Despite the constant FUD since the Novell/Microsoft deal, Novell's business model now revolves around FOSS software, so any attempt to kill it would be cutting their own throat.
I think that the fear is that one day, Novell, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, will find that their business model is doing whatever their parent company wants them to.
By far most people who are going to lose their jobs are lower-level programmers and managers like us who had absolutely no input on the direction SCO was going.
BS. The job market isn't so terrible that you have to sell your soul to eat. Do you really think SCO had enviable salaries for the little folk? It's not like they were making dot-com venture capital pay and are suddenly losing it. Also, people who aren't bright enough to understand that "worked for SCO until the bitter end" looks bad on a resume shouldn't be in a mentally strenuous career anyway.
No, the people who stuck it out were the ones who knew their employer was evil and pestilential and didn't care. I have a hard time getting worked up about their fates.
Don't shun me. We also have several linux servers, but this one needed SCO.
Out of curiosity, have you tried running your SCO applications on FreeBSD? It has all sorts of interesting cross-platform binary support, to the extent that Solaris for Linux runs fine on it. It's rumored that the SVR4 compatibility layer can handle SCO as well as Solaris binaries.
Might be worth a shot if you can't get rid of some applications but detest the rest of the system.
I could ask my broker, but this seems ripe for public discussion:
Actually, I wouldn't mind owning a bunch of single shares to pass out as gag gifts, etc. At $22 a hundred, it's pretty cheap entertainment. Is there any legal downside at all to buying this stock? I'd hate to have IBM show up with an invoice-bearing Nazgul just because I wanted to play a joke on a friend.
sometimes I couldn't help thinking whether it would have been better if Novell hadn't stepped into this fight.
By defending themselves in the lawsuit that SCO filed against them, you mean. I know what you mean, but they did what they had to do in order to defend their interests.
You hit it right on the head, though. It's a shame that a massively multithreaded version is more or less impossible right now. I'd love to benchmark a threaded clone of that function on a big SMP system without any of the inherent penalties of fork.
Down the road when you have, say, 200 cores, do you really want to be dealing with sharing data in memory between tens or hundreds of thousands of threads spread out over them?
Do I want that as an option? Oh, yeah. Consider a multi-processing map() replacement that I'd been playing around with. The fork()ing version is much more complicated than a threaded version would need to be because you have to serialize return values, and is less capable because it's unable to return any values that aren't serializable (such as sockets or file handles).
Yes, all that complexity can be a nightmare, but sometimes that nightmare is actually preferable to the alternatives. As it stands today that's not a choice that I get to make.
What makes Apple's offering any better than anyone else's?
More broadly supported? What everyone else said. Better? Nothing. My wife has a Nano and I have a Sansa e280. Interface-wise, they're nearly identical except that my scrollwheel is an actual rotating disk instead of a touch sensor. Honestly, it basically comes down to taste and budget.
Your absolutely right. However, I had to deal with a simpler definition of bloat. I think my definition was slightly more accurate than "bloat is how long it takes me to compile the gentoo package."
Fair enough. Arguing bloat with a stereotypical Gentoo ricer is like arguing toxins with a hippie. Both groups love being the ones who see How Things Really Are.
I don't indent code, my editor indents code according to the block markers. If a language doesn't provide block markers, the editor can no longer do the task and its up to me, annoying and error prone.
Still using Notepad?
Using Emacs, if I type "if foo:", as soon as I press ":", the editor will enter a linefeed and move my cursor down, indented four spaces to the right of the "if" statement.
Now, if I type the command to be executed in the "if" clause and hit enter, I will be positioned immediately under the first non-whitespace character in that line. If I type "else:", as soon as I press ":", it will shift that line to the left four spaces so that it's immediately below "if foo:", insert a linefeed, and position the cursor exactly where it should be to enter the "else" clause.
I never have to think about indentation because Emacs does it for me. I literally have not had to deal this supposedly tricky whitespace in years. If things like this are difficult in your editor, it may be time to upgrade to one more suited for programming (and there are plenty that should fit the bill).
Nothing is more fun than trying to figure out just what the hell is going on when some stuff is spaced, some is tabbed, and automatically converting it could screw it all up for you.
I've never personally run across Python code that doesn't use four spaces, so this is much more a problem in theory than in practice. Furthermore, Emacs will automatically pick up the indentation mode of any Python file you open and use that instead of its default for that one file. I doubt that it's the only programming editor that can handle this for you.
True, but it still doesn't have autocrop, which I tend to use all the time. I love the idea of Krita and want so badly for it to work, but every time I try to use it I end up looking for some functionality that turns out not to exist and grudgingly fire up The Gimp.
I wholly understand that it's not meant to be a functional clone and that's perfectly OK. But please, someone, sit a few people down with The Gimp and see what functions they use, then make sure that the most common ones work well in Krita.
but the real measure of bloat is would be if you wrote a simple text editor in QT and one in GTK, and made them both static executables, which executable would be bigger.
No - that doesn't really measure anything at all. Suppose the Foo version automatically pulled in 5x the functionality, network filesystems, subpixel antialiasing, native Linux, Windows, and Mac build options. Then suppose that the Bar version gets you antialiasing and the possibility to maybe compile it on another platform as long as you haven't used and system-specific features. Would you still call the first bloated if it was bigger after static compilation, or would you say it's more featureful?
Now suppose that an updated version of Bar throws in a BitTorrent client, video transcoding, a screensaver, and dancing clowns. If it still compiles smaller than Foo's version, would you still call it less bloated?
Finally, suppose that Foo and Bar are functionally identical. Foo is written in a clear, easy-to-maintain generalized style. Bar is written in prematurely optimized spaghetti code and requires a PhD in informatics and a Turing Test-level AI to modify. Foo's editor is 10% bigger than Bar's but is more stable and more actively developed because regular humans can approach it. Would you still call it more bloated?
Size without context is nothing. It provides data but not information. Everyone hates bloat, but it's not at all obvious that size is the only way to measure it, or even a good one.
This is the thing that makes me laugh my ass off : people saying Python is not slow if you use Python libraries implemented in C.
How on earth did your broken reading comprehension lead you to that conclusion?
What I said (for people capable of reading English) is that it's best to let Python itself do as much as it can, rather than needlessly re-implement parts of the language in native Python. Don't write loops if map() or list comprehensions can replace them. Don't write "c = a; a = b; b = c" to swap two variables when "a, b = b, a" does the same thing but faster and with less memory.
The C equivalent would be saying to use libc instead of hand-rolled knockoffs because the standard version will almost certainly be more efficient and better tested.
Finally, it's "Lua", not "LUA", and even their Wiki doesn't claim as much superiority over Python as you do.
Why? I was a Python programmer for 3 years, and the print statement was one of the most obvious warts.
Amen to that. Because it's a command and not an expression, you can't do things like use it in a lambda command or pass it as a parameter. This means that if you want to print every value in a list, you can't just type "map(print, listname)" or anything else as compact and "clean". I'll be more than happy to drop yet another pointless command when the alternative is every bit as convenient and provides much more functionality.
Try this, in increasing order of work required (and likely reward).
One: try Psyco. It may give you the bump you needed, or it may do nothing, but since it's so easy you might as well try it.
Two: write faster code. Basically, let Python do the work for you by handing off as much processing as possible to the language. For example, this:
output = [] for value in input: output.append(transformfunc(value))
is longer to type and possibly vastly longer to execute than:
output = [transformfunc(value) for value in input]
since the latter knows how many values it needs to pre-allocate memory for, and can perform the operations in a tight C loop instead of evaluating a much slower Python loop.
Three: profile. Once you're sure that you've written good algorithms are aren't re-implementing large bits of Python in Python, run a profiler to find out where you can direct extra attention. Some people do this before #2, but I don't touch it until I know that everything else is right.
I wrote a "diff" function in native Python that searches two many-gig files for lines that appear in one but not the other. Said function is IO bound on a SCSI-320 RAID-0 system with 4 15K RPM drives, and typically uses about 20% CPU for the duration. You can write slow Python, but that doesn't mean that you have to.
The way they handled this (with banning the rational guys) is going to mean they can't have both.
Hey, just a second. Without seeing the videos, it's kind of hard to say which were the rational actors here. Imagine the scenario where the ID folks were saying "here's what we believe, and this is the logical basis behind it" while the evolution proponents were screaming "OMGWTFBBQ11!11! th3z3 guys r t3h suck". That's not likely, true, but I haven't seen the actual footage and likely neither have you.
Remember, the fact that someone shares your beliefs doesn't mean that they're also civil, reasonable, and calm. Maybe the RRS crew were the mouth-foamers this time around and banned for perfectly acceptable reasons. Again, unlikely, but we'll probably never know the whole story.
It starts with the premise that homeopathy is a fraud and that it cannot work. and goes on from there.
I get the gist of what you're saying, but at the same time, some conjectures are so absurd that they don't really need rigorous debunking. If I propose that smashing you in the mouth with a brick will end global warming, we can skip right past experimentation and go straight for the explanation of why it won't work. Frankly, homeopathy is approximately as reputable.
She drank a lot as she did while taking antibiotics (about 3 to 5 litres a day) and drank natural teas and stuff which are known to have a desinfectant property. And lookie lookie the problem was solved in no time with no sickness due to the antibiotics.
I'll let you in on a secret: most of the time, given acceptable nutrition, your body will heal itself. Do you think everyone who got cystitis or strep throat or earaches died before antibiotics were invented? Of course not. Your wife's immune system did what it was evolved to do.
Having said that, you couldn't pay me enough to run through an untreated course of strep throat. Antibiotics exist because 1) being that sick really sucks, and 2) sometimes those things did kill people, and you're far better off treating them when possible to keep them from getting out of control. Your wife got lucky this time. I hope she's lucky the next time, too, and the time after that.
After you do have a child and are trying to prevent another immediately your wife (a hypochondriac perhaps?) will likely tell you about how breast feeding for a long duration (multiple years) can be an effective form of birth control. It is in fact documented to be 'effective' in the third world, and can be effective here.
My oldest son is 11 months to the day younger than my oldest daughter. "Breast feeding as birth control" advocates can kiss my counter-anecdotal butt.
You will notice the letters H.P.U.S. next to each active ingredient. Those letters can only be placed at the end of the ingredient name if it is officially monographed in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States, which is the legal source for these drug products.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, would any of us know your band?
I think that the fear is that one day, Novell, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, will find that their business model is doing whatever their parent company wants them to.
Do math teachers learn that phrase in math teacher school, is it that people who say things like that grow up to be math teachers?
BS. The job market isn't so terrible that you have to sell your soul to eat. Do you really think SCO had enviable salaries for the little folk? It's not like they were making dot-com venture capital pay and are suddenly losing it. Also, people who aren't bright enough to understand that "worked for SCO until the bitter end" looks bad on a resume shouldn't be in a mentally strenuous career anyway.
No, the people who stuck it out were the ones who knew their employer was evil and pestilential and didn't care. I have a hard time getting worked up about their fates.
Out of curiosity, have you tried running your SCO applications on FreeBSD? It has all sorts of interesting cross-platform binary support, to the extent that Solaris for Linux runs fine on it. It's rumored that the SVR4 compatibility layer can handle SCO as well as Solaris binaries.
Might be worth a shot if you can't get rid of some applications but detest the rest of the system.
I could ask my broker, but this seems ripe for public discussion:
Actually, I wouldn't mind owning a bunch of single shares to pass out as gag gifts, etc. At $22 a hundred, it's pretty cheap entertainment. Is there any legal downside at all to buying this stock? I'd hate to have IBM show up with an invoice-bearing Nazgul just because I wanted to play a joke on a friend.
By defending themselves in the lawsuit that SCO filed against them, you mean. I know what you mean, but they did what they had to do in order to defend their interests.
Thanks man. It's nice to feel appreciated. :-)
You hit it right on the head, though. It's a shame that a massively multithreaded version is more or less impossible right now. I'd love to benchmark a threaded clone of that function on a big SMP system without any of the inherent penalties of fork.
Do I want that as an option? Oh, yeah. Consider a multi-processing map() replacement that I'd been playing around with. The fork()ing version is much more complicated than a threaded version would need to be because you have to serialize return values, and is less capable because it's unable to return any values that aren't serializable (such as sockets or file handles).
Yes, all that complexity can be a nightmare, but sometimes that nightmare is actually preferable to the alternatives. As it stands today that's not a choice that I get to make.
More broadly supported? What everyone else said. Better? Nothing. My wife has a Nano and I have a Sansa e280. Interface-wise, they're nearly identical except that my scrollwheel is an actual rotating disk instead of a touch sensor. Honestly, it basically comes down to taste and budget.
Fair enough. Arguing bloat with a stereotypical Gentoo ricer is like arguing toxins with a hippie. Both groups love being the ones who see How Things Really Are.
Still using Notepad?
Using Emacs, if I type "if foo:", as soon as I press ":", the editor will enter a linefeed and move my cursor down, indented four spaces to the right of the "if" statement.
Now, if I type the command to be executed in the "if" clause and hit enter, I will be positioned immediately under the first non-whitespace character in that line. If I type "else:", as soon as I press ":", it will shift that line to the left four spaces so that it's immediately below "if foo:", insert a linefeed, and position the cursor exactly where it should be to enter the "else" clause.
I never have to think about indentation because Emacs does it for me. I literally have not had to deal this supposedly tricky whitespace in years. If things like this are difficult in your editor, it may be time to upgrade to one more suited for programming (and there are plenty that should fit the bill).
I've never personally run across Python code that doesn't use four spaces, so this is much more a problem in theory than in practice. Furthermore, Emacs will automatically pick up the indentation mode of any Python file you open and use that instead of its default for that one file. I doubt that it's the only programming editor that can handle this for you.
True, but it still doesn't have autocrop, which I tend to use all the time. I love the idea of Krita and want so badly for it to work, but every time I try to use it I end up looking for some functionality that turns out not to exist and grudgingly fire up The Gimp.
I wholly understand that it's not meant to be a functional clone and that's perfectly OK. But please, someone, sit a few people down with The Gimp and see what functions they use, then make sure that the most common ones work well in Krita.
No - that doesn't really measure anything at all. Suppose the Foo version automatically pulled in 5x the functionality, network filesystems, subpixel antialiasing, native Linux, Windows, and Mac build options. Then suppose that the Bar version gets you antialiasing and the possibility to maybe compile it on another platform as long as you haven't used and system-specific features. Would you still call the first bloated if it was bigger after static compilation, or would you say it's more featureful?
Now suppose that an updated version of Bar throws in a BitTorrent client, video transcoding, a screensaver, and dancing clowns. If it still compiles smaller than Foo's version, would you still call it less bloated?
Finally, suppose that Foo and Bar are functionally identical. Foo is written in a clear, easy-to-maintain generalized style. Bar is written in prematurely optimized spaghetti code and requires a PhD in informatics and a Turing Test-level AI to modify. Foo's editor is 10% bigger than Bar's but is more stable and more actively developed because regular humans can approach it. Would you still call it more bloated?
Size without context is nothing. It provides data but not information. Everyone hates bloat, but it's not at all obvious that size is the only way to measure it, or even a good one.
How on earth did your broken reading comprehension lead you to that conclusion?
What I said (for people capable of reading English) is that it's best to let Python itself do as much as it can, rather than needlessly re-implement parts of the language in native Python. Don't write loops if map() or list comprehensions can replace them. Don't write "c = a; a = b; b = c" to swap two variables when "a, b = b, a" does the same thing but faster and with less memory.
The C equivalent would be saying to use libc instead of hand-rolled knockoffs because the standard version will almost certainly be more efficient and better tested.
Finally, it's "Lua", not "LUA", and even their Wiki doesn't claim as much superiority over Python as you do.
Amen to that. Because it's a command and not an expression, you can't do things like use it in a lambda command or pass it as a parameter. This means that if you want to print every value in a list, you can't just type "map(print, listname)" or anything else as compact and "clean". I'll be more than happy to drop yet another pointless command when the alternative is every bit as convenient and provides much more functionality.
You missed the tag, methinks.
Try this, in increasing order of work required (and likely reward).
One: try Psyco. It may give you the bump you needed, or it may do nothing, but since it's so easy you might as well try it.
Two: write faster code. Basically, let Python do the work for you by handing off as much processing as possible to the language. For example, this:
is longer to type and possibly vastly longer to execute than:
since the latter knows how many values it needs to pre-allocate memory for, and can perform the operations in a tight C loop instead of evaluating a much slower Python loop.
Three: profile. Once you're sure that you've written good algorithms are aren't re-implementing large bits of Python in Python, run a profiler to find out where you can direct extra attention. Some people do this before #2, but I don't touch it until I know that everything else is right.
I wrote a "diff" function in native Python that searches two many-gig files for lines that appear in one but not the other. Said function is IO bound on a SCSI-320 RAID-0 system with 4 15K RPM drives, and typically uses about 20% CPU for the duration. You can write slow Python, but that doesn't mean that you have to.
Hey, just a second. Without seeing the videos, it's kind of hard to say which were the rational actors here. Imagine the scenario where the ID folks were saying "here's what we believe, and this is the logical basis behind it" while the evolution proponents were screaming "OMGWTFBBQ11!11! th3z3 guys r t3h suck". That's not likely, true, but I haven't seen the actual footage and likely neither have you.
Remember, the fact that someone shares your beliefs doesn't mean that they're also civil, reasonable, and calm. Maybe the RRS crew were the mouth-foamers this time around and banned for perfectly acceptable reasons. Again, unlikely, but we'll probably never know the whole story.
I get the gist of what you're saying, but at the same time, some conjectures are so absurd that they don't really need rigorous debunking. If I propose that smashing you in the mouth with a brick will end global warming, we can skip right past experimentation and go straight for the explanation of why it won't work. Frankly, homeopathy is approximately as reputable.
I'll let you in on a secret: most of the time, given acceptable nutrition, your body will heal itself. Do you think everyone who got cystitis or strep throat or earaches died before antibiotics were invented? Of course not. Your wife's immune system did what it was evolved to do.
Having said that, you couldn't pay me enough to run through an untreated course of strep throat. Antibiotics exist because 1) being that sick really sucks, and 2) sometimes those things did kill people, and you're far better off treating them when possible to keep them from getting out of control. Your wife got lucky this time. I hope she's lucky the next time, too, and the time after that.
My oldest son is 11 months to the day younger than my oldest daughter. "Breast feeding as birth control" advocates can kiss my counter-anecdotal butt.
You're wrong. From headon.com:
"Uncontroversial among the greater public at large." Of course it's scientifically bogus.