No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer.
I'm not so sure that's true. As iTunes and the like have demonstrated, there are large numbers of people who are quite ready to pay a reasonable price for digital music that was professionally produced, well-organized, and delivered over a high-quality connection.
After all, iTunes provides value. It saves me time spent hunting down music, and I know that I am going to get high-quality for my money. And so, yeah, I'm willing to pay for that, and it turns out so are many other people.
I definitely agree with your first observation, but do you really consider it to be a controversial statement in 2009? We have an entire field of Behavioral Economics that attempts to explain the observed market inefficiencies, and irrational actions by market participants. I think this is what you were longing for in your original post when you said:
"What is desperately needed in economics is a more reality based outlook that attempts to truly deal with the social and economic problems of wider society, rather than a bunch autistic, antisocial, arrogant geeks who don't even realise they're only allowed to keep doing what they're doing because it serves the interests of the powerful"
Your ranting about the powerful, I didn't get until I pasted your quote into my browser, and the spell checker choked on the word "realise". I think that the general political bias between the US and the UK is fundamentally different, and I once heard it described as follows: In the UK, you look at a rich man and say, "I want to get that guy," whereas in the US, we look at him and say, "I want to be that guy."
Be that as it may:
these days we stress the natural, impartial action of the market, interference in its workings a sacrilege. Well that is until the wealthy are looking at losing serious money, then all the state interference necessary to mitigate this is suddenly allowed.
Do you really think any credible economist would argue that all government interference in the economy is a sacrilege? Business executives, maybe. But economists?
I mean, even the monetarist Milton Friedman wasn't against all government interference in the economy (he was, of course, against most interference). And as an aside, he also argued the ridiculousness of the "Economic Man", a walking, talking utility maximization problem, and that was in the 70s.
Your criticism, as it applies to Wall St. executives, I think is valid. But can you name any serious economist who claims that the government shouldn't be allowed to interfere in the workings of the market?
What you just witnessed was the result of teachers unions giving their members free legal representation. That being said, in most states, if you make an allegation that screws with someone's profession, that allegation is automatically considered defamatory. That's what the lawyer was probably talking about when he/she said the teacher would not need to show damages.
Of course, if you could show that the teacher in question in fact is a racist, and in fact was not doing her job, then you could not be guilty of defamation. The truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander charges.
In the future, you might have better luck leaving your opinion out of your complaints. For instance, instead of saying, "Mrs. Teacher is a racist," simply say, "Mrs. Teacher made the following comments in class: [insert comments here]. These comments offended me." Instead of saying, "Mrs. Teacher isn't doing her job," say, "I expected that Mrs. Teacher might [insert derelictions of duty here]. She did not, however, do those things."
If you can do that, it's very difficult to come after you for defamation. After all, your complaints would simply talk about your own feelings and expectations, and nobody is better qualified than you to judge the truthfulness of statements regarding your own feelings. If you make judgments, you'd then have to defend those statements; or more precisely, pay an attorney $10,000 for the privilege of getting in front of a judge to defend your statements.
And if no evidence was found, then that would be proof that the reasonable person was WRONG and therefore liable for any damages.
What you are describing is how you wish the world worked, as opposed to how the world really works.
Search warrants are issued in this country based on "probable cause". This is enshrined in the US Constitution. Probable cause is established when there is evidence such that a reasonable person would believe that evidence of a crime or contraband would be discovered in that search.
If an investigator traces criminal activity to an IP address, there is definitely probable cause to get a search warrant (first to reveal the identity of the user of that IP address at the time the evidence was collected, as well as for the subsequent search of the computer equipment where that IP address was assigned).
I'm sorry, but you can't collect damages that result from a lawfully-issued search warrant.
And if ironclad proof wasn't presented at the trial that there was NO OTHER WAY than the crime for the evidence being there, I wouldn't shut up until the
A lot of people mistake "proof beyond reasonable doubt" to mean "proof beyond all doubt".
I think you might be one of those people making that mistake.
These guys that barely made it out of the academy aren't lawyers and they will fuck it up. A good attorney will find a way to make the prosecution's evidence inadmissible.
Eh. I could definitely see a fresh-from-the-academy cop bungling up the evidence gathering, but cops get experience just like everybody else. After they get a few of their cases tossed, they'll learn.
Even with a good attorney, you have one more thing to contend with. Prosecutors tend to pile on 10 different charges with gargantuan maximum penalties for even the smallest of crimes. If you are facing 50 years in prison, but the prosecution is offering you a plea deal that gets you out in 2 months... does it really matter if you were guilty or innocent?
Most sane people would take the 2 months, and the prosecutor gets his conviction.
Part of the problem is that "the geeks" got hold of economics and constructed their big, deterministic, agent based models. Models can be illuminating true, but in the case of economics, when reality and models parted company, the economists bemoaned the inability of the real world to match theory.
Would you care to explain what you mean by that. Are you talking about Wall St. quantitative analysts? Because I would tend to identify that more with the discipline of Finance than Economics.
Also, care to explain your commentary about amusing the powerful?
I am no longer a practicing economist, but I have taken an interest in the current economic situation.
Frankly most small professional services type companies are virtually worthless on an asset value basis.
This was my first thought, as the owner of a small professional services company.
If you tried to value my company using multiples, it'd be worth some crazy, insane amount of money. But it's be honest, here. If you bought my company, and I tendered my 2-week resignation, in 2 weeks, that company would be worth less than $50,000 (actual value of all assets... some computer equipment and outstanding receivables, basically... I'm too lazy to fire up quickbooks and look at my balance sheet).
I wonder how that would work if my wife and I ever got divorced. The business would have to be valued at something above book value. Would she take shares, with full knowledge that I could shutter the business? Or would she buy me out with cash? Hopefully I never have to find out. But I'm the morbid type of person who thinks about these things.
you could use a system that separates components into libraries and interfaces, allows you to modularize, allows database independence, makes testing easy, has static typing so the compiler can catch 80% of problems before they ever get executed. Has AOP, has IOC that isn't insane and is used by more enterprise shops that anything else.
I'm curious on this one. When is the last time you swapped out one database for another?
Also, can you name a few good uses for AOP other than trace-level logging and security? I'm not trolling, I just really wish I knew the answer and I've been asking everyone who sounded like they could give one to me.
but you might have noticed that the internet has evolved since 1994, and technologies, such as AJAX, are transforming the web browsing experience in GOOD ways, such as google maps.
Yup. That's why AdBlock Plus is your friend. It only blocks the ad content, and leaves the rest of the page alone.
Why do you suppose he wasn't learning the material? I'm not trying to imply that it's your fault. I'm just curious what some of the preventers of education are.
I agree with everything you said except the first sentence. While a child's parents may be the single biggest predictor of academic success, it does not follow that parents are therefore the key to solving our educational problems. Unless you know of a way to make sure all parents are successful and supportive.
It's easy to make sure all parents are successful and supportive--just fix the schools!;)
OK, all kidding aside, my post was not intended as a blueprint for education reform; it was merely a refutation of the quote, "Please keep the parents isolated from the educational system. They are the problem." That guy's solution to education was "DEMAND EXCELLENCE", and it makes the usual mistake that you hear when you get unsolicited parenting advice: they say what worked (or they think would have worked) for them, and totally ignore the fact that every kid is different.
The "DEMAND EXCELLENCE" solution works only for the subset of kids of a middle to upper class background, with a calm home life, and a natural aptitude for studies, and who care about their future.
Anyone with two eyes can see that not all kids fall into that description. There are kids who come to school hungry (how can you work or learn when you're hungry?). There are kids with abusive parent(s). There are kids with terrible role models for parents. There are kids who struggle with certain subject areas--some parents can afford tutoring, which may or may not help. Many teenagers are not able to really grasp life even 1 year into the future, let alone 5 or 10 years in to the future.
Personally, I think our schools do pretty well. Sure, they don't develop each and every student to his or her maximum potential, but I think that expectation is unrealistic. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to the students to pressure all of them to be the next Einstein.
I attended a high school filled with children of over-achieving parents, and the school followed the "DEMAND EXCELLENCE" approach. It was probably the right call, given the background of the majority of the students, but at the same time, I saw it fail kids who were outside of the norm. Thankfully, the school had some good solutions for the 0.1% of the students who were not college-bound.
At any rate, I am yet to be convinced that there serious, fundamental problems with our schools that need urgent fixing. Sure, we have schools where students have low average test scores, but is that really a reflection on the school? Or are the low test scores just a reflection of the school's constituents? I'm not trying to throw up my hands and abdicate responsibility for those kids--after all, it's not their fault they lost the "good parents" lottery. I think what's most important is that there be a path out of that cycle of poverty for those who are willing to work at it.
Heh heh. Fair enough. But there is a big difference between instilling a sense of self-respect in your kids over their entire lifetimes, and some type of edict that "parents must make their kids go to school."
My kids go to school. But if they didn't, what exactly do you propose that I do about it at that point in time? By then, I'd have long-since missed the boat on modeling the importance of education.
If I drop my kids off at school and they go in the front door and straight out the back... seriously. What could I do about it?
For example, the access to my country's equivalent to the ivy league schools doesn't depend on your family's wealth, which means that if you are dumb as a door knob and you happen to be the son of a billionaire then you still have to work your ass off in order to be admitted to one of those schools. It also means that if you are terribly smart and talented then you may enrol in those schools, no matter how poor you are. It's raw talent that matters, now raw cash.
I see someone has been watching too many Hollywood movies. This is a silly caricature of how higher education really works in the states.
Harvard doesn't publish statistics of how many students are admitted into each freshman class solely because of rich parents building a new library (and the student would not have otherwise qualified), but the number is necessarily small. After all, if building a library is a requirement for matriculation, the campus would be stacked with nothing but libraries, one on top of another.
Scholarships and financial aid are readily available here for students that need it, and the overwhelming majority of Universities here strive to achieve a high level of diversity in each freshman class.
2) Schools are unable to get rid of disruptive students, and believe me as a guy who taught high school for awhile, one disruptive kid can distract 30 others who are happy to learn.
Why do you think that one kid was disruptive, in the face of 30 others who would have preferred to learn? Talk about going against a lot of peer pressure.
Please keep the parents isolated from the educational system. They are the problem.
This is absurd.
A child's parents are his single, biggest predictor of academic success. Don't believe me? Try this little thought experiment:
Picture the best-performing school in your immediate area.
Picture the worst-performing school in your immediate area.
Now, consider what would happen if you were to wave a magic wand and switch the two schools. That means the physical building, the contents, the teachers, the administrators, the budgets--everything but the students.
How long do you think it would take for the students that used to attend the worst school, but now attend the best school, to eclipse their best school to worst school student counterparts?
1 year? 5 years? 12 years? 20 years? Ever?
I'm sorry to say, but it's not the teachers who make the school. It's the students. And who makes the students?
There really isn't a lot a teacher can do to get my kids to perform. After all, a teacher will only see them for 1 hour per day, whereas I have had them their entire lives. Teachers love to bitch about parents, but the fact is, teachers can't accomplish anything without the parents. Why do you think my kid is acing your class? Because you are a brilliant teacher? Or because I taught them to speak, read, and write in 2 languages at age 3?
Teachers have very little control over education outcomes--A fact that they are quick to trumpet when a student comes from a wretched home life, but are slow to admit when a student arrives well-prepared to perform.
The process you are seeking is making parents accountable and making sure their children actually go to school.
One thing you'll notice about children is their innate love of learning. They are often called "sponges" for a reason.
If a child ever says, "I hate school," then there is something seriously wrong with that school. Any school that sucks the drive to learn out of a child should be shut down immediately.
Well if you have to ask that, you've probably gone horribly wrong as a parent years ago.
I hate to break this to you, but kids are their own people, and they don't always do as their parents instruct them.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that kids are genetically programmed to assert their independence from their parents. Some people refer to this as "teenage rebellion", but it's really just the natural order of things.
These days, it's normally more like, "If you have a common programming task that everyone and his mother has to solve, chances are there is a library/STL/JDK/whatever routine available that has had all the bugs worked out of it years ago. You'd be an idiot to write your own."
A huge pet peeve of mine is reviewing code where someone has reimplemented some type of date, math, sort, data structure, or similar construct. Chances are greater than 90% that there is a totally unnecessary bug in there somewhere; and chances are greater than 99.9% that the library function is in O(way the fuck less than the homebrew function).
Random-but-informed guess: these log files are large, and you slurped them all into memory in your Perl program, causing swap and IO thrash.
If I did that, it was not intentional. But even if I had done that, the machine I was running on had gigs of memory, and the log files were in the hundreds of megs in length.
This was about 2 years ago now, but knowing the way I used to code perl, the perl version would have done an 'open(IN,"<filename") || die' and then a 'while (<IN>) {}'. If perl takes that to mean "read the entire file into memory", then what would have been the more correct perl idiom?
I wouldn't say that perl is useless. I just found Java to have made perl obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer.
I'm not so sure that's true. As iTunes and the like have demonstrated, there are large numbers of people who are quite ready to pay a reasonable price for digital music that was professionally produced, well-organized, and delivered over a high-quality connection.
After all, iTunes provides value. It saves me time spent hunting down music, and I know that I am going to get high-quality for my money. And so, yeah, I'm willing to pay for that, and it turns out so are many other people.
I definitely agree with your first observation, but do you really consider it to be a controversial statement in 2009? We have an entire field of Behavioral Economics that attempts to explain the observed market inefficiencies, and irrational actions by market participants. I think this is what you were longing for in your original post when you said:
"What is desperately needed in economics is a more reality based outlook that attempts to truly deal with the social and economic problems of wider society, rather than a bunch autistic, antisocial, arrogant geeks who don't even realise they're only allowed to keep doing what they're doing because it serves the interests of the powerful"
Your ranting about the powerful, I didn't get until I pasted your quote into my browser, and the spell checker choked on the word "realise". I think that the general political bias between the US and the UK is fundamentally different, and I once heard it described as follows: In the UK, you look at a rich man and say, "I want to get that guy," whereas in the US, we look at him and say, "I want to be that guy."
Be that as it may:
these days we stress the natural, impartial action of the market, interference in its workings a sacrilege. Well that is until the wealthy are looking at losing serious money, then all the state interference necessary to mitigate this is suddenly allowed.
Do you really think any credible economist would argue that all government interference in the economy is a sacrilege? Business executives, maybe. But economists?
I mean, even the monetarist Milton Friedman wasn't against all government interference in the economy (he was, of course, against most interference). And as an aside, he also argued the ridiculousness of the "Economic Man", a walking, talking utility maximization problem, and that was in the 70s.
Your criticism, as it applies to Wall St. executives, I think is valid. But can you name any serious economist who claims that the government shouldn't be allowed to interfere in the workings of the market?
What you just witnessed was the result of teachers unions giving their members free legal representation. That being said, in most states, if you make an allegation that screws with someone's profession, that allegation is automatically considered defamatory. That's what the lawyer was probably talking about when he/she said the teacher would not need to show damages.
Of course, if you could show that the teacher in question in fact is a racist, and in fact was not doing her job, then you could not be guilty of defamation. The truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander charges.
In the future, you might have better luck leaving your opinion out of your complaints. For instance, instead of saying, "Mrs. Teacher is a racist," simply say, "Mrs. Teacher made the following comments in class: [insert comments here]. These comments offended me." Instead of saying, "Mrs. Teacher isn't doing her job," say, "I expected that Mrs. Teacher might [insert derelictions of duty here]. She did not, however, do those things."
If you can do that, it's very difficult to come after you for defamation. After all, your complaints would simply talk about your own feelings and expectations, and nobody is better qualified than you to judge the truthfulness of statements regarding your own feelings. If you make judgments, you'd then have to defend those statements; or more precisely, pay an attorney $10,000 for the privilege of getting in front of a judge to defend your statements.
Your funny.
Best of luck.
And if no evidence was found, then that would be proof that the reasonable person was WRONG and therefore liable for any damages.
What you are describing is how you wish the world worked, as opposed to how the world really works.
Search warrants are issued in this country based on "probable cause". This is enshrined in the US Constitution. Probable cause is established when there is evidence such that a reasonable person would believe that evidence of a crime or contraband would be discovered in that search.
If an investigator traces criminal activity to an IP address, there is definitely probable cause to get a search warrant (first to reveal the identity of the user of that IP address at the time the evidence was collected, as well as for the subsequent search of the computer equipment where that IP address was assigned).
I'm sorry, but you can't collect damages that result from a lawfully-issued search warrant.
And if ironclad proof wasn't presented at the trial that there was NO OTHER WAY than the crime for the evidence being there, I wouldn't shut up until the
A lot of people mistake "proof beyond reasonable doubt" to mean "proof beyond all doubt".
I think you might be one of those people making that mistake.
These guys that barely made it out of the academy aren't lawyers and they will fuck it up. A good attorney will find a way to make the prosecution's evidence inadmissible.
Eh. I could definitely see a fresh-from-the-academy cop bungling up the evidence gathering, but cops get experience just like everybody else. After they get a few of their cases tossed, they'll learn.
Even with a good attorney, you have one more thing to contend with. Prosecutors tend to pile on 10 different charges with gargantuan maximum penalties for even the smallest of crimes. If you are facing 50 years in prison, but the prosecution is offering you a plea deal that gets you out in 2 months... does it really matter if you were guilty or innocent?
Most sane people would take the 2 months, and the prosecutor gets his conviction.
Part of the problem is that "the geeks" got hold of economics and constructed their big, deterministic, agent based models. Models can be illuminating true, but in the case of economics, when reality and models parted company, the economists bemoaned the inability of the real world to match theory.
Would you care to explain what you mean by that. Are you talking about Wall St. quantitative analysts? Because I would tend to identify that more with the discipline of Finance than Economics.
Also, care to explain your commentary about amusing the powerful?
I am no longer a practicing economist, but I have taken an interest in the current economic situation.
Frankly most small professional services type companies are virtually worthless on an asset value basis.
This was my first thought, as the owner of a small professional services company.
If you tried to value my company using multiples, it'd be worth some crazy, insane amount of money. But it's be honest, here. If you bought my company, and I tendered my 2-week resignation, in 2 weeks, that company would be worth less than $50,000 (actual value of all assets... some computer equipment and outstanding receivables, basically... I'm too lazy to fire up quickbooks and look at my balance sheet).
I wonder how that would work if my wife and I ever got divorced. The business would have to be valued at something above book value. Would she take shares, with full knowledge that I could shutter the business? Or would she buy me out with cash? Hopefully I never have to find out. But I'm the morbid type of person who thinks about these things.
you could use a system that separates components into libraries and interfaces, allows you to modularize, allows database independence, makes testing easy, has static typing so the compiler can catch 80% of problems before they ever get executed. Has AOP, has IOC that isn't insane and is used by more enterprise shops that anything else.
I'm curious on this one. When is the last time you swapped out one database for another?
Also, can you name a few good uses for AOP other than trace-level logging and security? I'm not trolling, I just really wish I knew the answer and I've been asking everyone who sounded like they could give one to me.
Also by default it does not use the gps so it's always about 2500 feet off from where you really are.
Did I read that correctly? That by default, latitude can only get your location to within 1 mile by default (you specified a 1/2 mile radius)?
"Greatest Snow On Earth" and they're right.
I'd gladly pay double (and generally do!) to ski Deer Valley than...
Why, for the love of god, would you want to ski the greatest snow on earth after a snowcat has ruined it? Have you lost your mind?
but you might have noticed that the internet has evolved since 1994, and technologies, such as AJAX, are transforming the web browsing experience in GOOD ways, such as google maps.
Yup. That's why AdBlock Plus is your friend. It only blocks the ad content, and leaves the rest of the page alone.
Why do you suppose he wasn't learning the material? I'm not trying to imply that it's your fault. I'm just curious what some of the preventers of education are.
I agree with everything you said except the first sentence. While a child's parents may be the single biggest predictor of academic success, it does not follow that parents are therefore the key to solving our educational problems. Unless you know of a way to make sure all parents are successful and supportive.
It's easy to make sure all parents are successful and supportive--just fix the schools! ;)
OK, all kidding aside, my post was not intended as a blueprint for education reform; it was merely a refutation of the quote, "Please keep the parents isolated from the educational system. They are the problem." That guy's solution to education was "DEMAND EXCELLENCE", and it makes the usual mistake that you hear when you get unsolicited parenting advice: they say what worked (or they think would have worked) for them, and totally ignore the fact that every kid is different.
The "DEMAND EXCELLENCE" solution works only for the subset of kids of a middle to upper class background, with a calm home life, and a natural aptitude for studies, and who care about their future.
Anyone with two eyes can see that not all kids fall into that description. There are kids who come to school hungry (how can you work or learn when you're hungry?). There are kids with abusive parent(s). There are kids with terrible role models for parents. There are kids who struggle with certain subject areas--some parents can afford tutoring, which may or may not help. Many teenagers are not able to really grasp life even 1 year into the future, let alone 5 or 10 years in to the future.
Personally, I think our schools do pretty well. Sure, they don't develop each and every student to his or her maximum potential, but I think that expectation is unrealistic. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to the students to pressure all of them to be the next Einstein.
I attended a high school filled with children of over-achieving parents, and the school followed the "DEMAND EXCELLENCE" approach. It was probably the right call, given the background of the majority of the students, but at the same time, I saw it fail kids who were outside of the norm. Thankfully, the school had some good solutions for the 0.1% of the students who were not college-bound.
At any rate, I am yet to be convinced that there serious, fundamental problems with our schools that need urgent fixing. Sure, we have schools where students have low average test scores, but is that really a reflection on the school? Or are the low test scores just a reflection of the school's constituents? I'm not trying to throw up my hands and abdicate responsibility for those kids--after all, it's not their fault they lost the "good parents" lottery. I think what's most important is that there be a path out of that cycle of poverty for those who are willing to work at it.
Heh heh. Fair enough. But there is a big difference between instilling a sense of self-respect in your kids over their entire lifetimes, and some type of edict that "parents must make their kids go to school."
My kids go to school. But if they didn't, what exactly do you propose that I do about it at that point in time? By then, I'd have long-since missed the boat on modeling the importance of education.
If I drop my kids off at school and they go in the front door and straight out the back... seriously. What could I do about it?
For example, the access to my country's equivalent to the ivy league schools doesn't depend on your family's wealth, which means that if you are dumb as a door knob and you happen to be the son of a billionaire then you still have to work your ass off in order to be admitted to one of those schools. It also means that if you are terribly smart and talented then you may enrol in those schools, no matter how poor you are. It's raw talent that matters, now raw cash.
I see someone has been watching too many Hollywood movies. This is a silly caricature of how higher education really works in the states.
Harvard doesn't publish statistics of how many students are admitted into each freshman class solely because of rich parents building a new library (and the student would not have otherwise qualified), but the number is necessarily small. After all, if building a library is a requirement for matriculation, the campus would be stacked with nothing but libraries, one on top of another.
Scholarships and financial aid are readily available here for students that need it, and the overwhelming majority of Universities here strive to achieve a high level of diversity in each freshman class.
2) Schools are unable to get rid of disruptive students, and believe me as a guy who taught high school for awhile, one disruptive kid can distract 30 others who are happy to learn.
Why do you think that one kid was disruptive, in the face of 30 others who would have preferred to learn? Talk about going against a lot of peer pressure.
Please keep the parents isolated from the educational system. They are the problem.
This is absurd.
A child's parents are his single, biggest predictor of academic success. Don't believe me? Try this little thought experiment:
How long do you think it would take for the students that used to attend the worst school, but now attend the best school, to eclipse their best school to worst school student counterparts?
1 year? 5 years? 12 years? 20 years? Ever?
I'm sorry to say, but it's not the teachers who make the school. It's the students. And who makes the students?
There really isn't a lot a teacher can do to get my kids to perform. After all, a teacher will only see them for 1 hour per day, whereas I have had them their entire lives. Teachers love to bitch about parents, but the fact is, teachers can't accomplish anything without the parents. Why do you think my kid is acing your class? Because you are a brilliant teacher? Or because I taught them to speak, read, and write in 2 languages at age 3?
Teachers have very little control over education outcomes--A fact that they are quick to trumpet when a student comes from a wretched home life, but are slow to admit when a student arrives well-prepared to perform.
The process you are seeking is making parents accountable and making sure their children actually go to school.
One thing you'll notice about children is their innate love of learning. They are often called "sponges" for a reason.
If a child ever says, "I hate school," then there is something seriously wrong with that school. Any school that sucks the drive to learn out of a child should be shut down immediately.
Well if you have to ask that, you've probably gone horribly wrong as a parent years ago.
I hate to break this to you, but kids are their own people, and they don't always do as their parents instruct them.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that kids are genetically programmed to assert their independence from their parents. Some people refer to this as "teenage rebellion", but it's really just the natural order of things.
He probably meant 102 degrees.
These days, it's normally more like, "If you have a common programming task that everyone and his mother has to solve, chances are there is a library/STL/JDK/whatever routine available that has had all the bugs worked out of it years ago. You'd be an idiot to write your own."
A huge pet peeve of mine is reviewing code where someone has reimplemented some type of date, math, sort, data structure, or similar construct. Chances are greater than 90% that there is a totally unnecessary bug in there somewhere; and chances are greater than 99.9% that the library function is in O(way the fuck less than the homebrew function).
Random-but-informed guess: these log files are large, and you slurped them all into memory in your Perl program, causing swap and IO thrash.
If I did that, it was not intentional. But even if I had done that, the machine I was running on had gigs of memory, and the log files were in the hundreds of megs in length.
This was about 2 years ago now, but knowing the way I used to code perl, the perl version would have done an 'open(IN,"<filename") || die' and then a 'while (<IN>) {}'. If perl takes that to mean "read the entire file into memory", then what would have been the more correct perl idiom?
I wouldn't say that perl is useless. I just found Java to have made perl obsolete.