of course, instead of upgrading you can have a separate python install. the point of the example was just to show how python's immaturity makes it a bad choice to build upon when long term compatibility is of any concern. it's no surprise as long term compatibility isn't part of python's philosophy at all. python is still a great swiss army knife if it isn't.
one could argue it is a bad example because it would be RH/Yum's fault to rely on such a tool for this purpose, and then again RHEL is a stable distro, not concerned with being able to play well with whatever the future may bring, but with providing a very stable and concrete environment for given specs, so they just expect you to not upgrade and that's it. well, it's the example that came to mind, it turns out I don't know of much relevant software stacks that choose to rely on python.:)
sciencific literacy indeed provides excelent tools to construct a more ethical (that is, a more world-aware) self. however, those tools are seldom applied to that purpose. i'm afraid as a general rule our wretched "occidental" moral education always takes precedence, and those lucky enough to become literates end up being just what our education is aimed to produce: selfish, lost, reckless human beings, or just a literate version of that.
specially the advent of internet made this painfully obvious, but this should not render us hopeless. to improve our world we must know to what extreme it really is an immense shithole.
all clear: you are ignorant about mysql *and* about carrying out a rational, substantiated argument. (implying your ignorance about postgreSQL, while not proved, is still very likely indeed).
mysql easily outperforms postgreSQL for small databases. plus, it has tons of native binding libs and allows for bizarre strategies postgresql doesn't, nor does care about. they are two very different approaches to a db engine. if you don't see the differene it's because your use for db engines must be very specific and limited (troll: or because you have no clue altogether).
i would agree with you if you didn't compare worst and best case scenarios from each approach. neither working at home necessarily isolates you, nor are current average IT work environments as facilitating as you put it. also, work in a "collaborative space" can add in a lot of overhead and noise too. another problem with working in office is that it is assumed you are always there and ready for whatever crosses the employers mind. this allows for bad/little forward planing and also wastes energy and produces loss of focus.
having worked in all those environments i can tell you it depends a lot on the people involved. also, having plenty experience with pair programmig i can also tell you that while i totally agree, it simply doesn't work with everyone. if not, it can be frustrating, stressful and clearly counterproductive.
IMHO this is best left as an individual choice. a company should allow for both methods, even mixed, and once basic requirements are met let workers choose what they deem best for themselves and the task.
so many things have been criminalized that it's impossible to conduct a meaningful life without being a criminal any more.
couldn't resist:
SCRUTINIZER'S POSTLUDE
Eventually it was discovered That God Did not want us to be All the same This was BAD NEWS For the Governments of The World As it seemed contrary To the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings Mankind must be made more uniformly If THE FUTURE Was going to work Various ways were sought To bind us all together But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable It was about this time That someone Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION Based on the principle that If we were ALL crooks We could at last be uniform To some degree In the eyes of THE LAW Shrewdly our legislators calculated That most people were Too lazy to perform a REAL CRIME So new laws were manufactured Making it possible for anyone To violate them any time of the day or night, And Once we had all broken some kind of law We'd all be in the same big happy club Right up there with the President, The most exalted industrialists, And the clerical big shots Of all your favorite religions TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION Was the greatest idea of its time And was vastly popular Except with those people Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws, So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT... Which is one of the reasons why Music Was eventually made Illegal
Two years ago I was developing a webapp with very high usability requirements, one supported target being Safari 5.1. I hadn't used Safari much, and really didn't like the interface but had got very good references from diverse people, so I somehow had the notion it was a first class, slick, professional and quality browser. Some very lame inconsistencies came up related to Java support but well, that was supposedly not the browser's fault, but Apple's Java plugin/jvm, which they mantained it themselves at that time but was a messy thing on any browser anyway.
Then one day a particular very surprising bug showed up with randomly some images not showing. Just plain images, nothing special. After much digging I ended up in Apple's Safari support web with an official bug report (i.e., "known issue") about some images not displaying "sometimes". It seemed pretty much what was plaguing us. It was very embarrassing to see such a high standard developer not being able to consistently provide such a basic feature like showing fucking images, adn that's supposed to be it. But what was really mindblowing was the proposed workarounds: either a) use the services of a DNS provider (?????) or b) get a new router. I've never been so amazingly baffled by a bug report, in my life. A pity I don't have the link anymore. They not only weren't able to consistently display images in a browser, they had the goodamned guts to even laugh at their own customers in their face whith that bs. I felt kinda sorry for mac users, and lost all remaining respect for Apple that day, at least concerning software development.
We did work around the bug, eventually. It involved just some special preloading and a bit of luck.
way above the factical powers, which is the very reason for things like wikileaks to exist.
this is really bloody simple. it's obvious that any organization or individual trying to debunk power abuses has necessarily to be ninja, there's no other way. now, about the specific case of wikileaks or assange i don't know shit, but given that any such attempt can't succeed in full light, arging about them being somewhat shadowy seems infantile to me, or with even more probability just plain intoxication.
The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous.
Who said the government planned it. It could have been planned by their corporate overlords.
it could aswell be the natural outcome of greed. a group of people behaving with no social/environmental concern is very likely to end up burning out anything surronding it. if unopposed, that is.
that's true too. and in contrast to chess in the sw game the board does change, and so do the rules. it seems sw is no game for old men!:-)
my point is that if you screw it up too badly at the initial design, you will need lots of iterations to sort it out. you'll may face situations where needed changes are so extensive/complex/impacting that you have a really hard time with them. minecraft seems to be such a case. just an impression, though.
i'd throw in that experienced chess players play better partly because they simply don't see the bad moves, and don't have to bother with them.
if you have to implement a design to see it's flaws, it's just lack of experience. of course you'll get there by iteration, eventually, but in the process you'll have accumulated some experience in the field, and won't repeat the same mistakes the next time.
the problem with minecraft is not that it is slow, but a resource hog, both on the client and the server. i haven't looked at the code, but this and the fact that a whole team hasn't been able in a couple of years to fix this points more at a deficient design than at a poor implementation. if the problem is the architecture, language differences matter a lot less.
that said, adding js to it is way cool, but... rhino! oh my...
Are you kidding me? Rapidshare was a goldmine of copyright infringement. It's not as much anymore simply because there are now more alternatives and it's harder to search it.
technically, "copyright infringement" is claiming *authorship* of someone else's work. i doubt there is much of this on rapidshare or anywhere else in the internet. learn english, or stop reading propaganda (its unhealthy). (please note: this last sentence is not directed at you, a stranger in the net whom i fully respect, but at all the tons of idiocy spread around the term "copyright")
PISA reports that 35 percent of its test takers were eligible for the free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) program. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 36 percent of all U.S. high school students were FRPL eligible during the 2008–2009 school year in which the PISA sample was selected. In this respect, the sample seems representative.
then it goes on:
However, it is not sufficient to have a representative proportion of FRPL-eligible students in the overall sample, because we know that disadvantaged students perform more poorly if they attend schools where they are not integrated with more advantaged students and are instead heavily concentrated with other FRPL-eligible students.
oh, really? isn't this highly subjective. and they claim the sample is biased? i'm not defending the actual sampling process. i say that these appreciations don't seem as signifficant considering the whole process and the trend in successive surveys. the report is pretty overwhelming, resorting in this kind of juggling is bs. of course that's all just statistics.
quoted from the PISA 2009 Technical Report, which gives detailed information about the sampling procedure, stratification an bias corrections. they make complete sense considering the report's abjectives. and since they're very clearly defined, they mike kinda total morons of those guys at EPI (and slashdot) who seem to totally fail to grasp the purpose of such a study.
of course i have no say regarding the honesty/rigor the sampling procedure was actually carried out, but this is not wat the counter-study challenges. as said, absolute morons. there goes your elite, guys!
Exactly, they should find some manner of ranking like vs. like. It's not interesting to say that the US ranks below Canada because the US has a lot of poor kids. It is interesting to say whether the US ranks below or above Canada/among rich kids/ and/among poor kids/ separately. That will tell us something real about our system.
so having lots of poor kids and shitty public education isn't something real? you're making it worse:-)
it's just a statistical study comparing education across countries, not social classes. it doesn't question how well prepared US elite might be, it evaluates the education system as a whole, and thus the sample needs to be representative of the whole population.
it's not so hard to understand. are you poor or what? xD
"...: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S."
I read that 5 times and still don't understand it. Am I part of the reason the US is ranked low? Or is the writer of the summary?
basically the editor is proving that PISA has a point, regardless of Standford/EPI attempting to dodge the issue.
its blatantly obvious that the story is made up. i didn't even know about the onion or the comic versions.
and i'm totally baffled that so many/.ters who presumably are (or at least claim to be) IT professionals buy it. oh my! this is much, much worse than i could possibly imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
of course, instead of upgrading you can have a separate python install. the point of the example was just to show how python's immaturity makes it a bad choice to build upon when long term compatibility is of any concern. it's no surprise as long term compatibility isn't part of python's philosophy at all. python is still a great swiss army knife if it isn't.
one could argue it is a bad example because it would be RH/Yum's fault to rely on such a tool for this purpose, and then again RHEL is a stable distro, not concerned with being able to play well with whatever the future may bring, but with providing a very stable and concrete environment for given specs, so they just expect you to not upgrade and that's it. well, it's the example that came to mind, it turns out I don't know of much relevant software stacks that choose to rely on python. :)
it's indeed not a language intended for code monkeys. feel free to move along. here, have a banana.
So you have to maintain 2.7 for existing customer applications, or persuade them to pay you for an upgrade that brings them no benefits
if you are using python to build "customer applications" you're doing it wrong. your customers are doomed anyway.
python is a beautiful language and a superb tool for dishing out quick tools or prototypes. nowadays it simply isn't stable enough for much else.
as a quick sampling test, try upgrading python on a standard RHEL box. you'll totally screw the effing package system. this is simply not serious.
The biggest problem with IE10 as far as modern web apps go is its lack of WebGL support
wrong. the biggest problem with ie10 is ie10.
what's the meme for crap like this, "first sentence made no sense whatsoever;dr"?
sciencific literacy indeed provides excelent tools to construct a more ethical (that is, a more world-aware) self. however, those tools are seldom applied to that purpose. i'm afraid as a general rule our wretched "occidental" moral education always takes precedence, and those lucky enough to become literates end up being just what our education is aimed to produce: selfish, lost, reckless human beings, or just a literate version of that.
specially the advent of internet made this painfully obvious, but this should not render us hopeless. to improve our world we must know to what extreme it really is an immense shithole.
all clear: you are ignorant about mysql *and* about carrying out a rational, substantiated argument. (implying your ignorance about postgreSQL, while not proved, is still very likely indeed).
mysql easily outperforms postgreSQL for small databases. plus, it has tons of native binding libs and allows for bizarre strategies postgresql doesn't, nor does care about. they are two very different approaches to a db engine. if you don't see the differene it's because your use for db engines must be very specific and limited (troll: or because you have no clue altogether).
you have to be ignorant about mysql, postgreSQL or both. they are as duplicate as a car duplicates a truck. each has it's uses.
why suddenly stop believing in it
you know another way?
i would agree with you if you didn't compare worst and best case scenarios from each approach. neither working at home necessarily isolates you, nor are current average IT work environments as facilitating as you put it. also, work in a "collaborative space" can add in a lot of overhead and noise too. another problem with working in office is that it is assumed you are always there and ready for whatever crosses the employers mind. this allows for bad/little forward planing and also wastes energy and produces loss of focus.
having worked in all those environments i can tell you it depends a lot on the people involved. also, having plenty experience with pair programmig i can also tell you that while i totally agree, it simply doesn't work with everyone. if not, it can be frustrating, stressful and clearly counterproductive.
IMHO this is best left as an individual choice. a company should allow for both methods, even mixed, and once basic requirements are met let workers choose what they deem best for themselves and the task.
so many things have been criminalized that it's impossible to conduct a meaningful life without being a criminal any more.
couldn't resist:
SCRUTINIZER'S POSTLUDE
Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal
FZ / Joe's Garage
Two years ago I was developing a webapp with very high usability requirements, one supported target being Safari 5.1. I hadn't used Safari much, and really didn't like the interface but had got very good references from diverse people, so I somehow had the notion it was a first class, slick, professional and quality browser. Some very lame inconsistencies came up related to Java support but well, that was supposedly not the browser's fault, but Apple's Java plugin/jvm, which they mantained it themselves at that time but was a messy thing on any browser anyway.
Then one day a particular very surprising bug showed up with randomly some images not showing. Just plain images, nothing special. After much digging I ended up in Apple's Safari support web with an official bug report (i.e., "known issue") about some images not displaying "sometimes". It seemed pretty much what was plaguing us. It was very embarrassing to see such a high standard developer not being able to consistently provide such a basic feature like showing fucking images, adn that's supposed to be it. But what was really mindblowing was the proposed workarounds: either a) use the services of a DNS provider (?????) or b) get a new router. I've never been so amazingly baffled by a bug report, in my life. A pity I don't have the link anymore. They not only weren't able to consistently display images in a browser, they had the goodamned guts to even laugh at their own customers in their face whith that bs. I felt kinda sorry for mac users, and lost all remaining respect for Apple that day, at least concerning software development.
We did work around the bug, eventually. It involved just some special preloading and a bit of luck.
Where does that leave them ethically?
way above the factical powers, which is the very reason for things like wikileaks to exist.
this is really bloody simple. it's obvious that any organization or individual trying to debunk power abuses has necessarily to be ninja, there's no other way. now, about the specific case of wikileaks or assange i don't know shit, but given that any such attempt can't succeed in full light, arging about them being somewhat shadowy seems infantile to me, or with even more probability just plain intoxication.
why whould she? a phd is of no use for a science minister, but the skill of fabricating merits is very much. all good, keep moving.
How dare they not copy Windows! I demand that everyone keep copying Windows forever!
in which way is gnome a copy of windows, itself a copy of GEM?
oh wait, it uses a cursor, a desktop and icons. all patented stuff. got it.
The idea that our government could plan anything this complex and succeed is preposterous.
Who said the government planned it. It could have been planned by their corporate overlords.
it could aswell be the natural outcome of greed. a group of people behaving with no social/environmental concern is very likely to end up burning out anything surronding it. if unopposed, that is.
that's true too. and in contrast to chess in the sw game the board does change, and so do the rules. it seems sw is no game for old men! :-)
my point is that if you screw it up too badly at the initial design, you will need lots of iterations to sort it out. you'll may face situations where needed changes are so extensive/complex/impacting that you have a really hard time with them. minecraft seems to be such a case. just an impression, though.
i'd throw in that experienced chess players play better partly because they simply don't see the bad moves, and don't have to bother with them.
if you have to implement a design to see it's flaws, it's just lack of experience. of course you'll get there by iteration, eventually, but in the process you'll have accumulated some experience in the field, and won't repeat the same mistakes the next time.
the problem with minecraft is not that it is slow, but a resource hog, both on the client and the server. i haven't looked at the code, but this and the fact that a whole team hasn't been able in a couple of years to fix this points more at a deficient design than at a poor implementation. if the problem is the architecture, language differences matter a lot less.
that said, adding js to it is way cool, but ... rhino! oh my ...
Are you kidding me? Rapidshare was a goldmine of copyright infringement. It's not as much anymore simply because there are now more alternatives and it's harder to search it.
technically, "copyright infringement" is claiming *authorship* of someone else's work. i doubt there is much of this on rapidshare or anywhere else in the internet. learn english, or stop reading propaganda (its unhealthy). (please note: this last sentence is not directed at you, a stranger in the net whom i fully respect, but at all the tons of idiocy spread around the term "copyright")
by the way, sorry for the poor redaction. i must be from the lower end of the scale: never understood what "preview" really means ... :)
not really. quoting from the EPI study:
PISA reports that 35 percent of its test takers were eligible
for the free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) program.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that
36 percent of all U.S. high school students were FRPL
eligible during the 2008–2009 school year in which the
PISA sample was selected. In this respect, the sample
seems representative.
then it goes on:
However, it is not sufficient to have a representative proportion
of FRPL-eligible students in the overall sample, because we know that
disadvantaged students perform more poorly if they attend schools where
they are not integrated with more advantaged students and are instead
heavily concentrated with other FRPL-eligible students.
oh, really? isn't this highly subjective. and they claim the sample is biased? i'm not defending the actual sampling process. i say that these appreciations don't seem as signifficant considering the whole process and the trend in successive surveys. the report is pretty overwhelming, resorting in this kind of juggling is bs. of course that's all just statistics.
The sampling frame
All NPMs were required to construct a school sampling frame to correspond to their national defined target population.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/50036771.pdf
quoted from the PISA 2009 Technical Report, which gives detailed information about the sampling procedure, stratification an bias corrections. they make complete sense considering the report's abjectives. and since they're very clearly defined, they mike kinda total morons of those guys at EPI (and slashdot) who seem to totally fail to grasp the purpose of such a study.
of course i have no say regarding the honesty/rigor the sampling procedure was actually carried out, but this is not wat the counter-study challenges. as said, absolute morons. there goes your elite, guys!
Exactly, they should find some manner of ranking like vs. like. It's not interesting to say that the US ranks below Canada because the US has a lot of poor kids. It is interesting to say whether the US ranks below or above Canada /among rich kids/ and /among poor kids/ separately. That will tell us something real about our system.
so having lots of poor kids and shitty public education isn't something real? you're making it worse :-)
it's just a statistical study comparing education across countries, not social classes. it doesn't question how well prepared US elite might be, it evaluates the education system as a whole, and thus the sample needs to be representative of the whole population.
it's not so hard to understand. are you poor or what? xD
"...: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S."
I read that 5 times and still don't understand it. Am I part of the reason the US is ranked low? Or is the writer of the summary?
basically the editor is proving that PISA has a point, regardless of Standford/EPI attempting to dodge the issue.
its blatantly obvious that the story is made up. i didn't even know about the onion or the comic versions.
and i'm totally baffled that so many /.ters who presumably are (or at least claim to be) IT professionals buy it. oh my! this is much, much worse than i could possibly imagine.