Strictly, python doesn't allow variables to be _used_ implicitly, it only allows them to be created on assignment. But I agree that this can be a source of bugs (although in my experience much less frequently than giving variable an implicit value, as PHP - that terribly combination of the worst features of C and Perl - does).
"it does make it difficult to use Python as a templating language"
I don't know about that - check out KID, a Python templating engine which is carefully thought out to work with, rather than against, python's syntax (and which has lots of other cool features, too).
But Ruby does have some interesting features, to be sure.
There's no problem with infringing on Microsoft copyrights, as Mono is written from scratch, using no MS code. I don't think there's likely to be a problem with trademarks either (unless 'Windows' in 'Windows.Forms' can be trademarked - and that wouldn't apply to the ECMA stuff anyway).
What there might be a problem with is patents - MS apparently has patents on various things necessary to implement the ECMA spec. Now, if memory serves, Ximian say they have some kind of letter from MS promising reasonable, no-cost licensing of these patents (and possibly their ECMA membership might require it?). But how much this actually protects Mono, I'm not sure.
Hasn't Seth Nickel (interaction designer as Redhat) studied psychology? I seem to remember a lot of his best UI ideas come from applying psychological (or occassionaly sociological) analyses?
Technically, it's the TV Licensing Agency, not the Beeb themselves.
"Gotta tell ya though, the full size matt black posters with white bold text saying you *will* get caught, they even list names and postcodes of people who've been caught, are very sinister, very 1984ish."
Not so much sinister as silly and vaguely offensive. Government agencies shouldn't go around acting like wannabe gangsters. Presumably the reason they do it is because the actual chances of being prosecuted for having no TV license are miniscule, so they feel the need to intimidate people.
"Legally speaking, you don't own that file. You merely have a license to run it."
I don't own the bits of metal in my hard-drive because I happen to have copied some Britney tracks there? Unexpected.
It's disappointing that even among broadly well-informed people like Slashdot readers, there are some who accept this RIAA propaganda, because it's entirely false. I _do_ own that file, and I can do what I want with it except as _specifically_ limited by copyright law.
Well, I don't think the GNOME developers really publicise the devel versions until they're close to a release, at which point they call them 2.10 pre-release or whatever. But, for example, on the developers blogs at Planet GNOME, they refer to the work they're doing on 2.9 quite often.
It doesn't make sense to hide a part of a GUI when you need it every time you do the operation!
But you don't need it every time you do the operation, or most users don't. Most of the time, you're going to be saving to your home directory or a directory for a particular project you're working on, which you'll have set up a bookmark for. No need to waste time navigating through the filesystem to find either of them, just pick them from the drop-down list.
There's also no *right* to be able to use their seed on terms unacceptable to Monsanto. Don't like the terms, don't buy 'em.
Yes there is. It's called the right of first sale: you cannot sell goods on condition that they only be used in certain ways; this has been a cornerstone of capitalist property law for hundreds of years. That companies now appear to be able to restrict your rights in this area by using IP law is a coporation's wet dream, and a disconcerting shift of rights away from individuals.
Surely the problem is, Dreamweaver doesn't help enough with the task of managing a large site; a proper CMS is much better (and, of course, also 'automates the repetitive stuff', generally more than a tool like Dreamweaver). I'm surprised to see Dreamweaver still being used; it's used for the intranet where work, for example, making it both a pain to update the site (all changes have to be sent to the Dreamweaver-using 'web team', rather than being managed over the intranet by the people who create them) and impossible to automate (we currently have to manually maintain an index of documents by keyword).
Drupal takes about a morning to install, and would solve both these problems.
There's something rather amusing about a PHP extension specifically designed to keep code and markup separate, given that allowing you to combine code and markup has always been PHPs main (almost only - it's a pretty horrible language) selling point.
I'm quite partial to TAL for a templating language myself (available for python and PHP, among others).
Yeah, just after I posted that, I went over to a Livejournal that I subscribe to the RSS of, but also check manually for friends-only posts, and remembered that very problem. It's a shame there is (as far as I know) no way to access ones Friends page via RSS.
VB allows me to code efficiently, quickly and with a minimum of errors, and until I come across something which allows me to code even quicker, even more efficiently and with even less errors I'm sticking with it.
What else have you tried? I'm doing some VB work at the moment, and I'm finding it bloody horrible - I'd much rather be using python or (ugh) PHP.
VB is full of irritations - the almost-but-not exception handling (ON ERROR GOTO); the horrible inconsistencies, like a different syntax for calling functions and subroutines (WTF?) or having to end each block with a specific keyword (WEND, NEXT, END WITH); the rubbish standard library (Collection is utterly painful compared to the C++ STL, let alone python tuples, lists and dicts).
I guess all this stuff can be got used to, but I would have thought trying any new language would be a breath of fresh air. I'd be interested to hear what you've managed to find that was less good than VB.
Well, RMS explained why he thinks non-free software is anti-social twenty-something years ago (see this essay on the FSF site, for example, which expands on what he'd already written in the GNU manifesto).
It appears to me that such a feat could be a philosophical inability for a government that is purely secular. Am I wrong in that conclusion?
The short answer is, yes, you are. People have been developing secular bases for ethics for at least as long as the US has been in existence. Apart from David Hume, who was more a a consequentialist (i.e., he thought morality was about what had good consequences, without being terribly concerned about wether that violated people's rights), modern theories of human rights are usually based on the work of Kant, whose morality was definitely secular (Kant himself was a Christian, but his arguments don't depend on an appeal to god). Wikipedia have a short introduction to Kantianism, and the Internet Encyclopedia's article on human rights is good on secular justifications for rights.
It's also worth pointing out that you can believe in an objective ethics without believing in God _or_ human rights. The ancient Greeks did (some of them believed in gods, but rarely appealed to them when doing philosophy), and so do contemporary marxist philosophers; for example, see Alain Badiou and Raymond Geuss.
Could you inform us all what treaty that would be? Given that no-one has been told why, at whose request, or under what laws, the siezure took place, I'm sure Indymedia would be interested to know about this.
The US has MLAT treaties with a number of countries, incuding the likely suspects to have requested the seizures, Switzerland and Italy; but so far, the US government has promised that the seizures were legal, but they won't tell anyone under which treaty this is.
Epiphany has had integrated history/bookmark search in the address bar for a couple of years now.
Re:Another "Innovation" from Microsoft?
on
A .Net CPU
·
· Score: 1
Well, given that Open Source is a trade mark, it doesn't matter what your or my definition of it is - Microsoft's shared source isn't open, end of story.
Linux bluetooth support is pretty good, I think. I'm using a Belkin USB bluetooth adaptor, connected to my Erricson T630 over GPRS. On Debian unstable (2.6.8 kernel), setup was surprisingly simple - apt-get install bluez, then set up a standard PPP connection using/dev/rfcomm0 and dialling to the GPRS psedo numbers (*98*2# means 'use the second GPRS profile defined on the phone').
Slashdot Mirror
But what if there are an indeterminate number of types for which x * 2 makes sense?
Besides which, having to specify types is almost always redundant - OCaml is strongly typed, and you can do something like this:
let twice x = 2 * x;;
Strictly, python doesn't allow variables to be _used_ implicitly, it only allows them to be created on assignment. But I agree that this can be a source of bugs (although in my experience much less frequently than giving variable an implicit value, as PHP - that terribly combination of the worst features of C and Perl - does).
"it does make it difficult to use Python as a templating language"
I don't know about that - check out KID, a Python templating engine which is carefully thought out to work with, rather than against, python's syntax (and which has lots of other cool features, too).
But Ruby does have some interesting features, to be sure.
There's no problem with infringing on Microsoft copyrights, as Mono is written from scratch, using no MS code. I don't think there's likely to be a problem with trademarks either (unless 'Windows' in 'Windows.Forms' can be trademarked - and that wouldn't apply to the ECMA stuff anyway).
What there might be a problem with is patents - MS apparently has patents on various things necessary to implement the ECMA spec. Now, if memory serves, Ximian say they have some kind of letter from MS promising reasonable, no-cost licensing of these patents (and possibly their ECMA membership might require it?). But how much this actually protects Mono, I'm not sure.
Hasn't Seth Nickel (interaction designer as Redhat) studied psychology? I seem to remember a lot of his best UI ideas come from applying psychological (or occassionaly sociological) analyses?
"So the Beeb chose a more dracionian approach"
Technically, it's the TV Licensing Agency, not the Beeb themselves.
"Gotta tell ya though, the full size matt black posters with white bold text saying you *will* get caught, they even list names and postcodes of people who've been caught, are very sinister, very 1984ish."
Not so much sinister as silly and vaguely offensive. Government agencies shouldn't go around acting like wannabe gangsters. Presumably the reason they do it is because the actual chances of being prosecuted for having no TV license are miniscule, so they feel the need to intimidate people.
"Legally speaking, you don't own that file. You merely have a license to run it."
I don't own the bits of metal in my hard-drive because I happen to have copied some Britney tracks there? Unexpected.
It's disappointing that even among broadly well-informed people like Slashdot readers, there are some who accept this RIAA propaganda, because it's entirely false. I _do_ own that file, and I can do what I want with it except as _specifically_ limited by copyright law.
And when I want news, I want Page 3. Luckily, the internet already has plenty of that sort of content.
Well, I don't think the GNOME developers really publicise the devel versions until they're close to a release, at which point they call them 2.10 pre-release or whatever. But, for example, on the developers blogs at Planet GNOME, they refer to the work they're doing on 2.9 quite often.
It doesn't make sense to hide a part of a GUI when you need it every time you do the operation!
But you don't need it every time you do the operation, or most users don't. Most of the time, you're going to be saving to your home directory or a directory for a particular project you're working on, which you'll have set up a bookmark for. No need to waste time navigating through the filesystem to find either of them, just pick them from the drop-down list.
There's also no *right* to be able to use their seed on terms unacceptable to Monsanto. Don't like the terms, don't buy 'em.
Yes there is. It's called the right of first sale: you cannot sell goods on condition that they only be used in certain ways; this has been a cornerstone of capitalist property law for hundreds of years. That companies now appear to be able to restrict your rights in this area by using IP law is a coporation's wet dream, and a disconcerting shift of rights away from individuals.
Surely the problem is, Dreamweaver doesn't help enough with the task of managing a large site; a proper CMS is much better (and, of course, also 'automates the repetitive stuff', generally more than a tool like Dreamweaver). I'm surprised to see Dreamweaver still being used; it's used for the intranet where work, for example, making it both a pain to update the site (all changes have to be sent to the Dreamweaver-using 'web team', rather than being managed over the intranet by the people who create them) and impossible to automate (we currently have to manually maintain an index of documents by keyword).
Drupal takes about a morning to install, and would solve both these problems.
There's something rather amusing about a PHP extension specifically designed to keep code and markup separate, given that allowing you to combine code and markup has always been PHPs main (almost only - it's a pretty horrible language) selling point.
I'm quite partial to TAL for a templating language myself (available for python and PHP, among others).
Yeah, just after I posted that, I went over to a Livejournal that I subscribe to the RSS of, but also check manually for friends-only posts, and remembered that very problem. It's a shame there is (as far as I know) no way to access ones Friends page via RSS.
One, I keep a tightly-knit friends-list, and sadly enough, those people would not read my journal regularly if it were not on Livejournal.
Well, you could set up a WordPress blog and use LivePress to copy the entries to your LJ.
Also, you could try Bloglines, an online RSS aggregator which is like a much improved friends page.
What else have you tried? I'm doing some VB work at the moment, and I'm finding it bloody horrible - I'd much rather be using python or (ugh) PHP.
VB is full of irritations - the almost-but-not exception handling (ON ERROR GOTO); the horrible inconsistencies, like a different syntax for calling functions and subroutines (WTF?) or having to end each block with a specific keyword (WEND, NEXT, END WITH); the rubbish standard library (Collection is utterly painful compared to the C++ STL, let alone python tuples, lists and dicts).
I guess all this stuff can be got used to, but I would have thought trying any new language would be a breath of fresh air. I'd be interested to hear what you've managed to find that was less good than VB.
Well, RMS explained why he thinks non-free software is anti-social twenty-something years ago (see this essay on the FSF site, for example, which expands on what he'd already written in the GNU manifesto).
The short answer is, yes, you are. People have been developing secular bases for ethics for at least as long as the US has been in existence. Apart from David Hume, who was more a a consequentialist (i.e., he thought morality was about what had good consequences, without being terribly concerned about wether that violated people's rights), modern theories of human rights are usually based on the work of Kant, whose morality was definitely secular (Kant himself was a Christian, but his arguments don't depend on an appeal to god). Wikipedia have a short introduction to Kantianism, and the Internet Encyclopedia's article on human rights is good on secular justifications for rights.
It's also worth pointing out that you can believe in an objective ethics without believing in God _or_ human rights. The ancient Greeks did (some of them believed in gods, but rarely appealed to them when doing philosophy), and so do contemporary marxist philosophers; for example, see Alain Badiou and Raymond Geuss.
Could you inform us all what treaty that would be? Given that no-one has been told why, at whose request, or under what laws, the siezure took place, I'm sure Indymedia would be interested to know about this.
The US has MLAT treaties with a number of countries, incuding the likely suspects to have requested the seizures, Switzerland and Italy; but so far, the US government has promised that the seizures were legal, but they won't tell anyone under which treaty this is.
I guess this would also be a good time to remind people that the US also managed to shut down 22 IndyMedia sites, administered by groups around the world and physically located in the UK. More from the EFF here.
Damn, should have previewed. That links should be...
Epiphany has had integrated history/bookmark search in the address bar for a couple of years now.
Well, given that Open Source is a trade mark, it doesn't matter what your or my definition of it is - Microsoft's shared source isn't open, end of story.
Linux bluetooth support is pretty good, I think. I'm using a Belkin USB bluetooth adaptor, connected to my Erricson T630 over GPRS. On Debian unstable (2.6.8 kernel), setup was surprisingly simple - apt-get install bluez, then set up a standard PPP connection using /dev/rfcomm0 and dialling to the GPRS psedo numbers (*98*2# means 'use the second GPRS profile defined on the phone').
Pisses off users and fails to stop piracy - sounds like the perfect compromise between DRM and ease-of-use to me.