I keep hearing this as the #1 complaint about Python, but isn't Python open source? Why doesn't someone just modify it to ignore whitespace and use braces instead of indents? I don't get it.
The core developers do not want that. They had an opportunity - a mile wide - with python 3.x; but instead decided to implement a lot of nearly useless features.
There is also the issue of backward compatibility.
Not all systems have perl or python installed, but all of them have a shell. Lowest common denominator is a powerful thing sometimes.
Not all systems have any particular shell installed (UNIX/Linux systems have bourne shell, but nobody uses that). Lots of Solaris systems do not have bash (I assume the book is about bash).
I certainly cannot count on any UNIX/Linux shell to be running on Windows, but perl runs fine on Windows.
1) Virtually any unprotected ebook format can be converted to Kindle format. A good free converter is Calibre [calibre-ebook.com]. Of course, DRM-protected ebooks typically can only be read by the manufacturer's reader.
Most ebooks are not unprotected. Calibre is a time consuming PITA.
2) Nook color is more like an underpowered iPad competitor than a Kindle competitor--it can't match Kindle's key features: e-paper and battery life of many days.
Better to read any book format, and have color, and thousands of apps, than kindle's key features which are nearly useless.
3) But it sure is a convenience not to have to worry about a recharge, particularly on a long trip.
True, but nearly insignificant.
4) No, a Kindle is not the device of choice for reading comic books. But it's great for text-based literature.
Anything can read text. I already have several devices and don't need another.
5) I've got both. Neither gives me eye strain, but the Kindle display is more pleasant to read.
Maybe in bright sunlight, not anywhere else.
6) In dim light, I'll pull out my iPhone. I don't do so much reading in dim light that the small size of the screen is much of a handicap. But when the light is adequate, I'll put it away and pull out my Kindle. And in full daylight, I'd much rather have the Kindle.
I don't want to have to juggle several devices. Who reads in full daylight? I guess the kindle is targeted to the idle rich who read on the beach, or yacht, or whatever.
7) I don't carry around a notebook--too heavy. If I'm carrying my iPad for other uses, I might decide to leave my Kindle at home, but I'll miss it--the iPad is simply not as comfortable for straight reading--heavier, thicker, and (as noted below) for straight reading, the touch-screen tends to get in the way. Yes, I'd love a device that was as fast as an iPad, with the vibrant color of an LCD screen plus the clear text and bright light visibility of epaper, with touch screen capability plus physical page-flip buttons, and as thin and as light as a Kindle. Let me know when I will buy one. In the meantime, I will tend to use the best device for the task at hand whenever possible.
I have android smart phone for carrying around. I don't need to carry around several other devices all the time.
8) I don't need a touch screen to read a book. Mostly, I just use the page forward and back buttons. With a Kindle, I can hold it in either hand and access both the page forward and back buttons with my thumb. I can't do this with my iPad (even if it were not uncomfortably heavy), and I find the touch screen often gets in the way, because an accidental brush of my thumb against the edge of the screen can cause an unwanted page flip.
Having an android tablet, instead of a unitasking ebook reader, means you have far more functional device. You can still read books, but you can also browse the web effectively, and do many other things.
1) Kindle will not work with epub, or many other formats. Libraries typically use epub format.
2) B&N nook color will be a complete android platform soon. Read any format. Or just use your phone and/or computer to read any ebook format.
3) Ten days without a recharge is, typically, not needed.
4) No color.
5) The "LED eye strain" claims are a hoax. I read an LED all day without eye strain. I'm 52 and I have never had great vision.
6) Kindle does not work well in dim light.
7) Kindle is a unitasker. Why carry around a kindle and a notebook, when a notebook will do everything you need? Why have a kindle and an android tablet, or a kindle and an iPad?
I am pleased to announce that I have just formed the "Most Ethical & Respected Slashdot Reader Institute." Please send your contributions to my paypal account, so that I many conduct a purely scientific, and completely unbiased survey. I will post the results in a slashdot article I plan to submit later.
Hey if Obama can win a Nobel peace prize, and Microsoft is rated as the 4th most ethical company, and Amazon is the most respected company in the world - how could my results be any worse?
Less job security as well. Tech is being offshored, and inshored, to death. Why get an engineering degree, just to train your H1B replacement, or have your job offshored? Wadwha should know this better than anybody.
Smart Americans would be stupid to pursue STEM careers. Unless you have a top-secret clearance, you will just end up training your H1B replacement, or having your job offshored.
Increasingly, Red Hat’s major competition is just saying “hey, we’ll let Red Hat do the engineering work and just provide support.” This is true of Oracle, and Novell to a lesser extent. Oracle has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years and has said it would do just that, saying that companies should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”
Novell still does its own very fine Linux distro, but if you look carefully, the amount of new features and energy put into its Linux distro the past few years has waned a bit. The company has ramped up support offerings for RHEL in the meantime, and put a lot more energy into things like SUSE Studio.
Oracle is just content to leech off of Red Hat. While Novell is trying to woo customers over to SLES by supporting RHEL as a bridge to SLES, Oracle just freeloads off of Red Hat’s distribution.
It’s a good thing that the GPL and other open source licenses allow companies to jump in and provide support for competitor’s products. But this trend isn’t healthy for the larger community — and it’s not something that can or should be solved by licensing. Companies in the market for Linux services should exercise a little forward thinking and reward the companies that are doing the most to maintain the ecosystem. Here’s a hint: It ain’t Oracle. Even if that Oracle support contract is a bit cheaper than Red Hat’s right now, what do you think Oracle’s going to charge if it manages to marginalize Red Hat?
Bottom line: If you want to snipe at Red Hat for its admittedly community unfriendly change, at least recognize that the company is still doing more than its share of the work.
If just limewire is costing $75 trillion; what about all the other, more popular, ways of listening to free music? I can listen to practically anything I want on youtube, and it's no great trick to download the video and turn it into an.ogg format, or whatever.
When you add it all up, it's got to be over $750 trillion.
Are you serious? The RIAA wrote the relevant laws.
Lobbyists actually writing the laws, is much more common than you might think. This has been proved. You can take a look at the lobbyist proposal, and the actual bill that was passed; and find that congress just rubber-stamped the lobbyists proposal. The other thing congress did was collect some big "campaign contributions."
Does IBM use those to patents to file frivolous lawsuits all of time? Does IBM aggressively use those patents for to harass and intimidate it's competitors?
If IBM does not do those things, then I would think that is a very significant difference between IBM, and Microsoft.
Any tech company, especially a tech company that Microsoft is specifically targeting for legal harassment; would be stupid not to arm itself with every silly patent it could dream up.
Big difference between MS and Google - at least so far - Google is not using silly patents to harass it's competitors; which is more than Microsoft can say.
Just filing a patent is not necessarily evil, even if the patent is silly.
What makes you think Microsoft has anything to do with this? I mean, come on.... We have a story about google patenting something stupid and somehow it is Microsoft's fault?
I said companies like Microsoft. Amazon, Apple, Paul Allan, and others play the same game. I guess MS came to mind because of MS silly patent lawsuits against Android device makers.
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Maybe you have not heard about Microsoft suing andriod makers over such silly patents as the idea of an index, or a graphic that displays while a page is loading. Or the dozens of other equally silly IP extortion scams launched by Microsoft.
Google may not be perfect, but Microsoft's IP litigation is in a class by itself.
Big financial corporations, like Smith Barney, and Chase Manhattan. In 2010, these companies upgraded a lot of their desktops from old XP desktops, to new XP desktops.
You must remember that India was a colony until about 50 years ago, while the US has been an independent (and rich) nation for much longer. In fact, upon independence, India was torn into two nations (India and Pakistan), and very little was left after colonialization by the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese.
If it were not for the Brits, India would be even worse off. Why do you think India ever became such a force in the cheap offshore labor market? It's because so many Indians speak English.
Some amazing things have come from India, but let's be honest; India has never been a technological power-house.
3 of Google's 9 Board of Directors were foreign-born. 50% of Google's 2 founders were foreign born.
Not Indians, and certainly not H1Bs. The corporations keep screaming about Indian H1Bs being the "best and brightest." Sorry to pick on India, but a hugely disproportionate number of H1Bs come from India.
The Nobel prize (since there are so few of them) seems like a bad way to judge a population's level of education. But if you look at Nobel prize per capita, the USA ranks #11:
And where does India rank? Yet we are constantly told we need the geniuses from India.
If you compare the E.U. as a whole against the USA (which is closer in size and geographical area than one paticular european country), then Europe still outshines the USA in nobel prizes.
WTF are you going on about? Don't you know that the "best and brightest" do not come from Europe, any more than they come from the USA? The corporations keep screaming that the "best and brightest" always come from the worlds poorest nations - funny how that works, isn't it?
India is just now in the process of transforming itself from a 3rd world (2nd world?) nation into a first world nation, it's per capita GDP is just about 7% of the USA's. Most of the inventions you mention were invented more than 100 years ago and many were invented outside of the USA or by foreign immigrants:
India is making it's money by providing cheap labor. What was invented by Indians? What was invented by H1Bs? Yet we are told that all Americans are stupid, and all Indians are geniuses. We all know it's all about cheap labor.
Don't just look at the India of today, look at the India of 20, 30, 50 years from now. That's what America is competing with.
Sorry, India is cheap labor, and we both know it. India has never been in the same league as the US when it comes to technology, especially when it comes to computer technology. The US practically built the entire industry - and what did not come from the US, came from other western nations. And now we are supposed to believe the corporate propaganda, telling us that only Indians understand computer technology? India? Please, be serious.
It was worth it, especially as I'm laughing at you on my way to my new job OR career when you're still stuck in the unemployment line when they replaced you with the equivalent of a trained monkey for nearly minimum wage.
Good for you. I am one of the many unemployed who has his degrees: math with comp. sci. and business admin. Also a graduate-level certification in PM. I could introduce you to PhDs who are unemployed, or grossly under-employed.
Don't kid yourself, a degree is not what it used to be.
Microsoft holds a patent on the idea of an 'index'.
Why stop with the Nook? Every paper non-fiction book since Gutenberg has to be infringing had not Microsoft come up with the 'original' idea that one could use an index with an electronic device and stored files. Honestly, given the problem of 'how do I connect 2 pieces of information when I can only modify at most one of them' would anybody 'skilled in the art' fail to come up with some sort of mapping scheme?
Slashdot Mirror
I keep hearing this as the #1 complaint about Python, but isn't Python open source? Why doesn't someone just modify it to ignore whitespace and use braces instead of indents? I don't get it.
The core developers do not want that. They had an opportunity - a mile wide - with python 3.x; but instead decided to implement a lot of nearly useless features.
There is also the issue of backward compatibility.
Not all systems have perl or python installed, but all of them have a shell. Lowest common denominator is a powerful thing sometimes.
Not all systems have any particular shell installed (UNIX/Linux systems have bourne shell, but nobody uses that). Lots of Solaris systems do not have bash (I assume the book is about bash).
I certainly cannot count on any UNIX/Linux shell to be running on Windows, but perl runs fine on Windows.
1) Virtually any unprotected ebook format can be converted to Kindle format. A good free converter is Calibre [calibre-ebook.com]. Of course, DRM-protected ebooks typically can only be read by the manufacturer's reader.
Most ebooks are not unprotected. Calibre is a time consuming PITA.
2) Nook color is more like an underpowered iPad competitor than a Kindle competitor--it can't match Kindle's key features: e-paper and battery life of many days.
Better to read any book format, and have color, and thousands of apps, than kindle's key features which are nearly useless.
3) But it sure is a convenience not to have to worry about a recharge, particularly on a long trip.
True, but nearly insignificant.
4) No, a Kindle is not the device of choice for reading comic books. But it's great for text-based literature.
Anything can read text. I already have several devices and don't need another.
5) I've got both. Neither gives me eye strain, but the Kindle display is more pleasant to read.
Maybe in bright sunlight, not anywhere else.
6) In dim light, I'll pull out my iPhone. I don't do so much reading in dim light that the small size of the screen is much of a handicap. But when the light is adequate, I'll put it away and pull out my Kindle. And in full daylight, I'd much rather have the Kindle.
I don't want to have to juggle several devices. Who reads in full daylight? I guess the kindle is targeted to the idle rich who read on the beach, or yacht, or whatever.
7) I don't carry around a notebook--too heavy. If I'm carrying my iPad for other uses, I might decide to leave my Kindle at home, but I'll miss it--the iPad is simply not as comfortable for straight reading--heavier, thicker, and (as noted below) for straight reading, the touch-screen tends to get in the way. Yes, I'd love a device that was as fast as an iPad, with the vibrant color of an LCD screen plus the clear text and bright light visibility of epaper, with touch screen capability plus physical page-flip buttons, and as thin and as light as a Kindle. Let me know when I will buy one. In the meantime, I will tend to use the best device for the task at hand whenever possible.
I have android smart phone for carrying around. I don't need to carry around several other devices all the time.
8) I don't need a touch screen to read a book. Mostly, I just use the page forward and back buttons. With a Kindle, I can hold it in either hand and access both the page forward and back buttons with my thumb. I can't do this with my iPad (even if it were not uncomfortably heavy), and I find the touch screen often gets in the way, because an accidental brush of my thumb against the edge of the screen can cause an unwanted page flip.
Having an android tablet, instead of a unitasking ebook reader, means you have far more functional device. You can still read books, but you can also browse the web effectively, and do many other things.
1) Kindle will not work with epub, or many other formats. Libraries typically use epub format.
2) B&N nook color will be a complete android platform soon. Read any format. Or just use your phone and/or computer to read any ebook format.
3) Ten days without a recharge is, typically, not needed.
4) No color.
5) The "LED eye strain" claims are a hoax. I read an LED all day without eye strain. I'm 52 and I have never had great vision.
6) Kindle does not work well in dim light.
7) Kindle is a unitasker. Why carry around a kindle and a notebook, when a notebook will do everything you need? Why have a kindle and an android tablet, or a kindle and an iPad?
8) No touch screen.
I don't think google is solely responsible for distributing internet content.
I am pleased to announce that I have just formed the "Most Ethical & Respected Slashdot Reader Institute." Please send your contributions to my paypal account, so that I many conduct a purely scientific, and completely unbiased survey. I will post the results in a slashdot article I plan to submit later.
Hey if Obama can win a Nobel peace prize, and Microsoft is rated as the 4th most ethical company, and Amazon is the most respected company in the world - how could my results be any worse?
Less job security as well. Tech is being offshored, and inshored, to death. Why get an engineering degree, just to train your H1B replacement, or have your job offshored? Wadwha should know this better than anybody.
Who wants to compete with 3rd world wages?
Smart Americans would be stupid to pursue STEM careers. Unless you have a top-secret clearance, you will just end up training your H1B replacement, or having your job offshored.
Linux-Mag covers the Rat Hat decision much better
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8414/
Increasingly, Red Hat’s major competition is just saying “hey, we’ll let Red Hat do the engineering work and just provide support.” This is true of Oracle, and Novell to a lesser extent. Oracle has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years and has said it would do just that, saying that companies should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”
Novell still does its own very fine Linux distro, but if you look carefully, the amount of new features and energy put into its Linux distro the past few years has waned a bit. The company has ramped up support offerings for RHEL in the meantime, and put a lot more energy into things like SUSE Studio.
Oracle is just content to leech off of Red Hat. While Novell is trying to woo customers over to SLES by supporting RHEL as a bridge to SLES, Oracle just freeloads off of Red Hat’s distribution.
It’s a good thing that the GPL and other open source licenses allow companies to jump in and provide support for competitor’s products. But this trend isn’t healthy for the larger community — and it’s not something that can or should be solved by licensing. Companies in the market for Linux services should exercise a little forward thinking and reward the companies that are doing the most to maintain the ecosystem. Here’s a hint: It ain’t Oracle. Even if that Oracle support contract is a bit cheaper than Red Hat’s right now, what do you think Oracle’s going to charge if it manages to marginalize Red Hat?
Bottom line: If you want to snipe at Red Hat for its admittedly community unfriendly change, at least recognize that the company is still doing more than its share of the work.
If just limewire is costing $75 trillion; what about all the other, more popular, ways of listening to free music? I can listen to practically anything I want on youtube, and it's no great trick to download the video and turn it into an .ogg format, or whatever.
When you add it all up, it's got to be over $750 trillion.
Are you serious? The RIAA wrote the relevant laws.
Lobbyists actually writing the laws, is much more common than you might think. This has been proved. You can take a look at the lobbyist proposal, and the actual bill that was passed; and find that congress just rubber-stamped the lobbyists proposal. The other thing congress did was collect some big "campaign contributions."
Does IBM use those to patents to file frivolous lawsuits all of time? Does IBM aggressively use those patents for to harass and intimidate it's competitors?
If IBM does not do those things, then I would think that is a very significant difference between IBM, and Microsoft.
Unlike MS, Google is not actually filing harassment lawsuits against it's competitors.
When Google starts doing that, then it may be fair to call google actions evil.
Any tech company, especially a tech company that Microsoft is specifically targeting for legal harassment; would be stupid not to arm itself with every silly patent it could dream up.
Big difference between MS and Google - at least so far - Google is not using silly patents to harass it's competitors; which is more than Microsoft can say.
Just filing a patent is not necessarily evil, even if the patent is silly.
What makes you think Microsoft has anything to do with this? I mean, come on.... We have a story about google patenting something stupid and somehow it is Microsoft's fault?
I said companies like Microsoft. Amazon, Apple, Paul Allan, and others play the same game. I guess MS came to mind because of MS silly patent lawsuits against Android device makers.
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Maybe you have not heard about Microsoft suing andriod makers over such silly patents as the idea of an index, or a graphic that displays while a page is loading. Or the dozens of other equally silly IP extortion scams launched by Microsoft.
Google may not be perfect, but Microsoft's IP litigation is in a class by itself.
Have hyper-litigious, like Microsoft, created an environment where every silly idea must be patented just out of self defence?
If Google did not patent this, Microsoft would have; then Microsoft would have sued Google over it's use.
Who was buying XP in 2010?
Big financial corporations, like Smith Barney, and Chase Manhattan. In 2010, these companies upgraded a lot of their desktops from old XP desktops, to new XP desktops.
Isn't that actually true in Saudi and Iran?
You must remember that India was a colony until about 50 years ago, while the US has been an independent (and rich) nation for much longer. In fact, upon independence, India was torn into two nations (India and Pakistan), and very little was left after colonialization by the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese.
If it were not for the Brits, India would be even worse off. Why do you think India ever became such a force in the cheap offshore labor market? It's because so many Indians speak English.
Some amazing things have come from India, but let's be honest; India has never been a technological power-house.
3 of Google's 9 Board of Directors were foreign-born. 50% of Google's 2 founders were foreign born.
Not Indians, and certainly not H1Bs. The corporations keep screaming about Indian H1Bs being the "best and brightest." Sorry to pick on India, but a hugely disproportionate number of H1Bs come from India.
The Nobel prize (since there are so few of them) seems like a bad way to judge a population's level of education. But if you look at Nobel prize per capita, the USA ranks #11:
And where does India rank? Yet we are constantly told we need the geniuses from India.
If you compare the E.U. as a whole against the USA (which is closer in size and geographical area than one paticular european country), then Europe still outshines the USA in nobel prizes.
WTF are you going on about? Don't you know that the "best and brightest" do not come from Europe, any more than they come from the USA? The corporations keep screaming that the "best and brightest" always come from the worlds poorest nations - funny how that works, isn't it?
India is just now in the process of transforming itself from a 3rd world (2nd world?) nation into a first world nation, it's per capita GDP is just about 7% of the USA's. Most of the inventions you mention were invented more than 100 years ago and many were invented outside of the USA or by foreign immigrants:
India is making it's money by providing cheap labor. What was invented by Indians? What was invented by H1Bs? Yet we are told that all Americans are stupid, and all Indians are geniuses. We all know it's all about cheap labor.
Don't just look at the India of today, look at the India of 20, 30, 50 years from now. That's what America is competing with.
Sorry, India is cheap labor, and we both know it. India has never been in the same league as the US when it comes to technology, especially when it comes to computer technology. The US practically built the entire industry - and what did not come from the US, came from other western nations. And now we are supposed to believe the corporate propaganda, telling us that only Indians understand computer technology? India? Please, be serious.
It was worth it, especially as I'm laughing at you on my way to my new job OR career when you're still stuck in the unemployment line when they replaced you with the equivalent of a trained monkey for nearly minimum wage.
Good for you. I am one of the many unemployed who has his degrees: math with comp. sci. and business admin. Also a graduate-level certification in PM. I could introduce you to PhDs who are unemployed, or grossly under-employed.
Don't kid yourself, a degree is not what it used to be.
Math is not relevant - not for US workers. The tech stuff is all being offshored, and inshored, to death.
There are still a few good jobs left, but not for long. STEM jobs are dead end. We all know it.
Ripped from a post on investor's village:
Microsoft holds a patent on the idea of an 'index'.
Why stop with the Nook? Every paper non-fiction book since Gutenberg has to be infringing had not Microsoft come up with the 'original' idea that one could use an index with an electronic device and stored files. Honestly, given the problem of 'how do I connect 2 pieces of information when I can only modify at most one of them' would anybody 'skilled in the art' fail to come up with some sort of mapping scheme?
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/microsoft-cites-new-patents-vs-android
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/
srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,957,233.PN.&OS=PN/6,957,233&RS=PN/6,957,233
Eh the wiki article makes it look more like the exceptional of the exceptional
Are geniuses not the exceptional of the exceptional?
What makes H1Bs "exceptional" in the least? Because they have bachelor degrees?