Unfortunately PyPy only supports the legacy Python 2 dialect, not Python 3. Given that Python 2 is a dead end and all new code should be written in Python 3, this makes PyPy a non-starter for many people.
This is unfortunate, but not a total deal-breaker. The recommended compromise is to write in Python 2.x, but plan on using the 2to3 tool to convert to Python 3.x once you no longer need the Python 2.x support. And, you can run 2to3 as a check, to make sure you aren't writing any code that is too horribly tied to Python 2.x.
The 2to3 tool can port most Python 2.x code for you, so it isn't hard to avoid the hard-to-convert bits of Python 2.x. As long as you only use new-style classes, you use lazy iterators as much as possible (use xrange() instead of range(), etc.) and you don't do any deep magic with exceptions, Python 2.x code is a lot like Python 3.x code and the conversion is smooth.
Will users be thinking, "Gosh, this sucks, but I'm sure glad the programmer used a dynamic language, because it made it easier on him (the programmer)."? No, they'll be thinking, "Damn buggy programs! I just lost X (hours,minutes,seconds) of work, and now I'm frustrated!" Programming languages are a means to an end, not an end in itself. Don't be a self centered developer: the fruits of your labor are for users, not so you can write the code equivalent of poetry.
It's true that static type checking can catch bugs for you. That's why, in C, I'm rigorous about declaring const for anything that ought to not change; I like it when the compiler catches a bug for me.
But the world isn't as binary as you make it out to be. It's not a choice between poetry-like code or more correct code; there is more to it than that.
Python's "duck-typing" can let you write one function where you would need to write several in C or C++. As a contrived example:
def add5(x):
return float(x) + 5.0
It doesn't matter what you pass to this function, as long as it can be converted to a float. In C++ you would have to write multiple versions of this with different type signatures. In C you would have to write multiple versions of this with different names! And it would truly suck if just one of the various versions had a bug in it; in Python, with just one function, you have one place to look for bugs.
(You could probably do this contrived example with templates in C++, or even with a macro in C. And this is a useless example. But I think it makes the point, and real examples need not be as useless and trivial.)
Not to mention, statically typed languages allow for easy refactoring possibilities that make it possible to fix all sorts of serious issues, including architectural ones, with reasonable effort expended. Dynamic languages, while they have made some progress in the area of refactoring, are really in the dark ages here.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Dynamic languages, which impose fewer limits on what you can do, have some sort of disadvantage over statically-typed languages for refactoring? How does that work?
And let me counter that with an example. In Python, you are encouraged to simply read and write member variables directly, rather than writing getter and setter functions. But if you ever need to "hook" the getting or setting, you can write a property descriptor and run a getter or setter function, without needing to rewrite any code; the property descriptor does an implicit function call for you can you can do any checking you need.
And finally, every language has its best practices. In the Python community, self-tests are strongly encouraged. Yes, with Python, type errors aren't caught until runtime; but you can easily add self-tests that exercise the code and catch the type errors pretty much immediately after you introduced them.
No language is perfect, but in my experience Python hits a sweet spot. I can get a lot of work done in a few lines of Python, I can write those lines quickly, I can read them when I go back later, and I enjoy the coding more than C. I don't think my Python code is buggier than my C code per line of code, and in Python I write so many fewer lines of code I think I come out ahead on bugs.
Says the guy whose whole life is tied up in the language
That's fair.
and whose project, at Google, to speed it up, crashed and burned.
That's completely wrong. Unladen Swallow was not GvR's project, and it didn't "crash and burn". Unladen Swallow found that their approach was not speeding up Python as much as they had hoped, and the two Google employees were moved on to other projects. The code lives on, and I think people are still doing things with it, although it's clear that PyPy is a better approach.
To me at least, "crash and burn" implies a horrible failure with catastrophic consequences, and Unladen Swallow was considerably less dramatic than that. If you just meant to say "they didn't accomplish their goals", that would be a fair statement.
Python is slow because von Rossum refuses to cut loose the boat-anchor of "anything can change anything at any time".
That was a basic decision way back when, and it would be a profound change to make (the language wouldn't really be Python anymore). I personally don't make much use of this, but supposedly there are some programs that do.
PyPy, the newer Python implementation, uses two interpreters and a JIT compiler to try to handle the dynamism with less overhead. They're making progress, but they need a very complex implementation to do it, and they're many years behind schedule.
There is a very small group of people working on PyPy, and they are doing ambitious things. I'm not overly worried about their schedule.
You failed to mention that PyPy has already achieved great speed when compared to CPython. The latest PyPy is, on average, over 5x as fast as CPython.
if a module or class could only be modified from outside itself if it contained explicit self-modification code (like a relevant "setattr" call) most modules and classes could be nailed down as fixed, "slotted" objects at compile time.
This is an interesting idea. But I am not aware of anyone working on something like this.
Claiming that the "slow parts" should be rewritten in C is a cop-out.
I disagree. Way back at the dawn of time, GvR designed Python to make it easy to interface C code, just exactly as this sort of "escape hatch" to help projects that work well but are too slow, and also for libraries.
I think that the ability to link in C code was an important feature that helped Python win hearts and minds. It's slower than C, but at least you knew there is an escape hatch if you wind up having trouble with it.
Except for number-crunching, or glue code for existing libraries, it's seldom done.
Yeah, but that's kind of like saying that except for stop signs and traffic lights, you usually don't use the brake pedal in a car.
There are all sorts of useful libraries that have been glued into Python, and a major part of Python's popularity is that you can use powerful libraries from a convenient and friendly language.
SciPy is a great example: they took ferociously powerful libraries (written mostly in Fortran) and made them usable from Python. I know I for one can get more work done in Python than in Fortran.
As another example, a few years ago I worked on a project to make a DVD player with some fancy features, and we were doing our development in Python. It was fast enough, even on a cheap embedded processor, because all the heavy lifting was being done by C library code. And we got a lot of work done quickly.
(I have a Python program running right now which will run for over a week, parsing the street address of every business in the US into a standard format. The parser is complex enough that rewriting it in C would be a big job. There's no "inner loop".)
This sounds interesting.
Can you run this in PyPy?
Can you fan it out to multiple processes using the multiprocessing
Step 0 is to get the CCA to change the licensing terms on CSS descrambling. I don't think Apple could do that.
I don't understand why the MPAA guys are so rabid about DVD copying. Handbrake has been available for years, mainstream magazines have published how-to articles on how to use Handbrake to rip your DVDs and re-encode them to smaller files, and I have met people with home media centers that are stuffed to bursting with DVD images. Yet any attempt to try to do this legally is nuked in court.
Maybe the MPAA is deluding itself that Handbrake is so eldritch that only a few geeks have figured it out? (I've seen it and typical teenagers with time on their hands are not going to have a problem with it.) Whether they believe it or not, DVD ripping is already a mainstream activity. But no US-based company can ever release a product with a DVD-ripping feature.
Also, consider this: if you don't have a DVD-ripping feature, you might buy the same movie twice. You already bought the DVD, but you might go to iTunes and buy a download version so you can have it on your Apple TV. And in the near future, DVD sales might drop off, and Internet sales might be the biggest money-maker; I'm sure Apple is doing everything they can to try to set themselves up to grab the lion's share of the new download-only market. Either they don't care about DVDs, or they don't want to get the MPAA mad at them over DVDs when Internet downloads are just about to become a major business. (Apple is well-loved in Hollywood; why risk that?)
On Slashdot, the fact that DVDs are technically easy to rip and re-encode is a feature. For the MPAA and Apple, not so much.
Is this wacky proposal being seriously considered anywhere?
Meanwhile, nobody seems to want to study geoengineering.
We are probably only a few decades from being able to build space-based reflectors that block a nontrivial amount of sunlight from hitting Earth. We can already "seed" clouds to make them rain under some circumstances; maybe we can figure out how to encourage clouds to form, since at least some sorts of clouds seem to reflect heat away from Earth. I have read about proposals to drop something in the ocean (was it powdered iron?) to encourage algae to grow, thus locking in carbon dioxide. In short, there are numerous engineering approaches for cooling the Earth that do not involve mad-scientist gene tinkering.
I worked at RealNetworks for a while, on a doomed project called RealDVD. There were going to be two versions of RealDVD: a software-only version you could run on your laptop or whatever, and a software stack to be licensed to consumer electronics companies.
The reason RealNetworks thought there was a chance they could do this was: Kaleidescape. Kaleidescape made such a product, got sued, and won. There was a clear legal precedent.
For the next section, you are getting this third- or fourth-hand. I wasn't there for this. This is what I remember of how it was explained to me. I apologize in advance if anything here is incorrect.
What did Kaleidescape do? They signed up as a licensed and authorized customer of the official CSS unscrambling code, and built a licensed DVD player. Theirs just happened to have a big box full of hard drives that cached the disc images. (They had a quiet and stylish head-end unit for your living room, and some sort of big noisy box or boxes for the hard drives, which you would put in your basement or whatever.)
Once it was clear what Kaleidescape was up to, they got hit with a lawsuit for violation of contract. They were sued by the authority in charge of CSS, the CCA. In court, Kaleidescape pointed out that they had obeyed the contract to the letter: the contract didn't say anything about not copying the discs, or about the disc needing to be in the drive at the time of playback. (After they signed the contract, they received the technical specs, and the technical documents said "you can't copy the discs and the disc must be in the drive at the time of playback". Kaleidescape argued in court that this cannot be legally held to be part of the contract. The judge agreed.) Kaleidescape prevailed in court.
So, RealNetworks looked at this and said: clear legal precedent that this is legal to do. We had better do everything exactly the way Kaleidescape did it. So we ripped a bit-exact copy of each DVD, making no attempt to re-encode in MPEG4 or anything like that. We encrypted each disc image. We even made the UI pop up messages saying things like "remember, you can only do this if you own the disc". (It goes without saying, but RealNetworks also licensed CSS decryption, with all the hassles that entailed.)
Now, while Kaleidescape charged US $30,000 for their first model, and only US $10,000 for their "inexpensive" model, RealNetworks was going for a $300 price point on the consumer electronics product, and a $50 price point on the Windows software. No doubt this raised the level of concern from the MPAA; instead of a few rich people buying Kaleidescape units, the common people could buy RealDVD en masse.
The Windows software product shipped before we had the consumer electronics version ready to manufacture. It was sold by download, with an introductory price of $30.
The discussion here on Slashdot was nearly unanimous: hah, what morons those RealNetworks guys must be. Why would anyone buy a product that encrypts DVD images and is useless as a ripper, when we can just get Handbrake and do whatever we want?
Despite the/. scorn, the general consumer reaction to RealDVD was very positive, and sales were brisk.
Sales lasted about a week.
The MPAA picked a venue to sue RealNetworks, and asked the judge for an emergency injunction to shut down all sales of RealDVD. The judge (the same judge who ruled on the Napster case) granted the injunction.
This time, it wasn't a breach-of-contract suit. The DMCA gave them a big hammer and they used it. The judge agreed: DMCA says no copying, you guys are copying, you lose. There was more to it, but it was the DMCA that really did in RealDVD.
I wanted a RealDVD player in my living room. I believed in the product. It was not to be.
So when I saw this news, I figured the MPAA had used the DMCA to shut down Kaleidescape. Imagine my surprise when I found that it wa
a substantial number of assorted plastic SoC boxes running linux are user-modifiable today because their sellers were forced to provide sources under the GPL.
It's true. And it's pretty interesting!
The free software community developed a bunch of cool stuff under GPL. These manufacturers could have chosen to license some proprietary stack such as Windows CE, but they chose to use the cool GPL stuff. This cost them no money but imposed an obligation to share.
Then when they didn't share, some people threatened legal action, and they did share.
And I know that in at least the case of Linksys, their original router became very popular, and they likely sold far more units because hacker folks would buy them and customize them. Really this is a classic case of everybody winning.
Personally I think GPL v2 hits the sweet spot for a forced-sharing license: it requires the important things, isn't really onerous at all, and has been tested by the legal system and hasn't been ruled invalid. Linus Torvalds is also a fan; he said that releasing the source for Linux under GPL v2 was one of the best decisions he ever made.
Why don't you point that f-word at any companies who write that requirement into their licenses, rather than at me?
The specific example: I worked on a doomed project that was supposed to have DVD playback as one of its features. It turns out that when you sign the legal documents to legally license CSS, you need to agree to do all sorts of things: you must lock up the oh-so-secret CSS documentation (I never saw it myself), only full-time employees may see that oh-so-secret documentation, and... you are required to take steps to prevent reverse-engineering of the dread secret of CSS.
Mind you, one can buy a T-shirt with the dread secret of CSS printed on it. That horse has left the barn, the barn burned down, and condos were built on the site. But I didn't make this stuff up; the above is what I heard about the contractual requirements to implement CSS decryption.
So, because your opinion is so incredibly important to me, I am asking you: Do you have a problem with a company making software that can legally play DVDs? Please feel free to answer on behalf of any customers who might want to buy such software.
If it really riles you up, maybe you should arrange to have the DMCA repealed. If our product could have legally just used the CSS secret without signing any contracts, of course we would have done that.
Basically this is every free math tool out there, glued together using Python, with a nice web "workbook" interface. It can make plots, do symbolic math, and all sorts of stuff.
Fun fact: someone ported TeX font rendering to JavaScript, and that is what SAGE uses to draw math equations in your browser.
In other words, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who wish to violate that license and make unauthorized derivatives.
Wow, way to set up a straw man there.
Okay, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who want to violate the license. Tautology, so I'm hardly going to argue with it. But "in other words" implies that this is a reasonable paraphrase of the GP post, which this is not.
Some FLOSS licenses are a pain even for people who don't want to violate licenses. Suppose I want to include a library in a proprietary closed-source project. With some licenses, I can just do it. With BSD + "advertising clause", I now have an obligation to put text in my program, to put text in my manual, and possibly to put text on my web site and on a product package; I also have to keep track of whether I did the text or not, and make sure it isn't accidentally removed or altered. And I'll tell you right now: non-hypothetically, I avoid any license with an "advertising clause" for the above reason. With LGPL, I explicitly have to allow my customers to reverse-engineer my code, which would be a problem with a commercial product using licensed code (some licensed code requires one to take steps to prevent reverse-engineering).
So, a higher post in this thread claimed that the requirements of Affero GPL include an "auditing" clause, which potentially places an annoying burden on anyone who hosts the Affero GPL code. I haven't reviewed the Affero GPL so I don't know if this is correct, but I assume it is because you engaged in a straw-man attack rather than just pointing out an error.
So with a few examples I have shown that some licenses are more burdensome than others. In fact it is only people who do care about obeying licenses who are burdened; people who are just planning to violate the licenses can violate Affero GPL as easily as any other.
As to not seeing a "battle", that language overstates the case but you do probably see the differences among the licenses and you have apparently made your choice. Your choice is no more or less political than someone who chooses a strongly copylefted free software license such as the AGPL. Freedom of choice doesn't really explain anything. Choices are present in proprietary licenses too, thus highlighting how freedom of choice is a scam: The user's software freedoms are not respected nor is the open source development methodology present.
I have read this paragraph three times and I am not sure what you were trying to say here. If it is important, please restate.
"Freedom of choice doesn't explain anything"? What?
Ebooks based on public domain works are penned by authors and copyrighted. They cost the same to produce as any other new work.
Okay, if you want to parse "based on" that way, you are correct.
It would also be correct to say that a collection of public domain short stories is "based on public domain works", but now an editor is choosing the stories, and perhaps proofreading for typos. This will not in fact cost the same to produce as any other new work, because the editor will not be asking any authors to rewrite unclear sections or make any other changes, so the editing will be very fast; there will be no royalties paid to any authors; and people might just download a bunch of free stuff from Project Gutenberg so there is downward price pressure on the book. (I know I would spend a buck or two for an ebook of public domain stories, if an editor I like chose them and maybe wrote introductions.)
Similar to the above, if I discover an out-of-copyright book (one that is not available on the Internet yet) in a used bookstore somewhere, and I photograph all the pages with a digital camera and OCR them, it would take me some work to produce an ebook (OCR and proofreading for typos) and I think it would be fair to say the result would be an ebook based on a public domain work; and again it would likely be inexpensive rather than free.
But yes, if an author writes new Tarzan stories, and goes through the whole new-book process with an editor and a publishing house, the new Tarzan book will cost just as much as if he had invented a startlingly brand-new character named "Tazran".
Thank you for teaching me something. I had always thought that metal detectors detect iron or iron alloys.
As the saying goes, "It ain't the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we know that ain't so."
I apologize for upsetting you. I really don't think my offense rises to the level of "f***ing ***hole" but I do apologize.
If I may ask, why would the iron ball escape detection? Would a bigger ball be detected? Or a lumpy ball? The Wikipedia page you cited has a picture of a large lump of gold that was detected by a metal detector; was that detected because it has an irregular shape, or because it's large, or what?
They aren't iron detectors, they are metal detectors.
In fact, they'd detect bronze better than steel.
I have a bronze belt buckle that I have worn many times through airport metal detectors. So, I'd like a citation, because my personal experience argues against your claim.
P.S. I wonder if we will start seeing obsidian or synthetic diamond knives. Good luck detecting those...
But an e-book still has the costs of editing, marketing, royalties, a legal department to track copyright issues, a business development department to manage relationships with e-publishers, accountants, payroll... and for the e-publisher you can add data center costs, bandwidth bills, IT personnel costs, etc.
Absolutely correct. I agree 100%.
The physical part of a book is actually not the majority of the price of a book
I don't think you are correct here, at least not for all cases. This may be true for mass-produced paperbacks, but what about textbooks on non-mainstream subjects, where there may be hundreds of pages with equations and graphs, and not very many copies of the book are ever bought?
Also, what about the cases where a publisher thinks that a book will be a hit, prints ten billion copies, and then the book fails and all those copies get landfilled?
So, I think cost of materials is still a significant factor in the cost of books. In turn, I believe that ebooks ought to cost less than paper books: they shouldn't be free, because as you correctly noted they still have significant costs. But the cost of goods is zero, and the financial risk is greatly reduced, and those things do matter.
Even taking the above into account, obscure textbooks will still be expensive as ebooks, because they are expected to sell only a few copies, so the overhead is paid by fewer sales.
Of course, ebooks based on public domain materials really ought to be very inexpensive: extremely low production costs, no cost of materials, and no risk.
However, people tend not to value something they can't physically hold in their hands, regardless of how much the intangibles actually cost.
Hmm, I'm not sure on this one. iTunes music downloads are very popular, apps downloads are very popular, and ebooks are actually very popular.
If you are saying that people don't want to spend a whole lot on a software good, you are probably correct.
You don't sound like a troll, so if you are, good job for fooling me.
Very briefly, Python is an elegant blending of object-oriented programming with some functional programming stuff built in. It has very useful basic data types built in, including "dictionaries" (associative arrays, where the index can be any hashable value). It was designed to be easy to extend using C code, so that performance-critical stuff could be handled in C (or other languages like FORTRAN).
All languages are trade-offs. Python hits a sweet spot of being powerful and expressive, without being too slow to be useful.
In sciences, especially including astronomy, Python is becoming a widely-used language. Scientists who just want to get their work done appreciate the friendly Python language, and the heavy lifting is done by compiled C and FORTRAN libraries. Google search for "SciPy" and read up on it. (There isn't a "SciRuby" or "SciPerl"...)
Most of the database work I have done has been done in Python. I certainly didn't try to write my own database; I used Python as my interface to a real database. As I am not an SQL guru, Python helped to keep me from making dangerous mistakes and made me much more productive.
Python is my favorite language. Give it a try sometime, away from whatever broken project you were saddled with at your work.
I really liked the first three Stainless Steel Rat books; the others not as much.
As for Deathworld, read all three, in order.
And if you like Harry Harrison, don't miss The Daleth Effect and Tunnel Through the Deeps.
He has also written some pretty unhinged comedy stuff. The first Bill The Galactic Hero novel is grimly funny and has the funniest FTL stardrive ever; I think I read a little of another Bill novel and put it back down. Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers is a sendup of the space opera genre, and contains a whole bunch of deliberately bad and stilted prose. (My favorite: "They ran outside to where the waiting starship was waiting.") It will be funnier if you have already read the Skylark of Space books by E. E. "Doc" Smith.
I'm a big Heinlein fan and I recommend almost all of his "juveniles". Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is a solid choice, but my favorite of the juveniles, hands down, is Citizen of the Galaxy. I also very much recommend The Star Beast, which has some laugh-out-loud moments; plus it is unique among all Heinlein novels in that it has a character who is both competent and a government employee.
Randall Garrett is now best remembered for his Lord Darcy stories (which are great; if you haven't read them, check them out). But one of the best things he ever wrote was a novel called Unwise Child.
There are action scenes, there are geeky science-fiction ideas, there is a bit of sleuthing. The main character is "Mike the Angel", a genius who designs spaceship engines and likes to build gadgets. There's a robot named "Snookums" who... knows too much about hydrogen. There is an overall logic to the plot that isn't obvious as you are reading but makes sense when you reach the end. There is a love interest, a lady scientist who is every bit as brilliant as Mike but in a completely different field. And there is a bunch of lovely writing and snappy dialog, as smart people banter with each other. I think I have re-read this novel over a dozen times, and I'm not done with it yet.
And lucky you, it is one of the works that is actually in the public domain. (It was written when the author had to renew a copyright after a fixed term to keep the copyright, and Garrett never renewed it.) So go and grab your copy here:
You might also find a paperback edition published under the name Starship Death. Since the book was public domain, there was nothing stopping anyone from publishing it under a different title, and someone did.
P.S. If you haven't read the Lord Darcy stories, you can get them in ebook form (any format you like, and with no DRM) from Baen. The stories are collected in a single omnibus volume simply called Lord Darcy and it includes every story Garrett wrote. They are detective stories, set in an alternate-history Earth where magic was developed instead of the science we have; much of Europe and all of North and South America are united into the "Anglo-French Empire" and the rival superpower, the Polish Empire, is often causing trouble. The best stories work both as detective stories and as a glimpse into another world. You can read the first two stories as a preview; if your tastes are anything like mine, you will want to buy the book after you read these.
I think you will enjoy it more if you don't read any spoilers. I'll just say it's told first-person by a narrator with a truly strange point of view, and some truly strange things happen.
This isn't even forgotten, because I don't think it was ever well-known. But I enjoyed the heck out of it, and perhaps you will too.
I've noticed the vast majority of smartphone users simply browse facebook all day long. How smart does a phone need to be to do that?
Microsoft tried a social featurephone. It was called the Kin.RIP. It made sense when they first thought of the idea, partly because there was going to be a special data plan for it that would cost less than an unlimited data plan. When a manager at Microsoft decreed that the Kin project needed to use Windows Phone OS, the project was delayed by over a year, and by then Verizon got fed up and scrapped the special less-expensive data plan, and people were getting really excited about iPhones. So the monthly cost of the Kin would be about the same, the cost of the Kin was nearly the same as the cost of an iPhone (assuming the carrier subsidy of course) and instead of "there's an app for that" the rule was "there's no app for that".
So, does it really surprise you that the Kin failed and people chose smartphones instead?
P.S. Consider two classes of cars:
a) can only go a short distance (most electric cars)
b) can either go a short distance or a long distance (most cars)
The second class is outselling the first class, even for people who spend all week only going a short distance. Are you surprised?
Time was I would have said "any of those is fine".
But Ubuntu sets up the Unity desktop, and Fedora sets up GNOME Shell. Both of these are very different from other desktop environments, particularly Windows.
Unity is very Mac-like, but rather different from Windows.
GNOME Shell in particular has a brand-new interface that is not like Windows and not like the Mac. It is designed to be easy to learn and use, but IMHO it is egregiously different from what has gone before, and using it is (for me) an exercise in frustration. So I view GNOME Shell as a needless roadblock in the way for new students.
Linux Mint has GNOME Shell, but set up with extensions that make it work more like the GUI mainstream from the past decade or two. Which means it works more like Windows. It has a menu button in the same place Windows put the "Start" button, it has minimize/maximize/close, it has a window list, etc. If you choose Linux Mint, you can focus on telling the students the useful and interesting stuff, and not get bogged down in "here's how to manage the desktop GUI".
As someone who dodged unity, and actually switched from KDE to gnome 3 as one of the few people on earth who like it, I was talking to a guy in the office who really likes unity, and having watched him use it, I'm half tempted to give it another try, apart from the whole "unity/gnome 3" fork thing. And bringing windows up*.
I'm annoyed by Unity, partly on principle. By design, Unity is docked on the left side of the screen; you are not permitted to move it somewhere else. That's just petty. I got used to the cool feature of quick-zoom with the mouse wheel and the "logo" key; Canonical ripped that out because it didn't work with Unity. I use a giant, high-resolution monitor, and I don't want a single global menu bar; I like a menu bar per window, and I have the space for it.
So many changes, most of them I don't like, and most of them baked in with no option to change them. GNOME Shell likewise has many changes, most of which I don't like and are baked in.
I wish they would do something somewhere between "stable" and "testing".
There used to be a project like that. It was called "Ubuntu".
Originally, Ubuntu was pretty much Debian with a 6-month release cycle. Over time, Ubuntu kept making things better and feeding back the changes upstream.
But these days Ubuntu is setting policy. Window buttons on the left! "Unity" on the desktop!
But they haven't egregiously broken the Debian underpinnings of Ubuntu, and it is still possible to swap things out and have what you want. That's why I did, in the end, go back to Ubuntu.
Sounds like I could have gone for Linux Mint Debian, too, but done is done. I'll look at Linux Mint Debian sometime later.
Actually, I *did* look at the project page. Which states, in its entirety, "lf is a command-line tool to list files in a terse format, sorted by file extensions. Sorts by the user's locale, or by ASCII, and has many options to control its behavior." It makes no mention of printing the extensions separately, nor of stripping them from the file names.
Hmm, thank you for this feedback.
I have been unmotivated to update lf(1) because nobody is paying any attention to it. If you looked at the page and my explanation didn't make it clear, then that's my fault and I need to improve that. Maybe more people would care if I explained the benefits better.
I assumed the prose description on the web page would describe all the salient features. I see now that assumption was a bad one.
Ouch, sorry.
It didn't occur to me that you're breaking up the file names.
I got the idea from an old public domain program for MS-DOS, which was called LF.COM. I wish I could credit the person behind this program but I have no idea who that person was; the program didn't include any name, not even a nickname like "TheMadCoder" or whatever. And this was pre-Web, so there was no question of it mentioning a home page or anything like that.
Anyway, you might not think that leaving off the extension would make a big difference, but it can really pack more file names onto the screen, and I still find it very readable. And I like how you can tell at a glace what sort of files you are seeing: if they are mostly.cpp and.hpp files, you are looking at C++ source; if they are mostly.html files, you are looking at web page stuff; and so on.
I never stopped using Debian on my servers. Debian Stable for the win.
For desktops and especially for laptops, I'm still (sigh) on Ubuntu. To think that I used to look forward to each release!
I recently had to set up a laptop. First I tried Linux Mint, because I like their attitude toward the users. (You liked GNOME 2.x? Here's MGSE, here's Mate, and here's Cinnamon.) However, I was unable to build using Clang, because the linker would fail (something not quite set up right with the C library). Second I tried Debian 6.0, and I smiled when the GNOME 2.x desktop came up. But then I realized that my WiFi hardware wasn't working at all. I'm spoiled by good job Ubuntu has done of making WiFi "Just Work". So in the end I put Ubuntu 11.10 on there, and installed the PPA to get Cinnamon.
Cinnamon has rough edges, but it's good enough to get me working on the laptop, and I have hopes that it will be refined and polished to the point where it will match GNOME 2.x.
Another possibility is to just run GNOME Shell, but install about two dozen extensions to make it look and work more like GNOME 2.x.
Or you could just let the GNOME guys tell you how to use your own computer, and use GNOME Shell; that's a bit more tolerable than Unity.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately PyPy only supports the legacy Python 2 dialect, not Python 3. Given that Python 2 is a dead end and all new code should be written in Python 3, this makes PyPy a non-starter for many people.
This is unfortunate, but not a total deal-breaker. The recommended compromise is to write in Python 2.x, but plan on using the 2to3 tool to convert to Python 3.x once you no longer need the Python 2.x support. And, you can run 2to3 as a check, to make sure you aren't writing any code that is too horribly tied to Python 2.x.
The 2to3 tool can port most Python 2.x code for you, so it isn't hard to avoid the hard-to-convert bits of Python 2.x. As long as you only use new-style classes, you use lazy iterators as much as possible (use xrange() instead of range(), etc.) and you don't do any deep magic with exceptions, Python 2.x code is a lot like Python 3.x code and the conversion is smooth.
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
steveha
Will users be thinking, "Gosh, this sucks, but I'm sure glad the programmer used a dynamic language, because it made it easier on him (the programmer)."? No, they'll be thinking, "Damn buggy programs! I just lost X (hours,minutes,seconds) of work, and now I'm frustrated!" Programming languages are a means to an end, not an end in itself. Don't be a self centered developer: the fruits of your labor are for users, not so you can write the code equivalent of poetry.
It's true that static type checking can catch bugs for you. That's why, in C, I'm rigorous about declaring const for anything that ought to not change; I like it when the compiler catches a bug for me.
But the world isn't as binary as you make it out to be. It's not a choice between poetry-like code or more correct code; there is more to it than that.
Python's "duck-typing" can let you write one function where you would need to write several in C or C++. As a contrived example:
def add5(x):
return float(x) + 5.0
It doesn't matter what you pass to this function, as long as it can be converted to a float. In C++ you would have to write multiple versions of this with different type signatures. In C you would have to write multiple versions of this with different names! And it would truly suck if just one of the various versions had a bug in it; in Python, with just one function, you have one place to look for bugs.
(You could probably do this contrived example with templates in C++, or even with a macro in C. And this is a useless example. But I think it makes the point, and real examples need not be as useless and trivial.)
Not to mention, statically typed languages allow for easy refactoring possibilities that make it possible to fix all sorts of serious issues, including architectural ones, with reasonable effort expended. Dynamic languages, while they have made some progress in the area of refactoring, are really in the dark ages here.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Dynamic languages, which impose fewer limits on what you can do, have some sort of disadvantage over statically-typed languages for refactoring? How does that work?
And let me counter that with an example. In Python, you are encouraged to simply read and write member variables directly, rather than writing getter and setter functions. But if you ever need to "hook" the getting or setting, you can write a property descriptor and run a getter or setter function, without needing to rewrite any code; the property descriptor does an implicit function call for you can you can do any checking you need.
And finally, every language has its best practices. In the Python community, self-tests are strongly encouraged. Yes, with Python, type errors aren't caught until runtime; but you can easily add self-tests that exercise the code and catch the type errors pretty much immediately after you introduced them.
http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/index.html
No language is perfect, but in my experience Python hits a sweet spot. I can get a lot of work done in a few lines of Python, I can write those lines quickly, I can read them when I go back later, and I enjoy the coding more than C. I don't think my Python code is buggier than my C code per line of code, and in Python I write so many fewer lines of code I think I come out ahead on bugs.
steveha
Says the guy whose whole life is tied up in the language
That's fair.
and whose project, at Google, to speed it up, crashed and burned.
That's completely wrong. Unladen Swallow was not GvR's project, and it didn't "crash and burn". Unladen Swallow found that their approach was not speeding up Python as much as they had hoped, and the two Google employees were moved on to other projects. The code lives on, and I think people are still doing things with it, although it's clear that PyPy is a better approach.
To me at least, "crash and burn" implies a horrible failure with catastrophic consequences, and Unladen Swallow was considerably less dramatic than that. If you just meant to say "they didn't accomplish their goals", that would be a fair statement.
Python is slow because von Rossum refuses to cut loose the boat-anchor of "anything can change anything at any time".
That was a basic decision way back when, and it would be a profound change to make (the language wouldn't really be Python anymore). I personally don't make much use of this, but supposedly there are some programs that do.
PyPy, the newer Python implementation, uses two interpreters and a JIT compiler to try to handle the dynamism with less overhead. They're making progress, but they need a very complex implementation to do it, and they're many years behind schedule.
There is a very small group of people working on PyPy, and they are doing ambitious things. I'm not overly worried about their schedule.
You failed to mention that PyPy has already achieved great speed when compared to CPython. The latest PyPy is, on average, over 5x as fast as CPython.
http://speed.pypy.org/
if a module or class could only be modified from outside itself if it contained explicit self-modification code (like a relevant "setattr" call) most modules and classes could be nailed down as fixed, "slotted" objects at compile time.
This is an interesting idea. But I am not aware of anyone working on something like this.
Claiming that the "slow parts" should be rewritten in C is a cop-out.
I disagree. Way back at the dawn of time, GvR designed Python to make it easy to interface C code, just exactly as this sort of "escape hatch" to help projects that work well but are too slow, and also for libraries.
I think that the ability to link in C code was an important feature that helped Python win hearts and minds. It's slower than C, but at least you knew there is an escape hatch if you wind up having trouble with it.
Except for number-crunching, or glue code for existing libraries, it's seldom done.
Yeah, but that's kind of like saying that except for stop signs and traffic lights, you usually don't use the brake pedal in a car.
There are all sorts of useful libraries that have been glued into Python, and a major part of Python's popularity is that you can use powerful libraries from a convenient and friendly language.
SciPy is a great example: they took ferociously powerful libraries (written mostly in Fortran) and made them usable from Python. I know I for one can get more work done in Python than in Fortran.
As another example, a few years ago I worked on a project to make a DVD player with some fancy features, and we were doing our development in Python. It was fast enough, even on a cheap embedded processor, because all the heavy lifting was being done by C library code. And we got a lot of work done quickly.
(I have a Python program running right now which will run for over a week, parsing the street address of every business in the US into a standard format. The parser is complex enough that rewriting it in C would be a big job. There's no "inner loop".)
This sounds interesting.
Can you run this in PyPy?
Can you fan it out to multiple processes using the multiprocessing
Step 0 is to get the CCA to change the licensing terms on CSS descrambling. I don't think Apple could do that.
I don't understand why the MPAA guys are so rabid about DVD copying. Handbrake has been available for years, mainstream magazines have published how-to articles on how to use Handbrake to rip your DVDs and re-encode them to smaller files, and I have met people with home media centers that are stuffed to bursting with DVD images. Yet any attempt to try to do this legally is nuked in court.
Maybe the MPAA is deluding itself that Handbrake is so eldritch that only a few geeks have figured it out? (I've seen it and typical teenagers with time on their hands are not going to have a problem with it.) Whether they believe it or not, DVD ripping is already a mainstream activity. But no US-based company can ever release a product with a DVD-ripping feature.
Also, consider this: if you don't have a DVD-ripping feature, you might buy the same movie twice. You already bought the DVD, but you might go to iTunes and buy a download version so you can have it on your Apple TV. And in the near future, DVD sales might drop off, and Internet sales might be the biggest money-maker; I'm sure Apple is doing everything they can to try to set themselves up to grab the lion's share of the new download-only market. Either they don't care about DVDs, or they don't want to get the MPAA mad at them over DVDs when Internet downloads are just about to become a major business. (Apple is well-loved in Hollywood; why risk that?)
On Slashdot, the fact that DVDs are technically easy to rip and re-encode is a feature. For the MPAA and Apple, not so much.
steveha
Is this wacky proposal being seriously considered anywhere?
Meanwhile, nobody seems to want to study geoengineering.
We are probably only a few decades from being able to build space-based reflectors that block a nontrivial amount of sunlight from hitting Earth. We can already "seed" clouds to make them rain under some circumstances; maybe we can figure out how to encourage clouds to form, since at least some sorts of clouds seem to reflect heat away from Earth. I have read about proposals to drop something in the ocean (was it powdered iron?) to encourage algae to grow, thus locking in carbon dioxide. In short, there are numerous engineering approaches for cooling the Earth that do not involve mad-scientist gene tinkering.
steveha
I worked at RealNetworks for a while, on a doomed project called RealDVD. There were going to be two versions of RealDVD: a software-only version you could run on your laptop or whatever, and a software stack to be licensed to consumer electronics companies.
The reason RealNetworks thought there was a chance they could do this was: Kaleidescape. Kaleidescape made such a product, got sued, and won. There was a clear legal precedent.
For the next section, you are getting this third- or fourth-hand. I wasn't there for this. This is what I remember of how it was explained to me. I apologize in advance if anything here is incorrect.
What did Kaleidescape do? They signed up as a licensed and authorized customer of the official CSS unscrambling code, and built a licensed DVD player. Theirs just happened to have a big box full of hard drives that cached the disc images. (They had a quiet and stylish head-end unit for your living room, and some sort of big noisy box or boxes for the hard drives, which you would put in your basement or whatever.)
Once it was clear what Kaleidescape was up to, they got hit with a lawsuit for violation of contract. They were sued by the authority in charge of CSS, the CCA. In court, Kaleidescape pointed out that they had obeyed the contract to the letter: the contract didn't say anything about not copying the discs, or about the disc needing to be in the drive at the time of playback. (After they signed the contract, they received the technical specs, and the technical documents said "you can't copy the discs and the disc must be in the drive at the time of playback". Kaleidescape argued in court that this cannot be legally held to be part of the contract. The judge agreed.) Kaleidescape prevailed in court.
So, RealNetworks looked at this and said: clear legal precedent that this is legal to do. We had better do everything exactly the way Kaleidescape did it. So we ripped a bit-exact copy of each DVD, making no attempt to re-encode in MPEG4 or anything like that. We encrypted each disc image. We even made the UI pop up messages saying things like "remember, you can only do this if you own the disc". (It goes without saying, but RealNetworks also licensed CSS decryption, with all the hassles that entailed.)
Now, while Kaleidescape charged US $30,000 for their first model, and only US $10,000 for their "inexpensive" model, RealNetworks was going for a $300 price point on the consumer electronics product, and a $50 price point on the Windows software. No doubt this raised the level of concern from the MPAA; instead of a few rich people buying Kaleidescape units, the common people could buy RealDVD en masse.
The Windows software product shipped before we had the consumer electronics version ready to manufacture. It was sold by download, with an introductory price of $30.
The discussion here on Slashdot was nearly unanimous: hah, what morons those RealNetworks guys must be. Why would anyone buy a product that encrypts DVD images and is useless as a ripper, when we can just get Handbrake and do whatever we want?
Despite the /. scorn, the general consumer reaction to RealDVD was very positive, and sales were brisk.
Sales lasted about a week.
The MPAA picked a venue to sue RealNetworks, and asked the judge for an emergency injunction to shut down all sales of RealDVD. The judge (the same judge who ruled on the Napster case) granted the injunction.
This time, it wasn't a breach-of-contract suit. The DMCA gave them a big hammer and they used it. The judge agreed: DMCA says no copying, you guys are copying, you lose. There was more to it, but it was the DMCA that really did in RealDVD.
I wanted a RealDVD player in my living room. I believed in the product. It was not to be.
So when I saw this news, I figured the MPAA had used the DMCA to shut down Kaleidescape. Imagine my surprise when I found that it wa
a substantial number of assorted plastic SoC boxes running linux are user-modifiable today because their sellers were forced to provide sources under the GPL.
It's true. And it's pretty interesting!
The free software community developed a bunch of cool stuff under GPL. These manufacturers could have chosen to license some proprietary stack such as Windows CE, but they chose to use the cool GPL stuff. This cost them no money but imposed an obligation to share.
Then when they didn't share, some people threatened legal action, and they did share.
And I know that in at least the case of Linksys, their original router became very popular, and they likely sold far more units because hacker folks would buy them and customize them. Really this is a classic case of everybody winning.
Personally I think GPL v2 hits the sweet spot for a forced-sharing license: it requires the important things, isn't really onerous at all, and has been tested by the legal system and hasn't been ruled invalid. Linus Torvalds is also a fan; he said that releasing the source for Linux under GPL v2 was one of the best decisions he ever made.
steveha
Why don't you point that f-word at any companies who write that requirement into their licenses, rather than at me?
The specific example: I worked on a doomed project that was supposed to have DVD playback as one of its features. It turns out that when you sign the legal documents to legally license CSS, you need to agree to do all sorts of things: you must lock up the oh-so-secret CSS documentation (I never saw it myself), only full-time employees may see that oh-so-secret documentation, and... you are required to take steps to prevent reverse-engineering of the dread secret of CSS.
Mind you, one can buy a T-shirt with the dread secret of CSS printed on it. That horse has left the barn, the barn burned down, and condos were built on the site. But I didn't make this stuff up; the above is what I heard about the contractual requirements to implement CSS decryption.
So, because your opinion is so incredibly important to me, I am asking you: Do you have a problem with a company making software that can legally play DVDs? Please feel free to answer on behalf of any customers who might want to buy such software.
If it really riles you up, maybe you should arrange to have the DMCA repealed. If our product could have legally just used the CSS secret without signing any contracts, of course we would have done that.
steveha
Anyone interested in LastCalc is probably also interested in SAGE:
http://sagemath.org/
Basically this is every free math tool out there, glued together using Python, with a nice web "workbook" interface. It can make plots, do symbolic math, and all sorts of stuff.
Fun fact: someone ported TeX font rendering to JavaScript, and that is what SAGE uses to draw math equations in your browser.
steveha
In other words, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who wish to violate that license and make unauthorized derivatives.
Wow, way to set up a straw man there.
Okay, any FLOSS license is objectionable to those who want to violate the license. Tautology, so I'm hardly going to argue with it. But "in other words" implies that this is a reasonable paraphrase of the GP post, which this is not.
Some FLOSS licenses are a pain even for people who don't want to violate licenses. Suppose I want to include a library in a proprietary closed-source project. With some licenses, I can just do it. With BSD + "advertising clause", I now have an obligation to put text in my program, to put text in my manual, and possibly to put text on my web site and on a product package; I also have to keep track of whether I did the text or not, and make sure it isn't accidentally removed or altered. And I'll tell you right now: non-hypothetically, I avoid any license with an "advertising clause" for the above reason. With LGPL, I explicitly have to allow my customers to reverse-engineer my code, which would be a problem with a commercial product using licensed code (some licensed code requires one to take steps to prevent reverse-engineering).
So, a higher post in this thread claimed that the requirements of Affero GPL include an "auditing" clause, which potentially places an annoying burden on anyone who hosts the Affero GPL code. I haven't reviewed the Affero GPL so I don't know if this is correct, but I assume it is because you engaged in a straw-man attack rather than just pointing out an error.
So with a few examples I have shown that some licenses are more burdensome than others. In fact it is only people who do care about obeying licenses who are burdened; people who are just planning to violate the licenses can violate Affero GPL as easily as any other.
As to not seeing a "battle", that language overstates the case but you do probably see the differences among the licenses and you have apparently made your choice. Your choice is no more or less political than someone who chooses a strongly copylefted free software license such as the AGPL. Freedom of choice doesn't really explain anything. Choices are present in proprietary licenses too, thus highlighting how freedom of choice is a scam: The user's software freedoms are not respected nor is the open source development methodology present.
I have read this paragraph three times and I am not sure what you were trying to say here. If it is important, please restate.
"Freedom of choice doesn't explain anything"? What?
steveha
Ebooks based on public domain works are penned by authors and copyrighted. They cost the same to produce as any other new work.
Okay, if you want to parse "based on" that way, you are correct.
It would also be correct to say that a collection of public domain short stories is "based on public domain works", but now an editor is choosing the stories, and perhaps proofreading for typos. This will not in fact cost the same to produce as any other new work, because the editor will not be asking any authors to rewrite unclear sections or make any other changes, so the editing will be very fast; there will be no royalties paid to any authors; and people might just download a bunch of free stuff from Project Gutenberg so there is downward price pressure on the book. (I know I would spend a buck or two for an ebook of public domain stories, if an editor I like chose them and maybe wrote introductions.)
Similar to the above, if I discover an out-of-copyright book (one that is not available on the Internet yet) in a used bookstore somewhere, and I photograph all the pages with a digital camera and OCR them, it would take me some work to produce an ebook (OCR and proofreading for typos) and I think it would be fair to say the result would be an ebook based on a public domain work; and again it would likely be inexpensive rather than free.
But yes, if an author writes new Tarzan stories, and goes through the whole new-book process with an editor and a publishing house, the new Tarzan book will cost just as much as if he had invented a startlingly brand-new character named "Tazran".
steveha
Thank you for teaching me something. I had always thought that metal detectors detect iron or iron alloys.
As the saying goes, "It ain't the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we know that ain't so."
I apologize for upsetting you. I really don't think my offense rises to the level of "f***ing ***hole" but I do apologize.
If I may ask, why would the iron ball escape detection? Would a bigger ball be detected? Or a lumpy ball? The Wikipedia page you cited has a picture of a large lump of gold that was detected by a metal detector; was that detected because it has an irregular shape, or because it's large, or what?
steveha
They aren't iron detectors, they are metal detectors.
In fact, they'd detect bronze better than steel.
I have a bronze belt buckle that I have worn many times through airport metal detectors. So, I'd like a citation, because my personal experience argues against your claim.
P.S. I wonder if we will start seeing obsidian or synthetic diamond knives. Good luck detecting those...
steveha
But an e-book still has the costs of editing, marketing, royalties, a legal department to track copyright issues, a business development department to manage relationships with e-publishers, accountants, payroll... and for the e-publisher you can add data center costs, bandwidth bills, IT personnel costs, etc.
Absolutely correct. I agree 100%.
The physical part of a book is actually not the majority of the price of a book
I don't think you are correct here, at least not for all cases. This may be true for mass-produced paperbacks, but what about textbooks on non-mainstream subjects, where there may be hundreds of pages with equations and graphs, and not very many copies of the book are ever bought?
Also, what about the cases where a publisher thinks that a book will be a hit, prints ten billion copies, and then the book fails and all those copies get landfilled?
So, I think cost of materials is still a significant factor in the cost of books. In turn, I believe that ebooks ought to cost less than paper books: they shouldn't be free, because as you correctly noted they still have significant costs. But the cost of goods is zero, and the financial risk is greatly reduced, and those things do matter.
Even taking the above into account, obscure textbooks will still be expensive as ebooks, because they are expected to sell only a few copies, so the overhead is paid by fewer sales.
Of course, ebooks based on public domain materials really ought to be very inexpensive: extremely low production costs, no cost of materials, and no risk.
However, people tend not to value something they can't physically hold in their hands, regardless of how much the intangibles actually cost.
Hmm, I'm not sure on this one. iTunes music downloads are very popular, apps downloads are very popular, and ebooks are actually very popular.
If you are saying that people don't want to spend a whole lot on a software good, you are probably correct.
steveha
You don't sound like a troll, so if you are, good job for fooling me.
Very briefly, Python is an elegant blending of object-oriented programming with some functional programming stuff built in. It has very useful basic data types built in, including "dictionaries" (associative arrays, where the index can be any hashable value). It was designed to be easy to extend using C code, so that performance-critical stuff could be handled in C (or other languages like FORTRAN).
All languages are trade-offs. Python hits a sweet spot of being powerful and expressive, without being too slow to be useful.
In sciences, especially including astronomy, Python is becoming a widely-used language. Scientists who just want to get their work done appreciate the friendly Python language, and the heavy lifting is done by compiled C and FORTRAN libraries. Google search for "SciPy" and read up on it. (There isn't a "SciRuby" or "SciPerl"...)
Most of the database work I have done has been done in Python. I certainly didn't try to write my own database; I used Python as my interface to a real database. As I am not an SQL guru, Python helped to keep me from making dangerous mistakes and made me much more productive.
Python is my favorite language. Give it a try sometime, away from whatever broken project you were saddled with at your work.
steveha
I really liked the first three Stainless Steel Rat books; the others not as much.
As for Deathworld, read all three, in order.
And if you like Harry Harrison, don't miss The Daleth Effect and Tunnel Through the Deeps.
He has also written some pretty unhinged comedy stuff. The first Bill The Galactic Hero novel is grimly funny and has the funniest FTL stardrive ever; I think I read a little of another Bill novel and put it back down. Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers is a sendup of the space opera genre, and contains a whole bunch of deliberately bad and stilted prose. (My favorite: "They ran outside to where the waiting starship was waiting.") It will be funnier if you have already read the Skylark of Space books by E. E. "Doc" Smith.
steveha
I'm a big Heinlein fan and I recommend almost all of his "juveniles". Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is a solid choice, but my favorite of the juveniles, hands down, is Citizen of the Galaxy. I also very much recommend The Star Beast, which has some laugh-out-loud moments; plus it is unique among all Heinlein novels in that it has a character who is both competent and a government employee.
steveha
Randall Garrett is now best remembered for his Lord Darcy stories (which are great; if you haven't read them, check them out). But one of the best things he ever wrote was a novel called Unwise Child.
There are action scenes, there are geeky science-fiction ideas, there is a bit of sleuthing. The main character is "Mike the Angel", a genius who designs spaceship engines and likes to build gadgets. There's a robot named "Snookums" who... knows too much about hydrogen. There is an overall logic to the plot that isn't obvious as you are reading but makes sense when you reach the end. There is a love interest, a lady scientist who is every bit as brilliant as Mike but in a completely different field. And there is a bunch of lovely writing and snappy dialog, as smart people banter with each other. I think I have re-read this novel over a dozen times, and I'm not done with it yet.
And lucky you, it is one of the works that is actually in the public domain. (It was written when the author had to renew a copyright after a fixed term to keep the copyright, and Garrett never renewed it.) So go and grab your copy here:
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1957/unwise-child
You might also find a paperback edition published under the name Starship Death. Since the book was public domain, there was nothing stopping anyone from publishing it under a different title, and someone did.
P.S. If you haven't read the Lord Darcy stories, you can get them in ebook form (any format you like, and with no DRM) from Baen. The stories are collected in a single omnibus volume simply called Lord Darcy and it includes every story Garrett wrote. They are detective stories, set in an alternate-history Earth where magic was developed instead of the science we have; much of Europe and all of North and South America are united into the "Anglo-French Empire" and the rival superpower, the Polish Empire, is often causing trouble. The best stories work both as detective stories and as a glimpse into another world. You can read the first two stories as a preview; if your tastes are anything like mine, you will want to buy the book after you read these.
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200207/0743435486.htm
steveha
I really enjoyed a really strange novel called I, Zombie by "Curt Selby". According to this link, this was actually a pen name for Doris Piserchia.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1257369.I_Zombie
I think you will enjoy it more if you don't read any spoilers. I'll just say it's told first-person by a narrator with a truly strange point of view, and some truly strange things happen.
This isn't even forgotten, because I don't think it was ever well-known. But I enjoyed the heck out of it, and perhaps you will too.
steveha
I've noticed the vast majority of smartphone users simply browse facebook all day long. How smart does a phone need to be to do that?
Microsoft tried a social featurephone. It was called the Kin. RIP. It made sense when they first thought of the idea, partly because there was going to be a special data plan for it that would cost less than an unlimited data plan. When a manager at Microsoft decreed that the Kin project needed to use Windows Phone OS, the project was delayed by over a year, and by then Verizon got fed up and scrapped the special less-expensive data plan, and people were getting really excited about iPhones. So the monthly cost of the Kin would be about the same, the cost of the Kin was nearly the same as the cost of an iPhone (assuming the carrier subsidy of course) and instead of "there's an app for that" the rule was "there's no app for that".
So, does it really surprise you that the Kin failed and people chose smartphones instead?
P.S. Consider two classes of cars:
a) can only go a short distance (most electric cars)
b) can either go a short distance or a long distance (most cars)
The second class is outselling the first class, even for people who spend all week only going a short distance. Are you surprised?
steveha
Time was I would have said "any of those is fine".
But Ubuntu sets up the Unity desktop, and Fedora sets up GNOME Shell. Both of these are very different from other desktop environments, particularly Windows.
Unity is very Mac-like, but rather different from Windows.
GNOME Shell in particular has a brand-new interface that is not like Windows and not like the Mac. It is designed to be easy to learn and use, but IMHO it is egregiously different from what has gone before, and using it is (for me) an exercise in frustration. So I view GNOME Shell as a needless roadblock in the way for new students.
Linux Mint has GNOME Shell, but set up with extensions that make it work more like the GUI mainstream from the past decade or two. Which means it works more like Windows. It has a menu button in the same place Windows put the "Start" button, it has minimize/maximize/close, it has a window list, etc. If you choose Linux Mint, you can focus on telling the students the useful and interesting stuff, and not get bogged down in "here's how to manage the desktop GUI".
steveha
As someone who dodged unity, and actually switched from KDE to gnome 3 as one of the few people on earth who like it, I was talking to a guy in the office who really likes unity, and having watched him use it, I'm half tempted to give it another try, apart from the whole "unity/gnome 3" fork thing. And bringing windows up*.
I'm annoyed by Unity, partly on principle. By design, Unity is docked on the left side of the screen; you are not permitted to move it somewhere else. That's just petty. I got used to the cool feature of quick-zoom with the mouse wheel and the "logo" key; Canonical ripped that out because it didn't work with Unity. I use a giant, high-resolution monitor, and I don't want a single global menu bar; I like a menu bar per window, and I have the space for it.
So many changes, most of them I don't like, and most of them baked in with no option to change them. GNOME Shell likewise has many changes, most of which I don't like and are baked in.
Not the way to win me over.
steveha
I wish they would do something somewhere between "stable" and "testing".
There used to be a project like that. It was called "Ubuntu".
Originally, Ubuntu was pretty much Debian with a 6-month release cycle. Over time, Ubuntu kept making things better and feeding back the changes upstream.
But these days Ubuntu is setting policy. Window buttons on the left! "Unity" on the desktop!
But they haven't egregiously broken the Debian underpinnings of Ubuntu, and it is still possible to swap things out and have what you want. That's why I did, in the end, go back to Ubuntu.
Sounds like I could have gone for Linux Mint Debian, too, but done is done. I'll look at Linux Mint Debian sometime later.
steveha
Actually, I *did* look at the project page. Which states, in its entirety, "lf is a command-line tool to list files in a terse format, sorted by file extensions. Sorts by the user's locale, or by ASCII, and has many options to control its behavior." It makes no mention of printing the extensions separately, nor of stripping them from the file names.
Hmm, thank you for this feedback.
I have been unmotivated to update lf(1) because nobody is paying any attention to it. If you looked at the page and my explanation didn't make it clear, then that's my fault and I need to improve that. Maybe more people would care if I explained the benefits better.
I assumed the prose description on the web page would describe all the salient features. I see now that assumption was a bad one.
Ouch, sorry.
It didn't occur to me that you're breaking up the file names.
I got the idea from an old public domain program for MS-DOS, which was called LF.COM. I wish I could credit the person behind this program but I have no idea who that person was; the program didn't include any name, not even a nickname like "TheMadCoder" or whatever. And this was pre-Web, so there was no question of it mentioning a home page or anything like that.
Anyway, you might not think that leaving off the extension would make a big difference, but it can really pack more file names onto the screen, and I still find it very readable. And I like how you can tell at a glace what sort of files you are seeing: if they are mostly .cpp and .hpp files, you are looking at C++ source; if they are mostly .html files, you are looking at web page stuff; and so on.
Thank you for the feedback.
steveha
I never stopped using Debian on my servers. Debian Stable for the win.
For desktops and especially for laptops, I'm still (sigh) on Ubuntu. To think that I used to look forward to each release!
I recently had to set up a laptop. First I tried Linux Mint, because I like their attitude toward the users. (You liked GNOME 2.x? Here's MGSE, here's Mate, and here's Cinnamon.) However, I was unable to build using Clang, because the linker would fail (something not quite set up right with the C library). Second I tried Debian 6.0, and I smiled when the GNOME 2.x desktop came up. But then I realized that my WiFi hardware wasn't working at all. I'm spoiled by good job Ubuntu has done of making WiFi "Just Work". So in the end I put Ubuntu 11.10 on there, and installed the PPA to get Cinnamon.
Cinnamon has rough edges, but it's good enough to get me working on the laptop, and I have hopes that it will be refined and polished to the point where it will match GNOME 2.x.
Another possibility is to just run GNOME Shell, but install about two dozen extensions to make it look and work more like GNOME 2.x.
Or you could just let the GNOME guys tell you how to use your own computer, and use GNOME Shell; that's a bit more tolerable than Unity.
steveha