Or use the multifox extension for Firefox. It adds an option to the File menu to open a window with a "new Identity Profile", which doesn't share cookies with the main window. Works fine for me.
engineers will begin adapting Bing for the Yahoo site "in the coming days" and that they hope work is completed, at least the United States, by the end of this year.
and:
After full implementation, which the companies expect will come about two years after regulatory approval...
with these kind of glacial speeds of development... and they wonder why the mighty Google is trouncing them?
The term scientism is used to describe the view that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, such as philosophical, religious, mythical, spiritual, or humanistic explanations, and over other fields of inquiry, such as the social sciences. The term is used by social scientists like Hayek[1] or Karl Popper to describe what they see as the underlying attitudes and beliefs common to many scientists.
I've explicitly discounted both factual claims about measurable things (as in "physical stuff has this or that other charactersitic") and talk of creator god(s), from what I claim is the interesting core of religions, so both your arguments are beside the point.
What I actually claim, is that the most interesting part of a human's life is the subjective experience, which has little to do with anything science could measure.
Heh, time for some lecturing on one of my favourite topics:)
The whole point of religion has nothing, and I mean really nothing, to
do with filling explanatory gaps in our knowledge of the universe. It
also has little to do, really, with conceptual notions of a kind of
super-being called God. To quote from a christian authority on the
subject: "If you can understand it, then it is not God" (St.
Augustine). It also does not really have much to do with plain, cold
facts.
That, in itself, is a pretty good thing. By and large, we humans do not
live in a world of plain cold facts. Any one random given fact will
probably make one person happy and another depressed, so it's clearly
not the fact itself that makes much of a difference. And, "what's the
point of living", arguably the most important question that a living and
thinking individual faces, can hardly have a factual (let alone
measurable) answer.
Meanings are not facts, and we humans need, want and crave meaning.
Possibilities are also not facts, and we humans live in a whole world of
possibilities.... there's much to say on that too.
At the same time, science has, for the past few centuries, done a pretty
good job at amassing cold, plain facts, including meta-facts such as
whole theories and models. So basically, we can feel pretty safe in
delegating questions of plain cold facts to science and the scientific
method. But as we've said, facts do not constitute meaning! A
well-known scientific example of this is quantum theory, which has a
large number of diverging "interpretations" for the exact same equations
and sets of facts.
It's also good to be clear on the distinction between *science* and
*scientism*. Science is a method of enquiry based on the principles
empirical experimentation and theorisation, which inform each other in
an evolutionary way. Scientism, on the other hand, is the *belief* that
science produces not just plain, hard facts, but also the best, most
authoritative and most useful interpretation of life in general. It
often goes together with *materialism*, which means that everything that
exists must come down to things that science can measure and make
theories about. In any case, these are *beliefs*, or philosophical
positions, not verified truths.
Now, these are a lot of hairy words, and the above sentences can be made
to mean very different things depending on how you want to read it.
What exactly do we mean by "exist". Does the number three exist? Does
consciousness exist? Does a quantum state exist? And what does "come
down to" really mean?
Another hairy thing to consider when we look for any "truth" involving
"meaning": there is no ultimate criterion for "truth" or meaning,
besides "it convinces enough people who have thought hard about it". I
know, that sounds inexcusably soft and flimsy and subjective, but that's
the way it is. No matter how technical an argument may be, you just
can't take the subjective element out of it. Turning an argument into a
formal proof only raises the problem to a higher level: you'll still
have to *convince* people that the logical model actually applies, etc.
Now, if religion is not about facts, what to do about the many facts
that all the worlds' religions claim? That should not be much of a
problem either! Remember, in Christian terms, "If you can understand
it, then it is not God". So absolutely *any* claimed fact of any
religion can be safely viewed as no more than a metaphor, or a stage of
conceptualization which may be appropriate for some individuals (not
necessarily all), and may help them towards finding that elusive
"meaning".
And what kind of "meaning" is that? There are many possible answers, so
I'll just highlight a couple of points.
An important point, is viewing the conscious human being in an absolute
positive way, and without any pre-imposed limitations, both in terms of
what it *is* and in its *potential*. Instead of taking Joe Sixpack, or
Jane Prettygoodlawyer, or Bi
confirmed. VirtualBox does a great job and is freeware (there's even a GPL version).
even better, run VirtualBox on linux and create windows instances, then you have the best of both worlds: linux stability and security, and access to windows applications.
maybe I wasn't sufficiently clear, but what I meant by "embedding the code in the html" was not a reference to Javascript, but to PHP and ASP type of programming.
my point is that PHP could only have happened through a major blunder of the perl community, since it is basically a bland clone of perl. I don't see the languages themselves being different enough to make a difference, so I tend to think that the main reason why PHP took off is that it has a dead easy programming model ("change your files extension to.php and embed your <?php php code ?> in there"), and is friendly towards shared hosts, by basically resetting the interpreter between requests and having "safe_mode". The point is that all these things are possible to do with perl, but no-one at the time bothered to produce a package that did them and was simple to install, or if anyone did, they didn't make enough noise. So php came and filled the gap for the wider world, while the perl people smugly replied "we can do that too, and about 10,000 other things".
so yep, I know you can use mod_perl for the performance, and templating kits if you like them, and that CGI is still available. I regularly use all of these:)
besides, as a perl programmer, it bothers me if the perl community shoots itself in the foot, because I enjoy perl programming for the web, and
that market looks to me like it's dwindling.
Opinionated post follows, feel free to ignore or disagree....
Perl is the original language that taught a whole generation of programmers that you don't have to write 1000s of lines to do a simple thing. I love its expressiveness, its design philosophy (There's More Than One Way To Do It) and its linguistic roots. Despite being known for write-only shit, actually writing clean, maintainable code in perl is a pure pleasure. It just gives you the extra bit of latitude in your coding, that what you write can express not just what you want done, but a little extra bit of how you think of it... by using "unless" instead of "if" at times, putting the conditionals after the statement at others, you can actually make the code read like the main points are main points, adn the accessory checks are accessory. I love that flexibility.
For years, perl was the secret productivity tool of many. What others would spend weeks writing in C++ or java whatever, a perl coder would prototype in a day or two, and often the result was good enough to be declared final. And with the amazing collaboration experiment called CPAN, there was a good chance you would find a module to do the heavly lifting for you, and the two days could be shortened to a couple hours.
Sadly, the perl development community missed not one, but two boats.
First, it missed the second wave of web programming. Perl was virtually synonymous with CGI programming, but then the web world moved on to embedding code inside the HTML, which is a rather crappy combination but is easy to start with. So the perl guys produce mod_perl and about a thousand templating kits, which all together made mod_perl a powerful, scalable, flexible web platform that was at the same time confusing, hard to learn, and unfriendly towards shared hosts. And then PHP came to fulfil that need, with their bastardized watered down clone of the language, and basically stole the show.
Second, the perl community in all their wisdom, back in 2000, decided that the whole language needed to be redesigned from scratch, and built on a new generic virtual machine for dynamic languages, which would run not only perl6 but also python, tcl, logo, and who knows what else. They embarked on a prolonged process of design by committee, which 8 years later has just managed to produce a variety of incomplete specifications, and two incomplete prototypes of the language interpreter, with no completion date nor any backwards compatibility to be seen. In the meantime, the whole.NET framework has been created and gone through several iterations, Ruby has risen from obscurity to fame, etc. For all we know, perl6 may still one day reach completion, and be a useful language. The design specs are way cool, and the people implementing it sound like they are having fun.
So what happens with perl and.NET? Well, not much. Apparently ActiveState have at some point developped a bridge of some kind, but I can't find it in CPAN. There's Inline::Java, but no Inline::CSharp. Maybe no-one cares enough. It's true that the target demographics for perl and.NET are quite separate, but that should not be a reason for the language that pioneered interfacing with everything on earth.
1. In your mathematical reasoning, you lost me at #2. If only one guy (minor or not) smoked, society wouldn't give enough of a shit to ban it. Such laws are about things that affect
enough people to make laws about them, that's the way they work.
2. Congratulations, you just discovered that thresholds are arbitrary. See above post
about how your argument applies to e.g parents force-feeding a baby who won't eat. Or in
other words, you could imagine a continuum with a mildly addictive but mostly harmless
substance (say, chewing gum) at one end, and some seriously dangerous drug or poison on the other. Unless you take the view that society should never prevent you from harming yourself
(which is tenable in itself, but not very humane, and doesn't sound like your position anyway), you'll have to choose a point in this continuum where you start making the substance
less freely available. Once you've done that, and since it is a continuum, there's no way to avoid the effect that
just a tiny, almost undetectable amount of change in "badness" would put you on the "allowed" or the "controlled"
side of the fence. Which is logically absurd, for high enough values of "logically".
Fun with reasoning and the real world.... ever wondered how many atoms you could take out of an apple without it ceasing to be "an apple"?
As long as your subjective level of "needs" are comfortably taken care of, money is not really very relevant to how happy either job will make you. Trying to outguess the future is even less so.
Choose what you'll enjoy, and keep your mind flexible. If you plan to stay in the tech field, keep learning new interesting technologies. Focus on what's interesting, and you'll easily be able to pick up the not-so-interesting stuff that the industry keeps throwing at us.
As for debt... maybe it's a cultural thing (I'm European), but I've never seen the logic why regular people, outside of exceptional difficulties or circumstances, would ever want to be in debt. Just spend the money *after* you earn it, will save you from heaps of trouble.
For all the noise about it, for and against, and all the moral high, low and middle grounds that the slashdot crowd so loves to argue about, the obvious fact is that RIGHT NOW we have a working economy without DRM. So obviously one is possible.
Just look at it. The music industry's entire catalog is pretty much available on a digital, easily rippable, non-DRM'd medium: the good old CD. For all their noise and complaints, I don't see the labels shutting down CD stores to prevent "piracy"... and you can be sure that 99% of illegal music copying originates in CDs.
And if you look at video, you have the same thing. The DVD was originally DRM'd, but that was broken a long time ago and DVD ripping programs abound these days, from reputable sources even. Do you see the industry putting a stop to DVD sales, or somehow trying to prevent computers from having DVD drives with ripping ability in them? Actually just the opposite is happening - until recently people didn't have much of a (legally bought) movie collection at home, because original VHS tapes of movies were way expensive, so people resorted to renting them. The industry has actually figured out that by pricing movie DVDs quite cheap, people will buy lots of them, and the industry makes a BIGGER PROFIT!
So what's all this DRM noise then? Well, Yahoo themselves summed it up pretty well, and considering their position in the industry, you'd think they know what they're talking about:
DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.
As far as I can tell, that's good news for all of us. DRM is now like cryptography export regulations were a decade ago: a big threat that we all get so worked up about, but is ultimately irrelevant on its own grounds.
Just like there comes a point where
crypto knowledge is "not that hard anymore" and cannot be kept in a box, in the long term, the greed of
DRM vendors combined with the fear of audio-visual producers is just not enough to make something as techically broken *and* useless as DRM fly.
1) Avoid anything that will make you have reduntant copies of the same code, whether html or perl/php/java/whatever. That bring maintainablility through centralization of common things.
2) Avoid code that is doesn't look semantically related to the actual work you are doing. That brings maintainability by avoiding over-abstraction.
In this case, and in my interpretation, it means:
1) use a good templating engine that lets you have a single place for the structural <html><head><etc> tags, instead of repeating them in every page. I use a home-grown system called iAct, but you'd probably be better off with something more widespread.
2. Separate presentation and logic, because you'll probably at some point want to have different presentations for the same content generated by the same code, and that would mean duplication if you didn't keep them separate.
2.5. Separating presentation and logic doesn't necessarily mean all Perl/PHP goes on one side and all HTML on the other. For example, if you need to use alternately colored rows on a table, that's actually presentation, even if you might need a line of programming or two to achieve it.
3. Use ideas from MVC, but if you find yourself writing code that litterally looks like $object->preform_action(), stop and go back a step or two.
Norton AV is pure, unadulterated crap software. It hogs CPU and memory, and last I heard, it uses the IE engine to render itself, instead of using a widget toolkit like any other app would. To add insult to injury, the same company (Symantec) produces a perfectly fine antivirus (Symantec AV Corporate Edition), with no enforced expiration dates, reasonable memory and CPU requirements, and no such garish interface. But that one is priced well above the "Home" market.
These days I just recommend that people switch to AVG, if they can't go to Linux or (and for new computers, I tell them to get check app compatibility and get a Mac if they can afford it.)
...Which is that the most successful open-source projects end up going cross-platform, supporting at least Linux, Unix, Windows and (eventually) MacOS X.
Look at FireFox and the mozilla family, OpenOffice.org, last I heard Evolution was headed for windows compatibility and apparently people are even talking of making KOffice cross-platform. On the server side, MySQL has always done it, and Apache 2.0 and PostgreSQL 8.0 also added Windows support. As for the languages, Perl, PHP and Python support all the main OSs.
And that's only counting native ports... if you look at Cygwin, you can find the entire Unix universe in there.
well, I did do a large project with MSSQL, and while it didn't crash or fail spectacularly the way other Microsoft products tend to do, it did have a few issues with locking.
specifically, it had an overly complicated strategy of automatically escalating types of locks (row-level, page-level, table-level, etc), the end result of which was that you never quite knew what was going to happen. I did have a rather fun bunch of hours tracking down transaction deadlocks that should not really have ocurred with a better engine.
the result of it all was that it made me realize how much better MVCC databases (which are able to hold more than one version of a record at a time, and show each client the appropriate version of the universe) are than the ones based on simple locking and exclusive access. on a non-MVCC database, an open transaction which has modified a row will freeze any other client that attempts to read it! imagine how happy your users are when all their front-ends stop working just because one user's computer crashed at the wrong moment.
AFAIK, all the major open source transactional db engines are MVCC: PostgreSQL, MySQL+InnoDB and Firebird are (dunno about SapDB, Ingres and the various Java engines).
in the proprietary world, Oracle does MVCC, but Sybase and DB2 don't.
apparently the next version of MSSQL will have some sort of MVCC support too.
btw, all this talk of database independence ("it's all SQL dialects anyway") is an oversimplification in the real world. MVCC or not is actually a big deal in how a database application is engineered. as soon as you want to do anything sightlycomplicated in your transactions, and maintain integrity in the face of multiple clients, you have to think hard about locking, and start using things like "SELECT... FOR UPDATE". at that point, the code you write will depend heavily on whether your database is MVCC or not.
In spite of being GPL, good luck on finding another crew of programmers that specialize in relational database engines to this product up. The few that exist in the open source world seem to all work at postgresql.
In other words, MySQL AB cannot count on the InnoDB storage engine for the
long term, and therefore needs a new transaction-safe storage
engine for its database. This storage engine has to be open source, under a GPL-compatible license. MySQL AB's business model also adds the requirement that they must be able to sell a proprietary version of it, like they have so far with InnoDB, MaxDB and BerkeleyDB.
In that case, there is an obvious arrangement that stands out: MySQL AB should incorporate PostgreSQL's storage engine as a new backend for MySQL, using MySQL's syntax, parser, etc.
First it could be added as an experimental option, then gradually moved to be the default backend, just like the InnoDB engine has become preferred over MyISAM.
PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and GPL-compatible, so there's nothing preventing MySQL AB from selling you a proprietary version with support, and continuing to offer a GPL version.
Now that would be an exciting move on MySQL's part:)
If you want to teach them Computer Science and the deeper concepts of programming, then give them Lisp and/or some form of ML.
If you want them to have a clue how computers actually work, show them assembler and/or C.
If you want them to learn the "my data is mine i can easily do what i want with it" attitude, teach them Python, Perl, Ruby or PHP.
If you want them to get "standard" jobs in the industry, teach them Java or C#, with some C++.
In no case would I first show them any form of Basic. Kind of brain-damaging as a first language.
My personal take would be to give them two different classes corresponding to the first two items in my list: ML/Lisp and assembly/C. Make a solid grab at the two extremes and they can always figure out the 'middle' stuff on their own, which is comparatively easier.
I'm currently doing a big project in, of all things, visual basic.NET. Not my choice, I'd probably have picked wxPython, but There Were Good Reasons(TM). It's got nearly all the uncool bits of Java (static typing, cumbersome VM, and an overwrought class library with three bazillion classes where a more dynamic design could have done with a tenth of those), plus some of its own (a butt-ugly verbose syntax, and MS lock-in).
You know what, at the end of the day, it's code. If you're a good programmer, it's readable, maintainable code. If you're not, no matter the language, it's going to be a mess.
I grew up in the 1980's assuming that I would one day be able to write some really cool software, then *SELL IT*, and make some real money for my trouble.
...
Some argue that there will always be a market for vertical market software (customized, very specific to a particular business), and this is true, but why can't I write a wonderful new *general* tool and make money from it?
Well here's some news for you: that model doesn't work anymore. Never did except for a small minority of developers. The vast majority of the
money in the software world is in in-house and speciality software, or in large enterprise software where the support is the actual cash cow, not the licensing.
General-purpose software that sells in the millions and makes you an instant millionaire, while you spend at most the equivalent of a few thousands of dollars while writing it... AKA easy money... AKA won't fly. Never did. Before it was Microsoft that was going to commoditize it, now it's the Open Source community. If neither existed, it would be someone else, it's just too damn easy. General purpose software for mass audiences is just not THAT hard to replicate. You're not going to get rich selling boxed copies of your app for luxury prices, so you might as well deal with it now.
Let MS enjoy their Office cash cow while it lasts... it won't be
forever either.
It's still like that, I don't know where they came
up with their Rs 60+ / hour rate. Maybe some really
touristic place.
In south Indian cities you can have fast internet for about 20 Rs an hour, that's less than half a dollar. In smaller cities and towns it's about the same rate, even cheaper, but then the connections are *really slow*.
I'm a Spaniard (Catala tambe) living in India these days, and believe me, RENFE sucks, but Spanish trains are still safer, faster and more on time than indian ones.
I quite admire the Indian railway system though... probably the biggest in the world, with something like 1 million users every day, and computerized reservation for any trip from any place in the country. And pretty damn cheap.
ObOnTopic: If they can build the tunnel for a reasonable amount of money, I'm all for it. It's about time Spain looks a bit more friendlily towards its forgotten neighbors, Morocco and Portugal.
Slashdot Mirror
Or use the multifox extension for Firefox. It adds an option to the File menu to open a window with a "new Identity Profile", which doesn't share cookies with the main window. Works fine for me.
and:
with these kind of glacial speeds of development... and they wonder why the mighty Google is trouncing them?
I've explicitly discounted both factual claims about measurable things (as in "physical stuff has this or that other charactersitic") and talk of creator god(s), from what I claim is the interesting core of religions, so both your arguments are beside the point.
What I actually claim, is that the most interesting part of a human's life is the subjective experience, which has little to do with anything science could measure.
Heh, time for some lecturing on one of my favourite topics :)
The whole point of religion has nothing, and I mean really nothing, to do with filling explanatory gaps in our knowledge of the universe. It also has little to do, really, with conceptual notions of a kind of super-being called God. To quote from a christian authority on the subject: "If you can understand it, then it is not God" (St. Augustine). It also does not really have much to do with plain, cold facts.
That, in itself, is a pretty good thing. By and large, we humans do not live in a world of plain cold facts. Any one random given fact will probably make one person happy and another depressed, so it's clearly not the fact itself that makes much of a difference. And, "what's the point of living", arguably the most important question that a living and thinking individual faces, can hardly have a factual (let alone measurable) answer.
Meanings are not facts, and we humans need, want and crave meaning. Possibilities are also not facts, and we humans live in a whole world of possibilities.... there's much to say on that too.
At the same time, science has, for the past few centuries, done a pretty good job at amassing cold, plain facts, including meta-facts such as whole theories and models. So basically, we can feel pretty safe in delegating questions of plain cold facts to science and the scientific method. But as we've said, facts do not constitute meaning! A well-known scientific example of this is quantum theory, which has a large number of diverging "interpretations" for the exact same equations and sets of facts.
It's also good to be clear on the distinction between *science* and *scientism*. Science is a method of enquiry based on the principles empirical experimentation and theorisation, which inform each other in an evolutionary way. Scientism, on the other hand, is the *belief* that science produces not just plain, hard facts, but also the best, most authoritative and most useful interpretation of life in general. It often goes together with *materialism*, which means that everything that exists must come down to things that science can measure and make theories about. In any case, these are *beliefs*, or philosophical positions, not verified truths.
Now, these are a lot of hairy words, and the above sentences can be made to mean very different things depending on how you want to read it. What exactly do we mean by "exist". Does the number three exist? Does consciousness exist? Does a quantum state exist? And what does "come down to" really mean?
Another hairy thing to consider when we look for any "truth" involving "meaning": there is no ultimate criterion for "truth" or meaning, besides "it convinces enough people who have thought hard about it". I know, that sounds inexcusably soft and flimsy and subjective, but that's the way it is. No matter how technical an argument may be, you just can't take the subjective element out of it. Turning an argument into a formal proof only raises the problem to a higher level: you'll still have to *convince* people that the logical model actually applies, etc.
Now, if religion is not about facts, what to do about the many facts that all the worlds' religions claim? That should not be much of a problem either! Remember, in Christian terms, "If you can understand it, then it is not God". So absolutely *any* claimed fact of any religion can be safely viewed as no more than a metaphor, or a stage of conceptualization which may be appropriate for some individuals (not necessarily all), and may help them towards finding that elusive "meaning".
And what kind of "meaning" is that? There are many possible answers, so I'll just highlight a couple of points.
An important point, is viewing the conscious human being in an absolute positive way, and without any pre-imposed limitations, both in terms of what it *is* and in its *potential*. Instead of taking Joe Sixpack, or Jane Prettygoodlawyer, or Bi
even better, run VirtualBox on linux and create windows instances, then you have the best of both worlds: linux stability and security, and access to windows applications.
yep, you have several good points there.
maybe I wasn't sufficiently clear, but what I meant by "embedding the code in the html" was not a reference to Javascript, but to PHP and ASP type of programming.
my point is that PHP could only have happened through a major blunder of the perl community, since it is basically a bland clone of perl. I don't see the languages themselves being different enough to make a difference, so I tend to think that the main reason why PHP took off is that it has a dead easy programming model ("change your files extension to .php and embed your <?php php code ?> in there"), and is friendly towards shared hosts, by basically resetting the interpreter between requests and having "safe_mode". The point is that all these things are possible to do with perl, but no-one at the time bothered to produce a package that did them and was simple to install, or if anyone did, they didn't make enough noise. So php came and filled the gap for the wider world, while the perl people smugly replied "we can do that too, and about 10,000 other things".
so yep, I know you can use mod_perl for the performance, and templating kits if you like them, and that CGI is still available. I regularly use all of these :)
besides, as a perl programmer, it bothers me if the perl community shoots itself in the foot, because I enjoy perl programming for the web, and that market looks to me like it's dwindling.
Opinionated post follows, feel free to ignore or disagree....
Perl is the original language that taught a whole generation of programmers that you don't have to write 1000s of lines to do a simple thing. I love its expressiveness, its design philosophy (There's More Than One Way To Do It) and its linguistic roots. Despite being known for write-only shit, actually writing clean, maintainable code in perl is a pure pleasure. It just gives you the extra bit of latitude in your coding, that what you write can express not just what you want done, but a little extra bit of how you think of it... by using "unless" instead of "if" at times, putting the conditionals after the statement at others, you can actually make the code read like the main points are main points, adn the accessory checks are accessory. I love that flexibility.
For years, perl was the secret productivity tool of many. What others would spend weeks writing in C++ or java whatever, a perl coder would prototype in a day or two, and often the result was good enough to be declared final. And with the amazing collaboration experiment called CPAN, there was a good chance you would find a module to do the heavly lifting for you, and the two days could be shortened to a couple hours.
Sadly, the perl development community missed not one, but two boats.
First, it missed the second wave of web programming. Perl was virtually synonymous with CGI programming, but then the web world moved on to embedding code inside the HTML, which is a rather crappy combination but is easy to start with. So the perl guys produce mod_perl and about a thousand templating kits, which all together made mod_perl a powerful, scalable, flexible web platform that was at the same time confusing, hard to learn, and unfriendly towards shared hosts. And then PHP came to fulfil that need, with their bastardized watered down clone of the language, and basically stole the show.
Second, the perl community in all their wisdom, back in 2000, decided that the whole language needed to be redesigned from scratch, and built on a new generic virtual machine for dynamic languages, which would run not only perl6 but also python, tcl, logo, and who knows what else. They embarked on a prolonged process of design by committee, which 8 years later has just managed to produce a variety of incomplete specifications, and two incomplete prototypes of the language interpreter, with no completion date nor any backwards compatibility to be seen. In the meantime, the whole .NET framework has been created and gone through several iterations, Ruby has risen from obscurity to fame, etc. For all we know, perl6 may still one day reach completion, and be a useful language. The design specs are way cool, and the people implementing it sound like they are having fun.
So what happens with perl and .NET? Well, not much. Apparently ActiveState have at some point developped a bridge of some kind, but I can't find it in CPAN. There's Inline::Java, but no Inline::CSharp. Maybe no-one cares enough. It's true that the target demographics for perl and .NET are quite separate, but that should not be a reason for the language that pioneered interfacing with everything on earth.
Actually, two of them.
1. In your mathematical reasoning, you lost me at #2. If only one guy (minor or not) smoked, society wouldn't give enough of a shit to ban it. Such laws are about things that affect enough people to make laws about them, that's the way they work.
2. Congratulations, you just discovered that thresholds are arbitrary. See above post about how your argument applies to e.g parents force-feeding a baby who won't eat. Or in other words, you could imagine a continuum with a mildly addictive but mostly harmless substance (say, chewing gum) at one end, and some seriously dangerous drug or poison on the other. Unless you take the view that society should never prevent you from harming yourself (which is tenable in itself, but not very humane, and doesn't sound like your position anyway), you'll have to choose a point in this continuum where you start making the substance less freely available. Once you've done that, and since it is a continuum, there's no way to avoid the effect that just a tiny, almost undetectable amount of change in "badness" would put you on the "allowed" or the "controlled" side of the fence. Which is logically absurd, for high enough values of "logically".
Fun with reasoning and the real world.... ever wondered how many atoms you could take out of an apple without it ceasing to be "an apple"?
Choose what you'll enjoy, and keep your mind flexible. If you plan to stay in the tech field, keep learning new interesting technologies. Focus on what's interesting, and you'll easily be able to pick up the not-so-interesting stuff that the industry keeps throwing at us.
As for debt... maybe it's a cultural thing (I'm European), but I've never seen the logic why regular people, outside of exceptional difficulties or circumstances, would ever want to be in debt. Just spend the money *after* you earn it, will save you from heaps of trouble.
For all the noise about it, for and against, and all the moral high, low and middle grounds that the slashdot crowd so loves to argue about, the obvious fact is that RIGHT NOW we have a working economy without DRM. So obviously one is possible.
Just look at it. The music industry's entire catalog is pretty much available on a digital, easily rippable, non-DRM'd medium: the good old CD. For all their noise and complaints, I don't see the labels shutting down CD stores to prevent "piracy"... and you can be sure that 99% of illegal music copying originates in CDs.
And if you look at video, you have the same thing. The DVD was originally DRM'd, but that was broken a long time ago and DVD ripping programs abound these days, from reputable sources even. Do you see the industry putting a stop to DVD sales, or somehow trying to prevent computers from having DVD drives with ripping ability in them? Actually just the opposite is happening - until recently people didn't have much of a (legally bought) movie collection at home, because original VHS tapes of movies were way expensive, so people resorted to renting them. The industry has actually figured out that by pricing movie DVDs quite cheap, people will buy lots of them, and the industry makes a BIGGER PROFIT!
So what's all this DRM noise then? Well, Yahoo themselves summed it up pretty well, and considering their position in the industry, you'd think they know what they're talking about:
As far as I can tell, that's good news for all of us. DRM is now like cryptography export regulations were a decade ago: a big threat that we all get so worked up about, but is ultimately irrelevant on its own grounds.
Just like there comes a point where crypto knowledge is "not that hard anymore" and cannot be kept in a box, in the long term, the greed of DRM vendors combined with the fear of audio-visual producers is just not enough to make something as techically broken *and* useless as DRM fly.
1) Avoid anything that will make you have reduntant copies of the same code, whether html or perl/php/java/whatever. That bring maintainablility through centralization of common things.
2) Avoid code that is doesn't look semantically related to the actual work you are doing. That brings maintainability by avoiding over-abstraction.
In this case, and in my interpretation, it means:
1) use a good templating engine that lets you have a single place for the structural <html><head><etc> tags, instead of repeating them in every page. I use a home-grown system called iAct, but you'd probably be better off with something more widespread.
2. Separate presentation and logic, because you'll probably at some point want to have different presentations for the same content generated by the same code, and that would mean duplication if you didn't keep them separate.
2.5. Separating presentation and logic doesn't necessarily mean all Perl/PHP goes on one side and all HTML on the other. For example, if you need to use alternately colored rows on a table, that's actually presentation, even if you might need a line of programming or two to achieve it.
3. Use ideas from MVC, but if you find yourself writing code that litterally looks like $object->preform_action(), stop and go back a step or two.
These days I just recommend that people switch to AVG, if they can't go to Linux or (and for new computers, I tell them to get check app compatibility and get a Mac if they can afford it.)
better than bash? sure, there's zsh. mostly compatible, too. bash might have caught up in these years though...
Look at FireFox and the mozilla family, OpenOffice.org, last I heard Evolution was headed for windows compatibility and apparently people are even talking of making KOffice cross-platform. On the server side, MySQL has always done it, and Apache 2.0 and PostgreSQL 8.0 also added Windows support. As for the languages, Perl, PHP and Python support all the main OSs.
And that's only counting native ports... if you look at Cygwin, you can find the entire Unix universe in there.
well, I did do a large project with MSSQL, and while it didn't crash or fail spectacularly the way other Microsoft products tend to do, it did have a few issues with locking.
specifically, it had an overly complicated strategy of automatically escalating types of locks (row-level, page-level, table-level, etc), the end result of which was that you never quite knew what was going to happen. I did have a rather fun bunch of hours tracking down transaction deadlocks that should not really have ocurred with a better engine.
the result of it all was that it made me realize how much better MVCC databases (which are able to hold more than one version of a record at a time, and show each client the appropriate version of the universe) are than the ones based on simple locking and exclusive access. on a non-MVCC database, an open transaction which has modified a row will freeze any other client that attempts to read it! imagine how happy your users are when all their front-ends stop working just because one user's computer crashed at the wrong moment.
AFAIK, all the major open source transactional db engines are MVCC: PostgreSQL, MySQL+InnoDB and Firebird are (dunno about SapDB, Ingres and the various Java engines).
in the proprietary world, Oracle does MVCC, but Sybase and DB2 don't. apparently the next version of MSSQL will have some sort of MVCC support too.
btw, all this talk of database independence ("it's all SQL dialects anyway") is an oversimplification in the real world. MVCC or not is actually a big deal in how a database application is engineered. as soon as you want to do anything sightlycomplicated in your transactions, and maintain integrity in the face of multiple clients, you have to think hard about locking, and start using things like "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE". at that point, the code you write will depend heavily on whether your database is MVCC or not.
In other words, MySQL AB cannot count on the InnoDB storage engine for the long term, and therefore needs a new transaction-safe storage engine for its database. This storage engine has to be open source, under a GPL-compatible license. MySQL AB's business model also adds the requirement that they must be able to sell a proprietary version of it, like they have so far with InnoDB, MaxDB and BerkeleyDB.
In that case, there is an obvious arrangement that stands out: MySQL AB should incorporate PostgreSQL's storage engine as a new backend for MySQL, using MySQL's syntax, parser, etc.
First it could be added as an experimental option, then gradually moved to be the default backend, just like the InnoDB engine has become preferred over MyISAM.
PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and GPL-compatible, so there's nothing preventing MySQL AB from selling you a proprietary version with support, and continuing to offer a GPL version.
Now that would be an exciting move on MySQL's part :)
Very roughly speaking (read the actual licences to clarify the real conditions...):
The GPL's idea is: whatever is linked or derived from the original program must also be GPL-free.
The LGPL: whatever is derived from the original code must be LGPL-free. No restriction on what code you can link or interface to.
The MPL: the original code and modifications to its files must be MPL-free. No restrictions on code in new files.
If you want them to have a clue how computers actually work, show them assembler and/or C.
If you want them to learn the "my data is mine i can easily do what i want with it" attitude, teach them Python, Perl, Ruby or PHP.
If you want them to get "standard" jobs in the industry, teach them Java or C#, with some C++.
In no case would I first show them any form of Basic. Kind of brain-damaging as a first language.
My personal take would be to give them two different classes corresponding to the first two items in my list: ML/Lisp and assembly/C. Make a solid grab at the two extremes and they can always figure out the 'middle' stuff on their own, which is comparatively easier.
After all, Gentoo is an alternative (deprecated) name for the Telugu. language.
You know what, at the end of the day, it's code. If you're a good programmer, it's readable, maintainable code. If you're not, no matter the language, it's going to be a mess.
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.locati
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.menuba
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimi
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.resiza
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.scroll
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.status
This makes all pop-ups have a full navigation bar, location bar, status bar, and forces them to be resizable and scrollable.
It may look uglier than plain-window pop-ups, but it does keep you in full control of your browser.
With these options set, the spoof pages look obviously like what they are: a fake browser within a real browser.
Well here's some news for you: that model doesn't work anymore. Never did except for a small minority of developers. The vast majority of the money in the software world is in in-house and speciality software, or in large enterprise software where the support is the actual cash cow, not the licensing.
General-purpose software that sells in the millions and makes you an instant millionaire, while you spend at most the equivalent of a few thousands of dollars while writing it... AKA easy money... AKA won't fly. Never did. Before it was Microsoft that was going to commoditize it, now it's the Open Source community. If neither existed, it would be someone else, it's just too damn easy. General purpose software for mass audiences is just not THAT hard to replicate. You're not going to get rich selling boxed copies of your app for luxury prices, so you might as well deal with it now.
Let MS enjoy their Office cash cow while it lasts... it won't be forever either.
In south Indian cities you can have fast internet for about 20 Rs an hour, that's less than half a dollar. In smaller cities and towns it's about the same rate, even cheaper, but then the connections are *really slow*.
I've like to see this kind of study applied to Indian Classical music, both the northern Hindustani or the southern Carnatic kind.
If there's a style of music that really "establishes a context" and explores is thoroughly, Indian classical music has to be it.
Describing a raga in terms of Zipf's frequencies... sounds like fun :)
I'm a Spaniard (Catala tambe) living in India these days, and believe me, RENFE sucks, but Spanish trains are still safer, faster and more on time than indian ones. I quite admire the Indian railway system though... probably the biggest in the world, with something like 1 million users every day, and computerized reservation for any trip from any place in the country. And pretty damn cheap. ObOnTopic: If they can build the tunnel for a reasonable amount of money, I'm all for it. It's about time Spain looks a bit more friendlily towards its forgotten neighbors, Morocco and Portugal.