True. You could call PHP the best bad language - while it's ugly and inconsistent it's also the best tool for quick and dirty scripts that doesn't require several years of dedicated study to use effectively.
Virtually any complex datatype can be implemented with a hierarchy of arrays (read: hashtables) and doing so requires no effort whatsoever. That's immensely useful when you quickly need to do something with complex data but don't want to spend any time working out a class tree to represent it. You just happily throw stuff into nested arrays and immediately have everything just as you need it.
Of course that approach is not suitable for larger projects, but for quick one-off scripts or simple text-format-to-text-format compilers it's very useful.
If someone forked PHP and reworked it to reduce the ugliness while retaining its advantages like the extremely flexible arrays we could end up with a rapid prototyping language with a deservedly good reputation. And, probably, a glacially slow runtime.
Wouldn't that article also make the point that C, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, Java and everything else that isn't Perl are retarded as well. That article's sole argument is "Perl does it differently so it must be wrong", which applies to everything, even different versions of Perl.
Given the fact that Perl is notorious for allowing scripts indistinguishable from line noise I'd reconsider considering it a reference for good language design.
Of course you still need to be able to keep things separate - I don't want my family photos to appear when I look for business-related images. So we still need something to identify what goes where. Some kind of path component would still be around and we'd have to use virtual directories to access path-specific files. In the end we'd end up reimplementing what we already have on top of that object storage model just to make sense of the flood of files.
Hierarchical organization of things makes sense. Maybe we can reorganize the hierarchy, but I don't really see file systems as we know them going away. A Spotlight-style indexing engine with rich metatdata and a file manager designed to expose that data to the user would essentially do the same without requiring messy low-level hacks to existing software.
Typical example - how the hell does it make sense to drag a disk to the trash when you want to eject it? When you drag other files to the trash, they're deleted. Therefore, when you drag a disk to the trash, shouldn't it be erased?
I actually had to try that to see if it still works. That way of unmounting a volume has long been superseded by eject buttons displayed next to the volumes in the Finder's sidebar. And, of course, by the physical eject button on the keyboard (only for the DVD drive).
That's exactly the point the GGGP was making - there's no need to "redefine file systems" when a well-integrated desktop search software already solves the problem.
Spotlight is merely a well-known example and widely used by Mac users; I don't know which percentage of desktop Linux users heavily relies on Beagle, but it's probably lower than the equivalent number for OS X and Spotlight. Also, Spotlight had a lot more screentime than Beagle, even though Beagle was released sooner.
I wonder how an ISP can defend such pricing in 2008
Because that's the standard market rate. The OP has already been identified as being from New Zealand where broadband is absurdly expensive. The only way to change that is to be a telco, lay your own optical cable between NZ and somewhere else (the question is where - as Australia isn't big on broadband either Japan might be the nearest useful connection) and then try to recoup your losses without charging as much as everyone else.
Not everyone has access to broadband as easily as Japan, Europe or the USA.
That only works if someone actually offers something better. If the OP sits in Australia or New Zealand a 10 GB limit might be the best offer he can afford.
I just have this instinctive dislike of anything being called a "right" when the "right" is followed by "except as restricted by law"....
Hey, that's how the American Bill of Rights works. You get all rights not taken from you by the state or the union (ninth amendment). The rest of the BoR is essentially a list of things that can't be taken away from you. Any right not listed there is "except as restricted by law".
Of course one can argue about the basic stuff that is listed.
Hey, that's almost like over here in Germany only we haven't been at it for quite as long. And, actually, most of the exceptions to the Basic Law stem from things we were explicitly told to do when we this nation was built, like having a zero-tolerance policy towards National Socialism.
The Allies didn't intend Germany to have unlimited free speech. We are the product of their nation building. For what we've been granted we've been doing quite well.
Because a War on Pedophilia will be just a great a success as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Besides the fact that killing peple over what's a part of their very nature reeks a bit of "ethnic cleansing".
You really need a differentiated and well-thught out approach. Brute force will neither reach all pedophiles, nor will it actully protect any children as pedophiles are usually only identified as such after a rape because the social stigma (and now threat to life and limb) associated with it will make them keep it a secret. Your proposal will, however, ensure that child molesters will kill the victim afterwards to evade detection so your proposal is actually more child-hostile than helpful.
Think before acting. Failing to do that will end with bad policy that will end up hurting the very thing you intend to protect.
Thank you. I thoguht I was the only person on the planet capable of applying rational thought to the issue.
There's a very simple reason why the current approach doesn't do us ay good: Prohibition doesn't solve problems, at least not alone. It doesn't help when you prohibit alcohol or drugs - it just pushes the users underground, away from any legal control and it also causes them to commit secondary crimes to cover up their drug usage. It helps even less when you prohibit a part of someone's nature. You can't tell someone that everything he's into is illegal and expect him to magically turn off his sex drive.
As prohibition and the vilification of the affected will not eliminate the problem but rather ensure that virtually all victims end up getting killed afterwards (as well as that there wil be victims in the first place) we really need to rethink some policies. Psychological support, self-help groups and maybe even the distribution of controlled-quality kiddie porn (= drawn or rendered with occasional governmental checks ensuring that no actual children are involved) could help reduce the problem and make paedophiles safe and stable members of society instead of sexually-repressed potential killer rapists.
Of course that would require society to stop knee-jerking, think about a very emotional topic and treat the offenders as human beings - and as long as media like Fox News or the German BILD exist we are guarateed that won't happen, 1 GG be damned*.
It's amazing how the people shouting "someone think of the children" are the ones whose policies are guaranteed to end up hurting children later on.
* A reference to the first paragraph of the German Basic Law ("Grundgesetz"), which is our equivalent to a Constitution. 1 says: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." If violating someone's dignity was directly punishable, the BILD editorial staff would have a debt of several billion Euros because of that alone.
Over here in Germany we use 24 hour time and UTC might not be a hard sell either (we're UTC +1/+2).
It would definitely make things easier if at least international businesses and communities talked UTC. Remember the Firefox download day where people from half the planet wondered why Mozilla hasn't started the action even though the date/time specified on the site have already been reached. Only afterwards did many people learn that Mozilla meant that time in some American time zone nobody has ever heard about.
If you try to give a date/time to someone who's probably not from your own country it's usually a bad idea to use local time. UTC was made for a reason and arguably should have greater significance on the internet.
So there will not be any patches or updates? Any patch or update you sell is the same as one you give away - the licence ensures that. So nobody will ever release patches. Doesn't sound like a good model to me.
The iPod Touch, however, is twice as fast, has twice the RAM, has a multitouch touchscreen, has twice the screen size (480x320 vs. 320x240), comes with more built-in storage (the smallest version comes with as much as the iKIT can possibly hold; without an additional card (= additional cost) the iKIT has a whopping 25 megs of storage), has access to the Apple App Store with lots of third-party apps, does OpenGL and can play MP3s without performance issues (which the iKIT's CPU apparently can't do when used in cheap MP3 players).
Compared to the iPod Touch the iKIT is ridiculously expensive.
1.) This is Slashdot. Being overly pedantic about stuff like that is what sets us apart from savages like... sites where people aren't overly pedantic about stuff like that.
2.) != is less restrictive about what it evaluates to true. I was talking about things it evaluates to false. I might have been more precise about that. Especially while being overly pedantic.
Gold Alpha. Because soon the terms "alpha" and "beta" will have become so watered down that the difference between alpha, beta and gold becomes epsilon.
Actually, !== places fewer restrictions on the operands than !=. !== implies that the value, the type or both are different. != implies that the value and possibly the type are different. !== would only make sense when you compare a software Java runtime to a supposedly-identical SoC implementation of Java.
Slashdot Mirror
True. You could call PHP the best bad language - while it's ugly and inconsistent it's also the best tool for quick and dirty scripts that doesn't require several years of dedicated study to use effectively.
Virtually any complex datatype can be implemented with a hierarchy of arrays (read: hashtables) and doing so requires no effort whatsoever. That's immensely useful when you quickly need to do something with complex data but don't want to spend any time working out a class tree to represent it. You just happily throw stuff into nested arrays and immediately have everything just as you need it.
Of course that approach is not suitable for larger projects, but for quick one-off scripts or simple text-format-to-text-format compilers it's very useful.
If someone forked PHP and reworked it to reduce the ugliness while retaining its advantages like the extremely flexible arrays we could end up with a rapid prototyping language with a deservedly good reputation. And, probably, a glacially slow runtime.
If we're already nitpicking, the GP never said "scripting language" and HTML is used more often that JavaScript, I'd think.
Wouldn't that article also make the point that C, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, Java and everything else that isn't Perl are retarded as well. That article's sole argument is "Perl does it differently so it must be wrong", which applies to everything, even different versions of Perl.
Given the fact that Perl is notorious for allowing scripts indistinguishable from line noise I'd reconsider considering it a reference for good language design.
Example:
prints:
Of course you still need to be able to keep things separate - I don't want my family photos to appear when I look for business-related images. So we still need something to identify what goes where. Some kind of path component would still be around and we'd have to use virtual directories to access path-specific files. In the end we'd end up reimplementing what we already have on top of that object storage model just to make sense of the flood of files.
Hierarchical organization of things makes sense. Maybe we can reorganize the hierarchy, but I don't really see file systems as we know them going away. A Spotlight-style indexing engine with rich metatdata and a file manager designed to expose that data to the user would essentially do the same without requiring messy low-level hacks to existing software.
I actually had to try that to see if it still works. That way of unmounting a volume has long been superseded by eject buttons displayed next to the volumes in the Finder's sidebar. And, of course, by the physical eject button on the keyboard (only for the DVD drive).
That's exactly the point the GGGP was making - there's no need to "redefine file systems" when a well-integrated desktop search software already solves the problem.
Spotlight is merely a well-known example and widely used by Mac users; I don't know which percentage of desktop Linux users heavily relies on Beagle, but it's probably lower than the equivalent number for OS X and Spotlight. Also, Spotlight had a lot more screentime than Beagle, even though Beagle was released sooner.
Because that's the standard market rate. The OP has already been identified as being from New Zealand where broadband is absurdly expensive. The only way to change that is to be a telco, lay your own optical cable between NZ and somewhere else (the question is where - as Australia isn't big on broadband either Japan might be the nearest useful connection) and then try to recoup your losses without charging as much as everyone else.
Not everyone has access to broadband as easily as Japan, Europe or the USA.
That only works if someone actually offers something better. If the OP sits in Australia or New Zealand a 10 GB limit might be the best offer he can afford.
Hey, that's how the American Bill of Rights works. You get all rights not taken from you by the state or the union (ninth amendment). The rest of the BoR is essentially a list of things that can't be taken away from you. Any right not listed there is "except as restricted by law".
Of course one can argue about the basic stuff that is listed.
Hey, that's almost like over here in Germany only we haven't been at it for quite as long. And, actually, most of the exceptions to the Basic Law stem from things we were explicitly told to do when we this nation was built, like having a zero-tolerance policy towards National Socialism.
The Allies didn't intend Germany to have unlimited free speech. We are the product of their nation building. For what we've been granted we've been doing quite well.
In theory. One could say that the wording of the US Constitution reflects ideal usage while the wording of the German Basic Law reflects actual usage.
Because a War on Pedophilia will be just a great a success as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Besides the fact that killing peple over what's a part of their very nature reeks a bit of "ethnic cleansing".
You really need a differentiated and well-thught out approach. Brute force will neither reach all pedophiles, nor will it actully protect any children as pedophiles are usually only identified as such after a rape because the social stigma (and now threat to life and limb) associated with it will make them keep it a secret. Your proposal will, however, ensure that child molesters will kill the victim afterwards to evade detection so your proposal is actually more child-hostile than helpful.
Think before acting. Failing to do that will end with bad policy that will end up hurting the very thing you intend to protect.
Thank you. I thoguht I was the only person on the planet capable of applying rational thought to the issue.
There's a very simple reason why the current approach doesn't do us ay good: Prohibition doesn't solve problems, at least not alone. It doesn't help when you prohibit alcohol or drugs - it just pushes the users underground, away from any legal control and it also causes them to commit secondary crimes to cover up their drug usage. It helps even less when you prohibit a part of someone's nature. You can't tell someone that everything he's into is illegal and expect him to magically turn off his sex drive.
As prohibition and the vilification of the affected will not eliminate the problem but rather ensure that virtually all victims end up getting killed afterwards (as well as that there wil be victims in the first place) we really need to rethink some policies. Psychological support, self-help groups and maybe even the distribution of controlled-quality kiddie porn (= drawn or rendered with occasional governmental checks ensuring that no actual children are involved) could help reduce the problem and make paedophiles safe and stable members of society instead of sexually-repressed potential killer rapists.
Of course that would require society to stop knee-jerking, think about a very emotional topic and treat the offenders as human beings - and as long as media like Fox News or the German BILD exist we are guarateed that won't happen, 1 GG be damned*.
It's amazing how the people shouting "someone think of the children" are the ones whose policies are guaranteed to end up hurting children later on.
* A reference to the first paragraph of the German Basic Law ("Grundgesetz"), which is our equivalent to a Constitution. 1 says: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." If violating someone's dignity was directly punishable, the BILD editorial staff would have a debt of several billion Euros because of that alone.
I have no idea how to set my watch. Doesn't matter, though; it's a radio watch. DCF77 does that for me.
Having to set your clocks is a bit quaint, at least as far as anything used as an alarm is concerned.
Over here in Germany we use 24 hour time and UTC might not be a hard sell either (we're UTC +1/+2).
It would definitely make things easier if at least international businesses and communities talked UTC. Remember the Firefox download day where people from half the planet wondered why Mozilla hasn't started the action even though the date/time specified on the site have already been reached. Only afterwards did many people learn that Mozilla meant that time in some American time zone nobody has ever heard about.
If you try to give a date/time to someone who's probably not from your own country it's usually a bad idea to use local time. UTC was made for a reason and arguably should have greater significance on the internet.
Heh. I thought cloud computing was a stupid idea when it was still called Web 2.0.
Yes, that is the geek version of "I already listened to $BAND_NAME when they were still underground".
That aren't rats but mungos. The airlines put them in there to counter the snake problem many planes seem to have lately.
Actually, the unmentioned part was already completed and has enjoyed a successful career in certain Japanese entertainment publications.
That's right, the Linux devs invented the probably-gay mecha pilot.
So there will not be any patches or updates? Any patch or update you sell is the same as one you give away - the licence ensures that. So nobody will ever release patches. Doesn't sound like a good model to me.
The iPod Touch, however, is twice as fast, has twice the RAM, has a multitouch touchscreen, has twice the screen size (480x320 vs. 320x240), comes with more built-in storage (the smallest version comes with as much as the iKIT can possibly hold; without an additional card (= additional cost) the iKIT has a whopping 25 megs of storage), has access to the Apple App Store with lots of third-party apps, does OpenGL and can play MP3s without performance issues (which the iKIT's CPU apparently can't do when used in cheap MP3 players).
Compared to the iPod Touch the iKIT is ridiculously expensive.
1.) This is Slashdot. Being overly pedantic about stuff like that is what sets us apart from savages like... sites where people aren't overly pedantic about stuff like that.
2.) != is less restrictive about what it evaluates to true. I was talking about things it evaluates to false. I might have been more precise about that. Especially while being overly pedantic.
Gold Alpha. Because soon the terms "alpha" and "beta" will have become so watered down that the difference between alpha, beta and gold becomes epsilon.
Actually, !== places fewer restrictions on the operands than !=. !== implies that the value, the type or both are different. != implies that the value and possibly the type are different. !== would only make sense when you compare a software Java runtime to a supposedly-identical SoC implementation of Java.
You can raytrace in any Turing-complete language. If you were insane enough to do so (and very patient) you could do raytracing in XSLT.