Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Having perl as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at ruby. Mind you, I am not saying that these reasons do not exist, I guess I was just lazy to find it out by myself and then again, nobody has yet offered any compelling reason. I have taken a good look at ruby, clean syntax and all, but really I couldn't find something really compelling.
Having Perl as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at Python? Having Python as it is, what are the reasons to take a look Ruby? Having Ruby as it is, what the reasons to take a look at Perl? Having Python as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at Perl?
Because they're different languages with different strengths and weaknesses. Just as Lisp and Ruby are different, and Python and Perl are different, so is Perl and Ruby.
A good staring point for you would be to read this article differentiating Perl and Ruby. Working back from that description, if you have experience in programming in languages other than Perl, you should be able to figure out what the advantages are of Ruby over Perl and vice-versa.
Regardless of who sits in the big chair, that person must positively sweat charisma.
It's Jobs' "Hey, look at I'm a rockstar!" persona that invites the True Apple Believers.
It's just not enough to have someone who's an effective CEO, they must be a rockstar on top of being (or at least appearing to be) a creative genius.
Well, I guess that rules out at least 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs... Actually, I can think of one person who might be able to pull it off but would probably never do it, even if asked. Jeff Bezos.
I can understand how it could be necessary for things like the original Mac and Windows 95. But why for yet-another-version of an established product?
For the same reason Windows Vista used to be called by the codename 'Longhorn' or that Ubuntu 6.10 is referred to by the codename 'Edgy Eft'. Because when they start working on the release, they don't know what they will end up calling it. "FF3" could just as easily end up being FF2.5 instead of FF3 if they don't end up with all the features that they wanted.
(1) They control what hardware their OS will run on"
No, they control the software need to run the hardware they build. Apple is a hardware company, always have been.
Does Apple have to change their name to "Apple Digital Entertainment" before you people will realize that Apple is not a computer hardware company anymore. One would think that the change to "Apple, Inc." would give people a clue, but apparently not.
The original poster's statement is accurate. OS X has the capability of running on hardware other than Apple's, but Apple doesn't want to support it on anything but their own hardware. Apple's tying the OS to the hardware is their way of changing the market conditions so that they are not competing directly with Microsoft, and the truth of the matter is this: When Apple pushes computers, they don't push computers, they push OS X. Read their advertising. OS X isn't a means of getting people to buy Apple computers. Apple computers are a means of getting people to buy OS X. Steve Jobs came from NeXT. NeXT was first and foremost a software company.
Why is Apple such a big fan of DRM? Because, like Microsoft, they are really a software and content distribution company.
"(2) They often tried (though not recently) to control what OS(es) will run on their hardware"
No, they never helped some write software for there hardware, but they never tried to stop anyone either.
You should read this article about the history of Linux on PPC. Much of the divide between MkLinux and LinuxPPC in the early days was due to Apple's loathsomeness to disclose hardware information. They didn't try to stop anyone from using alternative OSes (and in fact they helped quite a bit), but they didn't always make it easy, either.
The only remaining question is will Windows' successor be Mac OS X or Linux, or will we (finally) evolve to the point that the choice of platform no longer matters.
The one catch: As a patent holder I'm not required by law to license to you. I believe I can even revoke (or refuse to renew) your license. So patent holders could use that as leverage to prevent suits by declining to let people license the patent while they were actively challenging it in court.
You might be. It depends on what kind of agreement you signed when you licensed me the patent. Many patent agreements either license the patent for n units (i.e., You agree to license your PatentWidget(tm) technology to me for a flat fee on 1,000,000 units of my product that incorporates your PatentWidget(tm) technology), x years (i.e., You agree to license your PatentWookie(tm) system to me for a period of 1 year), or some are even in perpetuity, but say, limited to a specific geographic area. Many do, however, have stipulations that the license becomes revoked if a lawsuit is filed against the patent holder.
Who gives a flying fuck about this product? This is about as newsworthy as a new marshmallow shape in my lucky charms.
That's the parent's whole point! Nobody should care about the iPhone. It doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done by the likes of Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and a dozen other companies, including Apple itself. But Apple has been so successful in hyping this product that people demanded that Apple make a product available and pronto! So Apple 'makes good' on the demand and voila! The iPhone is an instant hit!
I must say, kudos to Jobs and co. on the styling. This thing just looks hot. I almost want to go out and buy one.;)
Actually there are quite a few 1080p TVs with DVI and/or VGA input, but you're right when you say that not all of them do.
The other difference is a remote for the TV and the features associated with it. You might think "Yeah, but I mostly use the remote on my [cable box|satellite receiver|DVR]." And that's true, but many TVs have features like auto-power-on/off, color adjustments, PIP, etc. that are only accessible from the TV's remote.
If you don't care about these things, then there is almost no practical difference between many flat panel TVs and many large flat panel monitors.
Yeah, but it's not just monitors. Like the parent said, every piece of equipment that the data passes through must be HDCP-enabled, right? And this situation isn't entirely Microsoft's fault, now is it? The OS claims support for HDCP, so it must fully support the standard.
What people are whining and complaining about is that Microsoft is actually following a standard. These same people are the ones that complain when Microsoft doesn't follow other standards like CSS2. It's just that the standard they are following happens to be one that implements DRM, and now they're going on about how "Oh, gee, they fully-implemented the standard!"
*sigh*
Here's the answer: don't buy HD-DVDs and BDs that require HDCP. Duh. Vote with your feet. If enough people really put their money where their mouth is (as opposed to what they normally do, which is just paying lip-service), and truly advocated that others do the same, it will make a difference. Sadly, most people are so weak in their convictions that when their favorite movie comes out requiring HDCP, they will just buy it no matter what.
* - the system can actually hose itself during a race condition while/bin/rm is running. say a kernel thread attempts to access a dependant (non-opened) file that was erased by/bin/rm, etc. best to do rm -rf / while running in single user mode
No, I'm not an idiot.
Yes, this is actually what usually happens. The rm itself can exhibit errors because some process has some file read-locked (or r/w-locked) -- and in many cases libc.so does end up read-locked by some process, but, you're right, rm won't crash until some other part of the system like init or something else that ultimately causes a kernel panic or some other equally hosed condition.
Single-user mode is about the only place you're going to be able to run an rm -rf / that isn't going to crash though.
Like I said -- it depends on the particular setup.
Very true. I haven't encountered any DRMed "CDs" that I couldn't extract on my Linux box, but they would not rip on any of my Windows boxes. However, I've encountered some that refuse to play on truck's in-dash CD player.
BTW--I noticed in your TFA quote that it references "illegal sites". I'd just like to point out, that, AFAIK, the P2P technology itself is still not illegal in any jurisdiction that I'm aware of, it's only the use of them for distributing copyrighted material that is illegal.
All-in-One devices (of any sort) tend to do all of these related things, but none of them particularly well. On top of it, if one of it's functions quits on you, you generally have to replace the entire thing, since the all-in-one device will typically not integrate with anything external.
I understand why they continue to gain popularity (takes less space, you get all the functions for one price, uses less power, etc.), but in general you can always seem to do better from a functionality and features standpoint from individual components than from any integrated 'all-in-one' device.
Who the heck modded that as flamebait? Tired old in-joke, yes, but hardly flamebait. Sheesh.
The pool of moderators consistently has a large number of BSD and Mac OS X users, all of whom reflexively mod down any post containing both the words 'BSD' and 'dying'.
Which brings me to my next conclusion: the Slashdot moderators are DYING! Netcraft confirms it! Since the moderators run BSD and, clearly, BSD is dying, therefore, the moderators are dying, too!
Does it cost to open the source? It's not as simple as opening a SourceForge account and posting the source under the GPL?
Lots of people seem to be asking this, but the question that they don't ask is this: is the source to Pegasus and Mercury 100% an original creation of David Harris? If not, he may have to pay off other authors who wrote libraries or other code written by Harris. One reason so much of the Netscape source code had to be rewritten to produce Seamonkey (and ultimately Firefox), aside from so much of it being crufty, is that there was a ton of third-party code that came from Sun and other companies.
Actually, both the battery fires and the rootkits were covered on CNN's Headline News. However, CNN's coverage is very forgiving (as I suspect the other major news networks' coverages are) to Sony, unlike what you see in the tech news world where Sony gets just absolutely lambasted for their mistakes.
One reason for this difference in news coverage, I think, is that the mainstream news editors don't understand tech news all that well, so they err on the side caution. After all, they don't want to get sued for libel by a company like Sony with deep pockets.
Actually, I've got to say that while IFORT/ICC do well on simple tests, it's not always cut and dry in the real world. gcc/g77 can do just as well as IFORT/ICC on more complex programs, and sometimes they do better. Other times, IFORT/ICC do better. The bottom line is that optimizing for the legacy cruft that is the x86 architecture just isn't very straight forward. There's a lot of voodoo involved, as any x86 assembly language programmer worth their salt will tell you.
I don't understand why you would state in your license agreement that it would be covered by future licenses anyway. It doesn't make sense. I can see having your license say "GPLv2 or earlier," because you already know the language of the earlier licenses.
Because GPLv1 is more restrictive than v2. GPLv1 seems to imply that you cannot sell the code, but v2 clears up this misunderstanding. The 'or later' is attached to most GPL code because the standard license notification template attached to license says that the program may be distributed under the 'General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version.'
Of course, this move does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from making a change to a version already licensed with the old wording from distributing MySQL under GPL v3 terms. Those versions already released have 'GPLv2 or later' moniker already attached and you can't change that now.
Slashdot Mirror
Having Perl as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at Python? Having Python as it is, what are the reasons to take a look Ruby? Having Ruby as it is, what the reasons to take a look at Perl? Having Python as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at Perl?
Because they're different languages with different strengths and weaknesses. Just as Lisp and Ruby are different, and Python and Perl are different, so is Perl and Ruby.
A good staring point for you would be to read this article differentiating Perl and Ruby. Working back from that description, if you have experience in programming in languages other than Perl, you should be able to figure out what the advantages are of Ruby over Perl and vice-versa.
A little known fact is that AKAImBatman owns more than 10% of all Google stock.
(It's a joke. Laugh.)
Maybe if they let him rename the company to 'Virgin Apple' ... :)
It's Jobs' "Hey, look at I'm a rockstar!" persona that invites the True Apple Believers.
It's just not enough to have someone who's an effective CEO, they must be a rockstar on top of being (or at least appearing to be) a creative genius.
Well, I guess that rules out at least 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs... Actually, I can think of one person who might be able to pull it off but would probably never do it, even if asked. Jeff Bezos.
No, no, no.
The proper equation is 70+(life of author)+((Disney campaign donations/$100M)-number of years it takes for everyone to forget Mickey Mouse) years
EmperorInABlackTurtleNeck@apple.com
For the same reason Windows Vista used to be called by the codename 'Longhorn' or that Ubuntu 6.10 is referred to by the codename 'Edgy Eft'. Because when they start working on the release, they don't know what they will end up calling it. "FF3" could just as easily end up being FF2.5 instead of FF3 if they don't end up with all the features that they wanted.
Does Apple have to change their name to "Apple Digital Entertainment" before you people will realize that Apple is not a computer hardware company anymore. One would think that the change to "Apple, Inc." would give people a clue, but apparently not.
The original poster's statement is accurate. OS X has the capability of running on hardware other than Apple's, but Apple doesn't want to support it on anything but their own hardware. Apple's tying the OS to the hardware is their way of changing the market conditions so that they are not competing directly with Microsoft, and the truth of the matter is this: When Apple pushes computers, they don't push computers, they push OS X. Read their advertising. OS X isn't a means of getting people to buy Apple computers. Apple computers are a means of getting people to buy OS X. Steve Jobs came from NeXT. NeXT was first and foremost a software company.
Why is Apple such a big fan of DRM? Because, like Microsoft, they are really a software and content distribution company.
You should read this article about the history of Linux on PPC. Much of the divide between MkLinux and LinuxPPC in the early days was due to Apple's loathsomeness to disclose hardware information. They didn't try to stop anyone from using alternative OSes (and in fact they helped quite a bit), but they didn't always make it easy, either.
That's exactly what I think. The time for the Windows era to come to an end is nigh.
The only remaining question is will Windows' successor be Mac OS X or Linux, or will we (finally) evolve to the point that the choice of platform no longer matters.
I'm betting on the latter, myself.
You might be. It depends on what kind of agreement you signed when you licensed me the patent. Many patent agreements either license the patent for n units (i.e., You agree to license your PatentWidget(tm) technology to me for a flat fee on 1,000,000 units of my product that incorporates your PatentWidget(tm) technology), x years (i.e., You agree to license your PatentWookie(tm) system to me for a period of 1 year), or some are even in perpetuity, but say, limited to a specific geographic area. Many do, however, have stipulations that the license becomes revoked if a lawsuit is filed against the patent holder.
IANAL
That's the parent's whole point! Nobody should care about the iPhone. It doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done by the likes of Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and a dozen other companies, including Apple itself. But Apple has been so successful in hyping this product that people demanded that Apple make a product available and pronto! So Apple 'makes good' on the demand and voila! The iPhone is an instant hit!
I must say, kudos to Jobs and co. on the styling. This thing just looks hot. I almost want to go out and buy one.
Actually there are quite a few 1080p TVs with DVI and/or VGA input, but you're right when you say that not all of them do.
The other difference is a remote for the TV and the features associated with it. You might think "Yeah, but I mostly use the remote on my [cable box|satellite receiver|DVR]." And that's true, but many TVs have features like auto-power-on/off, color adjustments, PIP, etc. that are only accessible from the TV's remote.
If you don't care about these things, then there is almost no practical difference between many flat panel TVs and many large flat panel monitors.
Yeah, but it's not just monitors. Like the parent said, every piece of equipment that the data passes through must be HDCP-enabled, right? And this situation isn't entirely Microsoft's fault, now is it? The OS claims support for HDCP, so it must fully support the standard.
What people are whining and complaining about is that Microsoft is actually following a standard. These same people are the ones that complain when Microsoft doesn't follow other standards like CSS2. It's just that the standard they are following happens to be one that implements DRM, and now they're going on about how "Oh, gee, they fully-implemented the standard!"
*sigh*
Here's the answer: don't buy HD-DVDs and BDs that require HDCP. Duh. Vote with your feet. If enough people really put their money where their mouth is (as opposed to what they normally do, which is just paying lip-service), and truly advocated that others do the same, it will make a difference. Sadly, most people are so weak in their convictions that when their favorite movie comes out requiring HDCP, they will just buy it no matter what.
No, I'm not an idiot.
Yes, this is actually what usually happens. The rm itself can exhibit errors because some process has some file read-locked (or r/w-locked) -- and in many cases libc.so does end up read-locked by some process, but, you're right, rm won't crash until some other part of the system like init or something else that ultimately causes a kernel panic or some other equally hosed condition.
Single-user mode is about the only place you're going to be able to run an rm -rf / that isn't going to crash though.
Like I said -- it depends on the particular setup.
Very true. I haven't encountered any DRMed "CDs" that I couldn't extract on my Linux box, but they would not rip on any of my Windows boxes. However, I've encountered some that refuse to play on truck's in-dash CD player.
BTW--I noticed in your TFA quote that it references "illegal sites". I'd just like to point out, that, AFAIK, the P2P technology itself is still not illegal in any jurisdiction that I'm aware of, it's only the use of them for distributing copyrighted material that is illegal.
The article is about running IE7 on Linux, not *BSD.
/bin/rm
From my Linux box:
morgan@myhost:/usr/include$ which rm
Now, whether or not the rm command would fail once, say, glibc was removed would depend on the particular setup.
Joke: ---> . --->
You: ___ O __
_ _ _
_ _ __ | __ _ _
_ _ _ / \ _ _ _
All-in-One devices (of any sort) tend to do all of these related things, but none of them particularly well. On top of it, if one of it's functions quits on you, you generally have to replace the entire thing, since the all-in-one device will typically not integrate with anything external.
I understand why they continue to gain popularity (takes less space, you get all the functions for one price, uses less power, etc.), but in general you can always seem to do better from a functionality and features standpoint from individual components than from any integrated 'all-in-one' device.
The pool of moderators consistently has a large number of BSD and Mac OS X users, all of whom reflexively mod down any post containing both the words 'BSD' and 'dying'.
Which brings me to my next conclusion: the Slashdot moderators are DYING! Netcraft confirms it! Since the moderators run BSD and, clearly, BSD is dying, therefore, the moderators are dying, too!
*ducking*
Lots of people seem to be asking this, but the question that they don't ask is this: is the source to Pegasus and Mercury 100% an original creation of David Harris? If not, he may have to pay off other authors who wrote libraries or other code written by Harris. One reason so much of the Netscape source code had to be rewritten to produce Seamonkey (and ultimately Firefox), aside from so much of it being crufty, is that there was a ton of third-party code that came from Sun and other companies.
Yeah, I guess you must be a COBOL programmer, since you seem to like TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
Anyway, the appropriate acronymical expansion of COBOL is 'Confused Oriental Bean-cOunting Langauge.'
Oh, BTW, how's the fingers? Stubs yet?
Actually, both the battery fires and the rootkits were covered on CNN's Headline News. However, CNN's coverage is very forgiving (as I suspect the other major news networks' coverages are) to Sony, unlike what you see in the tech news world where Sony gets just absolutely lambasted for their mistakes.
One reason for this difference in news coverage, I think, is that the mainstream news editors don't understand tech news all that well, so they err on the side caution. After all, they don't want to get sued for libel by a company like Sony with deep pockets.
Hey, Taco, are you sure that W doesn't have a Slashdot account?
Actually, I've got to say that while IFORT/ICC do well on simple tests, it's not always cut and dry in the real world. gcc/g77 can do just as well as IFORT/ICC on more complex programs, and sometimes they do better. Other times, IFORT/ICC do better. The bottom line is that optimizing for the legacy cruft that is the x86 architecture just isn't very straight forward. There's a lot of voodoo involved, as any x86 assembly language programmer worth their salt will tell you.
Because GPLv1 is more restrictive than v2. GPLv1 seems to imply that you cannot sell the code, but v2 clears up this misunderstanding. The 'or later' is attached to most GPL code because the standard license notification template attached to license says that the program may be distributed under the 'General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version.'
Of course, this move does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from making a change to a version already licensed with the old wording from distributing MySQL under GPL v3 terms. Those versions already released have 'GPLv2 or later' moniker already attached and you can't change that now.