I'm really going to miss being able to telnet to a server and troubleshoot using plain text. Feels like a lot of simple has disappeared from the internet
I wouldn't watch this video, and I suspect the motives for Fox News here is not pure. But ultimately this is a personal moment for the man who is suddenly faced with a horrific death. These are the last moments of his life, and I believe they should belong to him. Since I didn't watch it, I don't know what it contains, but I would suspect they do not show the man at his best. If we could know his wish in the matter, I'd want to defer to that. But since we can't I'd defer to the less morally ambiguous choice which is to keep the moment as private to him as is possible.
How much of your information needs to live significantly beyond your personal lifetime? My guess is you need not consider storage that will live beyond your children, who might have some need to review your papers for personal or practical reasons. Your grandchildren might like a handful of pictures, nothing more than than.
If your information is actually valuable (its creative or philosophical or similar) other people will look to its preservation.
I tend to split stuff up. For my profession life as a programmer I use github and one other git based storage. Anything worth keeping I'd migrate to whatever replaces git. For personal life I keep backups of photos and videos on local and networked (cloud based) storage. For tax stuff I just have a fireproof locker.
I imagine in 20 or 30 years the only stuff of value will be my movies and photos and written personal documents. After I'm dead none of that stuff will meant much to anyone, unless my son wants some pics of our dogs when he was young. And he'd be the last one to care about any of that stuff.
Try not to let possessions become too important. You are going to have it all taken away from you eventually.
This puts him in the same philosophical camp as the terrorists he denounced. He just argues for a slightly lower degree of violence in response to another's expression.
No, that's a very abstract stretch I think, although in some sort of odd platonic ideal world maybe you are right. Common sense, which is the basis of philosophy (or at least the rational starting point to investigation) tells us that it is not unreasonable for a person to be insulted if you attack something they care deeply about. Civilized society, which is concerned with maintaining order and justice, tries variously to balance how we allow a person to respond to attack against societies need to maintain that order and justice. There is of course a variability here because of cultural difference. Some cultures permit more aggressive responses than others. Most justice systems take both the crime and the context into account ('fighting words', example). And some philosophies promote certain ideals ('turn the other check") although they will all acknowledge this can be very hard (even the Pope here is admitting he'd have a tough time forgiving someone for insulting his mom, which is reasonable and understandable; although a former Pope did forgive a man who shot and tried to kill him, face to face).
Even though cultural difference and philosophy (religious or secular) promote certain ideals and try hard to not be too dogmatic and allow for individual context (at least the ones that actually catch on), there are few cultural contexts that say, "If you hear fighting words its ok to take a machine gun and slaughter a dozen unarmed people". This is likely because a culture that allowed that would be self destructive and tend not to last very long, and such a culture would probably be stressful to live in, and fail to catch on. On the other hand if someone insulted you in the street and you punched him/her we might let you off with community service or similar.
There is a world of difference between a punch in the face and machine gunning a dozen people. Only a mostly meaningless philosophical abstraction would somehow allow that 'these two behaviors are ultimately the same thing'. A society based on a philosophy like that would likely have a hard time enduring. I would also think someone that believed this is living too much in their head and not out in the world experiencing reality. Having been myself in street fights and having had a machine gun pointed at me in aggression I can assure you there is a big difference.
Your anecdotal evidence is meaningless. I've lived in two rural areas, one upstate NY and another in the center of TX. Upstate NY I could not even get decent dial up service (like we had in 1990...). I can get cellular data with a special antenna rig I made, and pay like $10/per Gb used... Here in TX I have spotty DSL that is never better than 1Mb down/ 256Kb up (and goes offline enough I need to use my cell data plan to make important teleconference meetings.)
AFAIK the idea that rural is getting better choice or speed that the high profit markets seems doubtful. I suppose there are always outliers. The question we have to decide is if this is something we are going to say is driven exclusively by semi free market forces, or if we decide its in our global best interest to set meaningful baselines.
.. and the experience not horrific (bad theater plus rowdy chumps in the audience) I might go more.
As it stand with my big screen plasma and home setup I enjoy that a lot more and don't mind having to wait for the movie I want to see to come out of disk.
..Blame yourselves for abusing dangerous power that we the people entrusted you with. Now we don't trust you and the power is gone. If you had used it sparingly and for real need you'd still have it. Now the world is indeed more dangerous because you failed to constrain yourselves.
"One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of."
Usually it goes like, "Oh shit this dude is pointing a gun at me, I better kill him before him kills me..."
And usually this is a pretty abbreviated thought process since anyone that actually goes through all that decision making is already dead before getting half done with it.
Yeah I felt the later stories were fair stories but not groundbreaking in the same way. I think the whole thing where he wants to connect the Robots saga stuff with the Foundation stuff felt a bit forced, although as a fan of his work I recall enjoying it at the time of reading (when I was much younger.)
And I tremble at the idea they might be trying to do this. I think Foundation and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant stories are two series I read when I was much younger that I always wondered if someone might want to cash in with a visual interpretation. I do think Foundation, particularly the earliest books don't have a ton of action and might not lead to interesting novels. And HBO seems to like to do stories with more 'adult themes' so to speak and I can't think of a single sex scene or anything even close in any of the Foundation stuff. I think Foundation was really teenager aimed (at least I read it when I was that age). I could see HBO doing the Donaldson works, seems more in line with what they are known for.
It would be incorrect to say Perl is dying because Perl6 has not delivered on its original goal of being a worthy successor to Perl5. Although Perl6 was originally slated as that replacement, the two languages (Perl5 and Perl6) have drifted significantly and there is no syntax compatibly between them (although there are some projects around who goal is to make it easier for Perl6 programers to load and use Perl5 libraries, and vice versus). As a result the Perl community no longer sees Perl6 as the replacement for Perl5. Now there are two separate development teams and the Perl5 team has recently release an update to version 20, and work on version 22 is in the works. The Perl6 team continues to work on Perl6 but many people in the Perl community see it more as a hobby and as a lab rather than as a language one would expect to use on the job. Nevertheless lots of ideas have emerged from the Perl6 'lab' and has influenced the more iterative development of Perl5.
I think the main thing I'd change is I wish I had started becoming active in the open source community around the tools I commonly use. I spent the first 10 years of my career mostly working on my own, or with a few people on the job and was not connected at all with the greater community. I think if I had done so earlier I'd be a better programmer today
Having a solid Contributor License Agreement process in place would probably be a good idea. That way, it's clear who owns the code that comes in and encourages people to contribute while defining a (necessary evil) process for doing so. You'll lose random passers-by, but just one passer-by who gets litigious could be more of a headache than it's worth.
I'm not sure if the idea of a contributor license as you suggest is in the spirit of open source.
One thing I notice is that sometimes a company decides to open source some in-house crapware because they heard its a good way to get free publicity and perhaps attract more developers. Quite often the project ends up with zero adoption because its not that interesting and often there's a bunch of existing projects with already built communities that are doing more or less the same thing. Or the focus is so narrow that it solves nobody's problem. What usually tell people is that its better to learn to contrib to an existing project rather than release some vanity ware and try to pretend the company is all hip and cool because you have a github account.
Its also a good way to get around the legal review and all, since generally if you are just sending patches to an existing project, typically bug fixes and feature enhancements there's not a big need for it. I think its easier for rusty management to accept you contributing documention, test cases and bug fixes to an already existing project than to get them to allow you to take some big in house project and get it out in the open.
If you build your in house stuff around existing open source projects and really leverage open source at all points in the stack (from automation and up) you will find lots of good ways to contribute back to those projects and you will find your custom code is mostly glue and company 'secret sauce' that you'd never give away anyway.
We all know his lawyer has the burden to basically try anything and everything between now and (possible) sentencing to get the client off or reduced penalty. The system is adversarial on purpose. What will be interesting to some of us is to see if there was anything used here to find him that is really pushing the limits right. I mean the official story I hear is that he was found with old fashion leg work more than anything else. I am interested to know how true that might be. I think a lot of us are worried some of that mega NSA power is being serendipitously shared with law enforcement, and then they cover it up. We have some reason to think that is and has happened.
I've been programming professional since 1995, never heard of them. I work primarily on open source systems and it seems like this organization is not really aimed at that group, at least based on the 'no code, behind a paywall' thing.
I contribute and volunteer on several open source projects, that's what I do to promote my interests and the interests of projects important to me and my career. Not sure how spending time and money on this ACM group would accomplish anything for me.
I'm not going to take sides on 'what language to learn next.' You've not given us enough information on your codebase, the size and nature of your company, etc. I would say a rewrite is as likely to put you out of business than not, but that's ultimately your choice and unless I know all the factors I can't tell you if its a risk worth doing.
Regarding the link you gave on Perl 'ossifying', there was actually a signification discussion on the Perl Reddit about that article which I want to point out:
I would say the website that generated that article seems to be some sort of SEO play (they just have a bunch of articles on stuff that has some interest and controversy) and they stick ads on it. There's nothing mentioned in it that hasn't been mentioned 100K elsewhere (including here on Slashdot).
Perl has pluses and minuses but I've made a good career at it, and most of the code I've worked with is newer (seldom more for 5 or 6 years old), not legacy stuff from before the first dot com bubble. I'll probably make 200K this year, so I can't say its a bad choice. I work with lots of fun people as well. I also like Javascript. If I was starting today I might choose Scala, its a nice clean, fast language with a lot of forward looking concepts. Best of luck whatever you do.
No doubt, I have a few friends that cashed in old Cobol skills back when we were partying like it was 1999 (for the second time). However in my nearly 20 years of writing Perl for web sites I've never worked on an application that was more than 6 years old when I was hired (and about half of them where new applications, the last 3 were startups using Perl).
I realize the Perl community doesn't spend a lot of time adverting all the companies that do choose Perl for new startups, since we are all busy working:)
I do know a lot of people making good money keeping some old financing systems running, down on Wall Street, but I never wanted to work in Finance so I don't know about them. My guess is they fall under what you called legacy, although its likely that stuff is running multi billion dollar a year apps for rich brokers.
Given I'll make more that $200K programming Perl this year, no that was not my first reflex...
My first reflex on seeing this on Slashdot was, "I probably shouldn't read the article because its going to be filled with the same tired, ignorant Perl hate. And then I'm going to waste time trying to respond to it."
You don't have to use Perl if you don't want to. Why isn't that enough? Why do you feel entitled to dump your FUD on my community? Perl isn't the most popular choice but there's a lot of us making a decent living at it, so please if you don't get it, or you don't like it, unless you have a grudge with Perl that hasn't already been mentioned 100K times what's the point of saying anything at all?
Eich's beliefs mean nothing, as long as he doesn't practice them at work.
Generally I find that intolerant, bigoted people find ways to practice their intolerance and bigotry all the time. I've never met a KKK member that said "Hey I only wear the sheet at night! When I am at work its all, 'Kumbaya man!'".
Just as the employee's sexual orientation means nothing, as long as he doesn't practice it at work.
There's a big difference between a leader of a company with power, wealth and influence and a general employee. One has a megaphone that they can use to promote their ideology, the other doesn't. Even if they are careful to give the appearance of separation, ultimately that megaphone is there.
What if this guy was like a Nazi, would you say the same thing? My guess is, no you would not.
Its not a matter of 'demanding my boss' anything. And its not about 'political correctness' or whatever that means nowadays. Lots of shit in life is ambiguous and arbitrary. The trousers of time have many pant legs to fall down, and quite often they are all more or less equal. But there are occasions when history will take sides. And this guy is on the wrong side of history. My guess is the parent poster is as well.
I've traveled around the world and lived as the natives do in lots of places. As in Rome, yeah? But you can hide intollerance under 'all opinions are equal' crap. There is a difference between matters of opinion and matters of ethics.
In terms of what can I expect from a boss, well I would say Mozilla is not just some company, its a big part of an ethical movement around open source / free software and about empowering people with information and technology. Many, many people who are part of that movement share other similar values around notions of diversity and tolerance for difference. I personally do find it distressing that the CEO of this company clearly doesn't share all those values. However I'd be willing personally to find some common ground if possible, on the hopes of influencing him over time. But I can't expect that over everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really going to miss being able to telnet to a server and troubleshoot using plain text. Feels like a lot of simple has disappeared from the internet
I wouldn't watch this video, and I suspect the motives for Fox News here is not pure. But ultimately this is a personal moment for the man who is suddenly faced with a horrific death. These are the last moments of his life, and I believe they should belong to him. Since I didn't watch it, I don't know what it contains, but I would suspect they do not show the man at his best. If we could know his wish in the matter, I'd want to defer to that. But since we can't I'd defer to the less morally ambiguous choice which is to keep the moment as private to him as is possible.
How much of your information needs to live significantly beyond your personal lifetime? My guess is you need not consider storage that will live beyond your children, who might have some need to review your papers for personal or practical reasons. Your grandchildren might like a handful of pictures, nothing more than than.
If your information is actually valuable (its creative or philosophical or similar) other people will look to its preservation.
I tend to split stuff up. For my profession life as a programmer I use github and one other git based storage. Anything worth keeping I'd migrate to whatever replaces git. For personal life I keep backups of photos and videos on local and networked (cloud based) storage. For tax stuff I just have a fireproof locker.
I imagine in 20 or 30 years the only stuff of value will be my movies and photos and written personal documents. After I'm dead none of that stuff will meant much to anyone, unless my son wants some pics of our dogs when he was young. And he'd be the last one to care about any of that stuff.
Try not to let possessions become too important. You are going to have it all taken away from you eventually.
... but I still think the rankings here are just about meaningless.
This puts him in the same philosophical camp as the terrorists he denounced. He just argues for a slightly lower degree of violence in response to another's expression.
No, that's a very abstract stretch I think, although in some sort of odd platonic ideal world maybe you are right. Common sense, which is the basis of philosophy (or at least the rational starting point to investigation) tells us that it is not unreasonable for a person to be insulted if you attack something they care deeply about. Civilized society, which is concerned with maintaining order and justice, tries variously to balance how we allow a person to respond to attack against societies need to maintain that order and justice. There is of course a variability here because of cultural difference. Some cultures permit more aggressive responses than others. Most justice systems take both the crime and the context into account ('fighting words', example). And some philosophies promote certain ideals ('turn the other check") although they will all acknowledge this can be very hard (even the Pope here is admitting he'd have a tough time forgiving someone for insulting his mom, which is reasonable and understandable; although a former Pope did forgive a man who shot and tried to kill him, face to face).
Even though cultural difference and philosophy (religious or secular) promote certain ideals and try hard to not be too dogmatic and allow for individual context (at least the ones that actually catch on), there are few cultural contexts that say, "If you hear fighting words its ok to take a machine gun and slaughter a dozen unarmed people". This is likely because a culture that allowed that would be self destructive and tend not to last very long, and such a culture would probably be stressful to live in, and fail to catch on. On the other hand if someone insulted you in the street and you punched him/her we might let you off with community service or similar.
There is a world of difference between a punch in the face and machine gunning a dozen people. Only a mostly meaningless philosophical abstraction would somehow allow that 'these two behaviors are ultimately the same thing'. A society based on a philosophy like that would likely have a hard time enduring. I would also think someone that believed this is living too much in their head and not out in the world experiencing reality. Having been myself in street fights and having had a machine gun pointed at me in aggression I can assure you there is a big difference.
Your anecdotal evidence is meaningless. I've lived in two rural areas, one upstate NY and another in the center of TX. Upstate NY I could not even get decent dial up service (like we had in 1990...). I can get cellular data with a special antenna rig I made, and pay like $10/per Gb used... Here in TX I have spotty DSL that is never better than 1Mb down/ 256Kb up (and goes offline enough I need to use my cell data plan to make important teleconference meetings.)
AFAIK the idea that rural is getting better choice or speed that the high profit markets seems doubtful. I suppose there are always outliers. The question we have to decide is if this is something we are going to say is driven exclusively by semi free market forces, or if we decide its in our global best interest to set meaningful baselines.
.. and the experience not horrific (bad theater plus rowdy chumps in the audience) I might go more.
As it stand with my big screen plasma and home setup I enjoy that a lot more and don't mind having to wait for the movie I want to see to come out of disk.
..Blame yourselves for abusing dangerous power that we the people entrusted you with. Now we don't trust you and the power is gone. If you had used it sparingly and for real need you'd still have it. Now the world is indeed more dangerous because you failed to constrain yourselves.
"One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of."
Usually it goes like, "Oh shit this dude is pointing a gun at me, I better kill him before him kills me..."
And usually this is a pretty abbreviated thought process since anyone that actually goes through all that decision making is already dead before getting half done with it.
Yeah I felt the later stories were fair stories but not groundbreaking in the same way. I think the whole thing where he wants to connect the Robots saga stuff with the Foundation stuff felt a bit forced, although as a fan of his work I recall enjoying it at the time of reading (when I was much younger.)
And I tremble at the idea they might be trying to do this. I think Foundation and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant stories are two series I read when I was much younger that I always wondered if someone might want to cash in with a visual interpretation. I do think Foundation, particularly the earliest books don't have a ton of action and might not lead to interesting novels. And HBO seems to like to do stories with more 'adult themes' so to speak and I can't think of a single sex scene or anything even close in any of the Foundation stuff. I think Foundation was really teenager aimed (at least I read it when I was that age). I could see HBO doing the Donaldson works, seems more in line with what they are known for.
... think about it.
It would be incorrect to say Perl is dying because Perl6 has not delivered on its original goal of being a worthy successor to Perl5. Although Perl6 was originally slated as that replacement, the two languages (Perl5 and Perl6) have drifted significantly and there is no syntax compatibly between them (although there are some projects around who goal is to make it easier for Perl6 programers to load and use Perl5 libraries, and vice versus). As a result the Perl community no longer sees Perl6 as the replacement for Perl5. Now there are two separate development teams and the Perl5 team has recently release an update to version 20, and work on version 22 is in the works. The Perl6 team continues to work on Perl6 but many people in the Perl community see it more as a hobby and as a lab rather than as a language one would expect to use on the job. Nevertheless lots of ideas have emerged from the Perl6 'lab' and has influenced the more iterative development of Perl5.
I think the main thing I'd change is I wish I had started becoming active in the open source community around the tools I commonly use. I spent the first 10 years of my career mostly working on my own, or with a few people on the job and was not connected at all with the greater community. I think if I had done so earlier I'd be a better programmer today
Having a solid Contributor License Agreement process in place would probably be a good idea. That way, it's clear who owns the code that comes in and encourages people to contribute while defining a (necessary evil) process for doing so. You'll lose random passers-by, but just one passer-by who gets litigious could be more of a headache than it's worth.
I'm not sure if the idea of a contributor license as you suggest is in the spirit of open source.
One thing I notice is that sometimes a company decides to open source some in-house crapware because they heard its a good way to get free publicity and perhaps attract more developers. Quite often the project ends up with zero adoption because its not that interesting and often there's a bunch of existing projects with already built communities that are doing more or less the same thing. Or the focus is so narrow that it solves nobody's problem. What usually tell people is that its better to learn to contrib to an existing project rather than release some vanity ware and try to pretend the company is all hip and cool because you have a github account.
Its also a good way to get around the legal review and all, since generally if you are just sending patches to an existing project, typically bug fixes and feature enhancements there's not a big need for it. I think its easier for rusty management to accept you contributing documention, test cases and bug fixes to an already existing project than to get them to allow you to take some big in house project and get it out in the open.
If you build your in house stuff around existing open source projects and really leverage open source at all points in the stack (from automation and up) you will find lots of good ways to contribute back to those projects and you will find your custom code is mostly glue and company 'secret sauce' that you'd never give away anyway.
We all know his lawyer has the burden to basically try anything and everything between now and (possible) sentencing to get the client off or reduced penalty. The system is adversarial on purpose. What will be interesting to some of us is to see if there was anything used here to find him that is really pushing the limits right. I mean the official story I hear is that he was found with old fashion leg work more than anything else. I am interested to know how true that might be. I think a lot of us are worried some of that mega NSA power is being serendipitously shared with law enforcement, and then they cover it up. We have some reason to think that is and has happened.
I've been programming professional since 1995, never heard of them. I work primarily on open source systems and it seems like this organization is not really aimed at that group, at least based on the 'no code, behind a paywall' thing.
I contribute and volunteer on several open source projects, that's what I do to promote my interests and the interests of projects important to me and my career. Not sure how spending time and money on this ACM group would accomplish anything for me.
I don't have anything else to add...
right on top of a volcano... What could possible go wrong?
I'm not going to take sides on 'what language to learn next.' You've not given us enough information on your codebase, the size and nature of your company, etc. I would say a rewrite is as likely to put you out of business than not, but that's ultimately your choice and unless I know all the factors I can't tell you if its a risk worth doing.
Regarding the link you gave on Perl 'ossifying', there was actually a signification discussion on the Perl Reddit about that article which I want to point out:
http://www.reddit.com/r/perl/c...
I would say the website that generated that article seems to be some sort of SEO play (they just have a bunch of articles on stuff that has some interest and controversy) and they stick ads on it. There's nothing mentioned in it that hasn't been mentioned 100K elsewhere (including here on Slashdot).
Perl has pluses and minuses but I've made a good career at it, and most of the code I've worked with is newer (seldom more for 5 or 6 years old), not legacy stuff from before the first dot com bubble. I'll probably make 200K this year, so I can't say its a bad choice. I work with lots of fun people as well. I also like Javascript. If I was starting today I might choose Scala, its a nice clean, fast language with a lot of forward looking concepts. Best of luck whatever you do.
Think of all the unlearning that would get in the way of me actually being a decent programmer.
No doubt, I have a few friends that cashed in old Cobol skills back when we were partying like it was 1999 (for the second time). However in my nearly 20 years of writing Perl for web sites I've never worked on an application that was more than 6 years old when I was hired (and about half of them where new applications, the last 3 were startups using Perl).
I realize the Perl community doesn't spend a lot of time adverting all the companies that do choose Perl for new startups, since we are all busy working :)
I do know a lot of people making good money keeping some old financing systems running, down on Wall Street, but I never wanted to work in Finance so I don't know about them. My guess is they fall under what you called legacy, although its likely that stuff is running multi billion dollar a year apps for rich brokers.
Given I'll make more that $200K programming Perl this year, no that was not my first reflex...
My first reflex on seeing this on Slashdot was, "I probably shouldn't read the article because its going to be filled with the same tired, ignorant Perl hate. And then I'm going to waste time trying to respond to it."
You don't have to use Perl if you don't want to. Why isn't that enough? Why do you feel entitled to dump your FUD on my community? Perl isn't the most popular choice but there's a lot of us making a decent living at it, so please if you don't get it, or you don't like it, unless you have a grudge with Perl that hasn't already been mentioned 100K times what's the point of saying anything at all?
Eich's beliefs mean nothing, as long as he doesn't practice them at work.
Generally I find that intolerant, bigoted people find ways to practice their intolerance and bigotry all the time. I've never met a KKK member that said "Hey I only wear the sheet at night! When I am at work its all, 'Kumbaya man!'".
Just as the employee's sexual orientation means nothing, as long as he doesn't practice it at work.
There's a big difference between a leader of a company with power, wealth and influence and a general employee. One has a megaphone that they can use to promote their ideology, the other doesn't. Even if they are careful to give the appearance of separation, ultimately that megaphone is there.
What if this guy was like a Nazi, would you say the same thing? My guess is, no you would not.
WTF how is this somehow modded insightful?
Its not a matter of 'demanding my boss' anything. And its not about 'political correctness' or whatever that means nowadays. Lots of shit in life is ambiguous and arbitrary. The trousers of time have many pant legs to fall down, and quite often they are all more or less equal. But there are occasions when history will take sides. And this guy is on the wrong side of history. My guess is the parent poster is as well.
I've traveled around the world and lived as the natives do in lots of places. As in Rome, yeah? But you can hide intollerance under 'all opinions are equal' crap. There is a difference between matters of opinion and matters of ethics.
In terms of what can I expect from a boss, well I would say Mozilla is not just some company, its a big part of an ethical movement around open source / free software and about empowering people with information and technology. Many, many people who are part of that movement share other similar values around notions of diversity and tolerance for difference. I personally do find it distressing that the CEO of this company clearly doesn't share all those values. However I'd be willing personally to find some common ground if possible, on the hopes of influencing him over time. But I can't expect that over everyone.