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Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 263

The simple (and reasonably inexpensive) thing to do here would be to have a display system, with a large LCD TV. Then update the two (LCD and site) from the same data. It's not perfect, but will be just as 'useable' by the shop.

There are three local bars using this approach for their beers, and a hamburger shop (which has a decidedly static menu). One of the bars went to this approach (from multiple 5'x5' chalk boards on multiple floors) because they had too many beers which changed entirely too often - they'd often be altering the board several times an evening.

(That said, I prefer the chalkboard, but this does address the irritation of the problem you have.)

Comment Re:Expensive (Score 1) 183

I don't know, it seems to me it may be less determinate - people of all ages die, not just the old.

I'm sure that, over several dozen generations, warfare would be somewhat more refined to be less catastrophically destructive. It will be fought other ways. Today, half the world's at war, and it doesn't result in most of the remainder even being aware of it.

Comment Re:Enjoy years of splitting between 5 and 6 (Score 1) 192

The reasons why perl is still (heavily) used is because of several reasons, I think (for good or bad):

1) The only people who can really read the code in an effective fashion are those who wrote it
2) The perl code that was written is immensely featureful/powerful for what it is, and it does its job well.
3) The types of people who work on software are not the same caliber of 'systems' people as the perl people from yester-year
4) Societal linguistic ability, as well as what we are able to appreciate, has somewhat declined (become more terse) in the past 20 years...

Comment Re:yes. Ex: some overuse of punctuation removed (Score 1) 192

That was /is a big part of the appeal to perl 5 for me.

Perhaps this is a bad example, but "five plus five, which is then divided by seven" may be more clear and consistent, but (5+5)/7 is easier to express - and i'ts formulaic, so it's easier for me to remember.

I really don't want to be verbing nouns and nouning verbs to write a regular expression.

Comment Re:Perl lets me do what I want (Score 1) 192

I agree with everything you said. Having said that, however, perl should not be used but for the simplest of things in the professional world... it's simply not maintainable, because its use encourages the "many ways to do it" mentality, and then nobody can grok what over developers have done. It's certainly at least part of the saying "perl is the only thing that can interpret perl" saying.

Comment really? (Score 1) 192

I was actually not aware that Perl 6 was still, actually, being developed as "someone may use this for real".

I, unlike many people, like perl. Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to flame here. I personally love perl (5), and I'd say it's the language I'm most comfortable/familiar with. It's what I've used for years when I've needed to write something.

But I fully realize that perl is not preferred by many, if not most, these days. It has been replaced in preference by python for many (most?) sysadmins and devops. Legacy mission critical perl code (second to, perhaps, old PHP) is, in my experience, the most reviled thing out there - not because the language is bad, but because so many truly horrible developers (think: those who work on Enterprise Java now for a living) wrote it - and bad perl is worse than pretty much anything and everything else due to how 'creative' it let people be. Most developers really shouldn't try to be creative; it ends badly for everyone but the developer (should he want a perpetual job maintaining the code).

Perl just isn't used all that much anymore, and you tend to get yelled at for trying to do so. I personally think this is sad: what other scripting language will work (often without having to install much, if anything, to get it working) on everything from Windows, to Linux, to FreeBSD, to AIX, and god knows what else, completely seamlessly (assuming it was only written in perl and did not system() stuff all over the place). BASH and even simple SH scripts will not do this.

Perl was written and adopted in the era when CGI was still common, if not still relatively young - almost 20 years ago. In the interim, other languages have come on (ruby, python) which are more pragmatic if you're dealing with common developers with common tasks, and it's use (as well as the many, many modules available for use have gone out of repair. What's more, perl 6 largely fragmented interest in further maintenance/development of perl.

I'm really not sure what perl 6 has to offer over perl 5, or other languages - it does appear to be quite the paradigm change, from what I recall reading a couple years ago... I wish it well but doubt it'll see much adoption.

Comment Re:Not Sexism (Score 1) 642

Also, on this:

"Maybe you could pick out the sexual nature of the violence and say that applying that to only one sex makes a difference."

They'll ultimately say that violence is inherrently 'male' and therefore, it's sexist.

Just like people who disagree with Obama's policy still get smeared with "racist". Just another way to shut down those they disagree with.

Comment how ignorant... (Score 1) 481

Pigs will revert to hairy wild boars within a couple generations in the wild. Judging by how they're considered pests throughout most of the US and are Freetown hunt (bounties, even), I'd suspectmost of what else you've ridden for factuality as well.

Comment The answer is: neither (Score 1) 392

This is what they say, but what they really want is H1B and similar workers.

The value of a degree has never been less in this country.

Yes, they want (and NEED) people with critical thinking skills and a firm grasp on the fundamentals of science as per their field, but what they're saying they need with their money is something not even close to that mark in any regard... at least in IT/systems/storage/development.

Comment Re: rsync causes lockups? (Score 1) 370

Rsync causes a lot of metadata lookups, which will fill arc metadata in a hurry. If arc max isnt set, you'll oom the box (or crash zol if it is, i think). I'm not sure how to monitor or control it on zol, because zol's memory management is still kernel independent....

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