It makes me think of that old footage of failed flying machines... remember the umbrella thing that bounced up and down?
Anyways, this is just the greatest. This is right up there with winning a hot dog eating contest. Totally useless probably, but so inspirational.
I suppose I'm a linux game old-timer. Back in the late 90s I had custom compiled Mesa for accelerated OpenGL with my most excellent Voodoo2 board. It was so big we called them graphics boards, not cards. It weighed about 5 pounds, was a full length card, and had every square centimeter covered with chips. But, my did it run Quake and Quake2 in full 3D glory. Truly I was the envy of my nerdish college neighbors who had not yet achieved Linux Wizard Level Zero, as I had done.
Really though, in my experience, which is rather quite enormous, it is generally possible to get most Windows® games to run mostly allright in linux operating systems through a huge amount of fiddling, tweaking, screwing around, and otherwise editing various config files and recompiling things with different options selected. The problem arises in that usually one does "some stuff" and eventually "it works." Unfortunately, you probably changed 20 things in between when it didn't work and when it did, and heaven only knows which one of those 20 things was the real thing that made it work.
Compounding the issue, is that some games seem to run with mutually exclusive settings to other games. In this case you find yourself running distinct instances of the X-Window System with specific config files, say to have 16-bit color at a certain special resolution, and a rather large number of configuration files special to a particular game of interest. Naturally, the more games like this that you have, the more the overall complexity is multiplied.
It really wouldn't take a lot to make a consistent platform which is capable of running all of these diverse applications, and Steam is definately something to think about. There was a lot of grumbling and whatnot when it was new, but personally I like the ability to purchase a game on Steam, sign in with my username and password, and have it download the content to whatever computer I am signed on at and magically make it work without having to search through boxes of cdroms and hope that the cd-key is on a sticker in the case and that the cdrom is still readable. Just log in, install content, and play... no optical drive required. If they can get this stuff working on a linux OS, and it really doesn't seem that far-fetched what with the excellent state of Wine these days, then hats off to Valve!
There is one bright shining star in the otherwise empty void of free engineering software packages. I would suggest that you investigate CAE Linux . From their website
Based on the open-source CAE softwares Salomé, Code_Aster, Code_Saturne and OpenFOAM , you can load your CAD geometry in Salomé and start partitionning and meshing your problem in just 5 minutes.
That being said, I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've messed around with CAE Linux, and this is *not* anything even close to what you get with Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor. While the FEA end is good, maybe even great, the modeling functionality is very basic and more akin to what you get with ANSYS or ALGOR rather than a full blown 3D drafting package. Nevertheless, its a great package for engineers and students who want to do some meshing and otherwise learn the basics of finite element analysis. The site even offers a standalone distribution of Salome-Meca-2009.1 which is the core FEA bundle that comes with CAE Linux. I have successfully installed their blob in Gentoo into/opt and it runs on my system at least.
As far as full featured free 3D drafting packages, there really isn't any such animal yet. Yes, I've tried BRL-CAD, and no, I wouldn't consider it to be a viable option. You're going to have to look towards some sort of professional CAD package for that. At home, I use TurboCAD as a reasonably full-featured yet relatively inexpensive solution. There are a great many lower priced 3D drafting packages out there, so look around.
And I must say, I really admire your ambition here... hope it works out for you.
If I was building a new machine, which I'm not at the moment, then I would probably get a copy of Windows-7 for it. However, I never upgrade a Windows OS on an existing machine because on those occasions in the past when I tried it, it always was a disaster. Better to start fresh, or as some poster earlier suggested, get an external drive. I ran the Windows-7 beta from an eSATA drive last year and it worked ok. It existed in peaceful harmony with my Vista installation and didn't cause any issues at all.
I've had scores of mice over the years. I've had them plug up with fibers, get beer spilled in them, have the buttons stop working, worn out the wheels, you name it. The Logitech ones always die hard, and the $20 USB wired optical wheel mice are great. It usually takes spilling something into them to wipe them out. As a gamer, I've clicked many a more expensive mouse into the trash bin in as short as a few months. Logitech makes fine products!
Well, there are quite a lot actually. So far I have tested out a bunch of FPS games, notable are Darkplaces and Nexuiz. VegaStrike compiled and runs nicely, a bunch of racing games like PPRacer, Torcs, SuperTuxKart.
Oh, and I run a 64-bit system, but so far the 32-bit binaries that I have tested also work with the compatibility libs. My card is a relatively recent Radeon HD 3870 and it has taken everything I could find to test on it under Linux.
I've run a lot of Nvidia cards in Linux, but this is my first Radeon. I'm pretty happy overall with it.
I don't know what I was thinking, but I am quite underwhelmed by it. I installed it on my new AMD spider system that I made, with a Phenom-X4, Radeon HD 3870, AMD 790FX motherboard, and 8G of DDR2.
Windows 2000 was great! XP-x64 was pretty good too, but Vista 64, bleech... It took me a couple weeks to debug it to keep it from crashing constantly, and even still, it crashes *a lot*.
This system just flys on Gentoo amd64, it is wonderful and rock solid. Never crashes at all, ever. But reboot into Vista 64 and I'm lucky if it can go a couple hours without a hard lockup or a blue screen.
Luckily, I've been around the block with Windows, and I know how to diagnose crash problems. I would not give Vista 64 to a newb though, its extremely buggy and just doesn't provide the experience that XP-x64 does. Vista is really nice and pretty, very slick and polished and it does run well if you throw enough hardware at it, but the crash bugs are inexcusable.
Bottom Line: I wish I had put XP-x64 on this new system, but I don't really use Windows for much other than World of Warcraft and Jagged Alliance 2 anyways, so I can deal with the irritating instability. X3 and Steam also seems to run somewhat but also crashes and locks up the system much more than XP-x64, which doesn't crash at all.
Vista 64 might be ok in a year or so, its getting better, but its definately not production quality.
I have a 3D space sim implemented in Python here: Spacecommander
It isn't the most sophisticated thing you've ever seen, but its definately pretty sciency. Personally I think that the vector math and matrix transformations are pretty cool if you take a minute to stop and think about the amount of data that the program is processing while it runs.
Fortran syntax is a useful way to type out formulas. Something like gfortran would be reasonable for teaching simple scientific programming ideas. I'm looking forward to trying out the new opensource implementation of Fortress which should prove to be rather handy owing to its concurrent programming support. I can see it becoming a language of choice for supercomputing applications. It has the advantage of an easy syntax, very similar to old FORTRAN, but has been updated to be a 3rd gen language.
As many others have mentioned also though, Python is pretty excellent really for all manner of sophisticated data processing programs. As a mechanical engineer, I use it all the time at work now that I took the time to learn how to use it. It really is an invaluable tool for me. Python has superb number crunching abilities and the realitively easy to use tkInter GUI toolkit among other nice things. Its indentation block syntax isn't really that much of an issue for small scientific type applications, and its other strengths are pretty tough to top.
I would not use C, C++, or Java for teaching science programming because more time would be spent explaining the language and less time focused on the actual science. Python makes for short concise programs which are pretty intuitive to understand, and Fortran variants have possibly the most straightforward manner of expressing a mathematical equation in computer language syntax, so I think that both are valuable.
In his early Known Space stories collected in Tales of Known Space [amazon.com] Larry Niven forsaw a future 1975 (ha) where the brains of people managled in car accidents are integrated into spacecraft for guidance, allowing them to continue contributing to society even if their bodies are gone. This entire idea of "brain in a jar" science fiction seems to have faded out with the 1970s.
Well, maybe jars. Personally, ever since I invented that harmonic portal to the other dimension where I learned how to enslave dead brain tissue within flying silver spheres, I've been extremely busy. Business -- is good!
I slammed together a really quite sophisticated robotic scanner controller processing unit for my own company, which I will now shamelessly plug in case any of you need to get custom 20-ton steel castings, give us a call, heck you never know.
WHEMCO
My unit uses the V4L Linux kernel API to run a frame grabber unit. I don't know of any way to run it under Windows except writing some kind of customized TWAIN driver or somesuch bull that will never happen. My Linux system works *right now* and has been demonstrated to company executives who said things like "this is fucking amazing!"
I ordered some hardware to build the actual prototype, and IT has shut me down. They are whining about all kinds of things like "who is going to support it?"
Hey, when I welded together the robot arms, IT didn't ask me who would "support it." Why should it be any different with my brainbox unit. Face it, those guys will *NEVER* be able to write or understand anything like this. If the program has a cos() call in it, they are done.
No. It just means that you have not been enlightened.
Lol! IMO A full gnome install, with the Enlightenment window manager, assorted KDE apps, and then a bunch of other independent apps would be pretty tough to beat. I haven't run E for a while, but it's always been phenomenal. E takes a lot of tuning up for a particular system, but it has always been really amazing to behold and use.
Enlightenment is only a WM, not really a whole system though. It otherwise needs Gnome, KDE, and other applications to flesh it out into a conventional desktop package. For instance, there isn't really an E-Sheet, E-Writer, E-Browser, and so on. Gnome and KDE both have a bundle of associated applications in addition to the window manager and desktop menu system.
First off, I have run a Gentoo system for around five years, and before that Debian, so I guess I look at it from a different perspective than a lot of Linux users. For some reason I like how Gentoo's Gnome Desktop emerges. It seems fairly nice, reasonably well configured, and certainly has an unmistakable linuxy kind of "look and feel" to it. It emulates other environments in some respects, but has some fairly unique characteristics of its own style. Furthermore, you can typically select a canned theme that appeals to you, pick a background, and just use it.
On the other hand, I generally build the QT and KDE libs once I have the Gnome Desktop running, and then selectively install KDE apps like the KDB debugger, which I like, QCad, etc. Gnome seems to be to be based on a whole bunch of odd little libraries, while KDE depends on a few very large ones. So typically adding KDE apps themselves are fairly quick compiles once the libs are all installed, but Gnome systems seem to be best built all at once so all the apps can configure themselves to best use all the libs that are going to be needed by everything else and hence have optimal features built in for the particular system.
Some of the KDE applications are much more advanced than their Gnome counterparts, so being able to have both is cool. I think I like how KDE handles files and folders slightly better than how Nautilus does it, but I like the Gnome panels and overall look and feel a bit better. The default Gnome desktop applications are typically somewhat minimalistic, but they seem to function as simple substitutes for most commonly needed tasks well enough unless a preferred package of some sort has been installed to do that task by the user. KDE seems to instead attempt to install somewhat more sophisticated desktop apps which tend to be less unified overall.
So I suppose what I'm saying here is that I prefer the somewhat simplistic style of Gnome as a base for my system but I like to add more complex apps like from KDE and elsewhere in an ad hoc fashion. I find that it tends to make a more heterogeneous mix of Linux applications which somehow adds to my enjoyment of using my Linux system. I believe that a complete KDE desktop system is better suited to a small tight system which requires maximum functionality in a compact package, like for PDA's and embedded systems particularly, which especially benefit from having a few large super-libs to share among them rather than Gnome's legion of flyweights.
In Gentoo at least, Gnome *appears* to compile faster because it is flying through zillions of minuscule packages, while KDE seems to take forever and a day to compile QT and KDElibs. It's anybody's guess as to whether this is actually true though and probably depends on what options you build Gnome with.
I could probably go on like this for pages. Nuff said . . .
Hehe, wow! All I can say, is that after having switched from Debian to Gentoo about five years ago, I don't ever recall having a smooth upgrade. Some of them have been pretty darned rough.
Thats the price I pay for having a completely custom operating system though. Oh, I'll do trivial upgrades all the time, but when something like glibc or gcc has a new version out, time to sit it out a bit. At least with Linux in general you can log into some irc chat box on freenode and ask questions and reasonably expect some kind of knowledgeable answer if you stick it out.
I've gone into windows chat boxes and asked for help and got nothing. I knew more than anybody else there. Like a lot more. There were no experts around, just a bunch of clueless dweebs mostly. They knew nothing about how Windows boots or anything of that nature.
Particularly, my wife's computer got messed up. She had all her stuff on an NTFS filesystem in Windows XP. We had all the recovery discs and everything. Full serials, all that crap.
In the end, I had to back up my wife's NTFS system to a Linux ext3 filesystem on another HDD, then COMPLETELY WIPE the original HDD and reinstall from the cdrom. The supposed "Recovery System" was an abject failure. I tried every possible recovery thing and it failed miserably. Windows could not fix its boot sector, it could not fix anything. FIXBOOT failed, CHKDSK failed, it all FAILED FAILED FAILED. So I spent a valuable week of my life restoring her system from scratch from a backup because none of Microsoft's supposed recovery tools worked.
She's lucky I was around, otherwise she would have most certainly lost everything. I was able to bootstrap the system from a USB stick to Linux, and backup her non-bootable NTFS filesystem to a linux drive. After the wipe and reformat we put it all back. NOT fun.
Thanks again Microsoft. I just have all this extra time to be doing this crap which we paid you for. I don't mind working on Linux because it was gratis, but when I have to pay for stuff, I get angry when it causes me personal grief.
until I became a wizard! I can fix problems with linux upgrades, but its dicey with Microsoft operating systems. I'd rather have a non-booting linux system any day than the Windows equivalent. You are correct in that MS gets blamed when their system isn't compatible with all that hardware out there, but in the end, they were the ones who brought that all upon themselves. When they gave IBM the finger and started whoring around with every other fly by night computer vendor on the planet they set this whole fiasco in motion.
Linux supports *a lot* more hardware than Vista does. Think about it.
I was shopping for laptops around November. They all had Vista installed. I asked the geek at Best Buy how they ran with XP installed instead and he replied "You can't install XP on these because there aren't any device drivers for this new hardware."
That did it, I bought a used XP laptop on Ebay for $200. Heck it even plays World of Warcraft. Runs linux too! Of course I spent about $200 more upgrading the thing's RAM, HDD, and Wifi, and then a couple weeks screwing around with it. Nice ultra-portable though.
Vista, ROFL! I'll be getting that in about 3 years probably, after it actually works somewhat half-assed decent.
Even though a lowly peon like myself can barely aspire to ever own much real IBM hardware, I have to say they really make some great stuff. Since my P20 monitor finally died, all I have now is an IBM Z50 Workpad, which is a pretty sweet little thing.
I had a RS/6000 briefly, I experimented with running Debian on it. It was some impressive metal, but AIX ran circles around Debian and the graphics was unsupported in Linux. I sold it for more than I payed for it and kept the P20 monitor for free. I ran that monitor for about 5 years.
IBM hardware has always been esoteric, fantastically expensive, and of supreme quality; however, they are just a bit out of touch with regular lusers. For instance, why can't we buy a workstation with a CELL chip even now? We know it could run Linux, easily. Why are we forced to fool around with PS3 consoles when Big Blue could be making the next best thing since the IBM PC?
I'd seriously consider spending $5k for a spiffy IBM cell box running AIX or Linux as long as it could run a PCIe OpenGL card. Heck, I'd take it if it came with OS/2 even!
Yeah headphones are a must. I just used my laptop and my Zaurus SL-5500 to listen to music with. I have a set of Roland RH25 headphones that I use at work and for travel. They fold flat, are pretty compact, cheap, and sound decent. Your cell phone probably has a reasonably good camera. What else do you need? The more crap you tote along the more you have to worry about. A couple paperback novels are always a good idea too though.
I got myself a used HP nc4010 for cheap. I maxed out its RAM, put a big HDD in it, installed the 802.11g wireless board, and got the optional travel battery. To cap it off I got a mini bluetooth mouse, and its been great. I can dual boot it to windows or gentoo and it runs just dandy. It can even play WoW at about 7fps. Total investment was about $500. Its small and light even with the extra battery.
You could probably do as well with something similar, I've read that the IBM ultra-portables are pretty nice also.
Even if turned over to the FISA court, you're still burning government resources. The idea behind everyone encrypting everything is that it forces the government to go after people who are very likely to be criminals, instead of eavesdropping en masse, hoping to find dirt on a relatively innocent person. The idea is that we want actual crimes prosecuted, not the imaginary fantasies of an over-zealous prosecutor. If email scanning is not available, they'll have to revert to the time-honored tactic of using traditional police methods for investigation, instead of invading the privacy of the entire nation.
That is, of course, the crux of the matter. Do we need to employ enough police to keep constant surveillance on the entire population, watching for every minor infraction of every obscure law ever passed? A common sense approach has previously prevailed as to what is actually important to dedicate manpower towards, but with the ability to use computers to greatly reduce the required personnel to monitor everything, we run the risk that this "common sense" approach towards enforcement of the laws will be changed to a "blanket application."
From the standpoint of the law, every law must be obeyed absolutely, or else laws are meaningless. It shouldn't be OK for my neighbor to be able to Jay-Walk with impunity, while I get arrested each time I step a foot from the curb, just because his political party is currently in power, and mine isn't. Never mind that this law itself might be completely irrelevant now because the street is now closed to motor vehicles, for instance. The sad fact is that once a law is passed it is likely to linger around forever because no politician wants to take a risk by challenging the existing laws and potentially insulting those who created or supported that law! This slippery slope is what gets us sci-fi computers in the bathroom stalls printing out tickets for use as toilet tissue due to the use of proscribed language:-)
With my philosophical lecture complete, allow me to state that I think that the current email system is simply obsolete in lieu of these developments. The widespread use of encryption in current email is most likely doomed to failure. It has been attempted for years and incompatible and cumbersome approaches have simply splintered the community beyond repair. Just like OpenSSH has mostly superseded Telnet, I think that "classic email" should just die, and it would be far better to start over with something that is secure by design right from the start.
Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit. This in itself is enough for a new python release. Faster==better, and python always wants to be a bit faster. Tcl/Tk by itself is kind of clunky IMO, but python Tkinter makes good use of it. Thanks Tck/Tk guys!
I miss emacs on Multics. My first word processor, I wrote a lot of papers using it. Even today I catch myself typing emacs commands that only existed on Multics emacs.
Did you perchance happen to be using a MIT Space Cadet Keyboard with that Multics system, or did you just enter your papers in using punch cards?
Dear Sir,
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It just doesn't roll off the tongue very easily... sounds all foreign and subversive.
They need some marketing help. Action words! Buzzwords!
See, I spent about 5 minutes and came up with IMHO better alternatives than that pussy LibreOffice name.
It makes me think of that old footage of failed flying machines... remember the umbrella thing that bounced up and down? Anyways, this is just the greatest. This is right up there with winning a hot dog eating contest. Totally useless probably, but so inspirational.
Two of these drawers can hold some extra dvd's, flash drives, and whatnot. They are also rather stealthy.
I suppose I'm a linux game old-timer. Back in the late 90s I had custom compiled Mesa for accelerated OpenGL with my most excellent Voodoo2 board. It was so big we called them graphics boards, not cards. It weighed about 5 pounds, was a full length card, and had every square centimeter covered with chips. But, my did it run Quake and Quake2 in full 3D glory. Truly I was the envy of my nerdish college neighbors who had not yet achieved Linux Wizard Level Zero, as I had done.
Really though, in my experience, which is rather quite enormous, it is generally possible to get most Windows® games to run mostly allright in linux operating systems through a huge amount of fiddling, tweaking, screwing around, and otherwise editing various config files and recompiling things with different options selected. The problem arises in that usually one does "some stuff" and eventually "it works." Unfortunately, you probably changed 20 things in between when it didn't work and when it did, and heaven only knows which one of those 20 things was the real thing that made it work.
Compounding the issue, is that some games seem to run with mutually exclusive settings to other games. In this case you find yourself running distinct instances of the X-Window System with specific config files, say to have 16-bit color at a certain special resolution, and a rather large number of configuration files special to a particular game of interest. Naturally, the more games like this that you have, the more the overall complexity is multiplied.
It really wouldn't take a lot to make a consistent platform which is capable of running all of these diverse applications, and Steam is definately something to think about. There was a lot of grumbling and whatnot when it was new, but personally I like the ability to purchase a game on Steam, sign in with my username and password, and have it download the content to whatever computer I am signed on at and magically make it work without having to search through boxes of cdroms and hope that the cd-key is on a sticker in the case and that the cdrom is still readable. Just log in, install content, and play... no optical drive required. If they can get this stuff working on a linux OS, and it really doesn't seem that far-fetched what with the excellent state of Wine these days, then hats off to Valve!
There is one bright shining star in the otherwise empty void of free engineering software packages. I would suggest that you investigate CAE Linux . From their website
Based on the open-source CAE softwares Salomé, Code_Aster, Code_Saturne and OpenFOAM , you can load your CAD geometry in Salomé and start partitionning and meshing your problem in just 5 minutes.
That being said, I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've messed around with CAE Linux, and this is *not* anything even close to what you get with Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor. While the FEA end is good, maybe even great, the modeling functionality is very basic and more akin to what you get with ANSYS or ALGOR rather than a full blown 3D drafting package. Nevertheless, its a great package for engineers and students who want to do some meshing and otherwise learn the basics of finite element analysis. The site even offers a standalone distribution of Salome-Meca-2009.1 which is the core FEA bundle that comes with CAE Linux. I have successfully installed their blob in Gentoo into /opt and it runs on my system at least.
As far as full featured free 3D drafting packages, there really isn't any such animal yet. Yes, I've tried BRL-CAD, and no, I wouldn't consider it to be a viable option. You're going to have to look towards some sort of professional CAD package for that. At home, I use TurboCAD as a reasonably full-featured yet relatively inexpensive solution. There are a great many lower priced 3D drafting packages out there, so look around.
And I must say, I really admire your ambition here... hope it works out for you.
If I was building a new machine, which I'm not at the moment, then I would probably get a copy of Windows-7 for it. However, I never upgrade a Windows OS on an existing machine because on those occasions in the past when I tried it, it always was a disaster. Better to start fresh, or as some poster earlier suggested, get an external drive. I ran the Windows-7 beta from an eSATA drive last year and it worked ok. It existed in peaceful harmony with my Vista installation and didn't cause any issues at all.
I've had scores of mice over the years. I've had them plug up with fibers, get beer spilled in them, have the buttons stop working, worn out the wheels, you name it. The Logitech ones always die hard, and the $20 USB wired optical wheel mice are great. It usually takes spilling something into them to wipe them out. As a gamer, I've clicked many a more expensive mouse into the trash bin in as short as a few months. Logitech makes fine products!
Well, there are quite a lot actually. So far I have tested out a bunch of FPS games, notable are Darkplaces and Nexuiz. VegaStrike compiled and runs nicely, a bunch of racing games like PPRacer, Torcs, SuperTuxKart.
Oh, and I run a 64-bit system, but so far the 32-bit binaries that I have tested also work with the compatibility libs. My card is a relatively recent Radeon HD 3870 and it has taken everything I could find to test on it under Linux.
I've run a lot of Nvidia cards in Linux, but this is my first Radeon. I'm pretty happy overall with it.
I don't know what I was thinking, but I am quite underwhelmed by it. I installed it on my new AMD spider system that I made, with a Phenom-X4, Radeon HD 3870, AMD 790FX motherboard, and 8G of DDR2.
Windows 2000 was great! XP-x64 was pretty good too, but Vista 64, bleech... It took me a couple weeks to debug it to keep it from crashing constantly, and even still, it crashes *a lot*.
This system just flys on Gentoo amd64, it is wonderful and rock solid. Never crashes at all, ever. But reboot into Vista 64 and I'm lucky if it can go a couple hours without a hard lockup or a blue screen.
Luckily, I've been around the block with Windows, and I know how to diagnose crash problems. I would not give Vista 64 to a newb though, its extremely buggy and just doesn't provide the experience that XP-x64 does. Vista is really nice and pretty, very slick and polished and it does run well if you throw enough hardware at it, but the crash bugs are inexcusable.
Bottom Line: I wish I had put XP-x64 on this new system, but I don't really use Windows for much other than World of Warcraft and Jagged Alliance 2 anyways, so I can deal with the irritating instability. X3 and Steam also seems to run somewhat but also crashes and locks up the system much more than XP-x64, which doesn't crash at all.
Vista 64 might be ok in a year or so, its getting better, but its definately not production quality.
I have a 3D space sim implemented in Python here: Spacecommander
It isn't the most sophisticated thing you've ever seen, but its definately pretty sciency. Personally I think that the vector math and matrix transformations are pretty cool if you take a minute to stop and think about the amount of data that the program is processing while it runs.
Fortran syntax is a useful way to type out formulas. Something like gfortran would be reasonable for teaching simple scientific programming ideas. I'm looking forward to trying out the new opensource implementation of Fortress which should prove to be rather handy owing to its concurrent programming support. I can see it becoming a language of choice for supercomputing applications. It has the advantage of an easy syntax, very similar to old FORTRAN, but has been updated to be a 3rd gen language.
As many others have mentioned also though, Python is pretty excellent really for all manner of sophisticated data processing programs. As a mechanical engineer, I use it all the time at work now that I took the time to learn how to use it. It really is an invaluable tool for me. Python has superb number crunching abilities and the realitively easy to use tkInter GUI toolkit among other nice things. Its indentation block syntax isn't really that much of an issue for small scientific type applications, and its other strengths are pretty tough to top.
I would not use C, C++, or Java for teaching science programming because more time would be spent explaining the language and less time focused on the actual science. Python makes for short concise programs which are pretty intuitive to understand, and Fortran variants have possibly the most straightforward manner of expressing a mathematical equation in computer language syntax, so I think that both are valuable.
In his early Known Space stories collected in Tales of Known Space [amazon.com] Larry Niven forsaw a future 1975 (ha) where the brains of people managled in car accidents are integrated into spacecraft for guidance, allowing them to continue contributing to society even if their bodies are gone. This entire idea of "brain in a jar" science fiction seems to have faded out with the 1970s.
Well, maybe jars. Personally, ever since I invented that harmonic portal to the other dimension where I learned how to enslave dead brain tissue within flying silver spheres, I've been extremely busy. Business -- is good!
I slammed together a really quite sophisticated robotic scanner controller processing unit for my own company, which I will now shamelessly plug in case any of you need to get custom 20-ton steel castings, give us a call, heck you never know. WHEMCO
My unit uses the V4L Linux kernel API to run a frame grabber unit. I don't know of any way to run it under Windows except writing some kind of customized TWAIN driver or somesuch bull that will never happen. My Linux system works *right now* and has been demonstrated to company executives who said things like "this is fucking amazing!"
I ordered some hardware to build the actual prototype, and IT has shut me down. They are whining about all kinds of things like "who is going to support it?"
Hey, when I welded together the robot arms, IT didn't ask me who would "support it." Why should it be any different with my brainbox unit. Face it, those guys will *NEVER* be able to write or understand anything like this. If the program has a cos() call in it, they are done.
No. It just means that you have not been enlightened.
Lol! IMO A full gnome install, with the Enlightenment window manager, assorted KDE apps, and then a bunch of other independent apps would be pretty tough to beat. I haven't run E for a while, but it's always been phenomenal. E takes a lot of tuning up for a particular system, but it has always been really amazing to behold and use.
Enlightenment is only a WM, not really a whole system though. It otherwise needs Gnome, KDE, and other applications to flesh it out into a conventional desktop package. For instance, there isn't really an E-Sheet, E-Writer, E-Browser, and so on. Gnome and KDE both have a bundle of associated applications in addition to the window manager and desktop menu system.
First off, I have run a Gentoo system for around five years, and before that Debian, so I guess I look at it from a different perspective than a lot of Linux users. For some reason I like how Gentoo's Gnome Desktop emerges. It seems fairly nice, reasonably well configured, and certainly has an unmistakable linuxy kind of "look and feel" to it. It emulates other environments in some respects, but has some fairly unique characteristics of its own style. Furthermore, you can typically select a canned theme that appeals to you, pick a background, and just use it.
On the other hand, I generally build the QT and KDE libs once I have the Gnome Desktop running, and then selectively install KDE apps like the KDB debugger, which I like, QCad, etc. Gnome seems to be to be based on a whole bunch of odd little libraries, while KDE depends on a few very large ones. So typically adding KDE apps themselves are fairly quick compiles once the libs are all installed, but Gnome systems seem to be best built all at once so all the apps can configure themselves to best use all the libs that are going to be needed by everything else and hence have optimal features built in for the particular system.
Some of the KDE applications are much more advanced than their Gnome counterparts, so being able to have both is cool. I think I like how KDE handles files and folders slightly better than how Nautilus does it, but I like the Gnome panels and overall look and feel a bit better. The default Gnome desktop applications are typically somewhat minimalistic, but they seem to function as simple substitutes for most commonly needed tasks well enough unless a preferred package of some sort has been installed to do that task by the user. KDE seems to instead attempt to install somewhat more sophisticated desktop apps which tend to be less unified overall.
So I suppose what I'm saying here is that I prefer the somewhat simplistic style of Gnome as a base for my system but I like to add more complex apps like from KDE and elsewhere in an ad hoc fashion. I find that it tends to make a more heterogeneous mix of Linux applications which somehow adds to my enjoyment of using my Linux system. I believe that a complete KDE desktop system is better suited to a small tight system which requires maximum functionality in a compact package, like for PDA's and embedded systems particularly, which especially benefit from having a few large super-libs to share among them rather than Gnome's legion of flyweights.
In Gentoo at least, Gnome *appears* to compile faster because it is flying through zillions of minuscule packages, while KDE seems to take forever and a day to compile QT and KDElibs. It's anybody's guess as to whether this is actually true though and probably depends on what options you build Gnome with.
I could probably go on like this for pages. Nuff said . . .
Hehe, wow! All I can say, is that after having switched from Debian to Gentoo about five years ago, I don't ever recall having a smooth upgrade. Some of them have been pretty darned rough.
Thats the price I pay for having a completely custom operating system though. Oh, I'll do trivial upgrades all the time, but when something like glibc or gcc has a new version out, time to sit it out a bit. At least with Linux in general you can log into some irc chat box on freenode and ask questions and reasonably expect some kind of knowledgeable answer if you stick it out.
I've gone into windows chat boxes and asked for help and got nothing. I knew more than anybody else there. Like a lot more. There were no experts around, just a bunch of clueless dweebs mostly. They knew nothing about how Windows boots or anything of that nature.
Particularly, my wife's computer got messed up. She had all her stuff on an NTFS filesystem in Windows XP. We had all the recovery discs and everything. Full serials, all that crap.
In the end, I had to back up my wife's NTFS system to a Linux ext3 filesystem on another HDD, then COMPLETELY WIPE the original HDD and reinstall from the cdrom. The supposed "Recovery System" was an abject failure. I tried every possible recovery thing and it failed miserably. Windows could not fix its boot sector, it could not fix anything. FIXBOOT failed, CHKDSK failed, it all FAILED FAILED FAILED. So I spent a valuable week of my life restoring her system from scratch from a backup because none of Microsoft's supposed recovery tools worked.
She's lucky I was around, otherwise she would have most certainly lost everything. I was able to bootstrap the system from a USB stick to Linux, and backup her non-bootable NTFS filesystem to a linux drive. After the wipe and reformat we put it all back. NOT fun.
Thanks again Microsoft. I just have all this extra time to be doing this crap which we paid you for. I don't mind working on Linux because it was gratis, but when I have to pay for stuff, I get angry when it causes me personal grief.
until I became a wizard! I can fix problems with linux upgrades, but its dicey with Microsoft operating systems. I'd rather have a non-booting linux system any day than the Windows equivalent. You are correct in that MS gets blamed when their system isn't compatible with all that hardware out there, but in the end, they were the ones who brought that all upon themselves. When they gave IBM the finger and started whoring around with every other fly by night computer vendor on the planet they set this whole fiasco in motion.
Linux supports *a lot* more hardware than Vista does. Think about it.
I was shopping for laptops around November. They all had Vista installed. I asked the geek at Best Buy how they ran with XP installed instead and he replied "You can't install XP on these because there aren't any device drivers for this new hardware."
That did it, I bought a used XP laptop on Ebay for $200. Heck it even plays World of Warcraft. Runs linux too! Of course I spent about $200 more upgrading the thing's RAM, HDD, and Wifi, and then a couple weeks screwing around with it. Nice ultra-portable though.
Vista, ROFL! I'll be getting that in about 3 years probably, after it actually works somewhat half-assed decent.
Even though a lowly peon like myself can barely aspire to ever own much real IBM hardware, I have to say they really make some great stuff. Since my P20 monitor finally died, all I have now is an IBM Z50 Workpad, which is a pretty sweet little thing.
I had a RS/6000 briefly, I experimented with running Debian on it. It was some impressive metal, but AIX ran circles around Debian and the graphics was unsupported in Linux. I sold it for more than I payed for it and kept the P20 monitor for free. I ran that monitor for about 5 years.
IBM hardware has always been esoteric, fantastically expensive, and of supreme quality; however, they are just a bit out of touch with regular lusers. For instance, why can't we buy a workstation with a CELL chip even now? We know it could run Linux, easily. Why are we forced to fool around with PS3 consoles when Big Blue could be making the next best thing since the IBM PC?
I'd seriously consider spending $5k for a spiffy IBM cell box running AIX or Linux as long as it could run a PCIe OpenGL card. Heck, I'd take it if it came with OS/2 even!
Yeah headphones are a must. I just used my laptop and my Zaurus SL-5500 to listen to music with. I have a set of Roland RH25 headphones that I use at work and for travel. They fold flat, are pretty compact, cheap, and sound decent. Your cell phone probably has a reasonably good camera. What else do you need? The more crap you tote along the more you have to worry about. A couple paperback novels are always a good idea too though.
I got myself a used HP nc4010 for cheap. I maxed out its RAM, put a big HDD in it, installed the 802.11g wireless board, and got the optional travel battery. To cap it off I got a mini bluetooth mouse, and its been great. I can dual boot it to windows or gentoo and it runs just dandy. It can even play WoW at about 7fps. Total investment was about $500. Its small and light even with the extra battery.
You could probably do as well with something similar, I've read that the IBM ultra-portables are pretty nice also.
Even if turned over to the FISA court, you're still burning government resources. The idea behind everyone encrypting everything is that it forces the government to go after people who are very likely to be criminals, instead of eavesdropping en masse, hoping to find dirt on a relatively innocent person. The idea is that we want actual crimes prosecuted, not the imaginary fantasies of an over-zealous prosecutor. If email scanning is not available, they'll have to revert to the time-honored tactic of using traditional police methods for investigation, instead of invading the privacy of the entire nation.
That is, of course, the crux of the matter. Do we need to employ enough police to keep constant surveillance on the entire population, watching for every minor infraction of every obscure law ever passed? A common sense approach has previously prevailed as to what is actually important to dedicate manpower towards, but with the ability to use computers to greatly reduce the required personnel to monitor everything, we run the risk that this "common sense" approach towards enforcement of the laws will be changed to a "blanket application."
From the standpoint of the law, every law must be obeyed absolutely, or else laws are meaningless. It shouldn't be OK for my neighbor to be able to Jay-Walk with impunity, while I get arrested each time I step a foot from the curb, just because his political party is currently in power, and mine isn't. Never mind that this law itself might be completely irrelevant now because the street is now closed to motor vehicles, for instance. The sad fact is that once a law is passed it is likely to linger around forever because no politician wants to take a risk by challenging the existing laws and potentially insulting those who created or supported that law! This slippery slope is what gets us sci-fi computers in the bathroom stalls printing out tickets for use as toilet tissue due to the use of proscribed language :-)
With my philosophical lecture complete, allow me to state that I think that the current email system is simply obsolete in lieu of these developments. The widespread use of encryption in current email is most likely doomed to failure. It has been attempted for years and incompatible and cumbersome approaches have simply splintered the community beyond repair. Just like OpenSSH has mostly superseded Telnet, I think that "classic email" should just die, and it would be far better to start over with something that is secure by design right from the start.
Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit. This in itself is enough for a new python release. Faster==better, and python always wants to be a bit faster. Tcl/Tk by itself is kind of clunky IMO, but python Tkinter makes good use of it. Thanks Tck/Tk guys!
I miss emacs on Multics. My first word processor, I wrote a lot of papers using it. Even today I catch myself typing emacs commands that only existed on Multics emacs.
Did you perchance happen to be using a MIT Space Cadet Keyboard with that Multics system, or did you just enter your papers in using punch cards?
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