It's not going away, certainly, but its relevance to the future of computing may be somewhat limited despite its technical merit.
That's silly. Programming languages always were and will always be transient.
Compare Perl1 to Perl5 (that actually easy since change logs are delivered with every Perl version) and see how language have changed over the time. Like-wise PHP or even C.
Languages evolve along with tasks they are used to solve. Sometimes obviously a branch of evolution falls off and language becomes a thing of past. And that can happen to any language, because we still can't predict with certainty problems of tomorrow.
Corollary, niche languages have staying power coming from the niche they occupy. Because niches evolve at much slower pace compared to mainstream technologies, thus has lower risk of being forgotten fast.
And I personally do not think that Perl has its own strong niche. Probably only a "*NIX shell on steroids" - that's how I use it. As long as *NIX shell would exist, I would use Perl to automate large chunks of logic and information analysis which are hard/impossible to do in shell, but do not justify writing/maintaining a C/C++ program for.
But Python 3000 is already out, as Python 3.0, while Perl 6 is not.
Technically, Perl 6 is long time out: specification was out somewhere around 2005. Because the Perl6 isn't a software package (like Perl5), it is a language standard.
The other question is that there are no implementations of the standard yet...
And even then, Perl5 serves it's purpose so perfectly, that I personally atm see no real benefits to even toy with Perl6.
Perhaps if Nintendo gave us hardware that was easier to back up, they wouldn't have these issues.
It's not really Nintendo's responsibility to do this.
That's questionable and luckily questioned constantly: why the content has to be bound to a medium?
As sole distributor of DS games they might be made responsible with direct positive impact to consumers.
As video game market widens (and we have in greater part Nintendo to thank for that), their argument that consoles are their own proprietary technology and intellectual property would be loosing weight. It is not uncommon for state to force commercial companies to open up widely used market-enabling technologies to create new markets and spur better service to customers.
P.S. Heck, even console SDK licensing is discriminatory. If somebody would sue Nintendo over opening up DS/Wii in Europe, provided the two's popularity, Nintendo would have hard time coming up with arguments why it should remain closed in face of popular pressure. Luckily for Nintendo, they should have already a licensing agreement with pretty much every publisher around the world...
True. But with a catch. Normal *BSD installation is much much smaller than Linux installation. Some documentation "problems" do not exist on BSD simply because the tool/function/driver is not supported.
It's like driver man pages. In BSD every driver is well documented and you really can get most out of every device. Correction: every *supported* device. Linux doesn't even bother having man pages for the drivers and HOWTOs are generally outdated. But then e.g. Ubuntu or SUSE does most of the auto-configuration for me automatically so that I do not even need to look into the documentation. And in the end Linux supports more hardware than BSD...
In recent years, developer man pages on Linux have greatly improved.
For portability, I consult often FreeBSD and Linux (and other *NIX variants) manpages, and frankly most of the time Linux man pages are better. Biggest problem to me that historically, *BSD treated itself as elite setting standard, while rest (whole industry in fact) moved along with SysV-ish POSIX. (Compare sockets functions, for example.) Thus newer Linux man pages often contain much more useful portability info while BSD just says "function is available since *BSD X.X" what is really unhelpful.
"BUGS" sections found in some Linux man pages describing historical bogosities and side-effects are also enlightening.
Forwarding such note is a sure way to lose a customer. Part of that $1000 would be a compensation to ISP for the lost revenue. And also prevent frivolous abuse. (Think of it: $1000 is magnitude less than the punitive damages awarded to content industry *per infringement*, iirc $7500).
Actions of entertainment industry go far beyond "shifting the cost" or even "sharing the cost".
Forums took over other support means because it is really faster and better. Being cheaper (to manufacturers) it is plain side-effect. In fact manufacturers in some industries still dismiss user support forums and insist on expensive support contracts.
You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!
B.S.
Softsubs were relatively recently properly implemented in Mplayer. (Though "couple of years" technically is "for years" too.)
Likewise, proper MKV support is also very young. Before Mplayer wasn't demuxing the files properly nor could switch between audio/subtitle channels on the file. Due to bogus demuxing audio skips were also common.
I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?
Getting Mplayer never was a problem. In past I was often even compiling it myself. No big deal.
The problem is getting the rest of it to work: audio and video.
Audio on Linux is a total mess, unless of course you are lucky to have single sound card in your PC (and distro of your choice hasn't succumbed to PulseAudio madness). Many have at least two, since modern MBs have some primitive card always on-board. Managing two sound cards under Linux is still a must, since most applications (Mplayer included) do not integrate with KDE or Gnome and bypass most of the configuration.
Video and video acceleration is much cleaner on Linux. In sense that it is completely absent. And to smoothly playback H.264 files of 720p/bigger resolutions one need either H/W accelerated video playback (which is mostly absent) or properly optimized H.264 decoder (and forked ffmpeg of Mplayer isn't).
If you would limit you statement that you have watched DivX/XViD anime for years then I might believe you. Otherwise - B.S.
Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!
Don't be idiot. I develop for *NIX and my WS is a Linux. For past 10 years (I have started on SuSE 6.2 in 1999). The problem is that kernel team refuses to manage kernel related libraries and interfaces and in Linux scape there not a single entity dealing with multimedia issues. Thus the chaos and frustration - due to lack of organization. Developer are there. But with distros being openly anti-multimedia not much can be done about it.
Neither can Windows, the major player on the OS market. What's your point?
But that can be painlessly compensated by 3rd party software. One download, 2 minutes to install and after that it works pretty much flawlessly.
On Linux: find a repo where to get the fitting version of Mplayer; install Mplayer; spend couple of hours figuring out how to remove/disable the PulseAudio crap; spend more time properly configuring ALSA if you happen to have more than one sound card; spend couple of hours reconfiguring everything to use ALSA; then spend more time updating/finding a version of X.org/video driver because shipped version usually happen to have no support for video acceleration. Done. Almost. Because after every update you have to pray that it all still works. (E.g. on my system, after every other update (sometimes on reboot too) ALSA forgets default sound card and I have to fix it quite often.)
I believe he's talking about Dojinshi?
Dojinshi is absolutely different story. And precisely dojinshi are most often the new/original material, are the work of self-published amateurs trying to make something new. (Though in west they are most often associated with parodies and side-stories to other mangas or anime.) Pretty much all manga artists were starting with dojinshi before becoming professionals. Doing it for money on contract from a publisher: that is the difference between manga and dojinshi.
VLC is helpless when it comes to HD and/or subtitles.
And FlashVideo quality is sorry but acceptable only for funny short videos on YouTube. Nor do I expect the the 4+GB 720p HD videos would be streamed any time soon.
Mplayer is nice, but it integrates with the rest very poorly. I still prefer to run Mplayer from command line, since most of the front-ends (official included) fail very often.
Ages old problem of A/V sync in Mplayer was never fixed. If I try to work in parallel (e.g. compile 2-3 files) Mplayer still easily looses A/V sync.
And aspect ratio handling is also sometimes fails.
And in GUI there is no usable bookmarks/favorites: restarting playback at later time from place where I stopped last time is at best dysfunctional. Last time it failed for me because video file name contained *OMG* international characters. With default GUI it is possible to automagically remember only single position in a movie what sucks for anything longer than 15 minute short.
Mplayer still can't get out of Gnome/KDE setting my preferred audio card. And no real-time change of audio card is possible (e.g. switching from loudspeakers' sound card to headphones' one (built-in on motherboard) and back).
AVC support is still subpar (compared to Windows-only CoreAVC) what makes it unusable for many HD movies: Mplayer starts dropping frames and jitter goes into tens of seconds - if many fast moving objects are in frame.
Mplayer forums are also very welcome place, flooded with "works for me!" trolls.
Mplayer is surely best what Linux can offer in multimedia. Even most subtitle formats work now. But it is so rough on the edges that one can't simply rely on it in long run.
The fact that you link to an non Microsoft maintained collection of codecs with no verification that I've never heard of is just another possible security flaw.
F*ck security.
What the point of having secure (Linux) PC if it barely can play fraction of my video collection? Gathering dust???
P.S. And those are not "MS maintained" codecs - many are actually free software, some of it even GPLd. GPL software isn't limited to Linux, there are boatloads of Windows GPL software too. After introduction of WMS (Windows Media Service), multimedia support of Windows also plunged. Though at least with (free) 3rd party software one can get it all to work on Windows.
I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture.
That is getting stupider over time - considering that out of box Ubuntu can't play 99% of anime found on say mininova.
And even after installing all possible drivers, applications and codecs, Linux video playback - especially as anime concerned - is still eons behind of CCCP on Windows.
And what about the "remix culture" reference? Manga and anime fandom is interesting because there are more people who do new/original stuff - and few who rehash the old stuff. And even if they "remix" (what a stupid word lessig came up with) they still do it their own way, not some dumb copy paste like what many CC-lovers do.
Why then it didn't kill Opera?? Opera also wasn't gratis.
The break (to me personally) was after W3C accepted MS's div/span instead of Netscape's layer/ilayer. They were also terribly late with their extremely buggy CSS support... (JavaScript support was superior, but most people still prefer CSS tricks to JS programming.)
Do not get me wrong. I still like layer/ilayer more than div/span thing. (And Netscape 4.x Messenger remains in my heart the best MUA of all times.) But the majority have spoken and Netscape was slow to react to the sweeping changes.
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
You know... WinNT 4.0 was a "Unix Killer" and Windows 2000 was a "Mainframe Killer."
MS killed Netscape because MS gained the edge in development of HTML and JavaScript standards. Obviously Netscape couldn't compete with gorilla R&D of MS to keep up with all stuff from standards to implement. On other side, Opera for a long time was a non-free-as-beer browser and they are still doing pretty fine. So I guess the problem was with Netscape itself, not with whom they were competing with.
Slashdot Mirror
do perl afficionados think that this new version will enjoy the success that its predecessors have had?
Why should I care?
I use Perl5 because it is perfect fit for what it is. If Perl6 would catch might attention, I might consider trying it too.
Perl isn't about gathering design awards or topping charts. It's a robust tool for an array of *NIX related tasks. And not only.
It's not going away, certainly, but its relevance to the future of computing may be somewhat limited despite its technical merit.
That's silly. Programming languages always were and will always be transient.
Compare Perl1 to Perl5 (that actually easy since change logs are delivered with every Perl version) and see how language have changed over the time. Like-wise PHP or even C.
Languages evolve along with tasks they are used to solve. Sometimes obviously a branch of evolution falls off and language becomes a thing of past. And that can happen to any language, because we still can't predict with certainty problems of tomorrow.
Corollary, niche languages have staying power coming from the niche they occupy. Because niches evolve at much slower pace compared to mainstream technologies, thus has lower risk of being forgotten fast.
And I personally do not think that Perl has its own strong niche. Probably only a "*NIX shell on steroids" - that's how I use it. As long as *NIX shell would exist, I would use Perl to automate large chunks of logic and information analysis which are hard/impossible to do in shell, but do not justify writing/maintaining a C/C++ program for.
But Python 3000 is already out, as Python 3.0, while Perl 6 is not.
Technically, Perl 6 is long time out: specification was out somewhere around 2005. Because the Perl6 isn't a software package (like Perl5), it is a language standard.
The other question is that there are no implementations of the standard yet...
And even then, Perl5 serves it's purpose so perfectly, that I personally atm see no real benefits to even toy with Perl6.
Perhaps if Nintendo gave us hardware that was easier to back up, they wouldn't have these issues.
It's not really Nintendo's responsibility to do this.
That's questionable and luckily questioned constantly: why the content has to be bound to a medium?
As sole distributor of DS games they might be made responsible with direct positive impact to consumers.
As video game market widens (and we have in greater part Nintendo to thank for that), their argument that consoles are their own proprietary technology and intellectual property would be loosing weight. It is not uncommon for state to force commercial companies to open up widely used market-enabling technologies to create new markets and spur better service to customers.
P.S. Heck, even console SDK licensing is discriminatory. If somebody would sue Nintendo over opening up DS/Wii in Europe, provided the two's popularity, Nintendo would have hard time coming up with arguments why it should remain closed in face of popular pressure. Luckily for Nintendo, they should have already a licensing agreement with pretty much every publisher around the world...
True. But with a catch. Normal *BSD installation is much much smaller than Linux installation. Some documentation "problems" do not exist on BSD simply because the tool/function/driver is not supported.
It's like driver man pages. In BSD every driver is well documented and you really can get most out of every device. Correction: every *supported* device. Linux doesn't even bother having man pages for the drivers and HOWTOs are generally outdated. But then e.g. Ubuntu or SUSE does most of the auto-configuration for me automatically so that I do not even need to look into the documentation. And in the end Linux supports more hardware than BSD...
In recent years, developer man pages on Linux have greatly improved.
For portability, I consult often FreeBSD and Linux (and other *NIX variants) manpages, and frankly most of the time Linux man pages are better. Biggest problem to me that historically, *BSD treated itself as elite setting standard, while rest (whole industry in fact) moved along with SysV-ish POSIX. (Compare sockets functions, for example.) Thus newer Linux man pages often contain much more useful portability info while BSD just says "function is available since *BSD X.X" what is really unhelpful.
"BUGS" sections found in some Linux man pages describing historical bogosities and side-effects are also enlightening.
GNU info needs to just die
+1
The shell function makes "info" tad bit more usable to me:
info() { /usr/bin/info --subnodes --output=- "$@" | $PAGER; }
The internet doesn't need film studios.
Can you even imagine internets without rabbid Star Wars fans or Trekkies?
What we're are going to photoshop then??
$1000 is excessive but $100 each is not.
Forwarding such note is a sure way to lose a customer. Part of that $1000 would be a compensation to ISP for the lost revenue. And also prevent frivolous abuse. (Think of it: $1000 is magnitude less than the punitive damages awarded to content industry *per infringement*, iirc $7500).
If they had to get $1000 per request, they would be profiting off of piracy.
You are taking it in silly direction.
All they are asking for is that when the infringed party reports copyright infringement, the ISP actually investigates it
Whoever sends such report must pay for the investigation. ISPs are business, not charity.
You pay a company monthly (in most cases) for a connection.
Yes, yes. I pay for the service. So why entertainment industry should get a free ride?
Actions of entertainment industry go far beyond "shifting the cost" or even "sharing the cost".
Forums took over other support means because it is really faster and better. Being cheaper (to manufacturers) it is plain side-effect. In fact manufacturers in some industries still dismiss user support forums and insist on expensive support contracts.
Our economy cannot do without the internet....
But out economy can do just fine without movies. Hm....
But what's a "standard" movie editor?
Something that is shipped by a number of major distos (Ubuntu, Mandriva, SuSE, Fedora, etc).
You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!
B.S.
Softsubs were relatively recently properly implemented in Mplayer. (Though "couple of years" technically is "for years" too.)
Likewise, proper MKV support is also very young. Before Mplayer wasn't demuxing the files properly nor could switch between audio/subtitle channels on the file. Due to bogus demuxing audio skips were also common.
I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?
Getting Mplayer never was a problem. In past I was often even compiling it myself. No big deal.
The problem is getting the rest of it to work: audio and video.
Audio on Linux is a total mess, unless of course you are lucky to have single sound card in your PC (and distro of your choice hasn't succumbed to PulseAudio madness). Many have at least two, since modern MBs have some primitive card always on-board. Managing two sound cards under Linux is still a must, since most applications (Mplayer included) do not integrate with KDE or Gnome and bypass most of the configuration.
Video and video acceleration is much cleaner on Linux. In sense that it is completely absent. And to smoothly playback H.264 files of 720p/bigger resolutions one need either H/W accelerated video playback (which is mostly absent) or properly optimized H.264 decoder (and forked ffmpeg of Mplayer isn't).
If you would limit you statement that you have watched DivX/XViD anime for years then I might believe you. Otherwise - B.S.
Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!
Don't be idiot. I develop for *NIX and my WS is a Linux. For past 10 years (I have started on SuSE 6.2 in 1999). The problem is that kernel team refuses to manage kernel related libraries and interfaces and in Linux scape there not a single entity dealing with multimedia issues. Thus the chaos and frustration - due to lack of organization. Developer are there. But with distros being openly anti-multimedia not much can be done about it.
Or in other words: I would have dropped my home Windows PC 2+ years ago - if only video playback under Linux was half as good.
Neither can Windows, the major player on the OS market. What's your point?
But that can be painlessly compensated by 3rd party software. One download, 2 minutes to install and after that it works pretty much flawlessly.
On Linux: find a repo where to get the fitting version of Mplayer; install Mplayer; spend couple of hours figuring out how to remove/disable the PulseAudio crap; spend more time properly configuring ALSA if you happen to have more than one sound card; spend couple of hours reconfiguring everything to use ALSA; then spend more time updating/finding a version of X.org/video driver because shipped version usually happen to have no support for video acceleration. Done. Almost. Because after every update you have to pray that it all still works. (E.g. on my system, after every other update (sometimes on reboot too) ALSA forgets default sound card and I have to fix it quite often.)
I believe he's talking about Dojinshi?
Dojinshi is absolutely different story. And precisely dojinshi are most often the new/original material, are the work of self-published amateurs trying to make something new. (Though in west they are most often associated with parodies and side-stories to other mangas or anime.) Pretty much all manga artists were starting with dojinshi before becoming professionals. Doing it for money on contract from a publisher: that is the difference between manga and dojinshi.
VLC is helpless when it comes to HD and/or subtitles.
And FlashVideo quality is sorry but acceptable only for funny short videos on YouTube. Nor do I expect the the 4+GB 720p HD videos would be streamed any time soon.
Mplayer is nice, but it integrates with the rest very poorly. I still prefer to run Mplayer from command line, since most of the front-ends (official included) fail very often.
Ages old problem of A/V sync in Mplayer was never fixed. If I try to work in parallel (e.g. compile 2-3 files) Mplayer still easily looses A/V sync.
And aspect ratio handling is also sometimes fails.
And in GUI there is no usable bookmarks/favorites: restarting playback at later time from place where I stopped last time is at best dysfunctional. Last time it failed for me because video file name contained *OMG* international characters. With default GUI it is possible to automagically remember only single position in a movie what sucks for anything longer than 15 minute short.
Mplayer still can't get out of Gnome/KDE setting my preferred audio card. And no real-time change of audio card is possible (e.g. switching from loudspeakers' sound card to headphones' one (built-in on motherboard) and back).
AVC support is still subpar (compared to Windows-only CoreAVC) what makes it unusable for many HD movies: Mplayer starts dropping frames and jitter goes into tens of seconds - if many fast moving objects are in frame.
Mplayer forums are also very welcome place, flooded with "works for me!" trolls.
Mplayer is surely best what Linux can offer in multimedia. Even most subtitle formats work now. But it is so rough on the edges that one can't simply rely on it in long run.
The fact that you link to an non Microsoft maintained collection of codecs with no verification that I've never heard of is just another possible security flaw.
F*ck security.
What the point of having secure (Linux) PC if it barely can play fraction of my video collection? Gathering dust???
P.S. And those are not "MS maintained" codecs - many are actually free software, some of it even GPLd. GPL software isn't limited to Linux, there are boatloads of Windows GPL software too. After introduction of WMS (Windows Media Service), multimedia support of Windows also plunged. Though at least with (free) 3rd party software one can get it all to work on Windows.
Though personally I would consider possibility of making (even shitty) AMVs on Linux a great plus.
Fact that Linux still doesn't have half-decent "standard" movie editor is really frustrating.
I really believe the Anime fandom is a perfect match for Ubuntu, as they are by nature very much in line with open source and remix culture.
That is getting stupider over time - considering that out of box Ubuntu can't play 99% of anime found on say mininova.
And even after installing all possible drivers, applications and codecs, Linux video playback - especially as anime concerned - is still eons behind of CCCP on Windows.
And what about the "remix culture" reference? Manga and anime fandom is interesting because there are more people who do new/original stuff - and few who rehash the old stuff. And even if they "remix" (what a stupid word lessig came up with) they still do it their own way, not some dumb copy paste like what many CC-lovers do.
Ubunchu!
That is manga, not anime.
Why then it didn't kill Opera?? Opera also wasn't gratis.
The break (to me personally) was after W3C accepted MS's div/span instead of Netscape's layer/ilayer. They were also terribly late with their extremely buggy CSS support... (JavaScript support was superior, but most people still prefer CSS tricks to JS programming.)
Do not get me wrong. I still like layer/ilayer more than div/span thing. (And Netscape 4.x Messenger remains in my heart the best MUA of all times.) But the majority have spoken and Netscape was slow to react to the sweeping changes.
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
You know... WinNT 4.0 was a "Unix Killer" and Windows 2000 was a "Mainframe Killer."
MS killed Netscape because MS gained the edge in development of HTML and JavaScript standards. Obviously Netscape couldn't compete with gorilla R&D of MS to keep up with all stuff from standards to implement. On other side, Opera for a long time was a non-free-as-beer browser and they are still doing pretty fine. So I guess the problem was with Netscape itself, not with whom they were competing with.