To say Perl is hard is a bit much. Actually... I'd say it's just plain wrong. I'd say it's really easy. In fact, most people say it's *too* easy. In fact, some of the things Perl does are just... so stupid it's a miracle nobody ever thought of them before.
Really tell me, why does the if statement need to be at the head of a code block, and this must be adhered to even if the world comes crumbling down? In Perl it can be put at the end of a statement, e.g., do_this() if (TRUE);
At first glance it's cumbersome, but the language is thinking like the brain thinks. I think we're just used to the *really* "hard" languages, and have trouble wrapping our heads around a language that is actually, when it comes down to it... very easy!
Variables can be vaguely defined, or they can be done nice and neatly. And chomp is very well-defined, and a damn useful function, thank you very much!
Perl gives you the flexibility to be a slob, or to be prim and proper. It gives you a choice rather than putting you in a straight-jacket which helps prevent you from pulling your own eyes out, but you now you can't eat!
The fact that most people out there are slobs doesn't reflect poorly on a language that is otherwise a pleasure to work with, and very intuitive.
I work at a company (right now!) that developed it's own in-house framework on Perl. It's written in Chinese for all I know, there are portions of the system the IT head tells me not to look into. It's a black box. It works, so we don't touch it, we don't look at it. We don't think about it, in case something snaps and sends the system crashing.
I was code surfing once and came across 2-d arrays. I asked my boss, and he's like, oh, yeah, it gets even better: there are 3-d arrays in there.
The system is currently a black box. The business poured significant amount of money back in 2001 when the system was designed, and the company's been milking the productivity it gets out of the system. As new projects come up with new features and functionalities, the system is more strained, and we do more workaround and hacks, until we forget where the system ends and the hacks begin.
From a business standpoint, the management won't invest in a new system, Perl or otherwise, because that's additional costs for a system that *was* designed, they thought, back in 2001. They're not interested in listening to strange terms like "architecture" and "design." They hold the keys to the safe, so here we are, working on a project on a crumbling old system not designed to do anything like what we need it to do.
Boy, oh boy, I'm sending this article to my boss. And bro... I hear you. I love Perl, what a damn beautiful language to code in. Sure, you need to set the ground rules or people will run amok or write one-way code, but it's such an absolute pleasure to work with. But the language, nor the programmers who love working with it, get much respect.
Seriously, I don't think anyone on either side of the Atlantic is considering the possibility of Pakistan's nuclear capabilities falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.
Even at the peak of anti-American sentiments after the invasion of Afghanistan, the hard-liner Islamic political parties never got more than 11% of the popular vote. Most political parties in Pakistan are moderate, and the nukes are buried deep in the military chain of command, which is secular.
Pakistan remains firmly in the pocket of the United States. And there's enough inertia from both Pakistan and the United States to make sure that these traditional allies remain that way.
Absolutely. I was once talking about how Linux is a much more reliable solution on an IRC chat room, and a friend of mine mentioned that their Solaris server at a previous job was having extensive downtime.
This is quite definitely attributable to bad sysadmins. I used to sysadmin at a computer cluster at my university, and the line of sysadmins was so strong up to our point, that they had managed to have an uptime of more than a year on the main server running all the crucial services. And, in retrospect, that's not that staggering an accomplishment. Linux can do better. This was an older Debian kernel running on commodity Dell hardware, btw.
For its core applications, claims of Linux not being ready for prime-time are uninformed at best, and lies at worst.
I'd recommend Singapore, where I live, but they've got my fingerprint here too. I'm not a Singaporean national; they took my thumb print back in 2006 when I was a fresh graduate from university, applying for a work permit. They have a national ID card system for their nationals and permanent residents, though. And it's linked to nearly everything.
Back in Bangladesh, where I'm originally from, they're implementing a national ID card system. To wide public support, btw.
In the Middle East (United Arab Emirates) where I grew up, they've been keeping foreign workers' passports under lock & key of their employers for the longest time, and issuing an ID card for foreign workers (the majority of their resident population).
Most expatriates living and working in these countries have been stomaching this stuff for generations now. The general rule is keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you.
All the abuses you've listed above are very easily doable by someone without an RFID system, and easily preventable by good policies, enforcement, and accountability.
I don't believe that placing bunch of kids under a constant surveillance from which they cannot escape while they are in the school building will help them not to turn out too bad later on.
I never said that either.:) I believe you owe someone a straw man.
The system gives more power, which needs more control, regulation and established good practices. It's not different to any other technological improvement. The old ways are still the best ways, and I still don't disagree with the core of your point, but you're being needlessly idealistic.
I believe this discussion is taking a turn for the mindlessly polemic, so this will be my last post on the matter. We shall have to agree to disagree.
If a teacher cannot take one look at the class and see who is missing, then you either have too large classes, of the teacher is totally incompetent, and I would not want to have him or her in charge of my kids!
In an ideal world, teachers won't be incompetent, or have too many students in a class.
In an ideal world, teachers won't have too many classes assigned to them, so they won't get confused as to which class they're teaching, and who's in which class.
In an ideal world, a teacher gives a damn, and takes down the names of their students, or makes an effort to know their students.
Unfortunately, however...
The point you raise is true. But for practicality's sake, for schools with problematic children, or public schools where kids don't go to become the next Einstein, but just to learn the basics in the hopes that they don't turn out too bad later on... or for a school where the parents send their kids so they can have some peace at home... this isn't a bad solution.
I was involved with a start-up company in Singapore trying to sell RFID solutions to schools for tracking children.
The school we were pitching to were interested at first, but didn't make the jump once they discovered it was "experimental." In hindsight, it was a good thing, because the start-up I was working for lacked the expertise to pull it off.
But I agree with the parent; it's responsible so long as it's used within the school premises. Children aren't the same as adults, and otherwise draconian practices are part and parcel of raising kids.
This isn't a privacy issue, but on the contrary, an example of the application of technology to save many man-hours of tedious attendance-taking and embarrassingly mis-pronounced names.
OS X 10.2 was already better than Vista, and was better than Windows XP for that matter.
Uh, no. Haha. Have you used OS X 10.2? That's Jaguar, you do realize, right?
I used it when I bought my first Mac back in the summer of 2003. OS X 10.2 Jaguar was, at best, unpolished, but showed promise. At worst, it was very difficult to use, and there was really no compelling reason for XP users of the time to switch. Not for the user experience anyway.
First of all, it was very slow. Boot-up took a very long while. They improved that with OS X 10.3 Panther later that year, and OS X has been consistently having lower boot-up times with every upgrade since OS X 10.0 Cheetah. John Siracusa from Ars Technica has written on this, you could check him out.
Secondly, it had awful window management. It had the Mac COMMAND+TAB without Expose, which was very difficult to use. Imagine trying to command+tab into an application with five or six different windows open, then trying to find that one window you were looking for... it was like shuffling through a deck of cards looking for the Ace of Clubs. I'm serious, compared to OS X 10.2's implementation of window switching, XP was ahead of its game at the time.
OS X 10.2 Jaguar was not better than Vista, and certainly not better than XP. I'm sorry, I love OS X too, but my first few months with OS X 10.2 Jaguar were very painful.
OS X 10.3 Panther, however, completely changed the game. They polished up a lot of things in terms of user experience, and it was far from an incremental upgrade, but a sea-change. OS X 10.3 Panther marks the point where OS X was officially ahead of XP, in terms of usability.
It's amazing a mindless comment like that can be modded up to "Insightful" so people can read it. That's just flamebait.
Apple regularly bitch-slap their fanbase like 2-bit whores.
That's just hyperbole. I think what you're thinking of is Sony. A company has to be consistently nasty to its consumers to achieve the level of evil that you so dismissively assert Apple is guilty of.
There are a lot of things to gripe about when it comes to Apple. No games, dearth of third party apps, it comes at a significant price premium (in South and Southeast Asia at least), it's locked-in. Most of these have pretty decent answers too.
But Apple's done a lot for their consumers. For example, engaging the evil money-sucking overlords that is the music industry with, what might be argued as, very fair use of DRM'ed music: burn it as many times as you like in different playlists, and on up to five computers.
I hate DRM too, and own no DRM'ed music, but let's face it. These guys say burning CDs your own is stealing, and Apple got them to let you burn your DRM'ed tracks an unlimited number of times, and be stored on up to five Macs. That's not half bad.
There's a reason everyone's clambering for the iPhone. An excellent user experience which you get nowhere else, and, to all of Apple's marketing credit, a media hype-machine that they didn't have to spend too much money and effort on.
They didn't have to work too hard for it was because Apple has the street-cred for turning out some damn good products. Immitation is the best form of flattery, and a look at any computer electronics store will show you the influence Apple has had on the entire industry. From cheap Chinese hardware manufacturers to Microsoft, they're all influenced by Apple's design and implementation ethos.
Now what they did get wrong is closing up the platform. They claim to have reasons for it. Frankly, I don't know what their reasons are, but I won't get any of these locked down platforms until I know they're open. That's a choice you can make as a consumer.
Apple is a company which, although certainly not perfect, hasn't really been all that evil until now, and in some cases, has done some good. So there really isn't any reason to get nasty about it.
Economic feasibility is admitted as a hurdle, but technologically, they seem pretty confident. From TFA (formatted for easy reading):
FINDING: The SBSP Study Group found that SpaceBased Solar Power is a complex engineering
challenge, but requires no fundamental scientific breakthroughs or new physics to become a reality.
SpaceBased Solar Power is a complicated engineering project with substantial challenges and a
complex tradespace not unlike construction of a large modern aircraft, skyscraper, or
hydroelectric dam, but does not appear to present any fundamental physical barriers or require
scientific discoveries to work. While the study group believes the case for technical feasibility is
very strong, this does not automatically imply economic viability and affordabilitythis
requires even more stringent technical requirements.
Also
[...] Advances (since 1970s) have included
improvements in PV efficiency from about 10% (1970s) to more than 40% (2007);
increases in robotics capabilities from simple teleoperated
manipulators in a few degrees of freedom (1970s) to fully autonomous robotics with insect
class intelligence and 30100 degrees of freedom (2007);
increases in the efficiency of solid
state devices from around 20% (1970s) to as much as 70%90% (2007);
improvements in
materials for structures from simple aluminum (1970s) to advanced composites including
nanotechnology composites (2007); and many other areas.
And this is off an initial investment of $300 million for the whole trilogy?
Jackson & crew actually went way over budget, and the total was closer to $500 million plus, with all the extra effects shots they had to do in the latter movies because of lack of planning in principle photography (which, understandably focused more on the first two films, which is why there's less special effects in the first films than the last one), and the need to do pick-ups, etc.
In addition, they renegotiated contracts with pay rises for members of the crew after the crew discovered that they were really onto something, and New Line wasn't spreading the wealth.
This article is fluff. The section on the iPhone is common knowledge. He's never touched the Blackberry, never worked on Brew, he's waiting for Palm to do something, there's no indication he's developed anything on Symbian, and he "doesn't see any way" to develop for Linux because of lack of tools.
I'm not sure if their grievances are totally unfounded. The issue here isn't about money, it's time.
I purchased an iBook 900 3 months before they upgraded to the G4 line back in late 2003. I didnt whine, though, because the iBook 900 had been out for a while.
That is different from me buying something that has just been released to find the price got cut only 2 months after the fact. Cutting prices of products so soon after their release is a bit odd.
If Apple had done the price cut an additional 4 months later, nobody would have complained, because that would be more in line with what customers expect of a reasonable product cycle.
Early adopters pay as much for "the latest and greatest" as they do for exclusivity. Say what you want about that attitude, but they're not getting their money's worth if Apple makes the product mainstream so soon after endowing them with said exclusivity.
Slashdot Mirror
To say Perl is hard is a bit much. Actually... I'd say it's just plain wrong. I'd say it's really easy. In fact, most people say it's *too* easy. In fact, some of the things Perl does are just... so stupid it's a miracle nobody ever thought of them before.
Really tell me, why does the if statement need to be at the head of a code block, and this must be adhered to even if the world comes crumbling down? In Perl it can be put at the end of a statement, e.g., do_this() if (TRUE);
At first glance it's cumbersome, but the language is thinking like the brain thinks. I think we're just used to the *really* "hard" languages, and have trouble wrapping our heads around a language that is actually, when it comes down to it... very easy!
Every heard of the Perl Self-Answering Questions? Too easy, man. Not too hard. Too easy.
Variables can be vaguely defined, or they can be done nice and neatly. And chomp is very well-defined, and a damn useful function, thank you very much!
Perl gives you the flexibility to be a slob, or to be prim and proper. It gives you a choice rather than putting you in a straight-jacket which helps prevent you from pulling your own eyes out, but you now you can't eat!
The fact that most people out there are slobs doesn't reflect poorly on a language that is otherwise a pleasure to work with, and very intuitive.
I work at a company (right now!) that developed it's own in-house framework on Perl. It's written in Chinese for all I know, there are portions of the system the IT head tells me not to look into. It's a black box. It works, so we don't touch it, we don't look at it. We don't think about it, in case something snaps and sends the system crashing.
I was code surfing once and came across 2-d arrays. I asked my boss, and he's like, oh, yeah, it gets even better: there are 3-d arrays in there.
The system is currently a black box. The business poured significant amount of money back in 2001 when the system was designed, and the company's been milking the productivity it gets out of the system. As new projects come up with new features and functionalities, the system is more strained, and we do more workaround and hacks, until we forget where the system ends and the hacks begin.
From a business standpoint, the management won't invest in a new system, Perl or otherwise, because that's additional costs for a system that *was* designed, they thought, back in 2001. They're not interested in listening to strange terms like "architecture" and "design." They hold the keys to the safe, so here we are, working on a project on a crumbling old system not designed to do anything like what we need it to do.
Boy, oh boy, I'm sending this article to my boss. And bro... I hear you. I love Perl, what a damn beautiful language to code in. Sure, you need to set the ground rules or people will run amok or write one-way code, but it's such an absolute pleasure to work with. But the language, nor the programmers who love working with it, get much respect.
I know this is redundant, but seriously... don't! The summary's got more digestible information than the article on macdailynews.com does!
Aww, yeah. Well, I guess the naysayers were vocal back then. Now that this is out in the open, they're understandably embarrassed.
Comments are just a biased sample set of the ones willing to talk!
Like me. I always thought he did it. If I didn't think he did it, I wouldn't be posting right now. Heh.
That's really an excellent description of recent slashdot trends.
Seriously, I don't think anyone on either side of the Atlantic is considering the possibility of Pakistan's nuclear capabilities falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.
Even at the peak of anti-American sentiments after the invasion of Afghanistan, the hard-liner Islamic political parties never got more than 11% of the popular vote. Most political parties in Pakistan are moderate, and the nukes are buried deep in the military chain of command, which is secular.
Pakistan remains firmly in the pocket of the United States. And there's enough inertia from both Pakistan and the United States to make sure that these traditional allies remain that way.
Yeah, but the movie *was* awful, admittedly. I only read the first book, and it was a splendid read, but the movie was badly adapted.
Absolutely. I was once talking about how Linux is a much more reliable solution on an IRC chat room, and a friend of mine mentioned that their Solaris server at a previous job was having extensive downtime.
This is quite definitely attributable to bad sysadmins. I used to sysadmin at a computer cluster at my university, and the line of sysadmins was so strong up to our point, that they had managed to have an uptime of more than a year on the main server running all the crucial services. And, in retrospect, that's not that staggering an accomplishment. Linux can do better. This was an older Debian kernel running on commodity Dell hardware, btw.
For its core applications, claims of Linux not being ready for prime-time are uninformed at best, and lies at worst.
That's very informative, Thanks.
Mod parent up!
No, really... what's a prote? Dictionary.com says it's a short form of proteo, which is from proteins. I really don't think that's it.
The closest possible word it could be is "project."
That's a really bad typo.
I'd recommend Singapore, where I live, but they've got my fingerprint here too. I'm not a Singaporean national; they took my thumb print back in 2006 when I was a fresh graduate from university, applying for a work permit. They have a national ID card system for their nationals and permanent residents, though. And it's linked to nearly everything.
Back in Bangladesh, where I'm originally from, they're implementing a national ID card system. To wide public support, btw.
In the Middle East (United Arab Emirates) where I grew up, they've been keeping foreign workers' passports under lock & key of their employers for the longest time, and issuing an ID card for foreign workers (the majority of their resident population).
Most expatriates living and working in these countries have been stomaching this stuff for generations now. The general rule is keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you.
The keys are like right next to each other!
Cute. :)
All the abuses you've listed above are very easily doable by someone without an RFID system, and easily preventable by good policies, enforcement, and accountability.
I don't believe that placing bunch of kids under a constant surveillance from which they cannot escape while they are in the school building will help them not to turn out too bad later on.
I never said that either. :) I believe you owe someone a straw man.
The system gives more power, which needs more control, regulation and established good practices. It's not different to any other technological improvement. The old ways are still the best ways, and I still don't disagree with the core of your point, but you're being needlessly idealistic.
I believe this discussion is taking a turn for the mindlessly polemic, so this will be my last post on the matter. We shall have to agree to disagree.
If a teacher cannot take one look at the class and see who is missing, then you either have too large classes, of the teacher is totally incompetent, and I would not want to have him or her in charge of my kids!
In an ideal world, teachers won't be incompetent, or have too many students in a class.
In an ideal world, teachers won't have too many classes assigned to them, so they won't get confused as to which class they're teaching, and who's in which class.
In an ideal world, a teacher gives a damn, and takes down the names of their students, or makes an effort to know their students.
Unfortunately, however...
The point you raise is true. But for practicality's sake, for schools with problematic children, or public schools where kids don't go to become the next Einstein, but just to learn the basics in the hopes that they don't turn out too bad later on... or for a school where the parents send their kids so they can have some peace at home... this isn't a bad solution.
I was involved with a start-up company in Singapore trying to sell RFID solutions to schools for tracking children.
The school we were pitching to were interested at first, but didn't make the jump once they discovered it was "experimental." In hindsight, it was a good thing, because the start-up I was working for lacked the expertise to pull it off.
But I agree with the parent; it's responsible so long as it's used within the school premises. Children aren't the same as adults, and otherwise draconian practices are part and parcel of raising kids.
This isn't a privacy issue, but on the contrary, an example of the application of technology to save many man-hours of tedious attendance-taking and embarrassingly mis-pronounced names.
Experience is important!
Uh, no. Haha. Have you used OS X 10.2? That's Jaguar, you do realize, right?
I used it when I bought my first Mac back in the summer of 2003. OS X 10.2 Jaguar was, at best, unpolished, but showed promise. At worst, it was very difficult to use, and there was really no compelling reason for XP users of the time to switch. Not for the user experience anyway.
First of all, it was very slow. Boot-up took a very long while. They improved that with OS X 10.3 Panther later that year, and OS X has been consistently having lower boot-up times with every upgrade since OS X 10.0 Cheetah. John Siracusa from Ars Technica has written on this, you could check him out.
Secondly, it had awful window management. It had the Mac COMMAND+TAB without Expose, which was very difficult to use. Imagine trying to command+tab into an application with five or six different windows open, then trying to find that one window you were looking for... it was like shuffling through a deck of cards looking for the Ace of Clubs. I'm serious, compared to OS X 10.2's implementation of window switching, XP was ahead of its game at the time.
OS X 10.2 Jaguar was not better than Vista, and certainly not better than XP. I'm sorry, I love OS X too, but my first few months with OS X 10.2 Jaguar were very painful.
OS X 10.3 Panther, however, completely changed the game. They polished up a lot of things in terms of user experience, and it was far from an incremental upgrade, but a sea-change. OS X 10.3 Panther marks the point where OS X was officially ahead of XP, in terms of usability.
It's amazing a mindless comment like that can be modded up to "Insightful" so people can read it. That's just flamebait.
That's just hyperbole. I think what you're thinking of is Sony. A company has to be consistently nasty to its consumers to achieve the level of evil that you so dismissively assert Apple is guilty of.
There are a lot of things to gripe about when it comes to Apple. No games, dearth of third party apps, it comes at a significant price premium (in South and Southeast Asia at least), it's locked-in. Most of these have pretty decent answers too.
But Apple's done a lot for their consumers. For example, engaging the evil money-sucking overlords that is the music industry with, what might be argued as, very fair use of DRM'ed music: burn it as many times as you like in different playlists, and on up to five computers.
I hate DRM too, and own no DRM'ed music, but let's face it. These guys say burning CDs your own is stealing, and Apple got them to let you burn your DRM'ed tracks an unlimited number of times, and be stored on up to five Macs. That's not half bad.
There's a reason everyone's clambering for the iPhone. An excellent user experience which you get nowhere else, and, to all of Apple's marketing credit, a media hype-machine that they didn't have to spend too much money and effort on.
They didn't have to work too hard for it was because Apple has the street-cred for turning out some damn good products. Immitation is the best form of flattery, and a look at any computer electronics store will show you the influence Apple has had on the entire industry. From cheap Chinese hardware manufacturers to Microsoft, they're all influenced by Apple's design and implementation ethos.
Now what they did get wrong is closing up the platform. They claim to have reasons for it. Frankly, I don't know what their reasons are, but I won't get any of these locked down platforms until I know they're open. That's a choice you can make as a consumer.
Apple is a company which, although certainly not perfect, hasn't really been all that evil until now, and in some cases, has done some good. So there really isn't any reason to get nasty about it.
Overall good point, but:
Jackson & crew actually went way over budget, and the total was closer to $500 million plus, with all the extra effects shots they had to do in the latter movies because of lack of planning in principle photography (which, understandably focused more on the first two films, which is why there's less special effects in the first films than the last one), and the need to do pick-ups, etc.
In addition, they renegotiated contracts with pay rises for members of the crew after the crew discovered that they were really onto something, and New Line wasn't spreading the wealth.
Nothing to see here.
I'm not sure if their grievances are totally unfounded. The issue here isn't about money, it's time.
I purchased an iBook 900 3 months before they upgraded to the G4 line back in late 2003. I didnt whine, though, because the iBook 900 had been out for a while.
That is different from me buying something that has just been released to find the price got cut only 2 months after the fact. Cutting prices of products so soon after their release is a bit odd.
If Apple had done the price cut an additional 4 months later, nobody would have complained, because that would be more in line with what customers expect of a reasonable product cycle.
Early adopters pay as much for "the latest and greatest" as they do for exclusivity. Say what you want about that attitude, but they're not getting their money's worth if Apple makes the product mainstream so soon after endowing them with said exclusivity.
That's called Pascal's Wager.