First off, I'd like to see those benchmarks. I'm not sure I believe them. Oh I'm sure such results could be achieved, but likely they were programmed in ways that do not take advantage of the best features of Python. Probably things like Fibonacci tests and the like. Pfff.
Second, I've got a secret to share with you about writing software. The secret is that in most applications not more than 5% to 20% of the code actually requires the speed that an optimized C/C++/Java implementation would give it. GUIs, text processing, database queries, networking (and just about any I/O bound) will be very close in speed in Python or similar languages to natively compiled code. In the cases of GUIs especially most of the time the CPU is simply waiting on the user anyways.
Now what about that remaining 5% to 20% you may ask? If you need the speed then implement that in optimized C or C++. Python is designed to interface such code easily. But do us all a favor and leave the baggage of you high performance languages out of the main application logic.
Vote for a 3rd party candidate or independent, any of them. One more vote won't matter a whit to one of the big party candidates, but voting 3rd party actaully matters to their cause (1 vote in a a few thousand is much more significant percentage wise than one vote in a few million) and sends a message to the big two that you're not happy with the status quo.
Watching too much television may distort the hormonal balance of adolescents and push many of them into early puberty, say researchers.
Italian researchers found children denied access to television for just one week experienced a 30% jump in their melatonin levels.
The hormone is thought to prevent the early onset of puberty.
If confirmed, this would be the first sign of a direct physiological impact on television watching upon the young.
Re:Why should "cross platform" always mean Java/.N
on
Ars Technica Tours Mono
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is pure ignorance. The differences between programming languages and scripting languages are completely in the eyes of the developer. Python has excellent tools for developing solid applications which perform well and make use of libraries normally associate with C/C++ applications:
A JIT optimizing compiler for speeding up interpreted bytecode to near-directly compiled code speeds
Great support for regression/unit testing by allowing "main" functions to be used in every script/class file in large projects
In short, Python can do pretty much anything Java or Mono is likely able to do. In addition, it's faster and easier to code in than most "programming" languages, largely due to dynamic variable typing.
For developer friendliness Mono and Java are a step up from C/C++, but languages like Python (and probably Ruby, though I haven't used it) have potential to be even more.
The article is stating that Webmonkey is back. The above post is lamenting that "the web will be worse off without such a valuable help do [sic] web development newbies"?
Only on/. can someone get the gist of an article completely backwards and be rewarded for it by their peers.
PDF is an open standard in that its specification is 100% open and you can write and distribute software for reading, writing and modifying PDFs restriction and royalty free. This is why just about every Linux distribution (and BSDs also I assume) come with software like ps2pdf, which can convert Postscript (another open Adobe standard, used for almost all Unix printing) to PDF, and therefore any app which can write PS (again, basically any Unix app) by printing to a file can indirectly create PDFs.
You're right in that PDFs are not ideal when a document requires editing. But it is pretty ideal for distribution of a final version.
As to size, the size depends mainly on the images used. PDF is very efficient at sstoring large but good looking files of mostly text.
Because the linked article was a little light on details, and because 90% of the posts in this discussion either have very little understanding of what techniques exist in 3D mesh optimization, I thought I'd actually skim the paper (linked to in an above comment) and describe a summary of why this new technique is innovative. I studied the basics of Computer Graphics why working for my BS in CS and worked for several years on a project where I wrote code to triangulate and decimate (i.e. reduce triangle count) for range data, so I do have an idea of what I'm talking about here.
First of all, as many posts have stated there are wuite a few algorithms out there for mesh optimization. Two of the classic techniques were developed by Schroeder and Turk. Schroeder's method (PDF) is fast and is able to reuse a subset of the original vertices, but the quality is not great. Essentially, the mesh is simplified mainly by collapsing edges (eliminating two triangles for each edge collapsed) in the flattest parts of the mesh.
Turk's method (PDF) is more accurate, but cannot reuse the original vertices. Basically a new set of vertices are scattered across the original surface, forced to spread out from their neighbors. The amount of local spreading or repulsion is determined using local curvature, allowing greater point density where curvature and therefore detail is high. A new mesh is generated through these points using the original as a guide.
Further work has been done to create progressively decimated meshes, much like progressive JPEG images work. A model sent over the web could be displayed in low resolution very quickly while the bulk of the geometry is still in transit. Methods for this tend to be colser to Schroeder's approach because obviously it is desirable to reuse the existing data at each level of representation.
This new method is quite a bit different. It clusters triangles into patches that can be represented simply. These patches are optimized iteratively. Finally a new mesh is created, using the pathces as partitions and reusing vertices where the partitions meet.
Some benefits to this method:
High Accuracy: The total surface deviations are small, and the partitions fit very well to the contours of the original surface
Speed: the method is apparently reasonably fast, though not as fast as greedy methods
Ability to allow user interaction for variable refinement of specific regions, without requiring it in general cases
Iterative process means that in time constrained situations a time/quality tradeoff can be made without modifying the algorithm
Possible fuure applications in animation and simulation by introducing a time variable into the partitioning process
To me the potential animation capabilities and optional interactivity sound most interesting. Accurate decimation methods are already available that work well offline, and faster methods are available for online LOD management. Merging decimation with animation could lead to higher quality, lower computational cost 3D anmiation. Allowing high interactivity could help artists improve the aesthetics of scanned artifacts.
I won't argue that people like to have lots of space to themselves, this is obvious. The thing is it's a tradeoff. Lots of space means more money and/or farther from urban centers, which often implies a longer commute.
I live in an apartment right now because it is close to school and work, which save me time as well as money spent on my car. I could move farther away and live in either a bigger place or a cheaper place, but for me the tradeoff of convenience would not be worth it. This may change later in my life.
As far as living cheaply, maybe most people do live right up to their means, but who wouldn't gladly pay less for what they already have? This would mean more money for other things they may want. money saved on housing could be spent on nicer vacations. In my housing example I came up with a way to combine many of the positive charcteristics of urban apartment living (short commute, close to active city life) with thoseof suburban house living (mainly outdoor space). No it's not perfect, but I think it could be a lot better than what you describe. You've obviously had some bad apartment experiences, but plently of other people like apartments just fine. The garage thing was something I just came up with to go along with the shared parks replacing private lawns. Such a asystem could have private garages as well, many apartment complexes have private garages. For tool ownership, a simple set of lockers in the shared garage would do pretty nicely.
The reason Manhattan is expensive isn't because it's high density, it's because it's at the center of a huge city. You have cause and effect mixed up. If Manhattan apartment living is expensive, a house in Manhattan would be astronomical.
Urban sprawl would be a lot less serious if high density apartments were built out in the burbs rather than large houses with big yards. The same amount of people could live more cheaply and closer to their jobs in the city while taking up less land.
I believe that a better solution would be a more communal type of living. Urban areas could contain small apartments and lots of small parks. Less space would be needed for roads and parking (even if just as many people had cars), garages could be shared within an apartment. When you get right down to it, yards and garage workspaces are severly underutilized bu most suburbanites for the amount of space they consume. Sharing these resources among groups of families would cut down on wasted space and allow higher density living without significant drawbacks in quality of life.
1) Server market. MS is significant here up to about mid-range, but there's decent competetion and they don't exist at the really high end.
2) Console gaming market. Yes their market share is higher than 0%, what it was 3 years ago. This is (almost) meaningless. Their market share is less than 20% I believe. Sony and Nintendo aren't going away, and most importantly these companies have little reason to work with or trust MS, unlike many of the companies in the computing world MS has plundered or destroyed.
MS created one monopoly and have proven quite capable of entering new markets that are built upon the tools of that monopoly, i.e. software that runs on a home computer. They really haven't been able to dominate markets outside of this realm yet.
If prices, or demand, were going to stay this high, you'd think oil companies would be falling over themselves to build more refineries...but they're not. Why not? Because they know that, in the longer term, those refineries won't pay for themselves when the price of gasoline drops again.
Prices for gasoline have gone up because the current supply of crude has gone down. This means that existing refineries are likely a bit under-utilized at the moment.
It would only make sense to build more refineries if supply was going up.
How about (semi) automatically targetted text ads that are far less intrusive and more effective than most of the banner and flash ads out there on the web? I'd consider that innovative.
Froogle is nice for looking to buy something on the web, especially comparison shopping. I've used it to help a coworker looki into cable modem and router combos and we were easily able to determine the types of features that were widely available and for what price from a few simple searches.
When I want to catch up on non-geek related current events I always check Google News first.
Local search can help you find the web site of a restaurant and a map of the area all at once.
Don't forget Gmail, which *could* become a revolutionary email service.
Finally, head over to labs.google.com to see what else their working on. I've used Google Sets a few times. Plug in one or two related keywords and get back a whole set of keywords.
I'd say Google has done a lot to stay at the cutting edge of search technology.
Not to mention that terrorists are far more likely to take measures to alter their appearance, and the system can only identify known terrorists/criminals.
Even if the systems work within acceptable error range without considering these factors, once these are accounted for the recognition systems really look pointless.
Not to mention legal problems. I would assume that conspiracy to write computer viruses (or whatever MS would be guilty of if it contracted someone to write Linux viruses) would be just about as illegal as actually writing the viruses, and the actual virus writer would probably be eager to turn in MS in return for a lenient sentence if actually caught. No corporate exec for an already successful company is going to risk jail time to such a roundabout way of tarnishing a competitor's image.
So if Longhorn can do all this on existing hardware, what's the deal with needing hardware 8x as powerful to meet projected specifications? Something doesn't add up here...
Yeah, because high reliability servers require a full time, dedicated admin for each one. Whatever.
Anyone who shells out for hardware like that will have the admin doing other duties, even if this is the main server for the organization. Take 1/4 of the admin's wages (which seem totally pulled out of your ass, to start with) as actually dedicated to that single box. Especially when you're paying for top of the line support on top of a local admin.
Sun = $30K + $40K = $70K operation costs over 3 years Dell = $25K + $30K = $55K op costs/3 years
This is looking a bit closer, huh?
Now throw in the previous statments about being able to hot swap hardware from the Sun box. This will save time and more importantly allow the business to continue operations during repairs. Equivalent functionality from Dell would require a backup machine, load balancing or other forms of external redundancy not included in your evaluation.
Possibly because although most Linux distributions ship with a great set of core fonts nowadays, they also ship with many of the older, lower quality fonts. Most Windows machines don;t have too many fugly fonts on them.
The key is likely either configuring OO in some way to select better fonts (maybe choosing better default for each font family?) or simply removing the uglier fonts from your Linux machine.
The C++ specific benchmarks (the third and fourth ones) showed MinGW very close to MSVC (within about 5% performance), though both lagged behind Intel on benchmark #4.
So for C++ applications, MinGW would seem almost as good as MSVC.
1) As far as the GPL goes, the GPL grants additional rights beyond those normally given to copyrighted material. It does not take any rights away. Also, the GPL applies only to distribution and not personal use. DRM affects personal use in addition to distribution.
2) Many terms of service, lisencing agreements and other "contracts" (I use this term loosely, as both parties do not have the option to negotiate in these cases) often contain clauses that are not legally enforceable. Payment DOES NOT constitute a BINDING agreement in these cases.
Hmmm, almost certainly not related since I run Knoppix/Debian, but I've had a problem with lost bookmarks on Mozilla before.
Not eaten, or destroyed, but simply losing any bookmarks made during my current session. I eventually figured out that my bookmarks and other app settings were not being saved when I logged out of KDE with all of my apps running and my configuration saved. The next time I logged in, Mozilla would restart automatically and in the same desktop as it was previously, but nothing had been saved when KDE saved the session. Similar behavior happens with XMMS playlists, and probably many other non-KDE apps.
Since then I've taken to shutting down Mozilla and XMMS before logging out, and only leaving KDE apps like Kate, Konsole, Qt Designer and Konqueror open persistently.
I second this. I use KDE and find it far superior to Windows. Why? Largely because although it does copy many elements that Windows has (but probably were not invented there), it combines them many successful Unix/X-Windows GUI elements.
Multiple desktops, a powerful tabbed file manager/web browser, a great text editor (Kate), "Start" menus which do not require an entire folder for items related to a single app (though this is not really exclusive to KDE or directly a fault of Windows), and options to configure things like mouse and window behaviors like more traditional X-Windows counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting rid of Mono could never work.
First of all I doubt Miguel would stay with Sun/Novell if they quashed Mono. He'd probably leave and continue the work elsewhere. I doubt they could stop him since Mono is based on ECMA standards and the current Mono C# compiler, runtime and class libraries are all covered by open source licenses (GPL, LGPL and X11, respectively).
Second, if Mono was quashed most of its developers would probably migrate over to dotGNU, the other free C#/CLR implementation.
Long story short, free software can't be bought (and eliminated or made proprietary) as easily as the companies that develop it.
First off, I'd like to see those benchmarks. I'm not sure I believe them. Oh I'm sure such results could be achieved, but likely they were programmed in ways that do not take advantage of the best features of Python. Probably things like Fibonacci tests and the like. Pfff.
Second, I've got a secret to share with you about writing software. The secret is that in most applications not more than 5% to 20% of the code actually requires the speed that an optimized C/C++/Java implementation would give it. GUIs, text processing, database queries, networking (and just about any I/O bound) will be very close in speed in Python or similar languages to natively compiled code. In the cases of GUIs especially most of the time the CPU is simply waiting on the user anyways.
Now what about that remaining 5% to 20% you may ask? If you need the speed then implement that in optimized C or C++. Python is designed to interface such code easily. But do us all a favor and leave the baggage of you high performance languages out of the main application logic.
Vote for a 3rd party candidate or independent, any of them. One more vote won't matter a whit to one of the big party candidates, but voting 3rd party actaully matters to their cause (1 vote in a a few thousand is much more significant percentage wise than one vote in a few million) and sends a message to the big two that you're not happy with the status quo.
I saw them live in downtown Minneapolis that same summer, where they gave a FREE outdoor concert to over 100,000 people.
Don't you mean "Oops, IE did it again"?
Interestingly, I just came upon this news bit on underreported.com:
In short, Python can do pretty much anything Java or Mono is likely able to do. In addition, it's faster and easier to code in than most "programming" languages, largely due to dynamic variable typing.
For developer friendliness Mono and Java are a step up from C/C++, but languages like Python (and probably Ruby, though I haven't used it) have potential to be even more.
Umm, why is this Informative?
/. can someone get the gist of an article completely backwards and be rewarded for it by their peers.
The article is stating that Webmonkey is back. The above post is lamenting that "the web will be worse off without such a valuable help do [sic] web development newbies"?
Only on
PDF is an open standard in that its specification is 100% open and you can write and distribute software for reading, writing and modifying PDFs restriction and royalty free. This is why just about every Linux distribution (and BSDs also I assume) come with software like ps2pdf, which can convert Postscript (another open Adobe standard, used for almost all Unix printing) to PDF, and therefore any app which can write PS (again, basically any Unix app) by printing to a file can indirectly create PDFs.
You're right in that PDFs are not ideal when a document requires editing. But it is pretty ideal for distribution of a final version.
As to size, the size depends mainly on the images used. PDF is very efficient at sstoring large but good looking files of mostly text.
First of all, as many posts have stated there are wuite a few algorithms out there for mesh optimization. Two of the classic techniques were developed by Schroeder and Turk.
Schroeder's method (PDF) is fast and is able to reuse a subset of the original vertices, but the quality is not great. Essentially, the mesh is simplified mainly by collapsing edges (eliminating two triangles for each edge collapsed) in the flattest parts of the mesh.
Turk's method (PDF) is more accurate, but cannot reuse the original vertices. Basically a new set of vertices are scattered across the original surface, forced to spread out from their neighbors. The amount of local spreading or repulsion is determined using local curvature, allowing greater point density where curvature and therefore detail is high. A new mesh is generated through these points using the original as a guide.
Further work has been done to create progressively decimated meshes, much like progressive JPEG images work. A model sent over the web could be displayed in low resolution very quickly while the bulk of the geometry is still in transit. Methods for this tend to be colser to Schroeder's approach because obviously it is desirable to reuse the existing data at each level of representation.
This new method is quite a bit different. It clusters triangles into patches that can be represented simply. These patches are optimized iteratively. Finally a new mesh is created, using the pathces as partitions and reusing vertices where the partitions meet.
Some benefits to this method:
To me the potential animation capabilities and optional interactivity sound most interesting. Accurate decimation methods are already available that work well offline, and faster methods are available for online LOD management. Merging decimation with animation could lead to higher quality, lower computational cost 3D anmiation. Allowing high interactivity could help artists improve the aesthetics of scanned artifacts.
I won't argue that people like to have lots of space to themselves, this is obvious. The thing is it's a tradeoff. Lots of space means more money and/or farther from urban centers, which often implies a longer commute.
I live in an apartment right now because it is close to school and work, which save me time as well as money spent on my car. I could move farther away and live in either a bigger place or a cheaper place, but for me the tradeoff of convenience would not be worth it. This may change later in my life.
As far as living cheaply, maybe most people do live right up to their means, but who wouldn't gladly pay less for what they already have? This would mean more money for other things they may want. money saved on housing could be spent on nicer vacations. In my housing example I came up with a way to combine many of the positive charcteristics of urban apartment living (short commute, close to active city life) with thoseof suburban house living (mainly outdoor space). No it's not perfect, but I think it could be a lot better than what you describe. You've obviously had some bad apartment experiences, but plently of other people like apartments just fine. The garage thing was something I just came up with to go along with the shared parks replacing private lawns. Such a asystem could have private garages as well, many apartment complexes have private garages. For tool ownership, a simple set of lockers in the shared garage would do pretty nicely.
The reason Manhattan is expensive isn't because it's high density, it's because it's at the center of a huge city. You have cause and effect mixed up. If Manhattan apartment living is expensive, a house in Manhattan would be astronomical.
Urban sprawl would be a lot less serious if high density apartments were built out in the burbs rather than large houses with big yards. The same amount of people could live more cheaply and closer to their jobs in the city while taking up less land.
I believe that a better solution would be a more communal type of living. Urban areas could contain small apartments and lots of small parks. Less space would be needed for roads and parking (even if just as many people had cars), garages could be shared within an apartment. When you get right down to it, yards and garage workspaces are severly underutilized bu most suburbanites for the amount of space they consume. Sharing these resources among groups of families would cut down on wasted space and allow higher density living without significant drawbacks in quality of life.
You're giving MS way too much credit here.
1) Server market. MS is significant here up to about mid-range, but there's decent competetion and they don't exist at the really high end.
2) Console gaming market. Yes their market share is higher than 0%, what it was 3 years ago. This is (almost) meaningless. Their market share is less than 20% I believe. Sony and Nintendo aren't going away, and most importantly these companies have little reason to work with or trust MS, unlike many of the companies in the computing world MS has plundered or destroyed.
MS created one monopoly and have proven quite capable of entering new markets that are built upon the tools of that monopoly, i.e. software that runs on a home computer. They really haven't been able to dominate markets outside of this realm yet.
Prices for gasoline have gone up because the current supply of crude has gone down. This means that existing refineries are likely a bit under-utilized at the moment.
It would only make sense to build more refineries if supply was going up.
How about (semi) automatically targetted text ads that are far less intrusive and more effective than most of the banner and flash ads out there on the web? I'd consider that innovative.
Froogle is nice for looking to buy something on the web, especially comparison shopping. I've used it to help a coworker looki into cable modem and router combos and we were easily able to determine the types of features that were widely available and for what price from a few simple searches.
When I want to catch up on non-geek related current events I always check Google News first.
Local search can help you find the web site of a restaurant and a map of the area all at once.
Don't forget Gmail, which *could* become a revolutionary email service.
Finally, head over to labs.google.com to see what else their working on. I've used Google Sets a few times. Plug in one or two related keywords and get back a whole set of keywords.
I'd say Google has done a lot to stay at the cutting edge of search technology.
Not to mention that terrorists are far more likely to take measures to alter their appearance, and the system can only identify known terrorists/criminals.
Even if the systems work within acceptable error range without considering these factors, once these are accounted for the recognition systems really look pointless.
Not to mention legal problems. I would assume that conspiracy to write computer viruses (or whatever MS would be guilty of if it contracted someone to write Linux viruses) would be just about as illegal as actually writing the viruses, and the actual virus writer would probably be eager to turn in MS in return for a lenient sentence if actually caught. No corporate exec for an already successful company is going to risk jail time to such a roundabout way of tarnishing a competitor's image.
Great!
So if Longhorn can do all this on existing hardware, what's the deal with needing hardware 8x as powerful to meet projected specifications? Something doesn't add up here...
I'm guessing the GIMP developers would like to keep with the GNU/acronym theme, so let's see...
... the GNU Raster Image Manipulator, "GRIM", hmmm...
... the GNU Natural Universal Display Enhancer, "GNUDE", uhhh...
... the GNU Raster Image Transformer, "GRIT"...
This may be tougher than I thought...
Yeah, because high reliability servers require a full time, dedicated admin for each one. Whatever.
Anyone who shells out for hardware like that will have the admin doing other duties, even if this is the main server for the organization. Take 1/4 of the admin's wages (which seem totally pulled out of your ass, to start with) as actually dedicated to that single box. Especially when you're paying for top of the line support on top of a local admin.
Sun = $30K + $40K = $70K operation costs over 3 years
Dell = $25K + $30K = $55K op costs/3 years
This is looking a bit closer, huh?
Now throw in the previous statments about being able to hot swap hardware from the Sun box. This will save time and more importantly allow the business to continue operations during repairs. Equivalent functionality from Dell would require a backup machine, load balancing or other forms of external redundancy not included in your evaluation.
Possibly because although most Linux distributions ship with a great set of core fonts nowadays, they also ship with many of the older, lower quality fonts. Most Windows machines don;t have too many fugly fonts on them.
The key is likely either configuring OO in some way to select better fonts (maybe choosing better default for each font family?) or simply removing the uglier fonts from your Linux machine.
The C++ specific benchmarks (the third and fourth ones) showed MinGW very close to MSVC (within about 5% performance), though both lagged behind Intel on benchmark #4.
So for C++ applications, MinGW would seem almost as good as MSVC.
Wrong.
1) As far as the GPL goes, the GPL grants additional rights beyond those normally given to copyrighted material. It does not take any rights away. Also, the GPL applies only to distribution and not personal use. DRM affects personal use in addition to distribution.
2) Many terms of service, lisencing agreements and other "contracts" (I use this term loosely, as both parties do not have the option to negotiate in these cases) often contain clauses that are not legally enforceable. Payment DOES NOT constitute a BINDING agreement in these cases.
Hmmm, almost certainly not related since I run Knoppix/Debian, but I've had a problem with lost bookmarks on Mozilla before.
Not eaten, or destroyed, but simply losing any bookmarks made during my current session. I eventually figured out that my bookmarks and other app settings were not being saved when I logged out of KDE with all of my apps running and my configuration saved. The next time I logged in, Mozilla would restart automatically and in the same desktop as it was previously, but nothing had been saved when KDE saved the session. Similar behavior happens with XMMS playlists, and probably many other non-KDE apps.
Since then I've taken to shutting down Mozilla and XMMS before logging out, and only leaving KDE apps like Kate, Konsole, Qt Designer and Konqueror open persistently.
Just my $0.02.
I second this. I use KDE and find it far superior to Windows. Why? Largely because although it does copy many elements that Windows has (but probably were not invented there), it combines them many successful Unix/X-Windows GUI elements.
Multiple desktops, a powerful tabbed file manager/web browser, a great text editor (Kate), "Start" menus which do not require an entire folder for items related to a single app (though this is not really exclusive to KDE or directly a fault of Windows), and options to configure things like mouse and window behaviors like more traditional X-Windows counterparts.