The evidence is there (an absolute flood of entertainment that no one can keep up with) that the creative industry doesn't need any more encouragement to produce creative works.
Alex Payne has a hidden agenda: he is trying to push Scala to boost interest in the book about Scala he just wrote!
If that's damning criticism, it shows the stupidity of someone for believing that a technical book will sell enough copies that the author will earn more than minimum wage from writing it (a $39.95 book from O'Reilly with two authors gives Payne about $1 per copy -- he might earn $12k over three years).
How do you explain Kara (a messenger of a higher power) telling Lee upon her reappearance that she'd "been to Earth", then finding her body on this "Earth"? Was she misled? Lying? Covering a plot hole?
It was practically inevitable, even if all 30,000 had agreed to settle together and carefully husband, maintain, and pass down all of their collected technical knowledge and the remaining equipment that much of that knowledge and equipment would be lost in the following centuries....
That makes little sense. The New Caprica storyline showed that Colonials were exceedingly bad at long-term thinking. That was the point of the vote to colonize New Caprica. Sure, it was a lousy, inhospitable place suitable only for subsistence farming, but at least they could have land under their feet and sky overhead, even if they all starved to death later.
It is also important to remember that as the series continued it became more and more apparent that technology was not "the answer" to the problems of humanity....
That also makes little sense. They spent the last several episodes Basestarizing the Galactica, going as far as to give the Anders hybrid control over its systems to use technology to raid the Cylon colony, and they almost gave Cavil resurrection technology. Immediately after this, a unanimous hanging lampshade vote decides that even indoor plumbing is too dangerous? I don't believe it.
[Our] ancestors, totting spears as their most sophisticated technology, still managed to survive in Africa.
They did so in part because they grew up there, with immune systems acclimated to local conditions. (One idly wonders about the Colonial version of smallpox -- or hopes no Colonial ever happened to sneeze in the direction of a native.)
And after five years living a cramped, always-near-death-from-technology life, I imagine a quiet, pastoral life seemed a lot more appealing to them than it would to you or I.
I prefer the explanation that they took stupid pills to excise all memories of New Caprica before voting, thus using up all of their remaining medical supplies.
... but if you don't know the language, what does the ~ do?
If you don't know the language, what are you doing maintaining Perl code? I consider that professionally irresponsible, at least if you're getting paid. (I wouldn't maintain code in any language without knowing how to consult the reference material for the language, and I try never to maintain any codebase without a comprehensive automated test suite. Perhaps I'm just picky.)
If you're maintaining Perl code, you should know how to consult perldoc perlfunc, perldoc perlop, and perldoc perlsyn, or look them up online. (Where do you look up the/g flag for the JavaScript example?)
What's good for the goose may be good for the gander, but what's good for the interpreter is not always good for the JIT.
That doesn't mean a register machine is any worse than a stack machine for JITting. In particular, some of the Dis papers from the Plan 9 research suggest that avoiding unnecessary memory access can improve execution speed as well. The approach they suggest there is clever register allocation with a register-based machine. For example, if you inline function calls, the JIT can reallocate the registers so there's no overhead of even passing parameters and receiving arguments.
If epigraphs consisted of dull words to be interpreted literally, nobody would bother.
Tolkein wrote some turgid prose himself.
Of course, I named my latest Parrot release after an Ed Wood movie, so we've always hewed toward the postmodern "refer to something" approach rather than trying to appease the literary critics of the world. It's a release announcement. If you want to correct bad poetry in the world, start with some of the social networking sites.
It's impossible to read Mandarin, it's a spoken dialect. Chinese is the written language.
Even so, over a billion people seem to get by speaking some dialect of Chinese; clearly my ignorance of the language is no barrier to their communication!
I thought perl source was considered sufficiently obfuscated that it was safe from reverse-engineering in source form.
If you don't know Perl, you may have difficulty reading programs written in Perl. (I have a similar problem with Mandarin.) If you do know Perl, try B::Deparse for decoding obfuscated Perl.
I'm not convinced you can measure this accurately without analyzing unedited master tracks. It's too easy to postproduce away uniqueness in a recording -- especially in the music that this article calls "overproduced".
If you (or any other author) were stupid enough to sign a contract that gave you 10 cents for every 70 cents the publisher got then that is your fault.
I agree, to a point. Exploitive contracts may be legal, but they're not ethical. (I believe a more ethical business would have more equitable remuneration models.)
The fact that they are able to get authors to agree to terms like that is a clue that their buisness model isn't broken yet.
Would you consider a gentleman's wager? Let's choose the head of a book publishing company at random (say, the one with animals on the cover). Ask him whether he can afford to pay authors 25% royalties. I suspect he'll say no.
So, where you say in the original post that it was 18 months, and you divide the royalty figure by two because two of you were working, that's... what?
Sloppy wording for back-of-the-envelope calculations. It was 18 calendar months on the calendar, but probably about 18 FTE months. I don't have an exact figure for how many hours we spent individually and collectively writing the book, but even at the most sinister possible interpretation of my numbers, $10,000 for nine months of full time work is a horrible rate.
18 months work for two authors seems like a lot for a single book - I'll have to assume that's part time.
Between the two of us, it was about eighteen months of full-time work. It was a long, detailed book that required a lot of research. Not all books are like that -- I can write an average-sized novel in six months.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a terrible idea. What makes you think spammers use their real email addresses? Have you never received spam purportedly from your own account?
You might as well go outside and punch the next dozen people you see because they might be spammers. Hopefully you don't live near a police station.
At Sun in 2003, if you can believe that.
No, it wasn't. It has only a tangential connection to the GPL.
If you had read any of the material about the case, you might have noticed that Jacobsen in fact used the Artistic License.
When will it start producing creative works then?
What makes you think the system is CPU bound?
If that's damning criticism, it shows the stupidity of someone for believing that a technical book will sell enough copies that the author will earn more than minimum wage from writing it (a $39.95 book from O'Reilly with two authors gives Payne about $1 per copy -- he might earn $12k over three years).
That's almost a firing offense on its own.
I've never had malaria. What's the fuss?
You'd almost wonder if Parrot developers were working on something like that....
How do you explain Kara (a messenger of a higher power) telling Lee upon her reappearance that she'd "been to Earth", then finding her body on this "Earth"? Was she misled? Lying? Covering a plot hole?
That makes little sense. The New Caprica storyline showed that Colonials were exceedingly bad at long-term thinking. That was the point of the vote to colonize New Caprica. Sure, it was a lousy, inhospitable place suitable only for subsistence farming, but at least they could have land under their feet and sky overhead, even if they all starved to death later.
That also makes little sense. They spent the last several episodes Basestarizing the Galactica, going as far as to give the Anders hybrid control over its systems to use technology to raid the Cylon colony, and they almost gave Cavil resurrection technology. Immediately after this, a unanimous hanging lampshade vote decides that even indoor plumbing is too dangerous? I don't believe it.
They did so in part because they grew up there, with immune systems acclimated to local conditions. (One idly wonders about the Colonial version of smallpox -- or hopes no Colonial ever happened to sneeze in the direction of a native.)
I prefer the explanation that they took stupid pills to excise all memories of New Caprica before voting, thus using up all of their remaining medical supplies.
That sounds like every encounter I've ever had with Emacs Lisp.
If you don't know the language, what are you doing maintaining Perl code? I consider that professionally irresponsible, at least if you're getting paid. (I wouldn't maintain code in any language without knowing how to consult the reference material for the language, and I try never to maintain any codebase without a comprehensive automated test suite. Perhaps I'm just picky.)
If you're maintaining Perl code, you should know how to consult perldoc perlfunc, perldoc perlop, and perldoc perlsyn, or look them up online. (Where do you look up the /g flag for the JavaScript example?)
That doesn't mean a register machine is any worse than a stack machine for JITting. In particular, some of the Dis papers from the Plan 9 research suggest that avoiding unnecessary memory access can improve execution speed as well. The approach they suggest there is clever register allocation with a register-based machine. For example, if you inline function calls, the JIT can reallocate the registers so there's no overhead of even passing parameters and receiving arguments.
Tolkein wrote some turgid prose himself.
Of course, I named my latest Parrot release after an Ed Wood movie, so we've always hewed toward the postmodern "refer to something" approach rather than trying to appease the literary critics of the world. It's a release announcement. If you want to correct bad poetry in the world, start with some of the social networking sites.
Even so, over a billion people seem to get by speaking some dialect of Chinese; clearly my ignorance of the language is no barrier to their communication!
If you don't know Perl, you may have difficulty reading programs written in Perl. (I have a similar problem with Mandarin.) If you do know Perl, try B::Deparse for decoding obfuscated Perl.
Tolkein didn't write a line of Perl 5 either, yet Larry quotes him in his release announcements. Epigraphs are long-established literary traditions.
I'm not convinced you can measure this accurately without analyzing unedited master tracks. It's too easy to postproduce away uniqueness in a recording -- especially in the music that this article calls "overproduced".
I agree, to a point. Exploitive contracts may be legal, but they're not ethical. (I believe a more ethical business would have more equitable remuneration models.)
Would you consider a gentleman's wager? Let's choose the head of a book publishing company at random (say, the one with animals on the cover). Ask him whether he can afford to pay authors 25% royalties. I suspect he'll say no.
Sloppy wording for back-of-the-envelope calculations. It was 18 calendar months on the calendar, but probably about 18 FTE months. I don't have an exact figure for how many hours we spent individually and collectively writing the book, but even at the most sinister possible interpretation of my numbers, $10,000 for nine months of full time work is a horrible rate.
Indeed; I co-own an independent publishing company, and am actively working on two books right now.
Between the two of us, it was about eighteen months of full-time work. It was a long, detailed book that required a lot of research. Not all books are like that -- I can write an average-sized novel in six months.