I don't entirely agree with your post, but it certainly isn't worth a -1 'Troll'
In essence though, successful countries concentrate on satisfying home demand. Germany being the perennial example. If you make stuff that your own people want, others will want it too.
The part of your post to which I object is 'save the idiots from themselves', which I take to mean USA's late entry to WW2. It's true that without the help of the USA Germany would have taken over most of Europe (UK and Russia probably not) but your help was not given freely, it was paid for in UK gold reserves and made USA very rich and UK bankrupt. The UK finally paid off the debt in 2006. Thanks for that, stand shoulder to shoulder with us, at the ATM while we withdraw our life savings.
I think this is indicative of the generally great support that Python gets from other projects. The default GUI language is Tcl/Tk, but of course nobody uses that, Most 'industrial' coders will be using wxPython to get workmanlike GUIs. Gnomophiles will be using PyGTK and anyone wanting something pretty have PyQt to call on. I think there are some commercial offerings too for when you need a really shiny one. Isn't more choice a good thing?
Well, actually, it is. It has available libraries to do everything and it has a ridiculously easy-to-use wrapper for Fortran in f2py. I keep a repo on Ubuntu One and I can code on my x64 kubuntu netbook, my Windows lappy or G5 PPC kubuntu box without changing anything except the build script to call f2py.
The point being: it is awesome because it is so flexible and so well supported.
Yes, this is very true, the overhead of process spawning is vast. Especially when you factor in the garbage collection if you are passing large objects to your spawned processes. You need to be looking at processes that last minutes to make multiprocessing beneficial. TBH what I'm working on (engineering analysis) does fit this case, but it's still surprising just how big the process needs to be before you see any benefit.
The reason Google won't do anything to help out Microsoft on this or any other issue is this:
Bing
Google's revenue comes from search, everything else they do is gravy. It may be a (greatly) inferior product, but Bing is a viable competitor to Google search. If there's one thing that would greatly increase Bing usage at the expense of Google it would be widespread adoption of Windows Phone. It's not doing so well in the US, but don't be fooled. It's catching on in Europe and Nokia's cheap models are really starting to move in the lesser developed (i.e. growing) markets.
Microsoft is very diversified these days and has plenty of healthy revenue streams to fund its fight, Google has just the one.
Google is scared because, however unlikely it may seem, Microsoft could still steal its lunch.
I don't get your point. Are you saying I *can* run W8, on *any* P4 as in your earlier post, or I can't because some P4s lack the necessary capabilities?
I don't really understand the point you're making. It's true that with the OSX approach you have the benefit of a much more coherent install base, although if you want to sell to people still on older, even unsupported OS X variants you still have to consider backward compatibility. Plus, any windows computer bought since OSX 10.7 was released will be 64 bit, and one of the *good* bits of windows is the 32 bit layer on the 64 bit system, so it isn't an issue unless your app needs >4GB RAM.
Welllll.... I'm one of the extremely small minority of people who *like* windows 8, but even if it might install on a PIV I bet it would be
s o _ s l o w _ a s _ t o _ b e _ c o m p l e t e l y _ u s e l e s s . ..
It is a good point though that MSFT don't put any arbitrary restrictions on the installs and leave it up to the user as to how much 'suckiness' they can stand. Linux does this too, obviously. I once read a coding guideline that said 'don't impose arbitrary limits' which I've found to be good advice in my own work, leave it up to the user/memory/cpu
OneNote already is a killer app on tablets. I have it on my Surface Pro. I never used it before I got the Surface, but now I use it all the time on all devices I can. For me it's one of those, "how did I live before this?" things.
What I like about Python is you don't need to type much to do a lot. For the stuff I'm doing, which is very maths intensive, I might commit twenty lines of code on a good day but get through half a pad of A4 scribblings in the process. Like I said, I'm an 'edge case'...
When I'm not travelling, I code on an X220 Thinkpad, which has the best keyboard of any laptop and a very good screen hinge (but a 'meh' screen)
I agree on Ballmer, they should have kept Sinofsky - I realise that may not exactly be what you meant
I think Microsoft are trying to innovate. The whole Metro/Win8 thing is a mess but at least it's not XP and the phone OS really does have some new ideas (even if not everyone likes them)
I agree 100% on Flash!! and I'll raise you the utter horror that is Adobe Air, whoever was responsible for that should go one circle of Hell lower than even Ballmer!
When I have a bit of time I'm going to try dual-booting the Surface with Ubuntu
Yes I do, because that's where my customers run it and I don't have to recompile all the wrapped Fortran, in other words it's the right tool for the job
The Surface is replacing an Atom netbook (running Ubuntu) because it's too slow for running tests. I want a tablet on which to write Python - give me a better recommendation.
Slashdot Mirror
In essence though, successful countries concentrate on satisfying home demand. Germany being the perennial example. If you make stuff that your own people want, others will want it too.
The part of your post to which I object is 'save the idiots from themselves', which I take to mean USA's late entry to WW2. It's true that without the help of the USA Germany would have taken over most of Europe (UK and Russia probably not) but your help was not given freely, it was paid for in UK gold reserves and made USA very rich and UK bankrupt. The UK finally paid off the debt in 2006. Thanks for that, stand shoulder to shoulder with us, at the ATM while we withdraw our life savings.
Forgot the quotes, sorry about that
Not quite
Interesting tip. I'll check that out, thanks!
...do you really feel you have a handle on all of it? It seems to an outsider to be as gargantuan a task as Linus has with the kernel.
I think this is indicative of the generally great support that Python gets from other projects. The default GUI language is Tcl/Tk, but of course nobody uses that, Most 'industrial' coders will be using wxPython to get workmanlike GUIs. Gnomophiles will be using PyGTK and anyone wanting something pretty have PyQt to call on. I think there are some commercial offerings too for when you need a really shiny one. Isn't more choice a good thing?
Hmmm. I've just started looking at PyJamas. Python to JS compiler. Seems very powerful
Me too. In fact my question: Do you endorse PyPy?
The point being: it is awesome because it is so flexible and so well supported.
If you weren't AC and I hadn't posted you'd get a +1 for this
Yes, this is very true, the overhead of process spawning is vast. Especially when you factor in the garbage collection if you are passing large objects to your spawned processes. You need to be looking at processes that last minutes to make multiprocessing beneficial. TBH what I'm working on (engineering analysis) does fit this case, but it's still surprising just how big the process needs to be before you see any benefit.
Python has multi-threading, multi processing and wrappers for C and Fortran. The GIL is not holding back anything.
Bing
Google's revenue comes from search, everything else they do is gravy. It may be a (greatly) inferior product, but Bing is a viable competitor to Google search. If there's one thing that would greatly increase Bing usage at the expense of Google it would be widespread adoption of Windows Phone. It's not doing so well in the US, but don't be fooled. It's catching on in Europe and Nokia's cheap models are really starting to move in the lesser developed (i.e. growing) markets.
Microsoft is very diversified these days and has plenty of healthy revenue streams to fund its fight, Google has just the one.
Google is scared because, however unlikely it may seem, Microsoft could still steal its lunch.
I don't get your point. Are you saying I *can* run W8, on *any* P4 as in your earlier post, or I can't because some P4s lack the necessary capabilities?
I don't really understand the point you're making. It's true that with the OSX approach you have the benefit of a much more coherent install base, although if you want to sell to people still on older, even unsupported OS X variants you still have to consider backward compatibility. Plus, any windows computer bought since OSX 10.7 was released will be 64 bit, and one of the *good* bits of windows is the 32 bit layer on the 64 bit system, so it isn't an issue unless your app needs >4GB RAM.
s o _ s l o w _ a s _ t o _ b e _ c o m p l e t e l y _ u s e l e s s . . .
It is a good point though that MSFT don't put any arbitrary restrictions on the installs and leave it up to the user as to how much 'suckiness' they can stand. Linux does this too, obviously. I once read a coding guideline that said 'don't impose arbitrary limits' which I've found to be good advice in my own work, leave it up to the user/memory/cpu
...which of course, should have been : <, /, and > keys stop working..?
(I learned something today.)
Troll
Damn! Yesterday I had mod points. You'd have got a +1 funny :-)
He's referring to imaginary as in i = SQRT(-1) You have to make allowances for math geeks
Especially as iPhones have those 'moisture sensors'
OneNote already is a killer app on tablets. I have it on my Surface Pro. I never used it before I got the Surface, but now I use it all the time on all devices I can. For me it's one of those, "how did I live before this?" things.
I'd say that the rumours of Microsoft's death have been greatly exaggerated. The phone, with help from Elop's Nokia is doing pretty well now, at least in Europe. http://www.wpcentral.com/new-data-shows-microsoft-doubling-its-smartphone-market-share-uk
What I like about Python is you don't need to type much to do a lot. For the stuff I'm doing, which is very maths intensive, I might commit twenty lines of code on a good day but get through half a pad of A4 scribblings in the process. Like I said, I'm an 'edge case'...
When I'm not travelling, I code on an X220 Thinkpad, which has the best keyboard of any laptop and a very good screen hinge (but a 'meh' screen)
I agree on Ballmer, they should have kept Sinofsky - I realise that may not exactly be what you meant
I think Microsoft are trying to innovate. The whole Metro/Win8 thing is a mess but at least it's not XP and the phone OS really does have some new ideas (even if not everyone likes them)
I agree 100% on Flash!! and I'll raise you the utter horror that is Adobe Air, whoever was responsible for that should go one circle of Hell lower than even Ballmer!
When I have a bit of time I'm going to try dual-booting the Surface with Ubuntu
Yes I do, because that's where my customers run it and I don't have to recompile all the wrapped Fortran, in other words it's the right tool for the job
The Surface is replacing an Atom netbook (running Ubuntu) because it's too slow for running tests. I want a tablet on which to write Python - give me a better recommendation.