killer-rabbit - Slashdot User

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @07:07PM from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:05PM from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.

paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Comment This old fart still misses VMS (Score 1) 610

by killer-rabbit on Friday October 26, 2001 @10:05AM (#2483227) Attached to: Open Source Programmers Stink At Error Handling

I was introduced to Unix back in the early 80s when I studied for my Masters in CS. All the CS course homework was done on a VAX 11/780 running Berkeley Unix. At the time I was already a systems programmer on the University's DEC10 and VAX/VMS systems. Under VMS you could be confident that if a utility that your script called failed, you would get a clear an unambigous error message about exactly which program died and why it died. In contrast my first introduction to Unix error handling was when I made a change to my .login which caused the error message

Where are you?

Every time I logged in. I went to the local Unix sysadmin. He never saw that one before. How did he find out where it was coming from? He grepped the entire system looking for that literal string!!

After years of working on VMS, I moved to working on Linux. Even after years of building scripts on this platform I will ever once in a while be surprised at how some utility will die or fail in some interesting way that I was unable to catch or detect. In VMS this simply does not happen. But with Linux I find myself doing things like examining output files to verify that the stink'n utility I just executed really did do what it was suppose to do, rather than just failing silently.

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