There are lots of people that have installed python (or had it installed), but not as many that are willing to upgrade their python installation to the latest version. The jump to python 3.0 is a little tricky because some code is not compatible (which is why we still have 2.x) so there's lots of software that would break if people upgrade.
This.
My job, like most jobs, isn't to code in Python. It's to process data, and Python (be it 2.4, 2.7, or 3.0) just happens to be one of many tools that I use to process said data.
The fact that some developer might have built what he believes to be a better version of a Python interpreter than the one that ran my code is immaterial. I've got better things to do with my time than rewrite, re-test, and recertify known-good code.
If changing the first line of my script to #!/usr/local/bin/pythoninterpreterforbusinesscriticalstuff isn't elegant enough for your tastes, that's the Python devs' problem, not mine.
(If you think I'm annoying to Python devs, wait'll you see the grudge I have for Javashit frameworks and webdevs, who seem fixated on the concept that using HTML5 and Javashit is somehow more important than cross-browser compatibility, and that "cross-browser compatibility" means "all browsers will render it this week, and this week only, because the standard itself is a moving target! Who would want to display static HTML on a browser more than a week old?")
You should be working in Java. Or COBOL.
Most languages mutate enough that yes, keeping ahead of the bit rot is indeed as much the developer's job as coding it in the first place. The only exceptions are systems designed with the mainframe mindset that you code it and forget it for 3-4 decades. COBOL, because no one could really stand to muck with it, and Java because Sun put in deprecation mechanisms so that even really nasty old stuff will still be maintainable in an emergency.
Python is like Java in that it isn't simply a single program, it's a complex web of programs, libraries and model classes.
Although Java was expressly designed to permit multiple versions to co-exist and even execute at the same time in the same system, I'm less certain that you can do that with Python. At least without at least doing a chroot or a VM. Which isn't so much making the affected app play well with other systems that use other Python versions as it is setting up the app in a little world of its own.
Which has a certain appeal, but I doubt that users in general would go for it.
If all my customers are running offline RHEL 4, I'm stuck with python 2.3.
How do you deliver an application to your offline users? And why can't you deliver an up-to-date side-by-side version of Python along with it?
Anaconda - Red Hat's automated boot-time hardware configurator - is one of several critical RHEL components written in Python.
If you swapped out the Python that came with the system with a new, incompatible Python, chances are good that it break so hard it wouldn't even be able to boot up.
Gutenberg is stacked with classics. Stuff that has been successful over a long period of time. Some classics were flops when they were first published and some go periodically in and out of favor.
The NYT bestseller list, Oprah, et. al. focus on what's popular today. Relatively few books that make those lists will be popular in a century just as many of the bestsellers from Dickens' day would only be known to literary historians. And missing from Gutenberg.
Tale of Two Cities is in Gutenberg. That's where I read it from.
Marketing never hurts, but the advent of minimal-cost publishing via ebooks also has helped some authors. There are several best-selling authors who started out as "dollar discounts" from one of the e-publishers.
You may see them, but no actual expert in the field does.
- 3D chips are decades old and have never materialized. They do not really solve the interconnect problem either and come with a host of other unsolved problems. - Memristors do not enable any new approach to computing, as there are neither many problems that would benefit form this approach, nor tools. The whole idea is nonsense at this time. Maybe they will have some future as storage, but not anytime soon. - Photonics is a dead-end. Copper is far too good and far too cheap in comparison. - Spintronics is old and has no real potential for ever working at this time. - Quantum computing is basically a scam perpetrated by some part of the academic community to get funding. It is not even clear whether it is possible for any meaningful size of problem.
So, no. There really is nothing here.
And all that does is remind me of the times when a previously-useless technology suddendly became mainstream because someone finally found a proper use for it.
It sounds like you think "Pacifist" is a dirty word, synonymous with "Surrender Monkey".
When someone else becomes agressive and you move to defend yourself, that doesn't mean you surrender your pacifism. But the essence of pacifism is to attempt to find constructive solutions to problems. If the other side refuses to be constructive, slap them down.
On the other hand, people who sit around and do nothing while the other side is obviously building to a boiling point are part of the problem, not part of the solution. We cannot always ensure that others will behave constructively, but we owe it to ourselves and our allies to never stop trying right up to the point where we nuke the buggers.
War is destruction. The illogic of waste, as someone once said.
But the thing is, this displacement isn't anything we haven't seen before. It's happened repeatedly since at least the Industrial Revolution. Think of all the hand picking farmers big tractors replaced. Or what about all the weavers the loom put out of work. Move forward a few more years & you have automated factories killing the job of the assembly line worker. And now computers are doing the work of millions of accountants & other book keepers. Even scientists, who are creating the next biggest thing, aren't immune to the displacing effects of technology. So how is this new?
What's mostly new is that in the 19th and 20th Centuries, positions were reduced or eliminated but the changes in technology were such that new positions were created. Cottage weavers were hurt, but textile factories employed thousands. Clerks and scriveners were replaced by programmers and typists.
The difference, post-2000 is that this no longer seems to be the case. A truly accurate comparison isn't possible, since cheap transportation and communications have opened up a labor arbitrage gap that clouds the issue - even if nothing else changed, people who would have been farmers are now competing for skilled jobs simply because they can afford to buy lunch for a week for $8, but even small-town USA is going to cost that much for a single day.
Originally we were supposed to be heading towards a 30-hour work week, as automation made work easier. Instead, the labor war pressured us into 50+ hours for salaried workers, driving their effective "cost per hour" down. Since the gold standard for productivity continues to be hours worked, even when studies have proven that too much work makes people's actual output worth less.
But even after we clear out all that confusion as much as we can, we're left with a more critical issue. As far as I can see, we're not creating new job types to replace the older jobs. I exempt the "social media entrepreneur" job type, because while it does qualify, it's not something large numbers of people can be expected to succeed at nor does it require hiring large numbers of support personnel the way a mainframe did.
So we're in real trouble unless someone can either come up with new types of jobs in quantity or we re-think about how we value people's work.
The US Civil War? The South seceded from the North because their American Dream was based on States' Rights. Especially the right of States to ensure legal slavery. It wasn't like the North declared a jihad on the morally-bankrupt South. The two regions had been negotiating on the issue for decades. But when the South split, the more fundamental issue of whether it was the United States of America or the United States of America took over. Whether that justified a full-scale war or not is debatable.
World War II? Hitler was the one that "justified" that war. But the responsibility of putting that monster in power is in large part laid to blame to the powers that ended WWI. If they hadn't been so blindly determined to punish Germany and so uncaring of the consequences, Hitler would not have been able to gain the power he did.
In both cases, the "justifications" came after the fact, and had people spent more effort beforehand, it's unlikely that war would have happened. At least in Germany. In the USA, as mentioned, a lot of effort was expended, but they decided war was "justified" anyway.
Traditionally, the "laws" of war exempted civilians. That's because in older times, states were non-democratic, the people had little say in the decision, and in many cases, the goal was to annex territory, so it wasn't good policy to alienate or exterminate people who would - if you won - become your newest citizens.
The WTC incident (to take one example) was "justified" in that the USA, being an (alleged) democracy, had the implicit approval of the majority of the American people on the policies to which Al-Qaeda objected. Where their justification fails is that "majority" isn't totality and that in fact, there was a virtual certainty that not only were some of the victims willing to vote in the other direction, but that there was no "keep out" sign on the building that excluded Moslems. Many of which were likely to be more observant than the terrorists themselves, as the hijackers weren't exactly role models for the faith, even excluding their willingness to commit murder.
There are "Laws of War" in constructs such as the Geneva Conventions, but there are also "Rules of War", which are the precepts from which the Laws of War are constructed. They include minimizing the destruction to the goals at hand, sparing the innocent, treating captured enemies according to the same standards as you would wish for your own forces, and so forth. Those rules have remained largely invariant despite the ever-increasing ability over history to remove the opposing forces from direct physical and emotional contact with each other.
PHP is unparalleled for people who want to make a webpage without having to understand HTTP.
How does knowing HTTP help you at all when making a webpage? I've written my own HTTP server, but that doesn't seem to help my web programming at all.
You would not believe how many people think that HTTP is just like old-time conversational remote applications programming. They think that once you connect to the server you stay connected and 2-way asynchronous communications are the norm. They don't understand that HTTP is a touch-and-go protocol with a strict 1-1 request/response cycle.
Srsly? Do you know how stupid executives are? "Hey, that web page that my nephew wrote, it does what we need, put it into production." A week later you get this email: "We need you to maintain it - add a loyalty registration page to this thing here, and we're getting complaints about response time..."
And someone from China just hacked it.
PHP is also good for people who want to make a webpage without understanding web security.
What's the point when both sides are playing for the same team?
That sort of defeatism gets you nowhere. Vote for the side that is least treasonous, or write in or run yourself.
Just don't opt out or squander your vote on "noise" issues. We can worry about abortions, the debt, Obamacare, the War on Christmas and so forth after we've ensured that we have our country back. Otherwise at best we can win the single-issues only to lose them and everything else when an out-of-control administration finished shredding the Constitution.
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
You don't get carte blanche to be above the law in the USA just because you have a charter. Nor do charters supercede the law.
So even if the NSA's organization charter should allow illegal operations, foreign or domestic, that doesn't mean that they can do things that violate US law with impunity. Or immunity, for that matter. Violating other countries' laws is another matter, but as a US Government agency, they're very definitely subject to US laws. A charter that granted such things would be invalid, at least to that extent.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book.
I know I am in a very small 'paranoid' minority on this one but- POD gets you the ability to read the book, without having a psychological profile of you developed based on the relative times spent on each page. A profile that can and will be sold to advertisers (if only to fund the library building and license costs) . A profile that can and will be stored forever by the NSA so that should they ever find a reason to 'target' that 'collected data' it is there, and able to either help them understand and/or misportray your personality.
The minority may be larger than you think.
More than one author has written about books (usually grimoires) where "while you read the book, the book reads you". No longer is this just amusing fiction.
So far, I endure it on ebooks (although I reserve the right to read them in airplane mode to minimize the chatter). But one of the vendors I have history with publishes a monthly technical magazine that basically can't be read at all without an Internet connection. Even as a "downloaded" PDF.
So I don't. They're not nearly as essential to me as they'd like to think they are. And at that rate, they never will be.
In some old-time Science Fiction stories you'd see POD-like activity, but the documents (usually newspapers) were printed on media that would self-destruct after a time. Doing POD on stock paper for a lending library would kind of defeat the idea of a lending library. Might as well just buy the book.
I can do POD at home, thanks to a decently-fast laser printer and various binding tools I've acquired. Not as good as a dedicated POD setup - can't do folio binding or fancy covers, but enough for the latest 450-page technical spec document. I can see myself going to a commercial facility if I have something really special I want the full treatment for.
I don't do POD as often since I got an e-reader, but sometimes it's useful.
There's an unfortunate factor that paper nostalgites are not taking into account: books bought by your library are no longer forever, even when they don't get checked out enough times to wear out. Shelf space costs money just as it does in a store, and so my local library deaccessions a load of books yearly to make room for more. If all books were files on servers, there would be mo need to destroy the past (and it's all backed up at the NSA!)
Not true. The NSA stores metadata. They know who's checking out the books, but don't store the books themselves.
HC unfortunately has a lock on some of my favorite authors. Every time I buy a book from someone like Terry Pratchett, I stop and think if I really want to support those bastards (HC, not Terry). Conversely, the lendable and DRM-free books are often no-brainer buys. Hopefully, as contracts expire, wise authors will find more reasonable publishers.
I know I did check out a Pratchett ebook from the library not long ago, so it Overdrive dropped them, it must have been recent.
Slashdot Mirror
This.
My job, like most jobs, isn't to code in Python. It's to process data, and Python (be it 2.4, 2.7, or 3.0) just happens to be one of many tools that I use to process said data.
The fact that some developer might have built what he believes to be a better version of a Python interpreter than the one that ran my code is immaterial. I've got better things to do with my time than rewrite, re-test, and recertify known-good code.
If changing the first line of my script to #!/usr/local/bin/pythoninterpreterforbusinesscriticalstuff isn't elegant enough for your tastes, that's the Python devs' problem, not mine.
(If you think I'm annoying to Python devs, wait'll you see the grudge I have for Javashit frameworks and webdevs, who seem fixated on the concept that using HTML5 and Javashit is somehow more important than cross-browser compatibility, and that "cross-browser compatibility" means "all browsers will render it this week, and this week only, because the standard itself is a moving target! Who would want to display static HTML on a browser more than a week old?")
You should be working in Java. Or COBOL.
Most languages mutate enough that yes, keeping ahead of the bit rot is indeed as much the developer's job as coding it in the first place. The only exceptions are systems designed with the mainframe mindset that you code it and forget it for 3-4 decades. COBOL, because no one could really stand to muck with it, and Java because Sun put in deprecation mechanisms so that even really nasty old stuff will still be maintainable in an emergency.
Python is like Java in that it isn't simply a single program, it's a complex web of programs, libraries and model classes.
Although Java was expressly designed to permit multiple versions to co-exist and even execute at the same time in the same system, I'm less certain that you can do that with Python. At least without at least doing a chroot or a VM. Which isn't so much making the affected app play well with other systems that use other Python versions as it is setting up the app in a little world of its own.
Which has a certain appeal, but I doubt that users in general would go for it.
If all my customers are running offline RHEL 4, I'm stuck with python 2.3.
How do you deliver an application to your offline users? And why can't you deliver an up-to-date side-by-side version of Python along with it?
Anaconda - Red Hat's automated boot-time hardware configurator - is one of several critical RHEL components written in Python.
If you swapped out the Python that came with the system with a new, incompatible Python, chances are good that it break so hard it wouldn't even be able to boot up.
Success comes in two flavors.
Gutenberg is stacked with classics. Stuff that has been successful over a long period of time. Some classics were flops when they were first published and some go periodically in and out of favor.
The NYT bestseller list, Oprah, et. al. focus on what's popular today. Relatively few books that make those lists will be popular in a century just as many of the bestsellers from Dickens' day would only be known to literary historians. And missing from Gutenberg.
Tale of Two Cities is in Gutenberg. That's where I read it from.
Marketing never hurts, but the advent of minimal-cost publishing via ebooks also has helped some authors. There are several best-selling authors who started out as "dollar discounts" from one of the e-publishers.
Funny, I have the same opinion of Steven King.
Well, maybe not "terrible", but there have been some pretty bad moments. And not enough good ones.
So you haven't been to the movies or read a bestselling book lately? There is no talent to replace.
Lately? Sturgeon's Law is 50 years old or more.
Add friendly vampires. If that doesn't work, add werewolves. Alternate version: zombies.
The US government has never had the amount of technology, money, and laws to it's favor than any time before this, that is what is different.
"Governs least governs best" - it is time to shrink the Federal government and pull it's teeth by pulling the purse strings tight.
That's off-topic, though.
Basically, he's saying that the biggest detriment to his job was beauracracy and the antics of the Congress and the Administration.
I doubt it was any different 200 years ago.
You may see them, but no actual expert in the field does.
- 3D chips are decades old and have never materialized. They do not really solve the interconnect problem either and come with a host of other unsolved problems.
- Memristors do not enable any new approach to computing, as there are neither many problems that would benefit form this approach, nor tools. The whole idea is nonsense at this time. Maybe they will have some future as storage, but not anytime soon.
- Photonics is a dead-end. Copper is far too good and far too cheap in comparison.
- Spintronics is old and has no real potential for ever working at this time.
- Quantum computing is basically a scam perpetrated by some part of the academic community to get funding. It is not even clear whether it is possible for any meaningful size of problem.
So, no. There really is nothing here.
And all that does is remind me of the times when a previously-useless technology suddendly became mainstream because someone finally found a proper use for it.
So what's to stop Oracle from using CentOS srpms instead?
Because then they would be going from being a derivative to being a derivative of a derivative.
It sounds like you think "Pacifist" is a dirty word, synonymous with "Surrender Monkey".
When someone else becomes agressive and you move to defend yourself, that doesn't mean you surrender your pacifism. But the essence of pacifism is to attempt to find constructive solutions to problems. If the other side refuses to be constructive, slap them down.
On the other hand, people who sit around and do nothing while the other side is obviously building to a boiling point are part of the problem, not part of the solution. We cannot always ensure that others will behave constructively, but we owe it to ourselves and our allies to never stop trying right up to the point where we nuke the buggers.
War is destruction. The illogic of waste, as someone once said.
But the thing is, this displacement isn't anything we haven't seen before. It's happened repeatedly since at least the Industrial Revolution. Think of all the hand picking farmers big tractors replaced. Or what about all the weavers the loom put out of work. Move forward a few more years & you have automated factories killing the job of the assembly line worker. And now computers are doing the work of millions of accountants & other book keepers. Even scientists, who are creating the next biggest thing, aren't immune to the displacing effects of technology. So how is this new?
What's mostly new is that in the 19th and 20th Centuries, positions were reduced or eliminated but the changes in technology were such that new positions were created. Cottage weavers were hurt, but textile factories employed thousands. Clerks and scriveners were replaced by programmers and typists.
The difference, post-2000 is that this no longer seems to be the case. A truly accurate comparison isn't possible, since cheap transportation and communications have opened up a labor arbitrage gap that clouds the issue - even if nothing else changed, people who would have been farmers are now competing for skilled jobs simply because they can afford to buy lunch for a week for $8, but even small-town USA is going to cost that much for a single day.
Originally we were supposed to be heading towards a 30-hour work week, as automation made work easier. Instead, the labor war pressured us into 50+ hours for salaried workers, driving their effective "cost per hour" down. Since the gold standard for productivity continues to be hours worked, even when studies have proven that too much work makes people's actual output worth less.
But even after we clear out all that confusion as much as we can, we're left with a more critical issue. As far as I can see, we're not creating new job types to replace the older jobs. I exempt the "social media entrepreneur" job type, because while it does qualify, it's not something large numbers of people can be expected to succeed at nor does it require hiring large numbers of support personnel the way a mainframe did.
So we're in real trouble unless someone can either come up with new types of jobs in quantity or we re-think about how we value people's work.
The US Civil War? The South seceded from the North because their American Dream was based on States' Rights. Especially the right of States to ensure legal slavery. It wasn't like the North declared a jihad on the morally-bankrupt South. The two regions had been negotiating on the issue for decades. But when the South split, the more fundamental issue of whether it was the United States of America or the United States of America took over. Whether that justified a full-scale war or not is debatable.
World War II? Hitler was the one that "justified" that war. But the responsibility of putting that monster in power is in large part laid to blame to the powers that ended WWI. If they hadn't been so blindly determined to punish Germany and so uncaring of the consequences, Hitler would not have been able to gain the power he did.
In both cases, the "justifications" came after the fact, and had people spent more effort beforehand, it's unlikely that war would have happened. At least in Germany. In the USA, as mentioned, a lot of effort was expended, but they decided war was "justified" anyway.
Traditionally, the "laws" of war exempted civilians. That's because in older times, states were non-democratic, the people had little say in the decision, and in many cases, the goal was to annex territory, so it wasn't good policy to alienate or exterminate people who would - if you won - become your newest citizens.
The WTC incident (to take one example) was "justified" in that the USA, being an (alleged) democracy, had the implicit approval of the majority of the American people on the policies to which Al-Qaeda objected. Where their justification fails is that "majority" isn't totality and that in fact, there was a virtual certainty that not only were some of the victims willing to vote in the other direction, but that there was no "keep out" sign on the building that excluded Moslems. Many of which were likely to be more observant than the terrorists themselves, as the hijackers weren't exactly role models for the faith, even excluding their willingness to commit murder.
There are "Laws of War" in constructs such as the Geneva Conventions, but there are also "Rules of War", which are the precepts from which the Laws of War are constructed. They include minimizing the destruction to the goals at hand, sparing the innocent, treating captured enemies according to the same standards as you would wish for your own forces, and so forth. Those rules have remained largely invariant despite the ever-increasing ability over history to remove the opposing forces from direct physical and emotional contact with each other.
Well HTTP/XML/SGML is a terrible language. It's overly verbose and redundant and overly complicated.
One of these things is not like the others.
Methinks you've confused HTTP with HTML.
One is a markup language, but the other is a communications protocol.
They think that once you connect to the server you stay connected and 2-way asynchronous communications are the norm.
That's what WebSockets are for, after all. ;-)
Let's wait for them to get a handle on traditional HTTP first.
PHP is unparalleled for people who want to make a webpage without having to understand HTTP.
How does knowing HTTP help you at all when making a webpage? I've written my own HTTP server, but that doesn't seem to help my web programming at all.
You would not believe how many people think that HTTP is just like old-time conversational remote applications programming. They think that once you connect to the server you stay connected and 2-way asynchronous communications are the norm. They don't understand that HTTP is a touch-and-go protocol with a strict 1-1 request/response cycle.
Srsly? Do you know how stupid executives are? "Hey, that web page that my nephew wrote, it does what we need, put it into production." A week later you get this email: "We need you to maintain it - add a loyalty registration page to this thing here, and we're getting complaints about response time..."
And someone from China just hacked it.
PHP is also good for people who want to make a webpage without understanding web security.
What's the point when both sides are playing for the same team?
That sort of defeatism gets you nowhere. Vote for the side that is least treasonous, or write in or run yourself.
Just don't opt out or squander your vote on "noise" issues. We can worry about abortions, the debt, Obamacare, the War on Christmas and so forth after we've ensured that we have our country back. Otherwise at best we can win the single-issues only to lose them and everything else when an out-of-control administration finished shredding the Constitution.
The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.
You don't get carte blanche to be above the law in the USA just because you have a charter. Nor do charters supercede the law.
So even if the NSA's organization charter should allow illegal operations, foreign or domestic, that doesn't mean that they can do things that violate US law with impunity. Or immunity, for that matter. Violating other countries' laws is another matter, but as a US Government agency, they're very definitely subject to US laws. A charter that granted such things would be invalid, at least to that extent.
Ouch! Was he a contractor for 20 years?
No. A "Permanent" full-time employee.
Once you have standardized page size and other challenges inherent with POD, you might as well just be downloading an e-book.
I know I am in a very small 'paranoid' minority on this one but- POD gets you the ability to read the book, without having a psychological profile of you developed based on the relative times spent on each page. A profile that can and will be sold to advertisers (if only to fund the library building and license costs) . A profile that can and will be stored forever by the NSA so that should they ever find a reason to 'target' that 'collected data' it is there, and able to either help them understand and/or misportray your personality.
The minority may be larger than you think.
More than one author has written about books (usually grimoires) where "while you read the book, the book reads you". No longer is this just amusing fiction.
So far, I endure it on ebooks (although I reserve the right to read them in airplane mode to minimize the chatter). But one of the vendors I have history with publishes a monthly technical magazine that basically can't be read at all without an Internet connection. Even as a "downloaded" PDF.
So I don't. They're not nearly as essential to me as they'd like to think they are. And at that rate, they never will be.
In some old-time Science Fiction stories you'd see POD-like activity, but the documents (usually newspapers) were printed on media that would self-destruct after a time. Doing POD on stock paper for a lending library would kind of defeat the idea of a lending library. Might as well just buy the book.
I can do POD at home, thanks to a decently-fast laser printer and various binding tools I've acquired. Not as good as a dedicated POD setup - can't do folio binding or fancy covers, but enough for the latest 450-page technical spec document. I can see myself going to a commercial facility if I have something really special I want the full treatment for.
I don't do POD as often since I got an e-reader, but sometimes it's useful.
There's an unfortunate factor that paper nostalgites are not taking into account: books bought by your library are no longer forever, even when they don't get checked out enough times to wear out. Shelf space costs money just as it does in a store, and so my local library deaccessions a load of books yearly to make room for more. If all books were files on servers, there would be mo need to destroy the past (and it's all backed up at the NSA!)
Not true. The NSA stores metadata. They know who's checking out the books, but don't store the books themselves.
HC unfortunately has a lock on some of my favorite authors. Every time I buy a book from someone like Terry Pratchett, I stop and think if I really want to support those bastards (HC, not Terry). Conversely, the lendable and DRM-free books are often no-brainer buys. Hopefully, as contracts expire, wise authors will find more reasonable publishers.
I know I did check out a Pratchett ebook from the library not long ago, so it Overdrive dropped them, it must have been recent.