short story by Arthur Clarke.

Do note that the article refers to things happening in the UK..

Where I live, the NOC and IT departments of state universities, schools and research networks have been starved of resources in every conceivable way, including personnel.

At this point, all these organizations are waking up to a situation where both their human and computing resources are completely inadequate to carry out the load in bandwidth (incl VPN), online courses, directory services, mail services, everything. The slashdot effect is coming back with a vengeance. If there is one loud and clear realization, is that starving the IT departments was the single most moronic thing they pulled, ever.

If this social distancing thing persists, a lot more hands will be needed, fast.

And, as other posters pointed out, Amazon and everyone else for that matter, is light years away from bridging the chaos between what it is offering and what is required. People (and mind you I'm talking Professors and PhD-holding researchers here) want to pick up the phone and ask heaven knows what.

Finally, outsourcing some services (gmail or office365 for example) actually requires HEAVY IT involvement to setup SAML, account sync, instructions, support, etc.

You need an IoT cat feeder because you live in a proverbial bubble and don't know what to do with your money. These technologies and products are so fragile, that even people unfamiliar with technology can tell right away.

It's not unwelcome information, it's false information. If you're helping spread false information that will help people get harmed, you're not exercising freedom of speech.

You do know the difference between an opinion and a lie, right?

+1. Not only that, but the new features introduced after 5.8 have to be explicitly enabled(perldoc feature to know how). Otherwise, the behavior is consistent with 5.8. Somebody took extra extra care so that there are no surprises after upgrades.

http://www.measurementlab.net/

Just to be clear, I didn't say anything about C#. As a matter of fact, I agree that C# IS interesting in many pleasant ways.

This criticism that used to apply 15 years ago, but is not really relevant anymore. The Perl community has gone to great lengths to address these things.

For OO, nowadays there is Moose, which is an excellent and extremely capable OO framework for Perl. Please check it out if you like.

For the anti-patterns, please note that strict mode is now the default on Perl 5.14 and I cannot think of a modern library ignoring errors by default. The error ignoring behavior is there for a bunch of built-in stuff that needs to maintain compatibility with old code, but you can, and are encouraged to, include the autodie pragma to change even that behavior.

About the syntax, it's probably a matter of personal taste, so I can't say anything about that. But I believe that personal taste doesn't have to do with whether you know what you're doing or not.

Lastly, writing Perl doesn't mean that your code has to be ugly and error-prone. May I suggest Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices, which IMHO is an excellent book with recommended coding practices.

Hope this helps!...

Thanks for taking the time to read all this way down the comments! I do not know whether this "dogma" as you say applies to Apple, but I sure hope that it doesn't because I really like this company (typing comment on my iPad). But nevertheless this quote of C.N.Parkinson is the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article. Hope I'm wrong. So let's say that it was meant more as a warning rather than as a dogma. If there's one company that can escape being cast into stereotypes, it might as well be Apple.

By the way, good call, you are right about the name ;)

Best regards.

During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.

C. Northcote Parkinson

And yet it is being adhered to with religious devotion by many slashdoters :)

Short story by A.Clarke, highly recommended

Gizmo5 (acquired by Google) will be shutting down on April 3rd. So no more SIP from them. Does anyone know whether it will become possible to make calls to normal numbers by using a google account? Right now it is possible to make calls from within gmail by adding credit to one's account. What is not possible is to use SIP equipment (many good adsl routers and ATA devices have fxp ports and VoIP SIP functionality) to make these calls. So many of us that were using gizmo5 SIP are left in the cold. Any good gizmo5 alternatives anyone?