I introduced a wiki (MoinMoin) at my company about a year ago. My inspiration was a comment somewhere about how if you show people how much better a wiki is people will naturally use it.
With this in mind I started using it as a personal notepad. After a while, when someone asked a non-trivial question I would document it on the wiki and direct them to it.
Over time people started using it on their own and now it is a normal part of many people's workflow.
1. I've started using Turbogears and its is wonderful. Easy to setup, very easy to understand, and very powerful. I cannot comment on it with respect to Rails, but as far as I know it is inspired by similar ideas. One major advantage of Turbogears is that it is built out of several existing projects that have had lots of use and development, SQLObject (for Object-Relational mapping) and CherryPy.
2. I can't imagine any reason to believe Python would be more error-prone than Ruby. From a language standpoint they are very similar. However, Ruby is a somewhat immature language compared to Python. Standard library, 3rd party support and performance are all lacking in Ruby. I'm sure these things will catch up in time, but for now it's a much newer environment and it shows.
The Outlook plugin may have been written by Mark Hammond but spambayes is very much a group effort. The project can be found at spambayes.sf.net.
I've been using spambayes for months now and it really is quite amazing. Now, when I get the occasionaly spam in my mailbox it's actually interesting because I want to figure out why it made it in. The number of false positives is almost nil, and the ones that do get hit are spammy looking autogenerated reciepts from purchases I've made. It's made reading email a much more enjoyable activity.
We have this problem at Wisconsin-Madison. The dorm networks are saturated to the point of having worse performance over ethernet than dialup at some times. They are capped, but since it's a single cap for everyone the people trying to do real work get the shaft. What they really need to do is cap on a port-by-port basis, but I guess we don't have the router horsepower for that.
"Obesity affects more 20 percent of adults and 10-15 percent of children. Nearly 30 percent of adults and 10-14 percent of children are overweight and at risk for obesity. Obesity is responsible for nearly as many preventable deaths as smoking (300,000), and cost society about $100 billion a year according to AOA."
Just because it has been used at all doesn't qualify something as being "actively" used. The appropriate response is to notify the vendor, which has obviously (publicly) been done. Whatever this hole came from, it will be fixed ASAP and people using whatever will have time to fix it. Immediate release will only cause 5krip7 K1d problems.
I don't know about other schools, but at mine (University of Wisconsin-Madison) all intro level CompSci classes are taught purely in Java. This makes sense IMHO since it allows them to concentrate on the things that are actually important such as alogrithms and data structures instead of the cruft we deal with for perfomance reasons (pointers, memory managment by hand, etc.) I think you'll see a big group of programmers graduating in the next couple of years who's primary language is Java, for better or worse.
And I don't see why it would be any _less_ secure to run Java on your server. I really doubt it is posissble to use common attacks like buffer overflows on Java, and any other issues are language independant. There might be legitimate security reasons not to run FreeNet, but Java ain't one of them.
That may be the case now, but hopefully in the future there will be strong enough interconnection so that is much harder. What happens when your little island data haven has direct connections to 9 different backbones in 8 countries? The powers-that-be will have a much bigger problem if you are connected with, say, Russia, Pakistan and S. Africa, all of whom are in turn connected to a variety of other countries. The key is to have a large variety of backbone providers.
I actually don't think the port would be all that difficult, relativly speaking. AFAIK the "emotion engine" is running the MIPS instruction set which we already have a port for. So, a port would need, ideally: X, sound, Mesa, and any system specific stuff (booting, MMU etc.) USB and Firewire too of course, for full functionality.
Well, in addition to all of the other Unices that run X (all of them I think), the BeOS also has a client-server display model AFAIK. I don't think it is being used over networks, but I think in theory it could be.
Isn't this what IO2 is supposed to accompish? This is very cool, but it would be nice for the TCP/IP stack to be configurable and upgradable. i.e. to IPv6 etc. This should be great for homebrew routers and such also. I hope linux drivers appear soon.
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I introduced a wiki (MoinMoin) at my company about a year ago. My inspiration was a comment somewhere about how if you show people how much better a wiki is people will naturally use it.
With this in mind I started using it as a personal notepad. After a while, when someone asked a non-trivial question I would document it on the wiki and direct them to it.
Over time people started using it on their own and now it is a normal part of many people's workflow.
-Adam
A few comments:
1. I've started using Turbogears and its is wonderful. Easy to setup, very easy to understand, and very powerful. I cannot comment on it with respect to Rails, but as far as I know it is inspired by similar ideas. One major advantage of Turbogears is that it is built out of several existing projects that have had lots of use and development, SQLObject (for Object-Relational mapping) and CherryPy.
2. I can't imagine any reason to believe Python would be more error-prone than Ruby. From a language standpoint they are very similar. However, Ruby is a somewhat immature language compared to Python. Standard library, 3rd party support and performance are all lacking in Ruby. I'm sure these things will catch up in time, but for now it's a much newer environment and it shows.
I've been using spambayes for months now and it really is quite amazing. Now, when I get the occasionaly spam in my mailbox it's actually interesting because I want to figure out why it made it in. The number of false positives is almost nil, and the ones that do get hit are spammy looking autogenerated reciepts from purchases I've made. It's made reading email a much more enjoyable activity.
-Adam
This article was/is on the front page of google news. Thats the first time I've seen a /. article there, pretty cool.
-Adam
Xvid is an MPEG-4 codec. Quicktime is a stream format. You could, theoretically, put an xvid encoded video into a quicktime file.
-Adam
We have this problem at Wisconsin-Madison. The dorm networks are saturated to the point of having worse performance over ethernet than dialup at some times. They are capped, but since it's a single cap for everyone the people trying to do real work get the shaft. What they really need to do is cap on a port-by-port basis, but I guess we don't have the router horsepower for that.
-Adam
It's memepool.com, not .org
-Adam
"Obesity affects more 20 percent of adults and 10-15 percent of children. Nearly 30 percent of adults and 10-14 percent of children are overweight and at risk for obesity. Obesity is responsible for nearly as many preventable deaths as smoking (300,000), and cost society about $100 billion a year according to AOA."
http://www.tampamedicalgroup.com/update238.htm
'nuf said.
There is an Undergraduate Projects Lab at UW-Madison that is very similar. We are at http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu.
Just because it has been used at all doesn't qualify something as being "actively" used. The appropriate response is to notify the vendor, which has obviously (publicly) been done. Whatever this hole came from, it will be fixed ASAP and people using whatever will have time to fix it. Immediate release will only cause 5krip7 K1d problems.
-Adam
I don't know about other schools, but at mine (University of Wisconsin-Madison) all intro level CompSci classes are taught purely in Java. This makes sense IMHO since it allows them to concentrate on the things that are actually important such as alogrithms and data structures instead of the cruft we deal with for perfomance reasons (pointers, memory managment by hand, etc.) I think you'll see a big group of programmers graduating in the next couple of years who's primary language is Java, for better or worse.
And I don't see why it would be any _less_ secure to run Java on your server. I really doubt it is posissble to use common attacks like buffer overflows on Java, and any other issues are language independant. There might be legitimate security reasons not to run FreeNet, but Java ain't one of them.
-Adam
That may be the case now, but hopefully in the future there will be strong enough interconnection so that is much harder. What happens when your little island data haven has direct connections to 9 different backbones in 8 countries? The powers-that-be will have a much bigger problem if you are connected with, say, Russia, Pakistan and S. Africa, all of whom are in turn connected to a variety of other countries. The key is to have a large variety of backbone providers.
I actually don't think the port would be all that difficult, relativly speaking. AFAIK the "emotion engine" is running the MIPS instruction set which we already have a port for. So, a port would need, ideally: X, sound, Mesa, and any system specific stuff (booting, MMU etc.) USB and Firewire too of course, for full functionality.
Well, in addition to all of the other Unices that run X (all of them I think), the BeOS also has a client-server display model AFAIK. I don't think it is being used over networks, but I think in theory it could be.
Isn't this what IO2 is supposed to accompish? This is very cool, but it would be nice for the TCP/IP stack to be configurable and upgradable. i.e. to IPv6 etc. This should be great for homebrew routers and such also. I hope linux drivers appear soon.