I was awake and felt the Californina quake [I'm in Santa Clara county]. It's probably the 7th or so quakes I've felt over the last 30 years. Where I was it was a small sway for 3-4 seconds. I was lucky [my heart goes out to those more deeply affected]. In the 1989 quake I was in Europe, but came back to find my place had stuff flung everywhere.

My prep [not great]:
- 20 cans of spam [survival rate: one can/day]
- Bottles of water
- Bleach [1 drop per gallon of water from the toilet tank]
- Flashlights with batteries
- Landline phone (with old trimline so that it works w/o power)
- Try to keep my gas tank at least 1/2 full
- Car charger for cell phone
- USB thumb drive on my key ring with copies of all my important documents [*]

[*] Had a fire that gutted half the building near mine once. I had HD backups of data, but they could have gone up in smoke. After that, I got the thumb drive. Now I scan in as much as I can [or print receipt/confirmations to .pdf files]

Perhaps it was "The Green Slime" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Yes, you could provide power for the death ray when the sun isn't shining.

But, "staunchly" is--it was [probably] a typo. A synonym for staunchly is "strictly" [which flows better, IMO], but "staunchly" would still be acceptable.

As to "it's" vs "its", it's often a toss up for many people as its usage isn't always clear cut [even among scholars and academics]. Consider the coin that might be used. In particular, if it's possessed by its own demons :-)

How about Dr. Dobbs?

And the whole riff about GC. It makes out like it's superior in all cases.

It does mention refcounting as a subset [which perl does just fine with]. But, even with GC/refcount, you still have to break cyclic links in a tree (e.g. parent node has a list of children and each child points to its parent) when you're done or it will never GC. Also, sometimes you have to do something explicit to release resources (e.g. files) at a given time, rather than some arbitrary time later.

Further, GC is the bane of anything that must provide a constant semi-realtime response. With refcounting [can be done even in C/C++ if designed that way], you've got a "pay as you go" system [when refcount goes to zero, you free immediately]. With GC, you're "piling up debt" [of reclamation].

I've got a friend who is working on a java based web server system. When GC reclamation [finally] kicks in, the entire system goes "offline" for 35-45 seconds at a clip. He claims that particular system can be ameliorated with better programming practices (e.g. be mindful when a given construct will produce large amounts of GC), but is hard pressed to convince his colleagues of the need to do so.

And maybe perl. They forgot to mention that slashdot uses it [IIRC]. And TIOBE to compile the stats [IIRC].
http://developers.slashdot.org...

Perhaps. But, if you cared to look at the other posts on the thread, you'd see how calm and rationale he was. Or look at the gcc bug report he filed. The gcc bug has gotten fixed

I've met Linus in the flesh a number of years back and he is truly a calm and mellow guy. He only does the "bullying" for the "shock effect" to get people [with strong egos] to actually start _thinking_.

And there is some precedent for this. A number of years back, gcc was doing an illegal code motion optimization across a spinlock. After literally hundreds of posts on the gcc mailing list about how this wasn't a bug, Linus started using muscle. I would have, too, at that point. When somebody finally pointed out that the optimization was actually violating requirements in the memory model of the [then] upcoming ISO C spec, it took another hundred or so posts before they actually believed one of their own [gcc people].

Since that time, the gcc folks have become more receptive to [rather than dismissive of] bugs filed by the kernel people--which is a good thing.

IMO, cmd.com is [also] a four letter word :)

$lisp?? Was this on McGill's RAX/Music or BU's RAX/VPS system by any chance?

But, Germany wants to be part of the "special club" that has been US, GB, Canada, Australia, New Zealand for sharing SIGINT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... But, most of those are just part of the UK, and they speak English [more or less :-)], so Germany can never really be "one of the good ole boys" ...

Among its many other uses, QEMU is used as the android developers' simulator.

I agreed with your original first paragraph [but forgot to mention it--sorry].

We need multiple such ranking lists just like we need multiple style guides. On the latter, some are better than others, but when they all converge on a given point, that's when it's more likely to be a valid concept.

I just looked at the latest tiobe and it appears to better match how I would have [being a programmer] ranked some of the languages. Spectrum will no doubt [have to] tune their methodology, based upon the drumming they're getting in this slashdot topic.

But, comparing languages can be apples/oranges or more like wrench/screwdriver. Although a master index can have benefit, subdividing it by use cases may be better. For example:
- OS/embedded/realtime: C/C++/Obj-C
- Web server backend: perl/Java/php
- sysadmin: perl/python
Even still, there are overlaps/hybrids in these as well.

In the link they provided explaining how they do their rankings, they mention Google search is one metric and also mention that it's what tiobe uses [with a link to tiobe's page]. They're trying to be more transparent and use multiple metrics vs just one or two. Maybe it's time to have an alternative to tiobe. If both indexes, done with different methodologies, provide similar results, this would tend to bolster the validity of each.

I guess I should have used:
    if (a_simple_boolean_expression_variable.that_is_automatic_scope.and_therefore_on_the_stack);
        yet_another_simple_integer_variable.that_is_automatic.and_likewise_on_the_stack = 5; // set value to five

Or, if you [yikes!] prefer camel hump notation:
    if (aSimpleBooleanExpressionVariable.thatIsAutomaticScope.andThereforeOnTheStack);
        yetAnotherSimpleIntegerVariable.thatIsAutomatic.andLikewiseOnTheStack = 5; // set Value To Five

I can be flexible when needed ...