... His fortunes changed in 1999. Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading purveyors of Linux-based software packages tailored for large enterprises, had granted him stock options with no strings attached, thank-yous from entrepreneurs who hoped to grow rich off his creation. When Red Hat went public that year, Torvalds was suddenly worth $1 million. On the day VA Linux (now VA Software) went public, Torvalds was worth roughly $20 million, though by the time he could sell his shares, they were valued at only a fraction of that.... [Wired Magazine, Gary Livlin, 11.11, Leader of the Free World]
In numerousarticles
it outlines he has made a comfortable amount money (not stinking rich, but not poor either) out of his work. And for the ideas and toil deserves every bit of it. I think most interesting idea was giving Linux away. Linus said it himself who said that probably the best idea was to make Linux freely available.
I had the pleasure of watching The Star Dreamer (documentary on Pavel, making science fiction films before in the soviet union)
on australian sbs this year. If you can view this documentary or catch a copy of Planet of Storms or Planeta Bur you will be amazed at the Kubric like quality he acheives.... 15 years before Kubric!.
after completing a prime mission that discovered vast supplies of frozen water... As summer came to northern Mars and the north polar covering of frozen carbon dioxide shrank, Odyssey found abundant frozen water in the north, too.
Anyone have any idea of the water quantities they are talking about here? If the surface has been mapped in the IR spectrum at 100m resolution then what is the surface coverage of water?
No I disagree. Sure your hacker come programmer could put together a gamecube solution but first theres the problem of gamecube SDK (if your not an official developer you break license) Here's the gnu toolkit, but that's it. There are enthusiasts that want to try their hand at consoles closer to the metal than gamecube, ps2 or xbox. I can think of a lot of good AUS, NZ and UK programmers who cut their teeth as ankle biters on (expensive) Acorns, Sinclairs, Apple][ etc, hooked up to tv's. This is simply the latest example.
This is where Lamonthe's idea comes in, sell cheap hardware to code against. It looks like he's giving you known hardware to code with that can spit out to any tv system (seacam, pal) with access to additional hardware like PS2 controllers. The other thing is that the system is embedded. No drives, os.. just you the code. Try that with gamecube.
for example your code might be something like
...
Init Hardware
Init API
JMP MAIN your_code...
i must admit I've spent enough on Lamonthe books to keep him in plenty of pizza and look foward to reading more from his programming ideas. You can read a good interview here.
'... In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux...' [tim bray]
must make a mention of tim brays article on software patents that I've recycled from a while ago.
Re:Other IT Myths
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
'... members could qualify as Chartered Engineers (or whatever title), like the IEEE, the IMechE...'
could the qualification/licensing have to do with legal requirements under law?
You need permits to build bridges (CE)
you need to submit a license to mass produce an electrical device (EE) or vehicle (ME, AE) release a pharmaceutical (PHC, CE)?
Until Tom dick and harry start getting injured or die as a result of coding errors I suspect this is the real reason software engineers do not require licensing. Licensing is the result of saftey requirements enfoced by legislation. Hence the guarded professions: EE, ME, CE, MD, MS, pilots, plumbers etc where a measurable standard must be met.
Until then software design going to be the lowest price, fastest turn around: not necessarily with the highest quality or safety in mind. Read this post to see what I mean.
I've used moray dos version since 3.0 days. It's useful on Dos but the windows version is more useful for most. looking at the current download site all windows versions are shareware only and must be registered for any useful work.
is the fact that MS has made soft errors in their operating system as the article seems to indicate?
I thought it might have been the cost of the effort to polishing their releases (I seem to remember heaps of language releases on MSDN) so I guess it's not for lack of unicode support for language.
But cost of checking might not be worth it. Something 80%-90% accurate (chew me out if you can show examples to disprove this ratio) seems to be ok for MS.
here's an obilgatory JOS article on unicode that lots of MS developers would be aware of...Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
I seem to recall Linus saying "release usable code as fast as possible"
spot on for release. the quicker you get the feedback, the better the result but I'm not sure this covers all the problems. My first look at the 0.1 code saw the business logic (python) bound tightly with the gui (wxPython). What happens if I want to port to another GUI? or better still use a library?
business/groupware/Exchange/Notes
there is no focus in this area. One idea that struck me in the face with all this groupware was by installing a Mandrake and using for cross compiling ~ data. All my useful data was locked up in Islands of applications. I sorta hoped I could use bits of chandler to import/export data (email, rss, cal) in my gui's across win2k/linux this way without having to use say samba. Alas not the case so far.
I'm not writing off Chandler it's simply not as useful to me as I thought it could be.
take a look but at the moment is it worth it? problems in their development process and technology have appeared since I last looked at it post version 0.1. Will the Firebird+Sunbird combo make it irrelevant?
Back in the 60's the American car industry peddled out a similiar line of "product before safety". The book, Unsafe at any speed [Ralph Nader, 1965]...
... broke the car industries ability to pass off inferior products unsafe for use by the general public....
In the case of the Chev Corvairs even when parked. (you can read such stories from the reader testimonials at amazon. Better still read the book at your local library). As a result of the book and the following movement, the mantra of "Engineering, Enforcement, Education". The legacy that is still applied to Engineering practice today.
It's a sad day for journalists (let alone Journo's from the Washington Post [think Woodward and Burnstein]) that fail to understand Naders legacy and see it's relevence to todays computer software industry.
The lefty ratbag John Pilger's creed should be repeated here to see where this journalist has failed the Posts readers....
... it's not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas and myths that surround it....John Pilger.
... Unfortunately, some new concepts like Thin Clients, and Software Services are bringing us back to the bad old days of mainframe computers when a private message sent from one person to another could easily be intercepted by a corrupt official....
How do you create anonymous functions and pass them as variables in
Python? You can't, only "lambda *expressions*" which is a strange and
arbitrary distinction.
You can read all about lambda
expressions in the Tutorial section, 4.7.5 Lambda Forms. They have been around at least since '99. In fact if I dig out my trusty copy of Learning Python, Mark Lutz, 1st Ed.,
1999, Oreilly Press, I find that if I turn to page 111 - 113 I can read that:
...
Python also provides an expresson form that generates function objects.
Because of it's similarity to a tool in the LISP Language. It's called lambda.
It's general form is the keyword lambda, followed by one or more arguments,
followed by an expression after a colon:
lambda argument 1, argument N : expression using argument
So python does have lambda expression capability. However you maybe making a point similiar to PG in that Python is not as useful as Lisp as outlined in Beating the Averages and Sussinctness is power.
I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.
I think a better way to put it is, "I want my languages COSHER and prefer Computer Science over Computer Secrecy", [Steve Mann, wearcam.org]. It doesn't necessarily mean someone is smarter but it might mean they think better.
In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux, tim bray
Henry now has to carry this pack with him wherever he goes, which is the computer controller and batteries for the pump... a small price to pay for life he says. The Australian inventors of Henry's heart pump believe their device can do something no other artificial heart has....keep beating for years. They've already had pumps operating continuously... in the lab.
old news. patients are already benefiting from LVADS in melbourne. There was a story on ABC Catylst (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Heart Pump, 30 October 2003 (full transcript) where one of the recipients received a pump. The news presenter tried to find a pulse, but none could be found due to the continuous pump. Interestingly the body seems to adapt to it.
might be time to tryIronPython (~1.7 times faster than standard Py2.3). Here's some performance benchmarks comparing cpython to ironpython for those interested in the numbers. interestingly, IronPythons creator Jim Hugunin designed Jython.
Thanks for prompting me to look as Jim just completed a talk at OSCON, 28 ~ IronPython: A fast Python implementation for.NET and Mono and has released the source.
History shows us that such inventions have their place. Water may be a problem if your operating in desert or desert like conditions. What about Alpine?
real heroes of telemark
I'm watching a bbc series on abc tv called the real heros of telemark (by ray mear) ~ which follows the story of WWII british trained and equiped, norwegian commandoes conducting raids on a Norsk heavy water plant in norway. Hitler had captured this plant to help in the production of nuclear weapons.
where weight matters, extra food gets left behind
The problems they had with carrying their kit, traversing cold climatic conditions where you could expend upwards of 5000/6000 calaries per day this type of food would have gone a long way to solve their problems in surviving.
One day's food supply of three meals, weighs 3.5 kilograms but that can be reduced to about 0.4 kilograms with the dehydrated pouches
did everyone catch that "... 3 meals could be reduced from 3.5 Kg to 400g... "! The difference can be made up with a lot of kit which is a pretty significant consideration where bullets are more useful than food.
ahh I love the hoax lunar stories. try this one. not may remember but the voice and images, telemetry from apollo 11 had to be relayed from different tracking stations around the world. One of them in Honeysuckle creek (DSN 44) was receiving data from Apollo by directly pointing the dish at the moon. The data was then transmitted via Telstra to the yanks.
So the hoaxers have to contend not only with the Apollo crew, the ruskies but also csiro.
Not exactly Occam's Razor is it?
I wanted to change the login text. I grepped for the old login text, found/etc/issues, and I edited it. It worked. I rebooted. It went away.
interestingly motd ~ works like this with/etc/issue and/etc/motd... you can edit your/etc/rc.d file as shown in the link but I just leave 2 lines blank.
$ vi/etc/motd # commented newline 1 # commented newline 2 this is your motd message here :wq! (to save & quit) $
this should allow your motd to appear next boot into bash.
Slashdot Mirror
sounds like your having a bit of a hippy flashback.
- ... His fortunes changed in 1999. Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading purveyors of Linux-based software packages tailored for large enterprises, had granted him stock options with no strings attached, thank-yous from entrepreneurs who hoped to grow rich off his creation. When Red Hat went public that year, Torvalds was suddenly worth $1 million. On the day VA Linux (now VA Software) went public, Torvalds was worth roughly $20 million, though by the time he could sell his shares, they were valued at only a fraction of that.
... [Wired Magazine, Gary Livlin, 11.11, Leader of the Free World]
In numerous articles it outlines he has made a comfortable amount money (not stinking rich, but not poor either) out of his work. And for the ideas and toil deserves every bit of it. I think most interesting idea was giving Linux away. Linus said it himself who said that probably the best idea was to make Linux freely available.Do not forget Pavel Klushantsev . No science fiction list is complete without Planeta Bur or Road to the Stars .
I had the pleasure of watching The Star Dreamer (documentary on Pavel, making science fiction films before in the soviet union) on australian sbs this year. If you can view this documentary or catch a copy of Planet of Storms or Planeta Bur you will be amazed at the Kubric like quality he acheives .... 15 years before Kubric!.
Anyone have any idea of the water quantities they are talking about here? If the surface has been mapped in the IR spectrum at 100m resolution then what is the surface coverage of water?
this has been on the public radar (PBS: Frontline: Cyberwar) for a while now
for those interested in the the 49g+ in all it's gory technical details.
No I disagree. Sure your hacker come programmer could put together a gamecube solution but first theres the problem of gamecube SDK (if your not an official developer you break license) Here's the gnu toolkit, but that's it. There are enthusiasts that want to try their hand at consoles closer to the metal than gamecube, ps2 or xbox. I can think of a lot of good AUS, NZ and UK programmers who cut their teeth as ankle biters on (expensive) Acorns, Sinclairs, Apple][ etc, hooked up to tv's. This is simply the latest example.
This is where Lamonthe's idea comes in, sell cheap hardware to code against. It looks like he's giving you known hardware to code with that can spit out to any tv system (seacam, pal) with access to additional hardware like PS2 controllers. The other thing is that the system is embedded. No drives, os .. just you the code. Try that with gamecube.
for example your code might be something like
Init Hardware
Init API
JMP MAIN
your_code
i must admit I've spent enough on Lamonthe books to keep him in plenty of pizza and look foward to reading more from his programming ideas. You can read a good interview here.
'... In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux ...'
[tim bray]
must make a mention of tim brays article on software patents that I've recycled from a while ago.
could the qualification/licensing have to do with legal requirements under law?
you need to submit a license to mass produce an electrical device (EE) or vehicle (ME, AE)
release a pharmaceutical (PHC, CE)?
Until Tom dick and harry start getting injured or die as a result of coding errors I suspect this is the real reason software engineers do not require licensing. Licensing is the result of saftey requirements enfoced by legislation. Hence the guarded professions: EE, ME, CE, MD, MS, pilots, plumbers etc where a measurable standard must be met.
Until then software design going to be the lowest price, fastest turn around: not necessarily with the highest quality or safety in mind. Read this post to see what I mean.
I've used moray dos version since 3.0 days. It's useful on Dos but the windows version is more useful for most. looking at the current download site all windows versions are shareware only and must be registered for any useful work.
is the fact that MS has made soft errors in their operating system as the article seems to indicate?
I thought it might have been the cost of the effort to polishing their releases (I seem to remember heaps of language releases on MSDN) so I guess it's not for lack of unicode support for language.
But cost of checking might not be worth it. Something 80%-90% accurate (chew me out if you can show examples to disprove this ratio) seems to be ok for MS.
here's an obilgatory JOS article on unicode that lots of MS developers would be aware of ...Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
spot on for release. the quicker you get the feedback, the better the result but I'm not sure this covers all the problems. My first look at the 0.1 code saw the business logic (python) bound tightly with the gui (wxPython). What happens if I want to port to another GUI? or better still use a library?
business/groupware/Exchange/Notes
there is no focus in this area. One idea that struck me in the face with all this groupware was by installing a Mandrake and using for cross compiling ~ data. All my useful data was locked up in Islands of applications. I sorta hoped I could use bits of chandler to import/export data (email, rss, cal) in my gui's across win2k/linux this way without having to use say samba. Alas not the case so far.
I'm not writing off Chandler it's simply not as useful to me as I thought it could be.
take a look but at the moment is it worth it? problems in their development process and technology have appeared since I last looked at it post version 0.1. Will the Firebird+Sunbird combo make it irrelevant?
Well done Phil this is spot on.
Back in the 60's the American car industry peddled out a similiar line of "product before safety" . The book, Unsafe at any speed [Ralph Nader, 1965] ...
In the case of the Chev Corvairs even when parked. (you can read such stories from the reader testimonials at amazon. Better still read the book at your local library). As a result of the book and the following movement, the mantra of "Engineering, Enforcement, Education". The legacy that is still applied to Engineering practice today.
It's a sad day for journalists (let alone Journo's from the Washington Post [think Woodward and Burnstein]) that fail to understand Naders legacy and see it's relevence to todays computer software industry.
The lefty ratbag John Pilger's creed should be repeated here to see where this journalist has failed the Posts readers ....
Ouiki Glogs:Rationale for attribution-free online communities ~ [steve mann, wearcam.org]
repeat after me, "python documentation is my best fiend ... ".
You can read all about lambda expressions in the Tutorial section, 4.7.5 Lambda Forms. They have been around at least since '99. In fact if I dig out my trusty copy of Learning Python, Mark Lutz, 1st Ed., 1999, Oreilly Press, I find that if I turn to page 111 - 113 I can read that:
So python does have lambda expression capability. However you maybe making a point similiar to PG in that Python is not as useful as Lisp as outlined in Beating the Averages and Sussinctness is power.
I think a better way to put it is, "I want my languages COSHER and prefer Computer Science over Computer Secrecy", [Steve Mann, wearcam.org]. It doesn't necessarily mean someone is smarter but it might mean they think better.
In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux, tim bray
via this link I read an article on patents and linux.
sorry the faqs about the VentrAssist pump are here.
Heart Pump , 30 October 2003
old news. patients are already benefiting from LVADS in melbourne. There was a story on ABC Catylst (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Heart Pump , 30 October 2003 (full transcript) where one of the recipients received a pump. The news presenter tried to find a pulse, but none could be found due to the continuous pump. Interestingly the body seems to adapt to it.
The company who is commercialising this technology, Ventracor lists more faqs here.
btw it's released under CPL not GPL ~ doofus.
might be time to try IronPython (~1.7 times faster than standard Py2.3). Here's some performance benchmarks comparing cpython to ironpython for those interested in the numbers. interestingly, IronPythons creator Jim Hugunin designed Jython.
Thanks for prompting me to look as Jim just completed a talk at OSCON, 28 ~ IronPython: A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono and has released the source.
History shows us that such inventions have their place. Water may be a problem if your operating in desert or desert like conditions. What about Alpine?
real heroes of telemarkI'm watching a bbc series on abc tv called the real heros of telemark (by ray mear) ~ which follows the story of WWII british trained and equiped, norwegian commandoes conducting raids on a Norsk heavy water plant in norway. Hitler had captured this plant to help in the production of nuclear weapons.
where weight matters, extra food gets left behindThe problems they had with carrying their kit, traversing cold climatic conditions where you could expend upwards of 5000/6000 calaries per day this type of food would have gone a long way to solve their problems in surviving.
did everyone catch that "... 3 meals could be reduced from 3.5 Kg to 400g... "! The difference can be made up with a lot of kit which is a pretty significant consideration where bullets are more useful than food.
ahh I love the hoax lunar stories. try this one. not may remember but the voice and images, telemetry from apollo 11 had to be relayed from different tracking stations around the world. One of them in Honeysuckle creek (DSN 44) was receiving data from Apollo by directly pointing the dish at the moon. The data was then transmitted via Telstra to the yanks.
So the hoaxers have to contend not only with the Apollo crew, the ruskies but also csiro. Not exactly Occam's Razor is it?
interestingly motd ~ works like this with /etc/issue and /etc/motd... you can edit your /etc/rc.d file as shown in the link but I just leave 2 lines blank.
# commented newline 1
# commented newline 2
this is your motd message here
$
this should allow your motd to appear next boot into bash.