a standard.
"OpenOffice is a piece of crap..."
It's not about OpenOffice. Period. It's about the format, not the programs that exist (or will exist) that support that format. What _should_ happen as a result of all this is that MS will simply add the ability to read and write the OpenDocument format into MS Office (just like they already support ASCII and RTF and plan to support PDF). Then we will be able to meaningfully compare the features of various ODF supporting Office suites, what support they have for disabled persons, etc etc, and the best product will get the most market share. All of those arguments are MEANINGLESS when discussing the merits of document formats.
"...for one OpenDocument's only complete implementation is relativly obscure."
Last I heard there were currently 3 implementations with several more in the works. Massachusetts goal was to pick a standard format to require and publically announce that requirement so that software vendors of all ilks can start adding support for that format into their roadmaps. The search for which ODF supporting software they'll use won't even come up until 2007 or so... and they may not even have to standardize on one ODF supporting product, but might use different products for different purposes.
"This looks like a mindless OSS crusade to me."
It's actually a crusade about State Sovereignty. The point is that OpenDocument, like ASCII and certain forms of PDF, is a international standard that is freely available for any programmer, company, or government to create software to read, write, or otherwise mangle documents that were stored in that format.
Microsoft's XML, aside from not being in an international standards track (something MASS requested and MS didn't do), can only be legally implemented by people MS decides to allow to implement it, for the purposes MS decides to allow. In the future it is even possible that they could remove previously granted permissions.
It is the responsibility of government to make many of these documents available to their constituents for as long as neccessary, no matter what computer OSs they may or may not run and what software companies may or may not exist. To do that you need a standard format that anyone can implement. OpenDocument is that format.
My point was more that you're unlikely to increase any understanding of your data by generating said 10,000 point graph, as only about a tenth of them would actually be visible in the output. Similarly, you're probably not going to learn anything useful by looking at a 10,000 row spreadsheet with your eyeballs either. That's too much data to absorb at once, it needs more cooking before it's ready to be displayed in a useful manner.
I'm not making any excuses for OOo. It -is- noticeably slower and it shouldn't be.
I haven't thrown a profiler at it yet to help determine -why- it's slow, but we should.
My curiosity was piqued by this, so I went to try it.
...". By simply specifying a blank column you can get a nice blank X axis if that suits your data better. You can also change the font to something more appealing, if the default appears "ugly" to you.
Indeed, Excel can plot and manipulate 10,000 point graphs with relative ease, while OOo had to do some chugging (about 2 minutes for me rather than the OPs 30).
I wonder a little at why anyone would ever plot a 10,000 point graph in either program... all the applications I can think of are better served by graphing or scientific programs rather than a spreadsheet.
Useful tip for the OP: If you've specified your labels correctly (in an initial column for example) OOo will use those to label the X axis instead of the default "Row 1, Row 2,
It sounds like your wish will be answered.
IGN Interview
IGNPC: One aspect of the cultural game in Civilization 3 that really aggravated players was the lack of respect the AI showed for your borders. Are you planning to address this issue at all? Barry Caudill: In Civilization 4, the AI will have to respect your borders or declare war but you will be able to negotiate Open Borders to allow travel.
Ideally, our questions shouldn't overlap too much with what they've already answered elsewhere.
If they mean it to be a wildcard substitution you'd be completely correct.
If, however, they are treating the acronym in question as an expletive, it is standard procedure to blank out multiple letters with the '*' character. (Ex: Those s**tty suits) If that's the case, however, it should more properly be 'R**A'... so they more likely did intend it as a wildcard.
Still, not inappropriate to consider them as expletives given their behavior of late...
I think I'll start using 'Random Evil Media Or Recording Association', REMORA.
Interestingly, alumni from the California Institute of Technology (and the school itself) generally always spell it "Caltech" and not "CalTech" or "Cal Tech".
Now you know (and knowing is half the battle).
"Unless you have every single machine plugged into a GPS/radio time unit - or syncronizing every minute ... there is just no way to be sure that every machine in a mixed hardware enviroment is exactly the same time."
Actually there is... a properly set up NTP infrastructure. The NTP server on each host not only periodically resynchronizes to known good time sources, but uses the results of those synchronizations to track the drift of it's own internal clock, which then allows it to compensate (generally quite well) for it's own unique flaws.
"For the most part, you can't sell Linux desktop users much of anything (except distros, and barely that) but you might be able to sell a decent number of games like this at $5, but not $20."
I can only speak for myself, but I spend $5 per month on Transgaming and then go out and buy $50 shrinkwrapped games on a semi-regular basis. $20 seems like a great price for a reasonable game, and his sounds pretty interesting.
You can't even get a movie ticket in most countries for $5 (try $10)... why would it be too much for a game offering more than a movie's worth of entertainment.
"No one in his right mind would buy SGIs for a renderfarm, not now and not ten years ago"
CPU power isn't the only thing we ask from our computers... SGIs ten years ago had some of the best high-throughput I/O capability available.
Speaking of ambiguity...
I believe the quoted OP intended the "it" in "does it matter" to refer to "someone's work if devoid of common rules of grammar and usage", not to "you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing", although both are possible legitimate parsings.
Even if a highly misspelt and ungrammatical post/email/letter is completely unambiguous and can be completely and correctly understood, it usually takes more effort for the reader to get to that point of comprehension than it would without the errors. We are wonderful error-correcting devices, but it's not a zero-cost implementation.
By purposefully ignoring grammar and/or spelling when communicating, you're making things easier for yourself at the expense of requiring more effort from your readers. That's at the very least impolite and quite possibly arrogant and downright rude.
It's especially so in a forum like a news post, where you only need to write once, but what you write will be read many many times. Just making some attempt at reasonable grammar and spelling should greatly improve the overall efficiency of communication at a relatively small cost to the author. Just because something works doesn't mean it works well...
Here's what I can remember of a parody I did around '95...
I'm a sysadmin and I'm ok, I work all night and I work all day.
(He's our sysadmin and he's ok, he works all night and he works all day.)
I hack my code, I dump my core, I load up gdb.
On Wednesdays I read netnews and flame everyone I see.
(He hacks his code, he dumps his core, he loads up gdb.
On Wednesdays he reads netnews and flames everyone he sees.)
(He's our sysadmin and he's ok, he works all night and he works all day.)
I hack my code, I MUL and JUMP, I love to read your mail.
I reformat your hard drives and fill them up with porn.
(He hacks his code...)
For this one, you should be person B... a basic knowledge of vector operations is required.
A: "What's up?"
B: "Right Cross Forward."
For a longer joke, I like to go back to my old Applied Math days...
An airplane leaves Warsaw for London. Some crippling illness (take your pick) renders the pilot and co-pilot inoperative. The stewardess goes out among the passengers looking for anyone with flying experience to help make an emergency landing and finds two cropduster pilots.
They get up to the cockpit and get on the radio with the landing tower, who is going to help talk them down. As the instructions start coming in, however, they end up helplessly gazing across the vast expanse of lights, switches and controls in a modern passenger airplane, infinitely more complicated than their old cropduster. "I don't think we can handle this." one of says. "Why not?" asks the radio tower. "Well, you see, we're just two simple Poles in a complex plane."
I think what he actually meant was separating _content_ and design. Structure is generally part of the design (CSS) rather than the content (HTML).
Also don't forget all the people that are working on open-source projects not just becuase they want to, but because the end result is something they _need_.
That's one of the real strengths of this whole free software thing that flys directly against McVoy's confused assault. If no one is selling software to solve a particular problem that I have, I'm likely to try to write it myself, not to make money on the software, but to solve my problem.
If other people also have the same problem, there are two approaches I can take...
1) I can "productize" it, create a company around it, and try to sell it to these other people. More benefit to me in the form of income, but a lot of work...
2) I can turn it into free software and share it with the others (and the world). My benefit here isn't from cash, but from the useful fixes and modifications that the other users make to the software.
Money isn't the only benefit one can get from writing software, nor is doing it because you enjoy it, remember that software programs are invariably tools, and tools are useful and neccessary to have in their own right.
Read closer, specifically page 1, near the bottom.
"Once primed, the pipe acts like a giant siphon, requiring relatively little energy to keep an inexhaustible supply of cold at hand."
I'm afraid I must agree, although the term "RPG" is really way too broad to be defined by any one single game.
Wasteland helped define the post-apocalyptic party-based RPG "genre".
Bard's Tale defined the standard form for many party-based RPGs for quite some time.
Ultima IV was a defining game for RPGs where your in-game choices changed your character, and where certain situations would have no "correct" solution.
Ultima VII showed that you could create a surprisingly living world.
FF6 may be genre defining for it's little niche of the RPG landscape... I haven't played it myself and can't really say.
Well, I can tell you have some pretty strong feelings on this subject. I'd just like to add a few comments from my perspective as another long time Perl user...
Let me start by saying that I've read all of the perl6 documents with great interest and have almost universally been pleased with the changes that are being made. In all cases, I appreciate how most of the decisions are being made and that the concepts of useability and clarity are taken as important overarching goals. As an example, if you actually read apoc 5 which you linked to as an example of "smoking crack", you'll see that one of the main goals is "better huffman coding" - ie: making frequent tasks easier to express than infrequent tasks and that another is to make regular expressions more readable and maintainable and less like line noise. These, to me, are eminantly admirable goals in a scripting language.
On OO, Note that Perl6, unlike Perl5, is being rewritten with OO at its core, not as an expansion to the previous "nasty hack".
Note also that the perl6 team shares many of your issues with perl5's OO implementation and wants perl6 to be better: Apocalypse 12.
Similarly, when you complain about $,@,% and how confusing they are, you seem to be complaining about perl5isms that perl6 is dedicated to addressing...
In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length. In your specific case, because the hash in inside another hash, you're looking at something like (keys $hash{"key"}).length; ... which doesn't seem particularly brain melting to me, especially compared to perl5. I also don't see this threatened horde of new datatypes you seem so angry about. I really recommend that people interested in what these differences will bring read the Exegesises, where equivalent perl5 and perl6 code is usually compared.
"const int $var = 27;" ? Did you mean something like "my int $var is constant = 27;"? What specifically do you mean when you say that it isn't entirely constant or entirely an integer, and why does it matter?
I completely have no understanding of why perl6 would please "the managers" or what this "one thing that makes perl5 special" is that you think is being lost. As far as I can tell, perl6 keeps everything that I thought made perl5 special and aims to clean up many of the things that make it a PITA.
"It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess." Isn't that why perl6 is a complete rewrite? What unholy mess are you referring to? From your post, I don't believe that you're one to be swayed from your beliefs, but many of your arguments appear on the surface to be based more on emotional response than factual backing...
It reads digital information encoded into the image... it doesn't look at the actual image itself. It's still quite cool, but no good for what you are thinking.
I already explained more about this to a comment Here
The technology is that they can embed arbitrary digital information into arbitrary images, and do it in such a way that it's resistant to errors, damage, blurriness and other rigors of the real world.
If you have a jigsaw made using this technology where the embedded data indicates the location within the original image, you can use this software to decode that data and display where the piece should go. It doesn't look at the actual image at all, and thus wouldn't help you solve any 'normal' jigsaws, or do any sort of general image recognition.
It does use some similar techniques to facial recognition to identify the intersection points and enable the glyph decoding, but that's all.
...now that I think about it, so could just obtain a hobbyist DC power supply of sufficient amperage and hook all your devices up to the appropriate voltages.
It's possible that a spare PC power supply might even suffice, but be careful that you get one that doesn't detect and auto-off when a motherboard isn't plugged in.
Lots of power supplies from somewhere like this: http://www.kepcopower.com/prodmod.htm
It's designed for large scale server rooms, and as such won't particularly adapt to what you want, but this does show that others have had the same thoughts and are applying them to various niches. They do also explain what they see as the benefits of this arrangement.
http://www.rackable.com/products/dcpower.htm
I just bought a few 16GB Opterons a few months ago (and ordered more last week).
The 2GB DIMMs ran us around $880 each (registered ECC).
You can also get 4GB DIMMs now, but they'll run you about $2500 a pop. (yow!)
The company I'm dealing with (rackable.com) also offers a quad opteron system that has 16 slots, so you can get 16GB with 1GB DIMMs or 64GB with 4GB DIMMs (and 40 grand).
These systems are replacing a Sun V880 that previously provided our large memory support, and run the tools we have much faster.
What they really want to do is find out what your licensing goals are and encourage you to use a pre-existing license that fits those goals, rather than creating your own possibly incompatible license.
Why they want to do this is because the fewer number of licenses that are in use, the more likely it will be that your software's license is compatible with another piece of software's license... permitting both of you to benefit from each other's work and allowing all of your end-users, in turn, to benefit.
Keeping a small number of licenses also makes it easier for people to regularly review them and make sure that, legally, they are doing what they are intended to do. This can be a much more difficult endeavor than you think, especially when we want licenses to work across international and legal boundaries.
Sure, you can always roll your own, and no one can stop you from offering your copyrighted work under whatever license you choose, but if you pick from a limited set of known and tested licenses, you benefit from knowing that it's solid, you benefit from knowing that it's compatible with all the other software released under the same license, and we all benefit from having fewer 'license glitches' get in the way of what we care about... making better software (some us want to charge for it, some don't, that's not really relevant).
The skewing you mantion is referred to as "keystoning" (because it turns your nice rectangle into a keystone-shaped trapezoid).
Most projectors (decent ones at least) will have a 'keystone adjustment' in their menu that you can use to correct this to a reasonable extent (they are limited as to how much of an angle they can correct for).
Check the specifications on a specific projector to make sure it includes keystone correction if you plan to use it at a non-trivial angle.