I've written my share. And I've read (and, I think, understood) how python does it.
Really, it's not that bad. Simply look at each line and see if it's indented more than the previous; if so, add an OPEN_BRACE token; if less, a CLOSE_BRACE token (or call them OPEN/CLOSE, BEGIN/END, etc.). Then, once you've transformed the indentation structure into tokens, parse the rest.
You can probably do it faster if you do it on the fly (i.e. at the same time as "parse the rest") rather than in two passes, but the idea is more easily comprehensible this way.
Also, my practical experience with writing loads of python and more than my fair share of Makefiles suggests that it all Just Works (tm).
At least as long as you don't mix tabs and spaces. It's quite easy to write a shell script which tests for this and warns you. Also, any decent editor with an embedded lisp dialect can be made to highlight tab/space mixes (or just run your shell script in the background).
People will read a piece of code more times than they will write it, so it makes sense to optimize for readability.
If you can make the code 1% more readable (pick your measure) at the cost of making it take twice as long to write, is that worth it?
If you can make the code 1% less readable and simultaneously make it twice as fast to write, is that worth it?
Also, it's a particular name we're talking about. Is python unreadable because it says "len" instead of "length"? Is it bad to say "IndexError" instead of "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException"? Is it bad to say "" instead of "System.out."?
Of all things, I think names (with vs. without vowels) have the smallest impact on readability. Descriptive names are important, but I think it's much more important to be able to write code that has an easily comprehensible structure.
Vowels aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be back in the day.
It'd be a nice touch if they'd add vowel support in package names.
I can expand the name "fmt" in my head as I read it. I can't really expand my typing from "fmt" to "format" as I type it without typing it, or without having some auto-replace thing which then goes ahead and does the wrong thing sometimes (which I then have to undo), or I have to explicitly say "yes, expand this" which takes extra key presses (which we're trying to avoid), or...
If you ask me, it'd be a nice touch if they kept the support for brevity in their package names.
Otherwise, we end up with ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException rather than IndexError.
And if not, if they just replace the GPL parts and release a new version, will people who downloaded the first version be legally able to demand the source code?
Here's my guess, but I'm only a lawyer in the armchair sense (i.e. not at all, but I try picking up an understanding of the law).
If it's found to be a GPL violation, Microsoft has violated the law regarding copyrights.
It'll be up to the party (or parties) who can sue Microsoft (only the copyright holder? Only the people who have lost something by MS breaking the (C) law?) to either settle the matter between themselves, or to take it to court and have the matters settled by a judge.
The FSF's position is that they're usually happy as long as compliance is enforced. If the FSF has the copyright, you might expect the result to be that MS has to come into compliance with the license, also retroactively (i.e. give source to those already having the binaries in question or a written offer or however the GPL says you can satisfy that obligation).
If it's not the FSF who's the copyright holder, I don't know. Someone might be thinking they can get the RIAA-style million-dollar damages, and so refuse all settlements Microsoft are (realistically) going to offer and take them to court. (I don't think the free software / open source community attracts those kind of people, but then again we're a varied bunch.)
It all comes down to what the copyright holder can convince Microsoft to do (or convince the system to force Microsoft to do).
Will [...] cast a shadow [...]?
Yes, but you can't sue people for having shadows;-)
It might make people more likely to look here for another GPL violation, but being biased by selective observation doesn't mean your observations are wrong (only your statistics; or rather, your predictions about observations not similarly biased).
Microsofties' mothers are all hamsters, and their fathers smell like elderberries.
2. Blame Microsoft for it's stance against Free Software (and also for lack of network neutrality, the current state of patent laws, the Iraq war, and the extinction of the dinosaurs)
Microsoft is evil for not enjoying watching their competitors make progress, for not supporting initiatives potentially bad for their business, for supporting systems beneficial to their business (by raising the bar to entry), for... what the heck do they think about the iraq war, again?
Anyways, even though I routinely wear the XKCD "No raptors" t-shirt, shame on microsoft for their (crucial, I'm sure) involvement with the extinction of the dinosaurs!
3. Accuse the poster who wrote something positive about Microsoft of being either a fanboy or a Microsoft employee. If the poster in question made a comment about Microsoft's actual support of Free Software in a particular instance, accuse the poster of being an oblivious idiot unable to see through their Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach
GP is a fanboy or MS employee (really?). Also, gP is an oblivious idiot unable to see through MS's EEE-approach (wait, is that what Microsoft's new EEE PC is all about?).
(sorry, but I have to say it. See the quote).
4. State that the Linux revolution is inevitable
The probability of year n being the year of linux on the desktop approaches 1 for n approaching positive infinity, eventually reaching 1 after a finite number of steps.
5. Finish off with another outpour of flames
Burn, baby, burn. Disco inferno.
We don't need no water; let the motherfuckers burn. Burn motherfuckers, burn.
One two three FIRE!!!
Through the fire and the flames we carry on!
I'm your firestarter!
We hope you will be able to infer the potential content
approach to fighting PowerPoint. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Professors can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Boardroom presentations and other legitimate PowerPoint uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop PowerPoint for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of PowerPoint will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from professors ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many PowerPoint users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Professors don't care about invalid student IDs in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for PowerPoint ( ) Open diploma mills in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in PPT ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of tenure ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with professors ( ) Dishonesty on the part of professors themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (X) We should be able to have presentations about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Giving talks should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my slides (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
Sure. But what if chalk is put to good use 99% of the time and powerpoint is put to good use 1% of the time?
Will you still say "They're just tools"? Or would you wish that something could be done about the 99% bad uses of powerpoint? What if each of your professors used powerpoint and you got a poorer education as a consequence. Are they still "just tools"?
Note: I don't have any evidence that it's 99%-vs-1%; or even just that it's 99%. But I think the argument "they're just tools" is not good enough to disengage your critical thinking.
If it's $3 to rent and $9 to buy, then they'd have to rent *over* three times as much as they'd sell, since there's also three times the bandwidth to be paid for now, as well as the costs of the DRM.
Have you done the market research which shows that the demand for $3 rentals does indeed not exceed the demand for $9 purchases by a factor of three?
If there is this higher demand for rentals, it makes (in an objective sense) perfect sense to offer it. If people making the offer think the higher demand exists, it makes subjective, i.e. from their POV, sense to offer it.
open source project have violations [...] calling a library that isn't GNU compatible.
I take it by "GNU compatible" you mean GPL compatible?
Or were you suggesting that calling a library which can't be used on the GNU OS (with, of course, the wonderful microkernel Hurd) will bring forth the wrath of the Holy Warrior Stallman who will then be forced to swing with his katana[1][2]?;-)
My wife and I pay about $119/month [...] There are places where Verizon would be 5 bars that AT&T doesn't even get signal at all, and by that I mean not even Edge. [...] The moral of the story? You get what you pay for. Verizon may be more expensive
O_o wtf omg bbq o_O !!!
You get what you pay for?
It seems like the only way you can make that make sense is if you claim to pay for oligopoly abuse.
Point of reference: in Denmark, what I consider an extremely expensive subscription is ~$50 / mo. 90% land mass coverage, 99% population residence/work coverage (IIRC, roughly, grain-of-salt, etc.). I get 50 free SMS'es and 50 free minutes per month for NOTHING, zaroo bucks, then 10 cents / minute, 4 cents / SMS beyond that.
Get your regulators to regulate the telecommunications industry.
Err... I mean, get them to regulate it in a way that's good for society, not good for oligopoly rent-seekers.
Right now I'm wearing a T-shirt that says "Science -- it works, bitches" (you may have seen it on store.xkcd.com). I'm wondering whether I should get a red one that says Socialism instead of Science; it does seem to work for telecommunication.
$119/mo with bad coverage and "you get what you pay for"... I'm stunned...
(please don't take it too personally; I'm stunned not at you but at what passes for good telephony "over there")
because nobody uses Flash for [list of uses of flash]
By way of anal extraction, I arrive at the conclusion that 90% of the eyeball wall time spent looking at flash is spent looking at videos.
(89% of those 90% being youtube + google video, another 0.5% being redtube).
Once we get to HTML5 video being popular, flash will become much more a niche thing. There's a long way between "niche" and "dead", but I don't know that we need to cross that gap. Heck, I still see Java applets around (for Rubik's Cube animations; I think that's one niche where they're used well).
On the other hand, if we RTFS:
The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported
Note that IE is not on the list. Make an educated guess about the implications for the penetration of the video tag.
I know you're just cracking a joke here, but a job can bring you benefits other than money.
Challenges that match your skill (the "flow" state). An opportunity to meet people who share your trade, a mentor, a student, a fellow student. Motivating realistic deadlines (if you have natural slacking tendencies). Something to accomplish, and the satisfaction of accomplishing it. A way of being useful to others instead of just yourself.
Of course, you could also get one of those dailywtf jobs, but those you quit. Right?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you insane? Have you ever written a parser?
I've written my share. And I've read (and, I think, understood) how python does it.
Really, it's not that bad. Simply look at each line and see if it's indented more than the previous; if so, add an OPEN_BRACE token; if less, a CLOSE_BRACE token (or call them OPEN/CLOSE, BEGIN/END, etc.). Then, once you've transformed the indentation structure into tokens, parse the rest.
You can probably do it faster if you do it on the fly (i.e. at the same time as "parse the rest") rather than in two passes, but the idea is more easily comprehensible this way.
Also, my practical experience with writing loads of python and more than my fair share of Makefiles suggests that it all Just Works (tm).
At least as long as you don't mix tabs and spaces. It's quite easy to write a shell script which tests for this and warns you. Also, any decent editor with an embedded lisp dialect can be made to highlight tab/space mixes (or just run your shell script in the background).
Why the big worry?
People will read a piece of code more times than they will write it, so it makes sense to optimize for readability.
If you can make the code 1% more readable (pick your measure) at the cost of making it take twice as long to write, is that worth it?
If you can make the code 1% less readable and simultaneously make it twice as fast to write, is that worth it?
Also, it's a particular name we're talking about. Is python unreadable because it says "len" instead of "length"? Is it bad to say "IndexError" instead of "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException"? Is it bad to say "" instead of "System.out."?
Of all things, I think names (with vs. without vowels) have the smallest impact on readability. Descriptive names are important, but I think it's much more important to be able to write code that has an easily comprehensible structure.
Vowels aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be back in the day.
It'd be a nice touch if they'd add vowel support in package names.
I can expand the name "fmt" in my head as I read it. I can't really expand my typing from "fmt" to "format" as I type it without typing it, or without having some auto-replace thing which then goes ahead and does the wrong thing sometimes (which I then have to undo), or I have to explicitly say "yes, expand this" which takes extra key presses (which we're trying to avoid), or...
If you ask me, it'd be a nice touch if they kept the support for brevity in their package names.
Otherwise, we end up with ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException rather than IndexError.
And if not, if they just replace the GPL parts and release a new version, will people who downloaded the first version be legally able to demand the source code?
Here's my guess, but I'm only a lawyer in the armchair sense (i.e. not at all, but I try picking up an understanding of the law).
If it's found to be a GPL violation, Microsoft has violated the law regarding copyrights.
It'll be up to the party (or parties) who can sue Microsoft (only the copyright holder? Only the people who have lost something by MS breaking the (C) law?) to either settle the matter between themselves, or to take it to court and have the matters settled by a judge.
The FSF's position is that they're usually happy as long as compliance is enforced. If the FSF has the copyright, you might expect the result to be that MS has to come into compliance with the license, also retroactively (i.e. give source to those already having the binaries in question or a written offer or however the GPL says you can satisfy that obligation).
If it's not the FSF who's the copyright holder, I don't know. Someone might be thinking they can get the RIAA-style million-dollar damages, and so refuse all settlements Microsoft are (realistically) going to offer and take them to court. (I don't think the free software / open source community attracts those kind of people, but then again we're a varied bunch.)
It all comes down to what the copyright holder can convince Microsoft to do (or convince the system to force Microsoft to do).
Will [...] cast a shadow [...]?
Yes, but you can't sue people for having shadows ;-)
It might make people more likely to look here for another GPL violation, but being biased by selective observation doesn't mean your observations are wrong (only your statistics; or rather, your predictions about observations not similarly biased).
Let me have a go at that trolling.
1. Make a general anti-Microsoft jab
Microsofties' mothers are all hamsters, and their fathers smell like elderberries.
2. Blame Microsoft for it's stance against Free Software (and also for lack of network neutrality, the current state of patent laws, the Iraq war, and the extinction of the dinosaurs)
Microsoft is evil for not enjoying watching their competitors make progress, for not supporting initiatives potentially bad for their business, for supporting systems beneficial to their business (by raising the bar to entry), for ... what the heck do they think about the iraq war, again?
Anyways, even though I routinely wear the XKCD "No raptors" t-shirt, shame on microsoft for their (crucial, I'm sure) involvement with the extinction of the dinosaurs!
3. Accuse the poster who wrote something positive about Microsoft of being either a fanboy or a Microsoft employee. If the poster in question made a comment about Microsoft's actual support of Free Software in a particular instance, accuse the poster of being an oblivious idiot unable to see through their Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach
GP is a fanboy or MS employee (really?). Also, gP is an oblivious idiot unable to see through MS's EEE-approach (wait, is that what Microsoft's new EEE PC is all about?).
(sorry, but I have to say it. See the quote).
4. State that the Linux revolution is inevitable
The probability of year n being the year of linux on the desktop approaches 1 for n approaching positive infinity, eventually reaching 1 after a finite number of steps.
5. Finish off with another outpour of flames
Burn, baby, burn. Disco inferno.
We don't need no water; let the motherfuckers burn. Burn motherfuckers, burn.
One two three FIRE!!!
Through the fire and the flames we carry on!
I'm your firestarter!
We hope you will be able to infer the potential content
No need, I've filled it in. How am I doing?
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting PowerPoint. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Professors can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Boardroom presentations and other legitimate PowerPoint uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop PowerPoint for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of PowerPoint will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from professors
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many PowerPoint users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Professors don't care about invalid student IDs in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for PowerPoint
( ) Open diploma mills in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in PPT
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of tenure
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with professors
( ) Dishonesty on the part of professors themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to have presentations about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Giving talks should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my slides
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
Sure. But what if chalk is put to good use 99% of the time and powerpoint is put to good use 1% of the time?
Will you still say "They're just tools"? Or would you wish that something could be done about the 99% bad uses of powerpoint? What if each of your professors used powerpoint and you got a poorer education as a consequence. Are they still "just tools"?
Note: I don't have any evidence that it's 99%-vs-1%; or even just that it's 99%. But I think the argument "they're just tools" is not good enough to disengage your critical thinking.
If it's $3 to rent and $9 to buy, then they'd have to rent *over* three times as much as they'd sell, since there's also three times the bandwidth to be paid for now, as well as the costs of the DRM.
Have you done the market research which shows that the demand for $3 rentals does indeed not exceed the demand for $9 purchases by a factor of three?
If there is this higher demand for rentals, it makes (in an objective sense) perfect sense to offer it. If people making the offer think the higher demand exists, it makes subjective, i.e. from their POV, sense to offer it.
You claim this isn't the case. Got data?
At the risk of being burned at the stake, [...]
Don't sweat it. Your post doesn't contain enough evidence for the mods to conclusively prove that you weigh the same as a duck.
open source project have violations [...] calling a library that isn't GNU compatible.
I take it by "GNU compatible" you mean GPL compatible?
Or were you suggesting that calling a library which can't be used on the GNU OS (with, of course, the wonderful microkernel Hurd) will bring forth the wrath of the Holy Warrior Stallman who will then be forced to swing with his katana[1][2]? ;-)
[1] http://xkcd.com/225/
[2] http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/life-imitates-xkcd-part-ii-richard-stallman/
As much as I like the latter interpretation, I'm thinking you meant the first. Yes? :)
Are you saying that the DLC gives you a good amount of ! for your $?
You can always just surf /. with M-x w3m-with-sarcasm-overload-handler
bake [...] for one MS minute
Is that one MS minute of boot-up time or one MS minute of uptime? :->
My wife and I pay about $119/month [...] There are places where Verizon would be 5 bars that AT&T doesn't even get signal at all, and by that I mean not even Edge. [...] The moral of the story? You get what you pay for. Verizon may be more expensive
O_o wtf omg bbq o_O !!!
You get what you pay for?
It seems like the only way you can make that make sense is if you claim to pay for oligopoly abuse.
Point of reference: in Denmark, what I consider an extremely expensive subscription is ~$50 / mo. 90% land mass coverage, 99% population residence/work coverage (IIRC, roughly, grain-of-salt, etc.). I get 50 free SMS'es and 50 free minutes per month for NOTHING, zaroo bucks, then 10 cents / minute, 4 cents / SMS beyond that.
Get your regulators to regulate the telecommunications industry.
Err... I mean, get them to regulate it in a way that's good for society, not good for oligopoly rent-seekers.
Right now I'm wearing a T-shirt that says "Science -- it works, bitches" (you may have seen it on store.xkcd.com). I'm wondering whether I should get a red one that says Socialism instead of Science; it does seem to work for telecommunication.
$119/mo with bad coverage and "you get what you pay for"... I'm stunned...
(please don't take it too personally; I'm stunned not at you but at what passes for good telephony "over there")
It wouldn't matter if they did; no one would buy [common sense] as everyone thinks they already have it.
I'd be first in line!
Wait, maybe I shouldn't have admitted to that in public...
because nobody uses Flash for [list of uses of flash]
By way of anal extraction, I arrive at the conclusion that 90% of the eyeball wall time spent looking at flash is spent looking at videos.
(89% of those 90% being youtube + google video, another 0.5% being redtube).
Once we get to HTML5 video being popular, flash will become much more a niche thing. There's a long way between "niche" and "dead", but I don't know that we need to cross that gap. Heck, I still see Java applets around (for Rubik's Cube animations; I think that's one niche where they're used well).
On the other hand, if we RTFS:
The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported
Note that IE is not on the list. Make an educated guess about the implications for the penetration of the video tag.
You will have a tougher time arguing that Disney should be able to protect the anonymity of their Hannah Montana customers upon subpoena.
Simple: it'll destroy their reputation...
that is a lot harder than just CTRL+X CTRL+F and the filename.
FTFY ;-)
I know you're just cracking a joke here, but a job can bring you benefits other than money.
Challenges that match your skill (the "flow" state). An opportunity to meet people who share your trade, a mentor, a student, a fellow student. Motivating realistic deadlines (if you have natural slacking tendencies). Something to accomplish, and the satisfaction of accomplishing it. A way of being useful to others instead of just yourself.
Of course, you could also get one of those dailywtf jobs, but those you quit. Right? ;-)
Since there's no packaging, no physical media, no cover art, not shipping, no retail over[]head, it should be a fraction of the retail cost.
1/1 is a fraction :p
Just like DRM, then? ;-)
I and my brownshirts will be able to sweep-in to the Congress, declare emergency powers [...]
Just like Hitler and the Naz... oh...
You, sir, win the Godwin award of this thread :)
Next we'll be seeing the revelation that Linux has overtaken Windows 98. Or something.
Does that mean 2008 was the year of Windows 98 on the desktop?
Heck, I know people who still live in EMACS.
I really have a hard time believing that.
C-x C-s
C-x C-c
'yes