> TeX is already long in the tooth, and will > become obsolete soon
and join all those other technolgies which are "dead"? BSD, Lisp, Smalltalk, ???
When Word ate my latest report for the umptheenth time I decided to stop using it at the office (where its use is mandatory, but rank does allow some privileges...). Instead of going to OpenOffice, which behaves in manners not unlike Word when confronted with big docs, I looked at plain text based markup languages. In the end I just went back to Tex (Latex). it's more readable than XML based markup languages (Docbook, anyone?), and has the best (superb) toolset while still having a large and vibrant user community (in academia).
So now my documents look superb and they are never eaten by my word processor. Tex has some life in it yet,,,,,
Re:I think he came off as having OCD
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> he came off as having some sever social disorders >.... as normalcy is concerned, the guy comes up > lacking
Ah, judicious terms like "disorder" and "normalcy".... Woe to those who don't confirm to the canonical ways of behaviour. Let's be interchangable with anyone else.
Who cares that there is a direct link between extraordinary talent and "weird" behaviour. Who cares that these strange individuals might actually be, well, actually just *nice* people.
It seems to work for Common Lisp. Although this is a "real" standard (ANSI) and not one controlled by a single commercial entity, it does resemble the proposed solution in that multiple commercial and open source implementations closely follow the defined standard. No fragmented market there.
The case of Common Lisp is rather illuminating in that it was not actively maintained (it lacks facilities like sockets etc) so the implementors did differantiate but only there where there was no standardisation.
And Common Lisp is a case in point where a spectaculary superior language (and not just compared with the rather crappy Java) will loose out because of an inedequate library and, perhaps, user community.
It "..was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. Many people bought Apple Macintoshes so that they could use Bill Gates' Excel spreadsheet program..."
Having a full-blown GUI on the Mac is a different ball-game compared with faking windows with ascii 176-223.
It a thing Micosoft understood and the competition did not.
"When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3.0 in late 1989 Excel was Microsoft's flagship product. For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of 1992."
We've been using Plone for a while now and for me it has a few distinct advantages:
* Plone works *out-of-the-box* and is easy to extend and configure.
* Plone provides excellent workflow support. A Workflow is the editorial chain used to manage documents. Creating new workflows is easy.
* Plone is easily extended with external components ("Products" in Zope/Plone parlance). I run Plone with Zwiki (a wiki extention) and CMFBoard (forums), making for a very rich intranet site with loads of possibilities. Check out the The Collective or the Zope website
* Plone comes with Archetypes, which is a framework which allows for the relatively easy creation of new content types (in Python)
* It runs on Zope which is a very powerfull Application Server and Content Management System. Zope has got a rather steep learning curve, but its documentation has been improved and it has got a very supportive and vibrant user community.
Tut tut. The parent was right. "The Knoppix install" you are mentioning in the grand-parent is in reality as described in http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdBasedHowTo
You on the other hand are pointing at what is at best a fun hack and certainly not the "default knoppix way". It' s also a rather pointless excersise. A normal Knoppix HD install is faster, can be updated through the apt-get update/upgrade routine and it also cannot be damaged when using non-root accounts (as you should). After all, in Knoppix-as-run-from-CD they have full access to their machine through the password-less root-console.....(wich you then should remove). The only advantage I could think of is that the method you're linking to will save you a little over a Gigabyte of HD space...
In the grand-partent you write:
"...Yes, I failed it. I assumed that they would understand that since it was running from a CD, that the experience would be slower..."
You failed your users because you didn't offer them a solution which fitted with *their* expectations. Instead you came up with a wizz-bang hack which fittted yours (running an office environment from CD! Cool!). Your users only want to have easy, hassle-free computing. A reduction in speed *is* a major hassle.
I like OO, in fact prefer it over MS Office. I promote/advertise it because it is Free Software, Free (no $), has enough features, it allows me to escape from Microsoft's upgrade cycle and is generally a good product.
But to state that it's more stable is simply ridiculous.
Microsoft Office has long left the dark ages of Office 95/97. Office 2000, XP and 2003 harbour plently of bugs (which are usually ironed out after one or two *huge* "service releases") but overall they are stable, if sluggish applications. And I've used both Open Office and StarOffice for the last few years and they've crashed on me a number of times.
Right. Mass migration to FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X. Massive porting of all possible windows apps to Unix. Suppose that whould happen quickly or even overnight. You can always hope.
Will the problem become less severe? Probably, at least for a while. Will the problem go away? Of course not.
Because insecurity stems not from some flaw in an OS but from a fundamental problem with the users and industry's mindset which stresses features and convenience over security. Just imagine what a simple script could do on a Uix dervative when accidentatlly run aby a user. Now imagine what happens when that user is running as root. And that's just what many people are going to do...
'....."The Debian installer sucks!" People saying this are astonished to hear me reply "Which one?"....'
It's nice, but not good enough for Python
on
Komodo Beta Release
·
· Score: 1
The problem with products like Komodo, WingIDE and PythonWorks is that they offer little more features than Python's own IDLE and Pythonwin (win32). In their latest incarnation the latter also offer syntax colouring, primitive autocompletion, reasonable debugging; and some other gloss associated with modern IDE's. Not advanced, but good enough for a quick hack.
A combination of any good editor and a form-painter for a good multi-platform "GUI Library" like wxWindows or QT, easily defeats the aforementioned commercial products on a feature by feature basis. PythonWorks does incorporate a lay-out editor for tkinter, but it's limited and tkinter is hardly as slick as QT.
What Python needs IMHO is a tool like Delphi or JBuilder. Python is an ideal language for a rapid prototyping tool and fast enough for most applications. Boa Constructor is a nice attempt at creating such an IDE, but currently far too unstable for actual use.
It would be nice to have a Python plug-in for Kylix...
Slashdot Mirror
Dijkstra was Dutch
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/CSobit.html
If you are running the latest Debian Stable version, Sarge, you can add the line
ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ stable main
to your
> TeX is already long in the tooth, and will
...). Instead of going to OpenOffice, which behaves in manners not unlike Word when confronted with big docs, I looked at plain text based markup languages. In the end I just went back to Tex (Latex). it's more readable than XML based markup languages (Docbook, anyone?), and has the best (superb) toolset while still having a large and vibrant user community (in academia).
> become obsolete soon
and join all those other technolgies which are "dead"? BSD, Lisp, Smalltalk, ???
When Word ate my latest report for the umptheenth time I decided to stop using it at the office (where its use is mandatory, but rank does allow some privileges
So now my documents look superb and they are never eaten by my word processor. Tex has some life in it yet,,,,,
> he came off as having some sever social disorders .... as normalcy is concerned, the guy comes up
>
> lacking
Ah, judicious terms like "disorder" and "normalcy".... Woe to those who don't confirm to the
canonical ways of behaviour. Let's be interchangable with anyone else.
Who cares that there is a direct link between extraordinary talent and "weird" behaviour. Who cares that these strange individuals might actually be, well, actually just *nice* people.
It seems to work for Common Lisp. Although this is a "real" standard (ANSI) and not one controlled by a single commercial entity, it does resemble the proposed solution in that multiple commercial and open source implementations closely follow the defined standard. No fragmented market there.
The case of Common Lisp is rather illuminating in that it was not actively maintained (it lacks facilities like sockets etc) so the implementors did differantiate but only there where there was no standardisation.
And Common Lisp is a case in point where a spectaculary superior language (and not just compared with the rather crappy Java) will loose out because of an inedequate library and, perhaps, user community.
> The movie *is* truthful, and if you think
> otherwise, please state specific claims.
Funny, I always thought that the person making the accusation, raising the issue, making the bold statement, is obliged to deliver proof. Silly me...
Anyway, quite a few people did, and rather eloquently
And even those who like the movie state that you should not confuse it for a factual portrayal of reality...
Let me guess.... American, right?
[..yawn..]
Excel v1.0 was released in 1985 on the Mac.
It "..was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. Many people bought Apple Macintoshes so that they could use Bill Gates' Excel spreadsheet program..."
Having a full-blown GUI on the Mac is a different ball-game compared with faking windows with ascii 176-223.
It a thing Micosoft understood and the competition did not.
"When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3.0 in late 1989 Excel was Microsoft's flagship product. For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of 1992."
source: http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html
We've been using Plone for a while now and for me it has a few distinct advantages:
* Plone works *out-of-the-box* and is easy to extend and configure.
* Plone provides excellent workflow support. A Workflow is the editorial chain used to manage documents. Creating new workflows is easy.
* Plone is easily extended with external components ("Products" in Zope/Plone parlance). I run Plone with Zwiki (a wiki extention) and CMFBoard (forums), making for a very rich intranet site with loads of possibilities. Check out the The Collective or the Zope website
* Plone comes with Archetypes, which is a framework which allows for the relatively easy creation of new content types (in Python)
* It runs on Zope which is a very powerfull Application Server and Content Management System. Zope has got a rather steep learning curve, but its documentation has been improved and it has got a very supportive and vibrant user community.
Tut tut. The parent was right. "The Knoppix install" you are mentioning in the grand-parent is in reality as described in http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdBasedHowTo
You on the other hand are pointing at what is at best a fun hack and certainly not the "default knoppix way". It' s also a rather pointless excersise. A normal Knoppix HD install is faster, can be updated through the apt-get update/upgrade routine and it also cannot be damaged when using non-root accounts (as you should). After all, in Knoppix-as-run-from-CD they have full access to their machine through the password-less root-console.....(wich you then should remove). The only advantage I could think of is that the method you're linking to will save you a little over a Gigabyte of HD space...
In the grand-partent you write:
"...Yes, I failed it. I assumed that they would understand that since it was running from a CD, that the experience would be slower..."
You failed your users because you didn't offer them a solution which fitted with *their* expectations. Instead you came up with a wizz-bang hack which fittted yours (running an office environment from CD! Cool!). Your users only want to have easy, hassle-free computing. A reduction in speed *is* a major hassle.
"It's like Office but free and doesn't crash."
P-lease....
I like OO, in fact prefer it over MS Office. I promote/advertise it because it is Free Software, Free (no $), has enough features, it allows me to escape from Microsoft's upgrade cycle and is generally a good product.
But to state that it's more stable is simply ridiculous.
Microsoft Office has long left the dark ages of Office 95/97. Office 2000, XP and 2003 harbour plently of bugs (which are usually ironed out after one or two *huge* "service releases") but overall they are stable, if sluggish applications. And I've used both Open Office and StarOffice for the last few years and they've crashed on me a number of times.
Right. Mass migration to FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X. Massive porting of all possible windows apps to Unix. Suppose that whould happen quickly or even overnight. You can always hope.
Will the problem become less severe? Probably, at least for a while. Will the problem go away? Of course not.
Because insecurity stems not from some flaw in an OS but from a fundamental problem with the users and industry's mindset which stresses features and convenience over security. Just imagine what a simple script could do on a Uix dervative when accidentatlly run aby a user. Now imagine what happens when that user is running as root. And that's just what many people are going to do...
Check out: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installer
'....."The Debian installer sucks!" People saying this are astonished to hear me reply "Which one?"....'
The problem with products like Komodo, WingIDE and PythonWorks is that they offer little more features than Python's own IDLE and Pythonwin (win32). In their latest incarnation the latter also offer syntax colouring, primitive autocompletion, reasonable debugging; and some other gloss associated with modern IDE's. Not advanced, but good enough for a quick hack.
A combination of any good editor and a form-painter for a good multi-platform "GUI Library" like wxWindows or QT, easily defeats the aforementioned commercial products on a feature by feature basis. PythonWorks does incorporate a lay-out editor for tkinter, but it's limited and tkinter is hardly as slick as QT.
What Python needs IMHO is a tool like Delphi or JBuilder. Python is an ideal language for a rapid prototyping tool and fast enough for most applications. Boa Constructor is a nice attempt at creating such an IDE, but currently far too unstable for actual use.
It would be nice to have a Python plug-in for Kylix...