Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
An excellent question. The documentation really doesn't make the distinction between lists and arrays clear at all. It is especially unclear why there is a distinction in the first place. I assume that it is probably for historic reasons - it's nasty, but changing the behaviour would break legacy code, so the cruft stays.
Similar story here. I even had the same difficulty understanding the difference between lists and arrays in Perl - the documentation really doesn't make it clear! I don't think it's in the camel book: if it is, it's certainly not in an obvious place. The article says that the specification for Perl 5 was the Perl 5 interpreter... well, that's not a surprise really!
Once, I used Perl regularly for little scripting tasks, things that were too much for Bash but too simple to require a C++ program. Then I discovered Python, which was so powerful that it replaced not only Bash and Perl, but also C and C++. It did the same thing as Perl, but without quirky syntax, and soon turned out to be even more powerful. Perl appears to have been designed to replace Bash, and then hackers have added more features to try to make it more powerful (e.g. OO support). Whereas Python appears to have been designed as a general-purpose OO language, that just happens to be lightweight enough to be used as a scripting language. I think that anyone who has tried both Perl and Python will be left in no doubt about which language is superior. Good design speaks for itself.
If you're going to introduce a backdoor, it had better be a backdoor that only YOU can use. Microsoft has known about code signing for ages.. a decent backdoor would verify a signature on the code before executing it. Anything else would be exploitable by anyone that found it - a very poor backdoor indeed! Using WMF for a backdoor would be a clever move, but leaving the backdoor open for everyone is retarded.
I think this is just over-the-top conspiracy theorising in order to drum up publicity for Mr Gibson's podcast.. strange that none of the other hackers that have worked with this (e.g. Ilfak) have set off alarm bells about it. But perhaps they are not blessed with Mr Gibson's insight.
Step 1: Find an artifact that converts {G} to alternating current.
Step 2: Use an infinite mana loop (e.g. this + this
+ this) to generate infinite {G}.
Step 3: Convert infinite {G} to a.c. as required.
Step 4: PROFIT!!!!!!!
Hang on, I filled in all the steps.. something must be wrong with this plan...
Maybe so, but the guy really doesn't have a clue what he's doing. So there's a potential difference between one electrode (in a tree) and another electrode (in the ground). Well, what a surprise! Give this man a prize: he's invented a spectacularly useless sort of battery and thinks he's come up with an amazing new source of energy.
It's not a limitless renewable source of energy - it will stop when the electrodes rot away. Nor is it a good source of energy - the amount of current that it can supply is likely to be tiny, because the electrolyte is hardly suitable. No doubt the man thinks he is tapping ley lines or crystal energy or something.. what a tool.
MagCap is looking to boost the current power from just under 2 volts to a more useful 12 volts
Neither current nor power is measured in volts. If they can't get that right...
At least in the UK, analogue FM radio is much better than that. Recently, a digital standard has been introduced for radio (DAB). Unfortunately, it is so compressed (128kbit MP3 level) that hifi people are sticking with the far better analogue signal, which approaches (and perhaps even surpasses) CD quality, if you have a decent receiver and a rooftop aerial. "Decent receiver" is not a PCI card inside a box of noisy electronics, though!
No they should switch to *BSD. No wait, I mean Linux. Err, GNU/Linux. No, hang on, they should switch to a Beowulf cluster of Soviet Russia, no-one will ever manage to crack that.
Why not just auto-scramble the DLL code on the fly for every installation of the Windows OS?
This would not prevent procedure call hijacking attacks, where an existing call to a procedure is given specially crafted parameters. Nor would it prevent exploits from using system calls directly. Just like preventing execution of code in the stack segment, the measure would make attacks harder, but would not prevent them.
But then, I guess the "more features does not mean better" sums it up pretty perfectly. Why don't we just all go back to coding in Assembler?
Yes, that's right, "more features does not mean better" is equivalent to, "more features never means better".
You use a language that uses indentation to define semantics, and you complain about languages not being "clean"? I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry now.
This rule makes it harder to write incorrect (but valid) code by mistake.
I'm a long-time fan of C and C++, but I've been converted to Python recently. Endlessly copying the C model is a bad idea. C++ did it, Perl did it, then Java copied C++, and all are perfectly servicable languages, but they are not clean, simple or pretty.
If we want to write complex and secure programs quickly, we need better languages, and more features does not mean better.
They're going to build more reactors, or they're going to restart coal mining, or they're going to shiver in the dark.
Quite. I find it ironic that environmentalists have actually made the environment worse by protesting against nuclear power: they only succeeded in forcing more coal, oil and gas-fired power stations to be built instead. Because of their misperception of the greater evil, we have burned more fossil fuels and produced more CO2. And now we have to build more nuclear power stations anyway, for economic reasons. D'oh!
It seems that our government is preparing to build reactors again,
But nuclear reactors are the only practical alternative to oil/natural gas-fired power stations. Which is the cleaner fuel, again? We made a mess because we didn't build enough reactors: we relied too heavily on dirty fossil fuels.
Actually, the scale of the holocaust is questionable, which is (I think) what he was writing about: you're not allowed to question the scale - that's denial! This is very sad, because the scale is irrelevant, really.
Communism is your beloved individual wants, heightened to a group/structure level. People can be egoists all they want, with the difference of wanting the best for US rather than ME.
Communism is tyranny disguised as a fair system. Who decides what is best for us? The likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, that's who. A centralised economy must have centralised leadership. Try to find an example of a communist regime which has democratic leadership, a perfect human rights record, and encourages dissent and freedom of expression.
I agree that capitalism has many disadvantages. Jefferson wasn't keen on corporations for the same reason that we dislike them now: they're living manifestations of the selfish greedy nature of a world that runs on money. Hence monopolies. But remember that they are not in charge! You still are not compelled to do what they say, work for them, and buy what they want you to buy. They don't have absolute power - they're too busy competing with each other. Granted, the system is not working as well as it could, because it has become corrupted, but that corruption is not inevitable and can be reversed. Whereas corruption is not only inevitable in communism, it is a requirement.
We all want to live in a better world, I'm sure you'll agree, but communism is not the way to do it. Strategies to improve our world should harness human nature. Humans want to be individuals and to work to improve their own lives. Society comes second - you look after your family and yourself first. Improving the world should be a byproduct of this process, not something that is enforced on people by the Soviet or the Fuhrer.
It really bothers me to hear people defend communism. You'd be unlikely to hear many intelligent people today writing in defence of fascism, for good reason. The difference there is that we all know why fascism is bad, what with the Holocaust and the whole business about taking over the world. But Stalin was worse. He should be villified, but the villification must not stop at him. It must continue all the way back to Marx: as the idea itself is poison disguised as a cure.
Does not a democratically elected capatilistic government ALSO require mass compliance? Is that not what our laws are?
No, our laws are based on the principle that the aim of government is only to stop people from hurting each other. I know that this has become corrupted lately, but capitalism does not require any laws beyond those proposed by Franklin and Jefferson and friends. Capitalism is all about the movement of wealth, and you are free to choose how you accumulate and dispose of your wealth, provided that you do so without hurting anyone else. This is freedom - how you live your life is up to you.
Whereas Communism requires many more laws to be created, with the intention of enforcing central control on a population. You cannot have a free Communist country - it is impossible, because if people are free, they will act in their own interests, and you will have a free market instead of a planned one. Thus, Communism must be forced upon them.
Don't be persuaded that there are good forms of Communism - that it has only lacked a proper implementation. Communist ideology requires a totalitarian system: it requires mass compliance with an unnaturally centralised system of Government. Even Marx could see this, long before Communism was actually implemented as a political system. Marx went as far as redefining the meaning of "freedom" to justify his intentions, telling his followers that they didn't need the old fashioned, "bourgeious" sort of freedom any more.
The core of Communism is a very old system of government, called slavery. When slavery and communism are implemented, citizens lose the right to own property, choose their occupation, and take public office. They become property of the State. Communism is just a modern way of selling this type of slavery to the people, who somehow imagine that it will be fairer than living under capitalism, a view that is based on a misunderstanding of both systems.
For more facts about communism, read the fascinating online Museum of Communism, which is a brilliant read, although rather dated in terms of presentation.
vi is the only surviving editor that has a protocol instead of a user interface. The datastream moving from your brain to the file on disk is about as compressed as it can be. All the commands are minimalist (most are single-key), you never need to use the mouse, there's built-in regex support... No wonder programmers like it: the editor doesn't require you to switch context.
Unfortunately the datastream produced by vi is very easy to examine - just pipe it into another copy of vi, and there you go. Easier than examining the keystrokes of someone typing in a lesser editor, anyway, as their editing will be punctuated by mouse-clicks and menu events, making analysis tricky.
Fortunately, if you're able to use vi, you are perfectly able to (a) patch your OS, or (b) use a sensible OS, or (c) both, so who cares?
I've been saying all along that China is a threat- and this is really the third front of WWIII. The first front was China as an economic threat, joined by the WTO and US Retail corporations. The second front was the Islamo-fascist terrorist threat. This is the third front. Do we really have to wait for a fourth front to open up before we get serious and begin fighting this the same way we won WWII?
Dude, what the fuck? I think your tinfoil hat fell off while you were typing.
But seriously though.. what is the problem, and what is your solution? Who are you planning to invade, and why do you think it's necessary to do so?
Is it only me, or does anyone else think a space port is better built...in space?
You're assuming that there is anywhere to go that would necessitate such a port. The only places to go from Earth orbit are Earth and the Moon.. and even the Moon will take ages.
Wonder if this'll get the U.S Govt to put NASA where it should be. I hope so. It's been a LONG time since there was any frontiers pushed - the US Space Programme seems happy just ticking along instead of pushing the boundaries as it did in the 60's and 70's.
But putting people in space is expensive, dangerous, and also futile, as it takes far too long to actually go anywhere at present. NASA has pushed back the boundaries constantly with the many probes it has sent out since the 60s, which are a much more cost-effective way to explore the Universe.
In the part you chose not to relpy to, I explained pretty well what I meant with "not even worth contemplating". It seems you are not even reading what I took so much time and effort to write.
I did read that, actually, and it still comes down to a matter of belief. I appreciate that you have taken the time to write back, but you are not talking to a person who is blinded by faith! Rather, you are talking to a curious person with a desire for understanding and a lack of knowledge, which is quite different.
"It's not worth giving it the doubt that "I don't know" expresses" is a belief, an opinion, and personally I no longer think it's a very well-founded one. Disbelief in pink unicorns, magic, astrology and so on is quite sensible, given the scientific evidence against them, but science really has nothing to say on the subject of God.
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An excellent question. The documentation really doesn't make the distinction between lists and arrays clear at all. It is especially unclear why there is a distinction in the first place. I assume that it is probably for historic reasons - it's nasty, but changing the behaviour would break legacy code, so the cruft stays.
Once, I used Perl regularly for little scripting tasks, things that were too much for Bash but too simple to require a C++ program. Then I discovered Python, which was so powerful that it replaced not only Bash and Perl, but also C and C++. It did the same thing as Perl, but without quirky syntax, and soon turned out to be even more powerful. Perl appears to have been designed to replace Bash, and then hackers have added more features to try to make it more powerful (e.g. OO support). Whereas Python appears to have been designed as a general-purpose OO language, that just happens to be lightweight enough to be used as a scripting language. I think that anyone who has tried both Perl and Python will be left in no doubt about which language is superior. Good design speaks for itself.
I'd like to see some analysis of the interpreter, too. Any Windows geeks want to make a name for themselves?
I think this is just over-the-top conspiracy theorising in order to drum up publicity for Mr Gibson's podcast.. strange that none of the other hackers that have worked with this (e.g. Ilfak) have set off alarm bells about it. But perhaps they are not blessed with Mr Gibson's insight.
Good plan.
Step 1: Find an artifact that converts {G} to alternating current.
Step 2: Use an infinite mana loop (e.g. this + this + this) to generate infinite {G}.
Step 3: Convert infinite {G} to a.c. as required.
Step 4: PROFIT!!!!!!!
Hang on, I filled in all the steps.. something must be wrong with this plan...
It's not a limitless renewable source of energy - it will stop when the electrodes rot away. Nor is it a good source of energy - the amount of current that it can supply is likely to be tiny, because the electrolyte is hardly suitable. No doubt the man thinks he is tapping ley lines or crystal energy or something.. what a tool.
MagCap is looking to boost the current power from just under 2 volts to a more useful 12 volts
Neither current nor power is measured in volts. If they can't get that right...
Practical fusion reactors will be available in a few decades. Same as always.
At least in the UK, analogue FM radio is much better than that. Recently, a digital standard has been introduced for radio (DAB). Unfortunately, it is so compressed (128kbit MP3 level) that hifi people are sticking with the far better analogue signal, which approaches (and perhaps even surpasses) CD quality, if you have a decent receiver and a rooftop aerial. "Decent receiver" is not a PCI card inside a box of noisy electronics, though!
No they should switch to *BSD. No wait, I mean Linux. Err, GNU/Linux. No, hang on, they should switch to a Beowulf cluster of Soviet Russia, no-one will ever manage to crack that.
This would not prevent procedure call hijacking attacks, where an existing call to a procedure is given specially crafted parameters. Nor would it prevent exploits from using system calls directly. Just like preventing execution of code in the stack segment, the measure would make attacks harder, but would not prevent them.
Yes, that's right, "more features does not mean better" is equivalent to, "more features never means better".
You use a language that uses indentation to define semantics, and you complain about languages not being "clean"? I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry now.
This rule makes it harder to write incorrect (but valid) code by mistake.
Yeah, the power of the dark side. You're only a master of evil, AC.
If we want to write complex and secure programs quickly, we need better languages, and more features does not mean better.
Quite. I find it ironic that environmentalists have actually made the environment worse by protesting against nuclear power: they only succeeded in forcing more coal, oil and gas-fired power stations to be built instead. Because of their misperception of the greater evil, we have burned more fossil fuels and produced more CO2. And now we have to build more nuclear power stations anyway, for economic reasons. D'oh!
But nuclear reactors are the only practical alternative to oil/natural gas-fired power stations. Which is the cleaner fuel, again? We made a mess because we didn't build enough reactors: we relied too heavily on dirty fossil fuels.
Actually, the scale of the holocaust is questionable, which is (I think) what he was writing about: you're not allowed to question the scale - that's denial! This is very sad, because the scale is irrelevant, really.
Communism is tyranny disguised as a fair system. Who decides what is best for us? The likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, that's who. A centralised economy must have centralised leadership. Try to find an example of a communist regime which has democratic leadership, a perfect human rights record, and encourages dissent and freedom of expression.
I agree that capitalism has many disadvantages. Jefferson wasn't keen on corporations for the same reason that we dislike them now: they're living manifestations of the selfish greedy nature of a world that runs on money. Hence monopolies. But remember that they are not in charge! You still are not compelled to do what they say, work for them, and buy what they want you to buy. They don't have absolute power - they're too busy competing with each other. Granted, the system is not working as well as it could, because it has become corrupted, but that corruption is not inevitable and can be reversed. Whereas corruption is not only inevitable in communism, it is a requirement.
We all want to live in a better world, I'm sure you'll agree, but communism is not the way to do it. Strategies to improve our world should harness human nature. Humans want to be individuals and to work to improve their own lives. Society comes second - you look after your family and yourself first. Improving the world should be a byproduct of this process, not something that is enforced on people by the Soviet or the Fuhrer.
It really bothers me to hear people defend communism. You'd be unlikely to hear many intelligent people today writing in defence of fascism, for good reason. The difference there is that we all know why fascism is bad, what with the Holocaust and the whole business about taking over the world. But Stalin was worse. He should be villified, but the villification must not stop at him. It must continue all the way back to Marx: as the idea itself is poison disguised as a cure.
No, our laws are based on the principle that the aim of government is only to stop people from hurting each other. I know that this has become corrupted lately, but capitalism does not require any laws beyond those proposed by Franklin and Jefferson and friends. Capitalism is all about the movement of wealth, and you are free to choose how you accumulate and dispose of your wealth, provided that you do so without hurting anyone else. This is freedom - how you live your life is up to you.
Whereas Communism requires many more laws to be created, with the intention of enforcing central control on a population. You cannot have a free Communist country - it is impossible, because if people are free, they will act in their own interests, and you will have a free market instead of a planned one. Thus, Communism must be forced upon them.
The core of Communism is a very old system of government, called slavery. When slavery and communism are implemented, citizens lose the right to own property, choose their occupation, and take public office. They become property of the State. Communism is just a modern way of selling this type of slavery to the people, who somehow imagine that it will be fairer than living under capitalism, a view that is based on a misunderstanding of both systems.
For more facts about communism, read the fascinating online Museum of Communism, which is a brilliant read, although rather dated in terms of presentation.
Unfortunately the datastream produced by vi is very easy to examine - just pipe it into another copy of vi, and there you go. Easier than examining the keystrokes of someone typing in a lesser editor, anyway, as their editing will be punctuated by mouse-clicks and menu events, making analysis tricky.
Fortunately, if you're able to use vi, you are perfectly able to (a) patch your OS, or (b) use a sensible OS, or (c) both, so who cares?
Dude, what the fuck? I think your tinfoil hat fell off while you were typing.
But seriously though.. what is the problem, and what is your solution? Who are you planning to invade, and why do you think it's necessary to do so?
You're assuming that there is anywhere to go that would necessitate such a port. The only places to go from Earth orbit are Earth and the Moon.. and even the Moon will take ages.
But putting people in space is expensive, dangerous, and also futile, as it takes far too long to actually go anywhere at present. NASA has pushed back the boundaries constantly with the many probes it has sent out since the 60s, which are a much more cost-effective way to explore the Universe.
I did read that, actually, and it still comes down to a matter of belief. I appreciate that you have taken the time to write back, but you are not talking to a person who is blinded by faith! Rather, you are talking to a curious person with a desire for understanding and a lack of knowledge, which is quite different.
"It's not worth giving it the doubt that "I don't know" expresses" is a belief, an opinion, and personally I no longer think it's a very well-founded one. Disbelief in pink unicorns, magic, astrology and so on is quite sensible, given the scientific evidence against them, but science really has nothing to say on the subject of God.
Have a nice day, too!