The convention published the complete voting and nomination data (PDF), so you can find out who would have come in second and what things were nominated but didn't make it onto the ballot.
For the first year or two, Sean was an unpaid volunteer, and the wireless was an all-volunteer effort. We felt bad about using up all his conference time, so we hired a company to run the network -- they're professionals, so everything should work fine, right? -- and Sean ended up helping them diagnose problems, using up *even more* of his conference time. Now we just pay Sean.
The pvote.org site notes that "the Diebold AccuVote TSX software contains over 64000 lines of C++; the Sequoia Edge software contains over 124000 lines of C." Those systems run on top of Windows or Windows CE, and in general regulations don't require verifying commercial off-the-shelf components.
A good book about being on a jury is "A Trial By Jury", by D. Graham Burnett. In 2000 Burnett, a science historian, was one of twelve jurors on a murder trial in New York City; the book describes the wrangling that went on inside the jury room from Burnett's point of view.
The last paragraph of the story says that the science committee will have a hearing on the budget on February 16th. So, if you disagree with this decision, write your representative and air your concerns. IMHO, the action most likely to succeed is holding the shuttle program to its budget and leaving the science funding untouched, so suggest that.
Another game-related Python activity is the PyWeek competition, where entrants have one week to write a game. Unfortunately you've just missed this year's competition; it's held in August, and the winners were just announced.
Note that Python on Parrot is complete vaporware at this point in time, and I don't know of anyone who's actively working on it. Given this, claims that Python-on-Parrot will have improved performance are really premature; what if some critical bit of Python's object model can't be implemented efficiently on Parrot, or relies on a particularly slow opcode? It's too early to form a judgement.
It would be more decentralized to encourage people to publish data as RDF. I have a near-trivial book review schema for marking things as reviews, and Dublin Core can already express title/author/publisher information.
However Microsoft have got pretty much every other language - Basic, Python, Eifel, Cobol, Perl, Scheme etc. to run.
Um, that's not true. The Python.NET work was an experimental effort that was incomplete, impractically slow, was never used for production work by anyone, and is no longer being developed or maintained. Perl.NET takes the existing C Perl interpreter and interfaces it so you can write.NET components, but Perl isn't being translated to CIL. The only Scheme compiler I can find implements a subset that doesn't support continuations.
I don't know why no one has called Miguel on his claim that you have to translate everything to Java, but.NET provides a happy shiny world where all of the languages are well-supported. Clearly that's untrue.
There's also Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 proposal, where mail messages are stored on the sender's computer until the recipient retrieves it. This would mean that recipients don't pay for disk space or bandwidth, senders do, and getting a spammer's account pulled would result in all their spammed e-mail disappearing.
But good luck getting everyone to adopt a new mail protocol...
Python gets a lot of patches, and some of the developers (such as me ) can be slow in dealing with them. Nudging the person who's been assigned your patch helps.
At the 1999 Ottawa Linux Symposium, Ian Goldberg, Zero Knowledge's Chief Technical Officer, gave a talk about their system (using xdvi as his presentation software, amusingly). Basically it applies the principles of an anonymous remailer network to individual IP packets. It's a really nifty hack, but given the general population's indifference to security and anonymity, it's hard to see how a business can be built through providing it.
Note that GvR does not work for CNRI any longer; he works for
Digital Creations. He previously worked at CNRI, and when he and his team left, CNRI's management wanted to revise the license to suit their legal view of the world, leading to this morass.
Irrelevant, though; languages don't link to the interpreter, they're executed by it. Your Gnumeric spreadsheets don't need to be GPLed, and your Python programs don't have to fall under the Python license. Python isn't GPLed, but there is GPLed Python software, and also completely proprietary Python software.
There was a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science about MOSIX that came out in the early 90s; I remember reading it as an undergrad and finding it quite interesting. At the time MOSIX was built on top of BSD. It basically added support to the kernel for automatically migrating processes from one machine to another. It's more complicated than just copying the code + data segments, mostly because of open files. Inside the kernel a machine ID
was added to the data structures for file descriptors, and I/O requests could be forwarded to the appropriate machine, so a process that gets migrated still has access to any files it had open.
That's the basic idea, suitable for spreading out CPU-heavy tasks that share nothing over a bunch of machines. It looks like they're working on extensions such as migratable sockets which would make it suitable for applications that require sharing or communication.
Current versions of BerkeleyDB support transactions, and note that MySQL's transaction support is built using BerkeleyDB, so clearly
MySQL isn't going to support transactions and be any faster.
Let me point out that the GPL-compatibility
doesn't affect software written in Python, only attempts to embed the Python interpreter inside a GPLed program. For example, there's GPLed software written in Java,
even though the most commonly used JVM isn't GPLed. Python's license should be irrelevant to whatever license your Python application uses.
Also, note that the Apache license isn't GPL-compatible, yet that doesn't prevent
Debian including Apache. I view this debate as a tempest in a teapot; it may affect people who want to do things like embed Python inside the GIMP, say, but most Python users don't have to care.
Note that Python 2.0 included a cycle-detection algorithm, so reference cycles
do get cleaned up now. See the Modules/gcmodule.c file in the Python source distribution,
and the GC module docs.
Queues can be done using Python lists; linked lists could be done using tuples or lists. AVL trees and B-trees are available in persistent forms (through the BerkeleyDB library, for example), and there's a BTrees package inside the ZODB.
PEP 218 proposes a built-in type for sets, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on what people want from a set type. Some people want fast intersection operations and some don't care;
some want; some people want an O(1) membership test and some people don't care; it seems difficult to write a set type
that's equally speedy for all possible applications.
Slashdot Mirror
The convention published the complete voting and nomination data (PDF), so you can find out who would have come in second and what things were nominated but didn't make it onto the ballot.
For the first year or two, Sean was an unpaid volunteer, and the wireless was an all-volunteer effort. We felt bad about using up all his conference time, so we hired a company to run the network -- they're professionals, so everything should work fine, right? -- and Sean ended up helping them diagnose problems, using up *even more* of his conference time. Now we just pay Sean.
The pvote.org site notes that "the Diebold AccuVote TSX software contains over 64000 lines of C++; the Sequoia Edge software contains over 124000 lines of C." Those systems run on top of Windows or Windows CE, and in general regulations don't require verifying commercial off-the-shelf components.
One obvious mechanism: some fraction of CO2 was absorbed by plants, deposited into sediments, and then locked underground where it became petroleum.
A good book about being on a jury is "A Trial By Jury", by D. Graham Burnett. In 2000 Burnett, a science historian, was one of twelve jurors on a murder trial in New York City; the book describes the wrangling that went on inside the jury room from Burnett's point of view.
Python just had a sprint in Iceland, too.
... actual Python gurus are off at a sprint in Iceland for a week of hacking that started yesterday.
The Python Software Foundation is also one of the organizations sponsoring projects. There's a guide for students that includes project ideas.
The last paragraph of the story says that the science committee will have a hearing on the budget on February 16th. So, if you disagree with this decision, write your representative and air your concerns. IMHO, the action most likely to succeed is holding the shuttle program to its budget and leaving the science funding untouched, so suggest that.
For PyCon 2006, we have a wiki page containing the master schedule data, and a parsing script to generate an HTML or pickled version of the schedule.
Another game-related Python activity is the PyWeek competition, where entrants have one week to write a game. Unfortunately you've just missed this year's competition; it's held in August, and the winners were just announced.
Note that Python on Parrot is complete vaporware at this point in time, and I don't know of anyone who's actively working on it. Given this, claims that Python-on-Parrot will have improved performance are really premature; what if some critical bit of Python's object model can't be implemented efficiently on Parrot, or relies on a particularly slow opcode? It's too early to form a judgement.
It would be more decentralized to encourage people to publish data as RDF. I have a near-trivial book review schema for marking things as reviews, and
Dublin Core can already express title/author/publisher information.
I don't know why no one has called Miguel on his claim that you have to translate everything to Java, but .NET provides a happy shiny world where all of the languages are well-supported. Clearly that's untrue.
where mail messages are stored on the sender's computer until the recipient retrieves it. This would mean that recipients don't pay for
disk space or bandwidth, senders do, and getting a spammer's account
pulled would result in all their spammed e-mail disappearing.
But good luck getting everyone to adopt a new mail protocol...
I wrote a guide to becoming a Python developer that will be of interest.
At the 1999 Ottawa Linux Symposium, Ian Goldberg, Zero Knowledge's Chief Technical Officer, gave a talk about their system (using xdvi as his presentation software, amusingly). Basically it applies the principles of an anonymous remailer network to individual IP packets. It's a really nifty hack, but given the general population's indifference to security and anonymity, it's hard to see how a business can be built through providing it.
Note that GvR does not work for CNRI any longer; he works for Digital Creations. He previously worked at CNRI, and when he and his team left, CNRI's management wanted to revise the license to suit their legal view of the world, leading to this morass.
Irrelevant, though; languages don't link to the interpreter, they're executed by it. Your Gnumeric spreadsheets don't need to be GPLed, and your Python programs don't have to fall under the Python license. Python isn't GPLed, but there is GPLed Python software, and also completely proprietary Python software.
That's the basic idea, suitable for spreading out CPU-heavy tasks that share nothing over a bunch of machines. It looks like they're working on extensions such as migratable sockets which would make it suitable for applications that require sharing or communication.
Current versions of BerkeleyDB support transactions, and note that MySQL's transaction support is built using BerkeleyDB, so clearly MySQL isn't going to support transactions and be any faster.
Let me point out that the GPL-compatibility doesn't affect software written in Python, only attempts to embed the Python interpreter inside a GPLed program. For example, there's GPLed software written in Java, even though the most commonly used JVM isn't GPLed. Python's license should be irrelevant to whatever license your Python application uses.
Also, note that the Apache license isn't GPL-compatible, yet that doesn't prevent Debian including Apache. I view this debate as a tempest in a teapot; it may affect people who want to do things like embed Python inside the GIMP, say, but most Python users don't have to care.
Note that Python 2.0 included a cycle-detection algorithm, so reference cycles do get cleaned up now. See the Modules/gcmodule.c file in the Python source distribution, and the GC module docs.
Queues can be done using Python lists; linked lists could be done using tuples or lists. AVL trees and B-trees are available in persistent forms (through the BerkeleyDB library, for example), and there's a BTrees package inside the ZODB. PEP 218 proposes a built-in type for sets, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on what people want from a set type. Some people want fast intersection operations and some don't care; some want; some people want an O(1) membership test and some people don't care; it seems difficult to write a set type that's equally speedy for all possible applications.
That's because Perl's OO used Python's as a model, so of course they're similar.