There are currently a dozen or so GUI modules supported by Python on some or all platforms.
Couldn't we just standardise on one and integrate it more fully into Python.
The venerable TK is good but looks out of place in a Python program. QT is execellent but will they let you package it as an integral part of Python?
I know this debate has been going on since python slithered out of its egg, but, I think the lack of integrated GUI is Pythons biggest (only?) drawback.
The reason the MPAA and RIAA are taking such a heavy attitude is that they are looking at the death of thier business.
Thier business is selling copies of copryrighted materials. There are some sidelines in promoting the creation of these materials, but the basic business is selling copies.
Now right or wrong thier basic business model has sprung a small but growing leak, and, I for one don't see how they can stop it. Its just so easy to download MP3s, is just so easy to rip a CD, its just so easy to post the files on a server.
If this continues the music business in the US will look like the music business in the Arabic world, where, because copying is the norm, and, nobody but nobody pays full price for a cassette, you have artists as big as Springsteen or Bon Jovi whose only way to earn money is to do concerts.
Artists who would be billionaires if they were as popular in the US, make a reasonable living but are not rich. Artists who are popular (but not quite so popular) play in nighclubs thier whole lives or drive taxis.
1.) Ball point pens were invented circa 1942 by a Hungarian? guy named Biro.
2.)Syntehetic fibres go way back at leat to Rayon in the 1930s.
3.)I am sure there were fairly advanced aircraft before 1965?
4.)Noise reduction was amust for Radar in world war two.
5.)Bar codes came from early sixties reasearch sponsored by railroad companies looking for ways to make freight cars machine readable.
6. ?
7. Thermocouples circa 1920.
8. I am sure we had batteries before 1965.
9. The Joystick -- Wasn't that Wilbert Wrights breakthrough! It made all the complex controls surfaces of the Wright Flyer easy to manipulate (He may have got the idea from somewhere else).
10. Well only Teflon and that see through stuff begining with C they use on motorcycle visors.
I have a friend who owns some copyrigth and while he occasionaly get payments from MTV etc. he has yet to see a check for his percentage of blank tapes etc...
People who spend large amounts of money on TV commercials also spend smaller but still significant amounts analysing how succesful the adverts were.
Hence they go to Neilsen for accurate estimates of how many people watched the ads. To there own sales figures to see what the effects were on sales, to companies like MORI and Gallup to see what the consumers thought of the ads, and, lastly to companies like JICTAR to see what effect the ads had on individual consumers purchases.
If the results of all this research showed TV advertising to be innefective (which it sometimes does) then companies spend the large wad of money in another medium.
One of the reasons the bottom dropped out of the market so quickly is Nielsen started to apply some of these disiplines to web advertising, hoping to to get in early and make lots of money out of web "metrics", only to discover that by any rational criteria web advertising was a waste of time and money for a non web related company.
There is no such thing as consent in pornography, because every person involved is there because of dire economic need. But we tolerate women's public humiliation and public rape, because men universally crave and devour pornography.
How come making amatuer porn is such a common hobby among well to do americans?
If you beleive any form of encryption will secure your data long term you are sadly msiguided.
Sure we have encryption algorithms that take n centuries of cpu time to break the code.
But we also have network sniffers, backdoors, people who give your data to strangers over the telephone because they say they are you, viruses that steal your PKI keys etc. etc. etc.
When someone like Bruce Schneier doesn't believe you can ever really make a system safe from attack, you have to start listening.
As for entrusting data to the people who produced some of the most insecure software of recent years, forget it.
Well all *NIX and NT boxes are working on "seconds since an early unix box started"
i.e. Midnight 1st January 1970 UTC.
POSIX routines easily convert this to local time, GMT, or UTC.
UTC being "Universal TIme Co-ordinated" which is basicaly the same as GMT but with "leap" seconds inserted on a more regular schedule.
So much as I like "SWATCH" watches "Internet Time" remains one of the prime examples of companies trying to leap on to the "DotCom" bandwagon with totaly unrelated products. If you really want to know how "un-wired" SWATCH is go to there web site and try finding some technical information on one of thier telephones.
I am just waiting for a book on how Bill Gates and microsoft were reponsible for the death of 6 trillion jewish hampsters.
Fact 1. Hollerith punch card machines were completely standard office equipment by the late 30s, the first standardised hollerith system was created for the US census of 1901(? I think.) the contract for a cheap handheld input device was awarded to the company which later became IBM. (The support for the Model 1 was dropped in the early eighties!)
Fact 2. Dehomag, along with all other German based companies regardless of ownership were required to follow directives issued by the various ministries in Berlin. They could have refused to supply equipment to the government but this would have resulted in the confiscation of the company be the German government.
Fact 3. Like it or not the Nazis were the internationally recognised and legally elected government of Germany. All companies were under an obligation to obey German law.
This all happened a long time ago and almost everybody involved is dead. If we could re-direct our efforts to preventing present day governments killing their citizens rather than re-vamping past attrocities for finacial gain the world would be slightly better place.
The only problem is what do they do with all those assembler programs which use bit 32 to indicate the end of an argument list?
Back in the good old days when men were men and sheep were scared the original 360 machine had 32 bit integers but used only 24 bits for addressing memory. Crafty assembler programers used the spare 8 bits to sneak pass extra information around with addresses. The most pervasive of these cheats was to use bit 32 to indicate the last address in a list of addresses.
Almost every assembler subroutine ever written expects to be passed the address of a list of addresses in register one, and, they expect the last entry in the list to have bit 32 set to one.
This is why OS/390 always used 31 bit addressing rather than 32 bit addresses.
PS. mainframes don't neccesarliy wiegh in at two tons. The smallest machine which will run OS/390 is a PCI card which fits into a standard slot on a PC.
This was released sometime in the late 60s for smaller IBM mainframes.
The current ancester of DOS is called VMS.
This is one of several operating systems called DOS, from, several manufacturers and "VMS" is also the name of a completely different OS from DEC (now Compaq).
Mainframe DOS has/had nothing in common with PC DOS, and, apart from running on the same harware it has nothing in common with "OS" which was the ultimate ancestor of OS/390.
This is probably the most re-branded OS the world has or will ever see SOME of the names it has had over the years are "OS" "OS/MFT" "OS/MVT" "OS/VS" "OS/VSE" "XA" "OS/390" and now "zOS".
Re:Bluetooth - necessary in 802.11 world?
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 1
It isn't viable because it does not work!
Even worse there is another proper standards based technoligy 802.1 which does work.
The only real effect Bluetooth has had is to delay the uptake of the 802.1 wireless standards, as, "industry commentators" (people who take press realeases from large companys and reprint them as articles in magazines) have been saying how the marketing muscle of Itel et al. will make Bluetooth the defacto standard.
This could have possably happended, but, just think about it. An organsisation as secretive and paranoid as Intel trying to lead an "open" standards consortium.
According to this press release IBM seem to have patented distibuted processing, which must come a news to distributed.net and seti@home.
I personally have no objections to patents, which when administered properly have served businisses, consumers and researchers well over the last century or so, but, it just doesn't work for software.
There is an intersting link on the Python Web site which compares some 80 different programmers solving the same non-trivial problem in 6 fifferent languages.
The clear winners are "C" -- fastest to run, least errors and reasonably speedy programming, and, Python -- fast to code, reasonably fast to run (on a par with C++) and very few errors.
The clear loser is Java ( v1.1) which was slow to run, slow to code and produced error prone programs.
The link is here: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/#jccpprt TR
The german "von" does indicate some sort of Aristocracy. This is the same in English; the bad "Guy" in Robin Hood is "of Gisbourne", which would be taken to mean he rules the place rather than just lives there.
The acedemic world did NOT give us UNIX. Bell labs did, the bit of Bell Labs which gave us UNIX was not a pure research department, but, an applied research department which was given a very clear task -- devolop software to control telephone switches using existing hardware.
Because the current OSes were not up to the job they developed a new one which was up to the job, and, did it so well that it was up to many other jobs as well.
The point of the article was that "Computer Sceintists contributed nothing useful".
This point is pretty much correct from thier point of view, the last piece of software which was generally useful to engineers was the Fortran Compiler.
As for the "schedule a trip" point, I can safely state having worked in various computer realted jobs in commercial organisations all my adult life that all the basic software required to schedule a business trip, book the flight, pay for it, fuel the aircraft etc. etc. was NOT written by anyone with a CS degree. Almost no software used in the real world originated in a CS research project.
CS is so irrelevent to the real world of computers that most IT professionals working in commercial organisation would consider a CS degree a reason for NOT hiring someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Well your talking about it ...................
I just had this wonderful image of the Biscuit Man ( a.k.a Lou Gerstner CEO of IBM ) doing his community service.
You know suit, tie, bucket, solvents et all scrubbing of all the Grafitti.$
IBM make hardware, the profits from selling one decent spec. xSeries or a quarter of a pSeries would pay for the fine.
It would represent the 0.01% of the selling price of a decently speced zSeries.
Couldn't we just standardise on one and integrate it more fully into Python.
The venerable TK is good but looks out of place in a Python program. QT is execellent but will they let you package it as an integral part of Python?
I know this debate has been going on since python slithered out of its egg, but, I think the lack of integrated GUI is Pythons biggest (only?) drawback.
The reason the MPAA and RIAA are taking such a heavy attitude is that they are looking at the death of thier business.
Thier business is selling copies of copryrighted materials. There are some sidelines in promoting the creation of these materials, but the basic business is selling copies.
Now right or wrong thier basic business model has sprung a small but growing leak, and, I for one don't see how they can stop it. Its just so easy to download MP3s, is just so easy to rip a CD, its just so easy to post the files on a server.
If this continues the music business in the US will look like the music business in the Arabic world, where, because copying is the norm, and, nobody but nobody pays full price for a cassette, you have artists as big as Springsteen or Bon Jovi whose only way to earn money is to do concerts.
Artists who would be billionaires if they were as popular in the US, make a reasonable living but are not rich. Artists who are popular (but not quite so popular) play in nighclubs thier whole lives or drive taxis.
Its the future -- get used to it.
I am not really arguing about the basic point which seems to be "spend a lot of money on research and you get unexpected spinoffs".
It was just that most of the examples given were factually wrong.
P.S. some of the things the space race was was really responsible for:-
IBM mainframes.
Databases.
Science cannot explain religious loonies therefore God must exist.
P.S. Send money now to my tax exempt church of the unexplainable expense account.
Sorry but its nearly all are wrong:--
1.) Ball point pens were invented circa 1942 by a Hungarian? guy named Biro.
2.)Syntehetic fibres go way back at leat to Rayon in the 1930s.
3.)I am sure there were fairly advanced aircraft before 1965?
4.)Noise reduction was amust for Radar in world war two.
5.)Bar codes came from early sixties reasearch sponsored by railroad companies looking for ways to make freight cars machine readable.
6. ?
7. Thermocouples circa 1920.
8. I am sure we had batteries before 1965.
9. The Joystick -- Wasn't that Wilbert Wrights breakthrough! It made all the complex controls surfaces of the Wright Flyer easy to manipulate (He may have got the idea from somewhere else).
10. Well only Teflon and that see through stuff begining with C they use on motorcycle visors.
Who gets this money??
Does anyone know??
I have a friend who owns some copyrigth and while he occasionaly get payments from MTV etc. he has yet to see a check for his percentage of blank tapes etc...
Beg to differ here.
People who spend large amounts of money on TV commercials also spend smaller but still significant amounts analysing how succesful the adverts were.
Hence they go to Neilsen for accurate estimates of how many people watched the ads. To there own sales figures to see what the effects were on sales, to companies like MORI and Gallup to see what the consumers thought of the ads, and, lastly to companies like JICTAR to see what effect the ads had on individual consumers purchases.
If the results of all this research showed TV advertising to be innefective (which it sometimes does) then companies spend the large wad of money in another medium.
One of the reasons the bottom dropped out of the market so quickly is Nielsen started to apply some of these disiplines to web advertising, hoping to to get in early and make lots of money out of web "metrics", only to discover that by any rational criteria web advertising was a waste of time and money for a non web related company.
There is no such thing as consent in pornography, because every person involved is there because of dire economic need. But we tolerate women's public humiliation and public rape, because men universally crave and devour pornography.
How come making amatuer porn is such a common hobby among well to do americans?
The problem is every survey about the effectiveness of Internet advertising has come to the same conclusion. It doesn't work.
a-- "Hit" rates are very low for "link"ed adds something like 0.01% of eyeballs are interested enough to hit the link.
b-- Most end users resent banner adds. So a comapany like CocaCola would probably be encouraging Pepsi sales if they did a lot of banner adds.
c-- The "eyeballs", "hits" etc do not transalate into sales.
This leaves a tiny niche market where "geeky" companies can advertise on hip sites to increase thier "coolness" factor.
If you beleive any form of encryption will secure your data long term you are sadly msiguided.
Sure we have encryption algorithms that take n centuries of cpu time to break the code.
But we also have network sniffers, backdoors, people who give your data to strangers over the telephone because they say they are you, viruses that steal your PKI keys etc. etc. etc.
When someone like Bruce Schneier doesn't believe you can ever really make a system safe from attack, you have to start listening.
As for entrusting data to the people who produced some of the most insecure software of recent years, forget it.
Well all *NIX and NT boxes are working on "seconds since an early unix box started" i.e. Midnight 1st January 1970 UTC.
POSIX routines easily convert this to local time, GMT, or UTC.
UTC being "Universal TIme Co-ordinated" which is basicaly the same as GMT but with "leap" seconds inserted on a more regular schedule.
So much as I like "SWATCH" watches "Internet Time" remains one of the prime examples of companies trying to leap on to the "DotCom" bandwagon with totaly unrelated products. If you really want to know how "un-wired" SWATCH is go to there web site and try finding some technical information on one of thier telephones.
I am just waiting for a book on how Bill Gates and microsoft were reponsible for the death of 6 trillion jewish hampsters.
Fact 1. Hollerith punch card machines were completely standard office equipment by the late 30s, the first standardised hollerith system was created for the US census of 1901(? I think.) the contract for a cheap handheld input device was awarded to the company which later became IBM. (The support for the Model 1 was dropped in the early eighties!)
Fact 2. Dehomag, along with all other German based companies regardless of ownership were required to follow directives issued by the various ministries in Berlin. They could have refused to supply equipment to the government but this would have resulted in the confiscation of the company be the German government.
Fact 3. Like it or not the Nazis were the internationally recognised and legally elected government of Germany. All companies were under an obligation to obey German law.
This all happened a long time ago and almost everybody involved is dead. If we could re-direct our efforts to preventing present day governments killing their citizens rather than re-vamping past attrocities for finacial gain the world would be slightly better place.
The only problem is what do they do with all those assembler programs which use bit 32 to indicate the end of an argument list?
Back in the good old days when men were men and sheep were scared the original 360 machine had 32 bit integers but used only 24 bits for addressing memory. Crafty assembler programers used the spare 8 bits to sneak pass extra information around with addresses. The most pervasive of these cheats was to use bit 32 to indicate the last address in a list of addresses. Almost every assembler subroutine ever written expects to be passed the address of a list of addresses in register one, and, they expect the last entry in the list to have bit 32 set to one.
This is why OS/390 always used 31 bit addressing rather than 32 bit addresses.
PS. mainframes don't neccesarliy wiegh in at two tons. The smallest machine which will run OS/390 is a PCI card which fits into a standard slot on a PC.
DOS ==> Disk Operating System.
This was released sometime in the late 60s for smaller IBM mainframes.
The current ancester of DOS is called VMS.
This is one of several operating systems called DOS, from, several manufacturers and "VMS" is also the name of a completely different OS from DEC (now Compaq).
Mainframe DOS has/had nothing in common with PC DOS, and, apart from running on the same harware it has nothing in common with "OS" which was the ultimate ancestor of OS/390.
This is probably the most re-branded OS the world has or will ever see SOME of the names it has had over the years are "OS" "OS/MFT" "OS/MVT" "OS/VS" "OS/VSE" "XA" "OS/390" and now "zOS".
It isn't viable because it does not work!
Even worse there is another proper standards based technoligy 802.1 which does work.
The only real effect Bluetooth has had is to delay the uptake of the 802.1 wireless standards, as, "industry commentators" (people who take press realeases from large companys and reprint them as articles in magazines) have been saying how the marketing muscle of Itel et al. will make Bluetooth the defacto standard.
This could have possably happended, but, just think about it. An organsisation as secretive and paranoid as Intel trying to lead an "open" standards consortium.
Well anthing that stops abuses like this:-
http://www.ibm.com/Press/prnews.nsf/jan/33331B969B 56D7AD852569D00073EFD4
According to this press release IBM seem to have patented distibuted processing, which must come a news to distributed.net and seti@home.
I personally have no objections to patents, which when administered properly have served businisses, consumers and researchers well over the last century or so, but, it just doesn't work for software.
I agree its a pretty cr*p article, especially, when you consider how articulate Guido is on almost any subject.
It reads like he was interviewed over the phone while he was trying to shave.
There is an intersting link on the Python Web site which compares some 80 different programmers solving the same non-trivial problem in 6 fifferent languages.
The clear winners are "C" -- fastest to run, least errors and reasonably speedy programming, and, Python -- fast to code, reasonably fast to run (on a par with C++) and very few errors.
The clear loser is Java ( v1.1) which was slow to run, slow to code and produced error prone programs.
The link is here: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/#jccpprt TR
The german "von" does indicate some sort of Aristocracy. This is the same in English; the bad "Guy" in Robin Hood is "of Gisbourne", which would be taken to mean he rules the place rather than just lives there.
Because you didn't buy a Bang & Olafson !
The acedemic world did NOT give us UNIX. Bell labs did, the bit of Bell Labs which gave us UNIX was not a pure research department, but, an applied research department which was given a very clear task -- devolop software to control telephone switches using existing hardware.
Because the current OSes were not up to the job they developed a new one which was up to the job, and, did it so well that it was up to many other jobs as well.
The point of the article was that "Computer Sceintists contributed nothing useful".
This point is pretty much correct from thier point of view, the last piece of software which was generally useful to engineers was the Fortran Compiler.
As for the "schedule a trip" point, I can safely state having worked in various computer realted jobs in commercial organisations all my adult life that all the basic software required to schedule a business trip, book the flight, pay for it, fuel the aircraft etc. etc. was NOT written by anyone with a CS degree. Almost no software used in the real world originated in a CS research project.
CS is so irrelevent to the real world of computers that most IT professionals working in commercial organisation would consider a CS degree a reason for NOT hiring someone.