dinom

What is "in-the-mattress" savings exactly... besides one person's savings that another wants to spend differently?

Who should be the ultimate judge of how capital is saved and invested? You? The government? What about the person who actually did the saving?

Taken to it's logical conclusion, saying that "devaluing in-the-mattress savings is a good thing" sounds a lot like "let's soak the rich" to me.... and it's a very slippery road to serfdom.

I see. Still, somehow I don't think trying to crow-bar "Perl11" onto machines against end user wishes is the right approach. There could be a backlash.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lol, here we are again bickering about Perl v. Python.

I guess nothing beats a good flame war... Emacs v. Vi anyone?

I hesitate to say "they're bikeshedding" since triviality can be highly subjective.

For me, backward compatibility and a smooth, discretionary upgrade path is greatly preferred to trends in language popularity. Therefore, I appreciate the extra deliberation they seem to be taking. Of course other people have different preferences.

To suggest they're bikeshedding implies there's some bigger problems being ignored. Can you elaborate on what those may be?

When speaking colloquially, making a distincntion between a "rewrite" and a "language evolution strategy" sounds like nit-picking to me.

I wouldn't worry much... the reports of Perl's death have been greatly exaggerated!

The blog post seems to indicate that the steering council simply wants to to avoid being bitten by Zawinski's "CADT" model.

And who could blame them after seeing the kind of stunts pulled in other language communities?

In the cases where you need root it's often even easier to use the 'tee' command instead of spawning another shell; esp. if the command has symbols which need to be escaped.

Your example would then become something like...

cat whatever.img | sudo tee /dev/whatever > /dev/null # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/82256

Just like in household plumbing, the 'tee' command basically takes the input and sends it to more than one place. Naturally, running 'sudo tee' will let you send things all over but as another user.

All that said, I won't speak to the comment "why does the entire internet say to use dd". I've never actually found the "whole internet" to agree on much of anything (-:

Hmm... that's an interesting question. Could it be that groupthink turns the whole idea on it's head and such a process would just end up hiring nice but mediocre people?

They say Steve Jobs could be a giant a$$hole at times. I've also heard that George Patton wasn't always a particularly lovable guy.

Ultimately all people have shortcomings and so mining their gifts comes with a cost. I'm not strictly trying to make excuses for anti-social behavior here but being able to understand, empathize and forgive must go hand in hand.

William Dunham's "The Mathematical Universe" was already mentioned but I actually came to suggest his earlier work "Journey Through Genius".

I'd like to point out that the strange occurrences of the "=3D" string are due to the fact that the message was originally a "quoted-printable" encoded email and for whatever reason this artifact wasn't removed when posted to the web. Perhaps this was pipermail's fault?

Anyway, when reading the code, you're safe in assuming "=3D" is just a single plain old equal sign. In the "quoted-printable" encoding scheme the two characters following an equal sign are the hex value of the intended character. In effect, equal signs need to be escaped using the "=3D" sequence.

This drove me a little nuts as I was reading and trying to code switch between the assorted languages used in the examples.

I do basically the same thing and I'm quite happy. Does it really counts as a "main computer" though?

Apologies if I'm being dismissive, but obviously it's possible to host email. How much there is to fix is a matter of perspective.

All that's required is to properly configure the service. Beyond that you probably haven't paid the people who run the other system enough to accept mail from you; they're under no obligation.

I'd go on about socioeconomic factors, demand-side economies of scale, perverse incentives and why it's more expensive to send than receive but that's a whole thesis dissertation and belaboring the point a fair bit.

I totally agree with this too. Additionally, MrChromebox is doing some great work in terms of fully liberating some of these older machines!

Interestingly, and on further consideration, using date with %w (as in the example I provided) suffers from the same problem, lol! Creating a file as you did should work nicely. Or a fair bit more arithmetic could be done using date's %s, not my cup of tea though.

As mentioned, the next problem appears when the job takes longer than two days, which requires using flock. I often prefer to use mkdir instead of flock, provided your mkdir is atomic and POSIX compliant... which is usually the case AFAIK. E.G. mkdir a-lock-dir || exit;... rmdir a-lock-dir

Ultimately I don't have too many complaints about cron. But, like anything, it has it's own quirks. Indeed a handy article.

The problem is some months have an odd number of days thereby causing the job to run two days in a row.

I'd consider offloading the work to the shell if you want to run things every other day, e.g.:

* * * * * [ $(($(date +\%w) \% 2)) -eq 0 ] || echo skipped-a-day