From slashdot's Is Comcast Intercepting Packets? to the comment Re:I work for a phone company (Score:5, Informative) a passing mention of perl being used (in readmore below), that I thought was cool, which brings me to a question, now questions, (which might have been asked before):

What Cool use for perl do you know of?

and How do you participate?

How useful, if at all, is this use?

And how profitable?

And finally, How does, whoever is using perl for cool purposes, support perl?

... The rule is if you can’t use a blue box on your phone line, then you are traceable down to that specific phone. Digital Switch = Trackable.

p.s. For those who wonder, The system is Called NTU, Network Transaction Usage. We use Perl to gather data off the switches, not every switch is alike, including the os they run and the data needs to be parsed for the database. A HP/UX demon is used to process rules, and sort out how they should be poked into the database. While an oracle database floating on 36 partitions in a huge raid system is used to house the data while it lives. The machine NEVER goes down, even it does go down, monitor machines can quite literally mirror the drives and swap out so no data is ever lost. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen was my cowboy boss walk over to this multi-billion dollar a year machine and say, “Time to test the emergency backup units.” These machines are located in other states altogether btw. Then he just pulls the power cord out of this rack mounted 8 by 8.

 
______crazyinsomniac_____________________________
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

In reply to (possibly *too* OT) A Phone Company uses perl by crazyinsomniac

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