Endless bits about immutability, without hints as to why I ought to care. I can appreciate the use of the interactive prompt now, but to start with it seems... strange.
The thing about mutability in Python is that it can bite you in the neck if you assume the variable passing and assignment work as in some other popular languages. I can appreciate the author's tirades about this, as he brought his point around, even with simple examples. And how do you propose to start with a language that doesn't have one-IDE-to-rule-them-all, like Visual Studio or Eclipse? You know how sparse is IDLE by today's standards.
Little discussion of how you might have accomplished tasks in other languages and wish to do the Pythonic equivalent.
That's why there's this other book, "Programming Python", again by Lutz, where he discusses the practical aspects of Python programming, and using the standard library modules. There are examples of the "Pythonic" way to do this or that, instead of masking C/C++ syntax with Python expressions. The discussions of modules, packages and classes is extensive, and down to the details of how they work and are used.
I understand your frustration, and can't comment on the first edition that you've seen. I've preordered the fourth edition - this one - (the whole 1000 or so pages), and I found it a very good self-educational tool - I managed to learn most of the ins-and-outs of the language in just one week, without having prior exposure to Python (I've got experience with 3-4 other programming languages, admittedly). I'd recommend it highly for anyone that wants to learn Python (the language) quickly.
Of course, this is my opinion, so take it as you may.
TFA doesn't even mention the what the base metal is (I'd guess aluminium -- most foams I've seen are Al-based). I'm not too impressed by this, as no details on either the method or the composition are mentioned - sounds like slashvertisment to me.
A common method to produce Al foams is similar to the way bread is made - add some "soda" to the base alloy, invoke a chemical reaction that releases a gas (CO2 or similar), then quickly cast and solidify. You get mostly spherical voids, which have relatively low influence as a stress concentrator. That being said, it's rather complicated to get uniform void distribution along the volume, especially avoiding large gas entrapments in critical places that can weaken significantly the material.
- loose indentation for some unclear reason. The bullet will start at the middle of the screen. And how to go back to the correct indentation is some voodoo magic
That's why you can quick indent with Tab and Shift+Tab, although I'm not sure what's this "voodoo" behaviour you seem to imply. You can control tab stops and indentations from the ruler - it's not the best, but works good most of the time.
- won't be able to create a bullet point on the same level of indentation than the previous one, after I made some multi-line text under the bullet or went back from correcting some text at another place in the doc
Oh, you mean, like, when you are writing the list, and you want to include some paragraphs under a bullet, and you press Shift+Enter to break inside the longer text, and then when you press Enter again it reverts back to bulleted list? That has been around for as long as I remember, although I cannot verify since which version exactly.
If I had to complain about Word, I'd more likely mention the lack of a proper citation/bibliography mechanism, or missing font kerning and ligatures, or the confusing ordeal of customizing styles vs. manually specifying section formatting. Word is one of the Microsoft's products I hate with passion - and do not use.
Seriously, when a person gets *that* pissed with a rich text editor, then you should try LaTeX - it's little more than HTML+CSS in principle. An eye opener, no less.
Documentation for commercial software can be sh*t as well. Good luck R-ing the FM, when the FM is just, well, F. At least with FOSS you can bet someone has already been frustrated by that particular feature and complained aloud on their support forums/mailing lists/IRC channels, or whatever. From my experience, the FOSS software that I use provide more superior, compact, up-to-date documentation than the proprietary stuff I have to use.
Case in point:
I'm using a certain high-end commercial CAD product (quite expensive, that). It comes with a kitchen sink included, printed manuals in 5 languages and 2 GB (HTML) of user documentation. Now, all is well and good, if you're an ordinary user. That I am not, as I try to integrate the whole thing in the system we're working on, and I'm using the official API to do that. While I'm not going to complain that the API can be a real PITA (even VB6 pales in comparison) -- the lack of documentation is even more frustrating. The online documentation for this particular API is quite a thing to look at - it is such a mess that you cannot get a list of all methods provided by a class and be sure that there's nothing missing. Some methods and properties are barely explained by a one-liner, and obscure parameters are not mentioned at all. Undocumented functionality galore. Missing functionality abound. Even the examples given do not go beyond the obvious declaration.
Now, as an academic institution, we're not entitled to support. What am I supposed to do now, when their 7-digit, high-end, market-leading, almost-cross-platform, DRM-ed to oblivion, proprietary product does not even work as advertised? There's basically no user community to talk to - everybody's knowledgeable is pretending to be a "consultant" or "expert", and wants to get paid for even the basic stuff.
F 'em.
Or use the Vacuum Places Improved (what kind of name is that anyway) addon from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.
True as it may be, the subject is called really "Informatics" in Bulgaria (I should know, it's my high school major, and I am Bulgarian coincidentally). It is not Computer Science as you understand it, because we didn't study much about e.g. networks, compilers, operating systems and such, but we concentrated really on the fundamentals and theory of programming and related mathematics - writing and testing algorithms, building and testing low-level code in e.g. Pascal or BASIC (on paper, too). Great starter for future programmers, I tell you that. If you haven't written your standard issue quicksort or a customized implementation of Newton's method in 10th grade for a homework assignment, then you wouldn't understand.
As far as "Olympiad" is concerned, the national student competitions between pupils in different schools have been traditionally called "Olympiads". It's a heritage of the olden days of Socialist government, paralleling the Olympic games. We have those in various other fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Not funny. I am not the greatest fan of MJ, but still his enormous influence on the music we enjoy every day for the last two decades is undeniable. The traffic surge that effectively DDoS'ed several of the largest news websites is a proof of that.
Slashdot. News for livers. Stuff that (hardly) matters.
As someone suggested, can we pay a little less attention to the health of Mr. Jobs and get along with ol'-skool tech news? Seriously, this is probably the third piece of article devoted to the health of the latter. No disrespect to the man at all, he's a proven tech guru and visionary, and I feel sorry for his health issues.. But still, do we need to get through the same pro-Jobs vs. anti-Apple narrative each and every time?
Slashdot has turned into a bastard offspring of a medical journal, a political propaganda rag, and Web 2.0 testing ground.
Perhaps the intention is to turn Slashdot in to a technological tabloid? Sad day..
scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
Not if you take into account the amount of research and project work conducted in CERN that is applicable in other areas - think superconductors, electronics, computing clusters, data processing and storage, etc.
You can compare it to Asimov's Foundation in a matter of speaking - the final goal is overshadowed by the implications of the intermediate work towards reaching it.
I've used it, and it's quite good - not up to par with VS in some occasions, but it's FOSS. Supports IronPython as well. Also, you can open directly your VS solutions and projects, and they will just work.
The latest version (3.0) supports.NET 3.5, and the installation is nowhere near as invasive as Visual Studio. The upcoming 3.1 will be compatible with the (currently being developed).NET 4.0.
1. Slack 12 was on 6 CDs, kitchen sink included, or a single DVD. How do you propose they'll squeeze basically twice the content on the same media?
2. Slack does not support upgrades even between major versions - the procedure is admittedly rather invasive and not for the faint of heart. I had no problems personally, though, but YMMV. In fact, this is the first time I've heard for upgrading from x86 to x86-64 for any OS.
3. It will be released when it's ready, as is the long-standing Slack policy. Slackware cannot afford to be both late and unstable.
Very true. I can't be bothered now to remember how many times I've literally struggled with Word with various more or less "advanced" features like cross-referencing inside the documents, *accurate* list of figures and tables, custom "floats" (does Word even have this?), bibliography management (ahhh, the pain!), index, glossary, automatic code highlighting etc. Heck, I'm even doing my presentations in LaTeX... In LaTeX, the pain is setting up the document initially --- after that, the content tend to be very light on markup (if you're doing it right, that is). It just, well, works.
Also, the cost is effectively zero, as it's open-source. Packages for everything that has been ever put into print exist. You don't need fancy hardware to run it --- you can probably run it on Win 98-era machine, and it will still work (granted, the compiling would be a bit on the slow side probably, but still).
LaTeX also gets additional bonus points for the essentially unchanged, and pretty readable as it is, file format. I can still compile sources that I've created several years ago, and the result will be *exactly* the same, without a single change. The same trick also works regardless of the operating system (AFAIK, there are (La)TeX distributions for Windows, *nix, and Mac OS X, and they can deliver the same predictable results across all platforms).
True. At least three of the most widely used (Deluge, KTorrent and Transmission) already have web UIs. No links, this can be easily checked on their official websites. rTorrent doesn't have web interface, AFAIK.
As someone who was in your shoes two years ago, let me tell you this:
You need MSc basically only if you're going to continue in the academia, or if you're serious about research (more or less the same thing). I went that road, and am at the beginning of a research gig that will last for some time right after I finish the thesis this month.
If you think that MSc will somehow magically open the doors for you, don't. This is more valid for CompSci than Engineering, for example. The knowledge required in the field changes so much through the years, that one or two more will probably leave you with a stale skill set. Not so for research, especially if you're working in a specialized cutting-edge area (I'm at AI).
But if you're a generic Java/C#/C++ guy, with no specialized knowledge or interests, you're the same as a million other people looking for a job that (probably) have more experience than you in the field. You need something to differentiate in this case, and that is either a more specialized skillset, or a more diverse skillset (e.g. MBA).
Please excuse me for not being exactly thrilled by the news, as Hulu is not available outside the USA (and many other content providers). For all the rest of us mere mortals, the "news" is as useful as the information about the weather last week in Tahiti.
You wouldn't guess which popular video site I'd be watching then.
Copyright is one of those things that everybody on/. seem to have a strong opinion about. We've gone through this innumerable number of times, really. Time for me to take a shot at it, I guess..
The thing with the current copyright law (both in EU and USA, it seems), is that it needs to please both the public and the authors, with the latter currently having the upper hand. I'd suggest having a two-tier scheme, with a grace period of say 20 years since publication, for which the government guards the copyrights of a work. After that, the individual is required to pay a non-trivial annual fee (probably based on the declared income on the works -- IRS will definitely know how much that would be, and a with a hard lower limit), essentially a tax to the public, for extending the copyright further. This way, Walt Disney could afford probably to pay up say 5 or 10% anually of its income out of Mickey and Co., and still generate profit. For the 90's teen-band, long disbanded, well -- tough luck if you can't cough up the $1000 for extension.
Of course, everything here's just speculation, and the way to work is through your congress/parliament member. I know which Swedish party I'm voting for on the EU elections in June..
Slashdot Mirror
More like Nuthin' Atol (hat tip to Guybrush Threepwood)
Endless bits about immutability, without hints as to why I ought to care. I can appreciate the use of the interactive prompt now, but to start with it seems ... strange.
The thing about mutability in Python is that it can bite you in the neck if you assume the variable passing and assignment work as in some other popular languages. I can appreciate the author's tirades about this, as he brought his point around, even with simple examples. And how do you propose to start with a language that doesn't have one-IDE-to-rule-them-all, like Visual Studio or Eclipse? You know how sparse is IDLE by today's standards.
Little discussion of how you might have accomplished tasks in other languages and wish to do the Pythonic equivalent.
That's why there's this other book, "Programming Python", again by Lutz, where he discusses the practical aspects of Python programming, and using the standard library modules. There are examples of the "Pythonic" way to do this or that, instead of masking C/C++ syntax with Python expressions. The discussions of modules, packages and classes is extensive, and down to the details of how they work and are used.
I understand your frustration, and can't comment on the first edition that you've seen. I've preordered the fourth edition - this one - (the whole 1000 or so pages), and I found it a very good self-educational tool - I managed to learn most of the ins-and-outs of the language in just one week, without having prior exposure to Python (I've got experience with 3-4 other programming languages, admittedly). I'd recommend it highly for anyone that wants to learn Python (the language) quickly.
Of course, this is my opinion, so take it as you may.
TFA doesn't even mention the what the base metal is (I'd guess aluminium -- most foams I've seen are Al-based). I'm not too impressed by this, as no details on either the method or the composition are mentioned - sounds like slashvertisment to me.
A common method to produce Al foams is similar to the way bread is made - add some "soda" to the base alloy, invoke a chemical reaction that releases a gas (CO2 or similar), then quickly cast and solidify. You get mostly spherical voids, which have relatively low influence as a stress concentrator. That being said, it's rather complicated to get uniform void distribution along the volume, especially avoiding large gas entrapments in critical places that can weaken significantly the material.
About time - we'll now be able to get those kewl advertisements before each movie in 3D as well..
Nuke him from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
- loose indentation for some unclear reason. The bullet will start at the middle of the screen. And how to go back to the correct indentation is some voodoo magic
That's why you can quick indent with Tab and Shift+Tab, although I'm not sure what's this "voodoo" behaviour you seem to imply. You can control tab stops and indentations from the ruler - it's not the best, but works good most of the time.
- won't be able to create a bullet point on the same level of indentation than the previous one, after I made some multi-line text under the bullet or went back from correcting some text at another place in the doc
Oh, you mean, like, when you are writing the list, and you want to include some paragraphs under a bullet, and you press Shift+Enter to break inside the longer text, and then when you press Enter again it reverts back to bulleted list? That has been around for as long as I remember, although I cannot verify since which version exactly.
If I had to complain about Word, I'd more likely mention the lack of a proper citation/bibliography mechanism, or missing font kerning and ligatures, or the confusing ordeal of customizing styles vs. manually specifying section formatting. Word is one of the Microsoft's products I hate with passion - and do not use.
Seriously, when a person gets *that* pissed with a rich text editor, then you should try LaTeX - it's little more than HTML+CSS in principle. An eye opener, no less.
Documentation for commercial software can be sh*t as well. Good luck R-ing the FM, when the FM is just, well, F. At least with FOSS you can bet someone has already been frustrated by that particular feature and complained aloud on their support forums/mailing lists/IRC channels, or whatever. From my experience, the FOSS software that I use provide more superior, compact, up-to-date documentation than the proprietary stuff I have to use.
Case in point:
I'm using a certain high-end commercial CAD product (quite expensive, that). It comes with a kitchen sink included, printed manuals in 5 languages and 2 GB (HTML) of user documentation. Now, all is well and good, if you're an ordinary user. That I am not, as I try to integrate the whole thing in the system we're working on, and I'm using the official API to do that. While I'm not going to complain that the API can be a real PITA (even VB6 pales in comparison) -- the lack of documentation is even more frustrating. The online documentation for this particular API is quite a thing to look at - it is such a mess that you cannot get a list of all methods provided by a class and be sure that there's nothing missing. Some methods and properties are barely explained by a one-liner, and obscure parameters are not mentioned at all. Undocumented functionality galore. Missing functionality abound. Even the examples given do not go beyond the obvious declaration.
Now, as an academic institution, we're not entitled to support. What am I supposed to do now, when their 7-digit, high-end, market-leading, almost-cross-platform, DRM-ed to oblivion, proprietary product does not even work as advertised? There's basically no user community to talk to - everybody's knowledgeable is pretending to be a "consultant" or "expert", and wants to get paid for even the basic stuff.
F 'em.
Or use the Vacuum Places Improved (what kind of name is that anyway) addon from AMO:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13878
Available for FF 3.5+. Labelled experimental at the moment, but works just fine. Works magic with the "awesomebar" suggestion speed: fetching suggestions has never has been so snappy.
There's an app for that..
True as it may be, the subject is called really "Informatics" in Bulgaria (I should know, it's my high school major, and I am Bulgarian coincidentally). It is not Computer Science as you understand it, because we didn't study much about e.g. networks, compilers, operating systems and such, but we concentrated really on the fundamentals and theory of programming and related mathematics - writing and testing algorithms, building and testing low-level code in e.g. Pascal or BASIC (on paper, too). Great starter for future programmers, I tell you that. If you haven't written your standard issue quicksort or a customized implementation of Newton's method in 10th grade for a homework assignment, then you wouldn't understand.
As far as "Olympiad" is concerned, the national student competitions between pupils in different schools have been traditionally called "Olympiads". It's a heritage of the olden days of Socialist government, paralleling the Olympic games. We have those in various other fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
I sure hope they are not going to MOP the floor with an unfriendly neighbouring country.
.. the Jackson effect?
Not funny. I am not the greatest fan of MJ, but still his enormous influence on the music we enjoy every day for the last two decades is undeniable. The traffic surge that effectively DDoS'ed several of the largest news websites is a proof of that.
Slashdot. News for livers. Stuff that (hardly) matters.
As someone suggested, can we pay a little less attention to the health of Mr. Jobs and get along with ol'-skool tech news? Seriously, this is probably the third piece of article devoted to the health of the latter. No disrespect to the man at all, he's a proven tech guru and visionary, and I feel sorry for his health issues.. But still, do we need to get through the same pro-Jobs vs. anti-Apple narrative each and every time?
Slashdot has turned into a bastard offspring of a medical journal, a political propaganda rag, and Web 2.0 testing ground.
Perhaps the intention is to turn Slashdot in to a technological tabloid? Sad day..
All your root are belong to us.
No, US.
scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
Not if you take into account the amount of research and project work conducted in CERN that is applicable in other areas - think superconductors, electronics, computing clusters, data processing and storage, etc.
You can compare it to Asimov's Foundation in a matter of speaking - the final goal is overshadowed by the implications of the intermediate work towards reaching it.
I've used it, and it's quite good - not up to par with VS in some occasions, but it's FOSS. Supports IronPython as well. Also, you can open directly your VS solutions and projects, and they will just work. The latest version (3.0) supports .NET 3.5, and the installation is nowhere near as invasive as Visual Studio. The upcoming 3.1 will be compatible with the (currently being developed) .NET 4.0.
1. Slack 12 was on 6 CDs, kitchen sink included, or a single DVD. How do you propose they'll squeeze basically twice the content on the same media?
2. Slack does not support upgrades even between major versions - the procedure is admittedly rather invasive and not for the faint of heart. I had no problems personally, though, but YMMV. In fact, this is the first time I've heard for upgrading from x86 to x86-64 for any OS.
3. It will be released when it's ready, as is the long-standing Slack policy. Slackware cannot afford to be both late and unstable.
Very true. I can't be bothered now to remember how many times I've literally struggled with Word with various more or less "advanced" features like cross-referencing inside the documents, *accurate* list of figures and tables, custom "floats" (does Word even have this?), bibliography management (ahhh, the pain!), index, glossary, automatic code highlighting etc. Heck, I'm even doing my presentations in LaTeX... In LaTeX, the pain is setting up the document initially --- after that, the content tend to be very light on markup (if you're doing it right, that is). It just, well, works.
Also, the cost is effectively zero, as it's open-source. Packages for everything that has been ever put into print exist. You don't need fancy hardware to run it --- you can probably run it on Win 98-era machine, and it will still work (granted, the compiling would be a bit on the slow side probably, but still).
LaTeX also gets additional bonus points for the essentially unchanged, and pretty readable as it is, file format. I can still compile sources that I've created several years ago, and the result will be *exactly* the same, without a single change. The same trick also works regardless of the operating system (AFAIK, there are (La)TeX distributions for Windows, *nix, and Mac OS X, and they can deliver the same predictable results across all platforms).
When is Word going to beat that?
True. At least three of the most widely used (Deluge, KTorrent and Transmission) already have web UIs. No links, this can be easily checked on their official websites. rTorrent doesn't have web interface, AFAIK.
Apple will need to ban http to pull this off.
As someone who was in your shoes two years ago, let me tell you this:
You need MSc basically only if you're going to continue in the academia, or if you're serious about research (more or less the same thing). I went that road, and am at the beginning of a research gig that will last for some time right after I finish the thesis this month.
If you think that MSc will somehow magically open the doors for you, don't. This is more valid for CompSci than Engineering, for example. The knowledge required in the field changes so much through the years, that one or two more will probably leave you with a stale skill set. Not so for research, especially if you're working in a specialized cutting-edge area (I'm at AI).
But if you're a generic Java/C#/C++ guy, with no specialized knowledge or interests, you're the same as a million other people looking for a job that (probably) have more experience than you in the field. You need something to differentiate in this case, and that is either a more specialized skillset, or a more diverse skillset (e.g. MBA).
Good luck, on any occasion.
What ridiculous mythical everpresent promise are we going to look forward to now?
No More DRM, Honest! And Will Work On Linux As Well!
"News for Herds... Stuff that Matters."
There, fixed that for you.
Please excuse me for not being exactly thrilled by the news, as Hulu is not available outside the USA (and many other content providers). For all the rest of us mere mortals, the "news" is as useful as the information about the weather last week in Tahiti.
You wouldn't guess which popular video site I'd be watching then.
Tormented? I thought that it's the CIA that does this. Oh, wait..
Copyright is one of those things that everybody on /. seem to have a strong opinion about. We've gone through this innumerable number of times, really. Time for me to take a shot at it, I guess..
The thing with the current copyright law (both in EU and USA, it seems), is that it needs to please both the public and the authors, with the latter currently having the upper hand. I'd suggest having a two-tier scheme, with a grace period of say 20 years since publication, for which the government guards the copyrights of a work. After that, the individual is required to pay a non-trivial annual fee (probably based on the declared income on the works -- IRS will definitely know how much that would be, and a with a hard lower limit), essentially a tax to the public, for extending the copyright further. This way, Walt Disney could afford probably to pay up say 5 or 10% anually of its income out of Mickey and Co., and still generate profit. For the 90's teen-band, long disbanded, well -- tough luck if you can't cough up the $1000 for extension.
Of course, everything here's just speculation, and the way to work is through your congress/parliament member. I know which Swedish party I'm voting for on the EU elections in June..