I mean, MS has never been open to alternative GUIs for their OS. Back in the Windows 3.x and Windows 9x days it was fairly easy to swap out the desktop manager, but I don't think thats the case now. I would guess MS has a big investment in branding the desktop experience, particularly since they have to compete with the MacOS much more directly. Would MS even let them call it Windows?
Seems to me what some people want is the ability to run the standard Windows Apps, mostly MS Office, and to have the ability to do some training with MS development tools. I guess I can sort of see this from the perspective of a country that wants to be the next outsourcing mecca. I'm not sure if the OLPC hardware would be good for this.
Maybe they could just dualboot the thing? Then let MS do their best to provide the missing pieces. If they want to play, then let them pay
The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.
My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
With all respect, I don't think rushing to the office at 3am to restart a server will be affected much by congestion time pricing, since every plan I know of (and I live in NYC with a plan like this on the table) doesn't increase prices at 3am. Anyway, perhaps you should look into improving your remote access in order to reduce that need in the first place.
As to the point about people working 'fuzzy' hours, well this is exactly the kind of situation congestion pricing is trying to encourage, that is to get employers to realize not everyone needs to be at the office at exactly 9am. By encouraging employers to look hard at who really needs to be in the office at that time we can hopefully spread out the road usage over greater time, thus reducing congestion, which will save fuel and reduce pollution.
All this will do for your friend with a fleet of plumping trucks is to encourage them to consider making non emergency appointments during non congestion time. Remember, this is not just about carpooling, cars sitting in traffic and not moving also waste a lot of fuel and cause pollution. If you can reduce your commute time by 20 minutes because your boss allows you to come in at 10:30am instead of at 9am that is going to 1) let you sleep 20 more minutes, 2) reduce the amount of fuel you waste idling in congestion, which incidentally saves you some money and 3) reduces the pollution spilling out your exhaust pipe. So even if you don't carpool this can end up being a win-win solution.
Also, for those people not living and/or working in a major city I very much doubt they have congestion trouble that needs fixing.
Maybe it's easy for me to not understand your objections since I live in NYC which has had the foresight to develop layers of useful and reasonably prices public transportation. All I can say for those of you living in big cities without it, well, the gov't you elected failed to have that foresight and guess who is to blame for putting those officials in place?
I don't know (or really care) why most people went to college. I did it because it was fun for a long time. I studied stuff I personally found interesting (I have undergrads in Philosophy and Literature) and left when I no longer felt it was leading me to a good place (right after I finished the Masters, I decided against pursuing the PhD). I guess I was lucky and/or spoiled, having come from a middle class background I didn't have the pressure to think education was my way our of poverty, it felt more like a coming of age ritual. I started work at the bottom pretty much, doing janitorial and security guard jobs while in school, then when I left I capitalized on my long term interest in computers and technology to build a reasonable career in web application development. I also did some teaching for a while, but eventually working two jobs was too much of my time.
I never felt promised the world, never thought school was a magic bullet to wealth. I also have a hard time understanding people that drop out for reasons other than just not having money to pay for it, since as I said I found school terrible fun, and although I enjoy my work career in many ways those where the funnest days of my life.
But maybe other people have a different experience. I mean if I was told college was going to make me wealthy I'd have been mad. Just like I was mad when I started college at an engineering school and there were not so many girls around. I'd been told it was easy to get laid in college and that turned out not so true, since there was like 1 girl for every 5 guys. But I fixed that by transferring.
I wonder how much of this is due to the unclear support for remote/unattended installations. Maybe FF3 is better, but with FF1/2 the only way to support custom/unattended installations was a collection of externally developed hacks or required you to basically build your own installer. I played with this about 2 years ago and compared to the remote install and customization tools for IE it's a no brainer for hassled admins.
Now, I admit freely the IE team has it a lot easier since they are only targeting a single platform and a handful of OSs, but I know for a fact this is something that a few places I worked at didn't like.
Yeah, I think the basic OO support that was addd to Perl in version 5 leaves a lot to be desired, since it's extremely minimal and requires a lot of typing boilerplate to do even basic stuff. The thinking was to make the most minimal solution and see what people needed.
If you are interested in doing real OO, I'd recommend using the Perl OO Framework called 'Moose', which you can install with 'cpan Moose' is you have a reasonably modern Perl (you might need to sudo that command, btw.)
Moose is a full meta object system with introspection, Roles (sort of like Interfaces on steroids), and a neat syntax. check out the tutorial at:
There's also a very active IRC channel at irc.perl.org#moose
If you like Perl but feel envious of languages with more strongly defined OO systems, I really recommend looking at Moose. It's a big step forward for the community and give you one of the nicest and most productive OO systems around.
Sorry you had such a negative experience learning Perl, particularly since one of it's overt goals is to make it possible for you to do useful programming right from the start. Since you didn't mention what kind of work you were trying to do I can't really make any suggestions. My recommendation to you or to anyone starting with Perl is to hop onto one of the many IRC channels at irc.perl.org and ask for some direction. The community has evolved very rapidly in that last two years and has primarily organized itself around IRC at the expense of blogging and other communication channels (not that those don't exist, they are just not the focus) so if you are looking for more modern practices that's the place to go.
Well, maybe 'phone_numbers' to 'numbers' might be a little far, unless you have a business need to restrict numbers in some way. I understand the idea though, that you shouldn't have so many values in your tables, just a lot of FK to very simple tables with just a PK and a value. I don't see this as fundamentally wrong, and sometimes in the end can help make you DB design more flexible. Also any decent ORM would make this easy. My ORM of choice DBIx::Class (current version: http://search.cpan.org/~ash/DBIx-Class-0.08008/) would probably look like
my $telephone = $teacher->phone_number->number;
I'd probably preload the numbers table in the phone_number join to simplify it even more.
If the ORM is designed well it makes it easier to do the right thing DB design-wise, in my opinion.
I got mine when I was 13 and used it until I went to Grad School and wanted a notebook computer so I could work from anywhere. My word processor was this application I had to type in line by line from a book (dozens of pages of assemble code) and didn't have spell check, but it worked for my limited needs.
I logged onto my first BBS, and logged into the internet for the first time (via my shell account, not actually IP to the C64, but still...)
It was a great machine. It introduced a lot of people to computing. It was much cheaper than the Apple IIc, it's main competition of the time.
I guess the difference is that the USA is in no danger of being destroyed and the freedom of millions of black slaves is not on the line.
In fact, many people are starting to wonder if this policy itself is not the greatest threat to the USA since the Civil War.
Lincoln definitely did a lot of things he should be reviled for, i's just that his ability to hold the Union together and the fact that he started the process of ending slavery in the US has generally caused us to be willing to overlook this things.
Additionally, those things stopped when the war was over. The war had a clear goal as well. Either the North would defeat the South of vis versa. It's not like this Orwellian thing of eternal war we are in.
One might also want to point out that Bush seems to think he needs more power and less freedom for Americans to defeat terrorism than we needed to defeat the USSR in the cold war.
Lastly, no one has shown me that 9/11 would have been avoided if the gov't had these powers on 9/10. In fact, all analysis has shown that gov't had enough power to prevent 9/11, just that it wasn't using it very well. 9/11 could have been avoided if some various gov't agencies had talked to each other better. So the gov't has no excuse to take my freedoms away, AFAIK.
I thought the Nixon's pardoning of all the war protesters/draft dodgers (your choice)that went to Canada to avoid Vietnam service was pretty much a blank check. I doubt that he compiled a list of names when he gave this pardon.
I agree that although it wasn't good to lie to a grand jury he did what any person in a marriage would do who wanted protect the marriage. Anyone married knows that if you make the error of fooling around but still love your partner and want to preserve the relationship the best thing to do is bury it as deep as possible. Your partner doesn't really want to know about this, particularly if it was just a short term slip and didn't lead you to question your commitment to the relationship.
Additionally he has his child to consider. Kids want to believe their parents are happy and true to each other. No kid wants to discover one of his or her parents fooled around.
The only reason I can think of to let your partner know about your cheating is if you are really trying to say you don't want to be with him or her anymore and you cheated to make them mad enough to leave you since you don't have the courage to be the one to end the relationship. Or maybe you have some guilt and are naive enough to think spilling the beans is going to make you feel better (not very likely). In general the only times that I know of someone voluntarily telling a partner about infidelity is when that person was feeling the relationship was in trouble, to express serious unhappiness with the relationship, to indicate a desire to end the relationship, or when the person they cheated with was still in the picture in some way. Almost always it means trouble. If your partner tells you they cheated the chances are good that what they are really saying is that they don't want the relationship with you to continue.
Oh, another good reason is if you think you picked up a STD while you where fooling around. Then you have the responsibility to tell your partner so s/he can get treatment.
Anyway, from my perspective Clinton was just acting as responsible as he could in a bad situation. Sure, it was irresponsible to cheat, particular with the stakes so high, but once he got control of himself again and ended the illicit relationship he did what anyone should do in this situation by burying it. He felt he could ride it out because it was his word against her word. If it wasn't for the dress with his DNA on it there would never have been an impeachment.
I'm not sure if this is an egregious case of big brother gov't at it's worst or just an expression of how annoying it's become to walk around the city because of the proliferation of these types of engaging personal devises. A lot of you responding that don't live in NYC or a similarly crowded city, where walking and using public transportation is the norm and not the exception can't really understand the complexity of feelings about this. Mobile phones were bad enough; I can't count the number of times someone yelling at his girlfriend has walked into me or stepped on my feet. But now people are walking around with music or video players, or playing video games. It's not much trouble when they are standing still at a bus stop, although sometimes the noise these devices make can be really annoying. But some people continue to use these devices as a way of entertaining themselves when they are moving around. This inevitable leads to them bumping into people or acting in other ways that seem rude, since they are often not fully away, or seem to care, of how what they are doing is effecting the people around them. And yes, they are a danger to themselves because if they are distracted while crossing the street they are more likely to miss the oncoming car.
In a very crowded city, in which millions of people flow into and out of everyday, what type of courtesy do we owe each other? A lot of people feel that some very selfish individuals are so caught up with their own stuff, with their video game, responding to their blackberry, etc. that they are acting rudely. So I'm not surprised to see this frustration vocalized in a bill like this, regardless of the safety issue.
And the truth is there is a real safety issue at stake. Just ask yourself, if you ran over and killed some kid who was walking to school and then you found out afterward the child was loudly playing an iPod and playing his PSP, totally oblivious to his surroundings, how would you feel about this proposed law? Would your support for it increase? At what point should the gov't regulate self protection and common courtesy? Maybe in small towns, or in spread out cities this isn't an issue, but in a place where people are literally crammed together into buses and subway cars it is an issue.
Also, how do you all feel about things the other way around, that is are you pro or against drivers using mobile phones while driving, or trying to play a PSP while driving?
I don't know if I like this law, but I am not having the self righteous libertarian reaction a lot of posters on this thread are having. In my mind there is an issue here and we need to start the discussion about it somewhere. So I see this as a start for coming to a common consensus as to what we are going to tolerate.
As a Perl programmer I can also say I've had my ups and downs with Perl6 development. Certainly this has not followed the standard trajectory for language development in a lot of ways. I think a big part of this was the fact that shortly into the process Larry Wall became gravely ill and for a while the project floundered. In the end I really think this was a good thing, not Mr Wall becoming ill of course, but it answered the question about what will happen to Perl when Larry decides to retire. What has happened is that over time a new group of very talented developers moved into leadership positions and began to substantially drive the project. So actually the Perl6 idea really spawned a dramatic change in the Perl community. This was exactly the kind of change that I believe Larry wanted to see. I believe that change was for the best, although it has been painful and has slowed some goals down. However I don't think it's correct to say that Perl6 is lingering without improving.
One thing that's been very important is how the ideas of Perl6 are influencing Perl5 development. Certainly a lot of the things that got people excited about Perl6 have been experimented with in Perl5. For example, there is the Moose Project (http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.17/lib/Moo se.pm) which is a Perl6 inspired Object Oriented framework for Perl5 that is really fantastic and has given Perl5 developers some great tools and techniques. In fact there is a whole perl6 section on CPAN, which is dedicated to playing with Perl6 concepts in Perl5.
I wouldn't give up hope on this project. Remember how the Mozilla project seemed to stall, right after they decided to dump the Netscape legacy code base and write an new browser from scratch? A lot of people felt that was a bad idea. It seemed like we were waiting forever for that magic version 1. However as we can see in the long term it was a good strategy and now Firefox is the premier Open Source web browser and a great success story. I believe in something similar for the Perl6 project.
Additionally the community has changed a lot on the past few years, and this change has affected what we want from Perl6. Perl developers are a different breed from the early 90s, there are a lot of us that want to use Perl for true enterprise application development, not justs system administration scripts, cron jobs and quick and dirty CGI applications. This is why there is so much interested in projects like Catalyst (http://search.cpan.org/~mramberg/Catalyst-Runtime -5.7006/lib/Catalyst.pm) in the Perl community. So this change has come with some growing pains. Perl6 has reflected those growing pains in a lot of ways.
So yes, Perl6 isn't completed, but I think the purpose of the Perl6 project, which was to reinvigorate the community and to act as a incubator for ideas, has been very successful.
Didn't he fight her in the second movie? I didn't care for the first one too much, but I saw the second one 3 or 4 times, mostly because I enjoyed the fantasy of mutants chasing president bush through the white house.
Actually I wouldn't blame the media on regarding Laci Peterson overload. It was her parents that hired a PR group to sensationalize the case because they thought it was the best way to get the police to take swift action. We are seeing this more and more lately, some rich kid on vacation disappears and his/her parents drop a wad hiring PR and media relations experts to sensationalize the case on the assumption that exposure will embarrass the police or local politicians to take quicker action.
Of course the media falls for the bait, but in truth they are just responding to our cultures desire for sensational news stories. This kind of thing drives ratings and ratings rule the media. If we all just stopped watching they'd change overnight. It just seems we like to both watch and complain about it. I guess it gives us something to complain about in a way that seems to absolve us of responsibility.
I really object to the way this article was titled. It's clearly a very biased interpretation of what MS is doing. Now, I use linux for my personal desktop and on the server and am a big advocate for free/open source, but I also think we need to be fair. Customizing deployment is a big issue and MS went to a lot of trouble to address it; this is a good thing although I will hold my judgment until I see it in action.
The only sort of malware made more easy is the kind found in pirated versions of windows. If you are using pirated software you really don't have much right to claim any sort of moral high ground or to make demands on MS.
So calling this article this way is really unfairly biased. Let Free|Open Software win on the merits, not on name calling. Let's show that customizing deployment and management can be better with Linux.
That public information about nuclear power plants includes instructions about where to crash a passenger jet if you want to have the best chance of creating a nuclear disaster, however I didn't read that document so I guess I'll take your word for it.
Now, sure that information could give a smart terrorist some ideas about vulnerable points in the system and so forth. Trouble is that is the exact information that the public needs to know about in order to inteligently evaluate the risks associated with having a nuclear power plant in one's backyard.
It's similar to the opensource "enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow".
Freedom of information and transparency aew key elements in protecting ourselves from the misuse of power by people in the government or in other positions of high power.
I fear the threat of fascism here in the USA way more than terrorism and I live in NYC, one of only places in the continental USA that has ever seen international terrorism. I worry more about the threat that the government will abuse it's power over my wife and child's Visa to live here than about "Islamofascism" or whatever they are using to brand the war of terrorism this week.
When I see our country's leaders (past or present) saying this kind of thing it makes me sick. It should make all of us sick.
I can see already the RMS bashers are out in force, but after reading this article I thought it came off as very reasonable in comparison to many other speeches. Sure there was the 'GNU/linux' thing and a short rant against open source, but that is all old hat really.
All I can see here is him talking about cleaning up the language of the GPL so that is works better in various countries and making sure it's properly compatible with other important free licenses, like the Eclipse and Apache license. That's important stuff. Some stuff about making unclear things clear, and setting it up so that you can more easily and clearly add additional rights, such as if you are using the GPL for a font set you made you can explicitly say that documents using that font can be under any license the document creator wants (which isn't a problem really, but it makes some people nervous so you can be explicit if you want).
I'm not sure what all the ranting here about RMS not having to work for a living is coming from, except maybe jealously. He's making a decent living at doing what he loves, which I thought was what we all want. Good for him, I hope someday to have a career as successful and important as his.
I actually enjoy sleep. I've learned some very important things from my dreams, and I belive my dream life is just an extension of my waking life. Yes, just like waking life you might not recall the details, but the bright flashes endure. I also find the more you respect dreaming then more you start to remember of it. My wife and I often discuss our dreams together, which has been a nice part of our relationship.
I certainly don't feel like it's 1/3 of my life where I am doing nothing.
Then again, some people waste the other 2/3 doing little or nothing as well.
Life is what you make of it.
That said, I can certainly see the benefits of using a drug like this for particular needs, such as when I'm on a heavy development cycle and feeling really productive. The truth is some days I am much more productive than others and on those days I'd prefer to stay up until I've exhausted what I am working on. Then I can go back to normal sleep on days when I am just getting by with work.
There are also quite a few post Marx theories that suggested the Revolution would be permanently postponed since the industrialized west coul shift the oppression to undeveloped nations. As long as the West could carefully balance developing the third world enough to produce useful labor but at the same time keep them undeveloped enough to prevent the critical mass for Revolution. So that's what gave the justification to many of the communist leaders of the 20th century to act in such fascist ways, they felt unless they could break the cycle by any means necessary they would never be free.
I do think we see aspects of this playing out in the world. For example in India, during the last election cycle, the poorer people in the country expressed their unhappiness with the fact that properity from outsourcing and other things seemed unequally distributed. And as India develops more, you see Western nations turning to other countries for outsourcing. The issue is will we ever get to the point were the whole world is developed enough that local labor has no disadvantage?
Complicating this is the degree to which some countries will embrace aspects of socialism. For example, in the USA most automobile companies are in big trouble because they can no longer afford retirement and health care benefits for their already retired workers. This is a HUGE expense for them. Many of their overseas competition doesn't have to worry about this, because the gov't provides healthcare and retirement benefits. In this case a gov'ts degree of socialism can provide an advantage to a particular industry by removing a large category of expense.
The question of which direction competition between countries will drive work rights is still undecided. The India example is heartening, but most other developing countries don't have such a democratic institutions. Will workers in China start to demand more involvement in gov't? After living there for 3 years I am not sure anymore.
I feel great personal benefit from Google at least. They provide a service which is free for all intents and purposes, and which has not only enhanced my private life, but enabled me to do more in less time in my career. The number of times I found a solution to a programming problem by using Google would be hard for me to count. Because of this I have personally made a decent living. My productivity is much higher. So yes, I feel Google has given back at least as much as they have taken.
If I had to take classes or buy books for everything I learned on the web that I found via Google, I would have a lot less money saved. Actually, I probably would not have learned any of those things:)
I also feel that Sun, by giving us Java, a viable contender to MS development tools, has also returned a lot. Lots of us make good money developing Java based apps and there are a lot of free tools to do so. If not for Java, many of us would have to use MS development tools, which are much more costly and offer significantly less freedom.
IBM I have not much of an opinion on, but they have contributed a lot to the Apache project, which I use everyday to make a living.
First of all there is the crazy piracy which costs them huge dollars and causes trouble since the pirated windows spread virii like crazy. Also there so much trouble enforcing contracts. When I was running my IT business people would constantly try to renegotiate the price AFTER the project was completed. A not small amount of time people would just not be able to pay. Forgot about taking them to court.
Then legally you can't really know if you are breaking the law or not half the time. Usually if you are breaking the law come down to who you know. So it's hard for them to make project plans and then suddenly the gov't tells them they can't do something (after they spent millions).
I know a guy working on a TV movie in China. They wrote this super tame script and had it checked by the gov't censor board. Then after spending several million dollars and months of effort the gov't decided they couldn't sell the movie, because it showed foreigners beating out local Chinese people. So this makes it hard to commit the big bucks in China, you get nervous that the gov't will suddenly make some arbitrary change and put you out of business.
Yeah, it's sort of like this here in the US (and lately our gov't been closing the gap) but it's much much worse in China. Or maybe the foriegners all get the 'special' treatment, who knows? At least that is my experience, and I lived in China (all over) for a couple of years, and I have western friends there living in china as long as 12 years.
So there might not be totally humanitarian reasons for this, although there certainly could be really bad stuff here that even MS doesn't want to be associated with.
Even if they had software that could detect a pornographic image, which they don't, China doesn't censor porn at all. When I was living in China my wife and I could get all the porn we wanted; just getting news sites and things like insurance company websites you couldn't get. Basically stuff the gov't doesn't want people thinking about.
It's really spotty anyway, I could get cnn.com most of the time, but then news.google.com wouldn't work for months.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, MS has never been open to alternative GUIs for their OS. Back in the Windows 3.x and Windows 9x days it was fairly easy to swap out the desktop manager, but I don't think thats the case now. I would guess MS has a big investment in branding the desktop experience, particularly since they have to compete with the MacOS much more directly. Would MS even let them call it Windows?
Seems to me what some people want is the ability to run the standard Windows Apps, mostly MS Office, and to have the ability to do some training with MS development tools. I guess I can sort of see this from the perspective of a country that wants to be the next outsourcing mecca. I'm not sure if the OLPC hardware would be good for this.
Maybe they could just dualboot the thing? Then let MS do their best to provide the missing pieces. If they want to play, then let them pay
My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
With all respect, I don't think rushing to the office at 3am to restart a server will be affected much by congestion time pricing, since every plan I know of (and I live in NYC with a plan like this on the table) doesn't increase prices at 3am. Anyway, perhaps you should look into improving your remote access in order to reduce that need in the first place.
As to the point about people working 'fuzzy' hours, well this is exactly the kind of situation congestion pricing is trying to encourage, that is to get employers to realize not everyone needs to be at the office at exactly 9am. By encouraging employers to look hard at who really needs to be in the office at that time we can hopefully spread out the road usage over greater time, thus reducing congestion, which will save fuel and reduce pollution.
All this will do for your friend with a fleet of plumping trucks is to encourage them to consider making non emergency appointments during non congestion time. Remember, this is not just about carpooling, cars sitting in traffic and not moving also waste a lot of fuel and cause pollution. If you can reduce your commute time by 20 minutes because your boss allows you to come in at 10:30am instead of at 9am that is going to 1) let you sleep 20 more minutes, 2) reduce the amount of fuel you waste idling in congestion, which incidentally saves you some money and 3) reduces the pollution spilling out your exhaust pipe. So even if you don't carpool this can end up being a win-win solution.
Also, for those people not living and/or working in a major city I very much doubt they have congestion trouble that needs fixing.
Maybe it's easy for me to not understand your objections since I live in NYC which has had the foresight to develop layers of useful and reasonably prices public transportation. All I can say for those of you living in big cities without it, well, the gov't you elected failed to have that foresight and guess who is to blame for putting those officials in place?
Well,
I don't know (or really care) why most people went to college. I did it because it was fun for a long time. I studied stuff I personally found interesting (I have undergrads in Philosophy and Literature) and left when I no longer felt it was leading me to a good place (right after I finished the Masters, I decided against pursuing the PhD). I guess I was lucky and/or spoiled, having come from a middle class background I didn't have the pressure to think education was my way our of poverty, it felt more like a coming of age ritual. I started work at the bottom pretty much, doing janitorial and security guard jobs while in school, then when I left I capitalized on my long term interest in computers and technology to build a reasonable career in web application development. I also did some teaching for a while, but eventually working two jobs was too much of my time.
I never felt promised the world, never thought school was a magic bullet to wealth. I also have a hard time understanding people that drop out for reasons other than just not having money to pay for it, since as I said I found school terrible fun, and although I enjoy my work career in many ways those where the funnest days of my life.
But maybe other people have a different experience. I mean if I was told college was going to make me wealthy I'd have been mad. Just like I was mad when I started college at an engineering school and there were not so many girls around. I'd been told it was easy to get laid in college and that turned out not so true, since there was like 1 girl for every 5 guys. But I fixed that by transferring.
I wonder how much of this is due to the unclear support for remote/unattended installations. Maybe FF3 is better, but with FF1/2 the only way to support custom/unattended installations was a collection of externally developed hacks or required you to basically build your own installer. I played with this about 2 years ago and compared to the remote install and customization tools for IE it's a no brainer for hassled admins.
Now, I admit freely the IE team has it a lot easier since they are only targeting a single platform and a handful of OSs, but I know for a fact this is something that a few places I worked at didn't like.
If anyone knows better please correct me!
Yeah, I think the basic OO support that was addd to Perl in version 5 leaves a lot to be desired, since it's extremely minimal and requires a lot of typing boilerplate to do even basic stuff. The thinking was to make the most minimal solution and see what people needed.
If you are interested in doing real OO, I'd recommend using the Perl OO Framework called 'Moose', which you can install with 'cpan Moose' is you have a reasonably modern Perl (you might need to sudo that command, btw.)
Moose is a full meta object system with introspection, Roles (sort of like Interfaces on steroids), and a neat syntax. check out the tutorial at:
http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.33/lib/Moose.pm (which is the lastest version as of this posting)
There's also a very active IRC channel at irc.perl.org#moose
If you like Perl but feel envious of languages with more strongly defined OO systems, I really recommend looking at Moose. It's a big step forward for the community and give you one of the nicest and most productive OO systems around.
Sorry you had such a negative experience learning Perl, particularly since one of it's overt goals is to make it possible for you to do useful programming right from the start. Since you didn't mention what kind of work you were trying to do I can't really make any suggestions. My recommendation to you or to anyone starting with Perl is to hop onto one of the many IRC channels at irc.perl.org and ask for some direction. The community has evolved very rapidly in that last two years and has primarily organized itself around IRC at the expense of blogging and other communication channels (not that those don't exist, they are just not the focus) so if you are looking for more modern practices that's the place to go.
Well, maybe 'phone_numbers' to 'numbers' might be a little far, unless you have a business need to restrict numbers in some way. I understand the idea though, that you shouldn't have so many values in your tables, just a lot of FK to very simple tables with just a PK and a value. I don't see this as fundamentally wrong, and sometimes in the end can help make you DB design more flexible. Also any decent ORM would make this easy. My ORM of choice DBIx::Class (current version: http://search.cpan.org/~ash/DBIx-Class-0.08008/) would probably look like
my $telephone = $teacher->phone_number->number;
I'd probably preload the numbers table in the phone_number join to simplify it even more.
If the ORM is designed well it makes it easier to do the right thing DB design-wise, in my opinion.
--john
I got mine when I was 13 and used it until I went to Grad School and wanted a notebook computer so I could work from anywhere. My word processor was this application I had to type in line by line from a book (dozens of pages of assemble code) and didn't have spell check, but it worked for my limited needs.
:)
I logged onto my first BBS, and logged into the internet for the first time (via my shell account, not actually IP to the C64, but still...)
It was a great machine. It introduced a lot of people to computing. It was much cheaper than the Apple IIc, it's main competition of the time.
I still have it
I guess the difference is that the USA is in no danger of being destroyed and the freedom of millions of black slaves is not on the line.
In fact, many people are starting to wonder if this policy itself is not the greatest threat to the USA since the Civil War.
Lincoln definitely did a lot of things he should be reviled for, i's just that his ability to hold the Union together and the fact that he started the process of ending slavery in the US has generally caused us to be willing to overlook this things.
Additionally, those things stopped when the war was over. The war had a clear goal as well. Either the North would defeat the South of vis versa. It's not like this Orwellian thing of eternal war we are in.
One might also want to point out that Bush seems to think he needs more power and less freedom for Americans to defeat terrorism than we needed to defeat the USSR in the cold war.
Lastly, no one has shown me that 9/11 would have been avoided if the gov't had these powers on 9/10. In fact, all analysis has shown that gov't had enough power to prevent 9/11, just that it wasn't using it very well. 9/11 could have been avoided if some various gov't agencies had talked to each other better. So the gov't has no excuse to take my freedoms away, AFAIK.
peace, or not?
John
I thought the Nixon's pardoning of all the war protesters/draft dodgers (your choice)that went to Canada to avoid Vietnam service was pretty much a blank check. I doubt that he compiled a list of names when he gave this pardon.
I agree that although it wasn't good to lie to a grand jury he did what any person in a marriage would do who wanted protect the marriage. Anyone married knows that if you make the error of fooling around but still love your partner and want to preserve the relationship the best thing to do is bury it as deep as possible. Your partner doesn't really want to know about this, particularly if it was just a short term slip and didn't lead you to question your commitment to the relationship.
Additionally he has his child to consider. Kids want to believe their parents are happy and true to each other. No kid wants to discover one of his or her parents fooled around.
The only reason I can think of to let your partner know about your cheating is if you are really trying to say you don't want to be with him or her anymore and you cheated to make them mad enough to leave you since you don't have the courage to be the one to end the relationship. Or maybe you have some guilt and are naive enough to think spilling the beans is going to make you feel better (not very likely). In general the only times that I know of someone voluntarily telling a partner about infidelity is when that person was feeling the relationship was in trouble, to express serious unhappiness with the relationship, to indicate a desire to end the relationship, or when the person they cheated with was still in the picture in some way. Almost always it means trouble. If your partner tells you they cheated the chances are good that what they are really saying is that they don't want the relationship with you to continue.
Oh, another good reason is if you think you picked up a STD while you where fooling around. Then you have the responsibility to tell your partner so s/he can get treatment.
Anyway, from my perspective Clinton was just acting as responsible as he could in a bad situation. Sure, it was irresponsible to cheat, particular with the stakes so high, but once he got control of himself again and ended the illicit relationship he did what anyone should do in this situation by burying it. He felt he could ride it out because it was his word against her word. If it wasn't for the dress with his DNA on it there would never have been an impeachment.
I'm not sure if this is an egregious case of big brother gov't at it's worst or just an expression of how annoying it's become to walk around the city because of the proliferation of these types of engaging personal devises. A lot of you responding that don't live in NYC or a similarly crowded city, where walking and using public transportation is the norm and not the exception can't really understand the complexity of feelings about this. Mobile phones were bad enough; I can't count the number of times someone yelling at his girlfriend has walked into me or stepped on my feet. But now people are walking around with music or video players, or playing video games. It's not much trouble when they are standing still at a bus stop, although sometimes the noise these devices make can be really annoying. But some people continue to use these devices as a way of entertaining themselves when they are moving around. This inevitable leads to them bumping into people or acting in other ways that seem rude, since they are often not fully away, or seem to care, of how what they are doing is effecting the people around them. And yes, they are a danger to themselves because if they are distracted while crossing the street they are more likely to miss the oncoming car.
In a very crowded city, in which millions of people flow into and out of everyday, what type of courtesy do we owe each other? A lot of people feel that some very selfish individuals are so caught up with their own stuff, with their video game, responding to their blackberry, etc. that they are acting rudely. So I'm not surprised to see this frustration vocalized in a bill like this, regardless of the safety issue.
And the truth is there is a real safety issue at stake. Just ask yourself, if you ran over and killed some kid who was walking to school and then you found out afterward the child was loudly playing an iPod and playing his PSP, totally oblivious to his surroundings, how would you feel about this proposed law? Would your support for it increase? At what point should the gov't regulate self protection and common courtesy? Maybe in small towns, or in spread out cities this isn't an issue, but in a place where people are literally crammed together into buses and subway cars it is an issue.
Also, how do you all feel about things the other way around, that is are you pro or against drivers using mobile phones while driving, or trying to play a PSP while driving?
I don't know if I like this law, but I am not having the self righteous libertarian reaction a lot of posters on this thread are having. In my mind there is an issue here and we need to start the discussion about it somewhere. So I see this as a start for coming to a common consensus as to what we are going to tolerate.
As a Perl programmer I can also say I've had my ups and downs with Perl6 development. Certainly this has not followed the standard trajectory for language development in a lot of ways. I think a big part of this was the fact that shortly into the process Larry Wall became gravely ill and for a while the project floundered. In the end I really think this was a good thing, not Mr Wall becoming ill of course, but it answered the question about what will happen to Perl when Larry decides to retire. What has happened is that over time a new group of very talented developers moved into leadership positions and began to substantially drive the project. So actually the Perl6 idea really spawned a dramatic change in the Perl community. This was exactly the kind of change that I believe Larry wanted to see. I believe that change was for the best, although it has been painful and has slowed some goals down. However I don't think it's correct to say that Perl6 is lingering without improving.
o se.pm) which is a Perl6 inspired Object Oriented framework for Perl5 that is really fantastic and has given Perl5 developers some great tools and techniques. In fact there is a whole perl6 section on CPAN, which is dedicated to playing with Perl6 concepts in Perl5.
e -5.7006/lib/Catalyst.pm) in the Perl community. So this change has come with some growing pains. Perl6 has reflected those growing pains in a lot of ways.
One thing that's been very important is how the ideas of Perl6 are influencing Perl5 development. Certainly a lot of the things that got people excited about Perl6 have been experimented with in Perl5. For example, there is the Moose Project (http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.17/lib/Mo
I wouldn't give up hope on this project. Remember how the Mozilla project seemed to stall, right after they decided to dump the Netscape legacy code base and write an new browser from scratch? A lot of people felt that was a bad idea. It seemed like we were waiting forever for that magic version 1. However as we can see in the long term it was a good strategy and now Firefox is the premier Open Source web browser and a great success story. I believe in something similar for the Perl6 project.
Additionally the community has changed a lot on the past few years, and this change has affected what we want from Perl6. Perl developers are a different breed from the early 90s, there are a lot of us that want to use Perl for true enterprise application development, not justs system administration scripts, cron jobs and quick and dirty CGI applications. This is why there is so much interested in projects like Catalyst (http://search.cpan.org/~mramberg/Catalyst-Runtim
So yes, Perl6 isn't completed, but I think the purpose of the Perl6 project, which was to reinvigorate the community and to act as a incubator for ideas, has been very successful.
Didn't he fight her in the second movie? I didn't care for the first one too much, but I saw the second one 3 or 4 times, mostly because I enjoyed the fantasy of mutants chasing president bush through the white house.
Glad to hear you got laid over the weekend.
Actually I wouldn't blame the media on regarding Laci Peterson overload. It was her parents that hired a PR group to sensationalize the case because they thought it was the best way to get the police to take swift action. We are seeing this more and more lately, some rich kid on vacation disappears and his/her parents drop a wad hiring PR and media relations experts to sensationalize the case on the assumption that exposure will embarrass the police or local politicians to take quicker action.
Of course the media falls for the bait, but in truth they are just responding to our cultures desire for sensational news stories. This kind of thing drives ratings and ratings rule the media. If we all just stopped watching they'd change overnight. It just seems we like to both watch and complain about it. I guess it gives us something to complain about in a way that seems to absolve us of responsibility.
I really object to the way this article was titled. It's clearly a very biased interpretation of what MS is doing. Now, I use linux for my personal desktop and on the server and am a big advocate for free/open source, but I also think we need to be fair. Customizing deployment is a big issue and MS went to a lot of trouble to address it; this is a good thing although I will hold my judgment until I see it in action.
The only sort of malware made more easy is the kind found in pirated versions of windows. If you are using pirated software you really don't have much right to claim any sort of moral high ground or to make demands on MS.
So calling this article this way is really unfairly biased. Let Free|Open Software win on the merits, not on name calling. Let's show that customizing deployment and management can be better with Linux.
That public information about nuclear power plants includes instructions about where to crash a passenger jet if you want to have the best chance of creating a nuclear disaster, however I didn't read that document so I guess I'll take your word for it.
Now, sure that information could give a smart terrorist some ideas about vulnerable points in the system and so forth. Trouble is that is the exact information that the public needs to know about in order to inteligently evaluate the risks associated with having a nuclear power plant in one's backyard.
It's similar to the opensource "enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow".
Freedom of information and transparency aew key elements in protecting ourselves from the misuse of power by people in the government or in other positions of high power.
I fear the threat of fascism here in the USA way more than terrorism and I live in NYC, one of only places in the continental USA that has ever seen international terrorism. I worry more about the threat that the government will abuse it's power over my wife and child's Visa to live here than about "Islamofascism" or whatever they are using to brand the war of terrorism this week.
When I see our country's leaders (past or present) saying this kind of thing it makes me sick. It should make all of us sick.
I can see already the RMS bashers are out in force, but after reading this article I thought it came off as very reasonable in comparison to many other speeches. Sure there was the 'GNU/linux' thing and a short rant against open source, but that is all old hat really.
All I can see here is him talking about cleaning up the language of the GPL so that is works better in various countries and making sure it's properly compatible with other important free licenses, like the Eclipse and Apache license. That's important stuff. Some stuff about making unclear things clear, and setting it up so that you can more easily and clearly add additional rights, such as if you are using the GPL for a font set you made you can explicitly say that documents using that font can be under any license the document creator wants (which isn't a problem really, but it makes some people nervous so you can be explicit if you want).
I'm not sure what all the ranting here about RMS not having to work for a living is coming from, except maybe jealously. He's making a decent living at doing what he loves, which I thought was what we all want. Good for him, I hope someday to have a career as successful and important as his.
I actually enjoy sleep. I've learned some very important things from my dreams, and I belive my dream life is just an extension of my waking life. Yes, just like waking life you might not recall the details, but the bright flashes endure. I also find the more you respect dreaming then more you start to remember of it. My wife and I often discuss our dreams together, which has been a nice part of our relationship.
I certainly don't feel like it's 1/3 of my life where I am doing nothing.
Then again, some people waste the other 2/3 doing little or nothing as well.
Life is what you make of it.
That said, I can certainly see the benefits of using a drug like this for particular needs, such as when I'm on a heavy development cycle and feeling really productive. The truth is some days I am much more productive than others and on those days I'd prefer to stay up until I've exhausted what I am working on. Then I can go back to normal sleep on days when I am just getting by with work.
There are also quite a few post Marx theories that suggested the Revolution would be permanently postponed since the industrialized west coul shift the oppression to undeveloped nations. As long as the West could carefully balance developing the third world enough to produce useful labor but at the same time keep them undeveloped enough to prevent the critical mass for Revolution. So that's what gave the justification to many of the communist leaders of the 20th century to act in such fascist ways, they felt unless they could break the cycle by any means necessary they would never be free.
I do think we see aspects of this playing out in the world. For example in India, during the last election cycle, the poorer people in the country expressed their unhappiness with the fact that properity from outsourcing and other things seemed unequally distributed. And as India develops more, you see Western nations turning to other countries for outsourcing. The issue is will we ever get to the point were the whole world is developed enough that local labor has no disadvantage?
Complicating this is the degree to which some countries will embrace aspects of socialism. For example, in the USA most automobile companies are in big trouble because they can no longer afford retirement and health care benefits for their already retired workers. This is a HUGE expense for them. Many of their overseas competition doesn't have to worry about this, because the gov't provides healthcare and retirement benefits. In this case a gov'ts degree of socialism can provide an advantage to a particular industry by removing a large category of expense.
The question of which direction competition between countries will drive work rights is still undecided. The India example is heartening, but most other developing countries don't have such a democratic institutions. Will workers in China start to demand more involvement in gov't? After living there for 3 years I am not sure anymore.
I feel great personal benefit from Google at least. They provide a service which is free for all intents and purposes, and which has not only enhanced my private life, but enabled me to do more in less time in my career. The number of times I found a solution to a programming problem by using Google would be hard for me to count. Because of this I have personally made a decent living. My productivity is much higher. So yes, I feel Google has given back at least as much as they have taken.
:)
If I had to take classes or buy books for everything I learned on the web that I found via Google, I would have a lot less money saved. Actually, I probably would not have learned any of those things
I also feel that Sun, by giving us Java, a viable contender to MS development tools, has also returned a lot. Lots of us make good money developing Java based apps and there are a lot of free tools to do so. If not for Java, many of us would have to use MS development tools, which are much more costly and offer significantly less freedom.
IBM I have not much of an opinion on, but they have contributed a lot to the Apache project, which I use everyday to make a living.
This could mean so many things really.
First of all there is the crazy piracy which costs them huge dollars and causes trouble since the pirated windows spread virii like crazy. Also there so much trouble enforcing contracts. When I was running my IT business people would constantly try to renegotiate the price AFTER the project was completed. A not small amount of time people would just not be able to pay. Forgot about taking them to court.
Then legally you can't really know if you are breaking the law or not half the time. Usually if you are breaking the law come down to who you know. So it's hard for them to make project plans and then suddenly the gov't tells them they can't do something (after they spent millions).
I know a guy working on a TV movie in China. They wrote this super tame script and had it checked by the gov't censor board. Then after spending several million dollars and months of effort the gov't decided they couldn't sell the movie, because it showed foreigners beating out local Chinese people. So this makes it hard to commit the big bucks in China, you get nervous that the gov't will suddenly make some arbitrary change and put you out of business.
Yeah, it's sort of like this here in the US (and lately our gov't been closing the gap) but it's much much worse in China. Or maybe the foriegners all get the 'special' treatment, who knows? At least that is my experience, and I lived in China (all over) for a couple of years, and I have western friends there living in china as long as 12 years.
So there might not be totally humanitarian reasons for this, although there certainly could be really bad stuff here that even MS doesn't want to be associated with.
Even if they had software that could detect a pornographic image, which they don't, China doesn't censor porn at all. When I was living in China my wife and I could get all the porn we wanted; just getting news sites and things like insurance company websites you couldn't get. Basically stuff the gov't doesn't want people thinking about.
It's really spotty anyway, I could get cnn.com most of the time, but then news.google.com wouldn't work for months.
...as well as the 'inaccurately' negative news?
Let's see if they start correcting Fox News, Bush's favorite news channel.