Agreed; Python doesn't need as much standardization for modules as Perl:-)... And the distutils package is indeed a great idea,...BUT: you still have to find that module/distro in order to install it.
I am thinking more of a site (even a Zope-powered one:-) where you can search not only the description of the code, or browse through an index but actually search through the doc-strings as well --the self-documenting functionality is there, why not use it?
And a final peeve: I am indeed a Python evangelist now, but when my colleagues ask me if there is stuff out there for Python and where to get them, I really don't want to send them to Starship or Parnassus: neither one looks well-organized or proffessionally made. I know that has very little to do with their usefulness (well, the organized part does:-) or the quality of their contents, but unfortunately that's how people judge...
When I first heard of Python, I thought it was a joke; I mean, whitespace-sensitive? what is this Fortran? However, it just so happened that my company was looking for a RAD language we could use on Unix and NT. So, I started using Python as a punchline as in "Be careful, or I am gonna write this in Python". After using that joke too many times, I actually started looking into the language. Python kicks ass. It's a RAD Java, a clean Perl, a consistent PHP. So, I am now this Python evangelist.
However, Python is severely lacking in the modules dept: Don't get me wrong the distro libraries are great, but occasionally you need a quick hack that you *know* someone else has already written. We need a CPAN for Python. Starship and the Vaults of Parnassus are OK, but they're nothing more than an index, without organization or consistency.
I hope Digital Creations actually tries something like that...
That's the first rule of security (and safety, and system robustness, etc).
Put your system files in one partition --enough for the system to boot up and your data files in another one, encrypted by a strong on-the-fly encryptor (I recommend E4M as ScramDisk is stuck on Win9x).
Go through your important applications and make sure they put even less important stuff (like temporary files) into the encrypted partition --Outlook.pst files, and %tempdir% come to mind; you don't want Word leaving whole copies of your business plan on C:/temp. You'll see a slow-down, but it's worth it.
Do not store passwords for anything in non-secure media (i.e. anything short of an encrypted file on a non-networkable machine or a PDA). I use Secret! on my Palm to store passwords and PINs I don't remember.
Go active: write a little hidden app (a batch file should do even) that will 'call home'. If you lose the laptop and the thief is stupid enough to go on the Net, the machine should start giving info about its wherabouts.
Most important: find a foreigner-friendly company. If a company has the processes in place to support foreign workers, your life will be much easier. This usually means that they won't mind hiring you in the training period of the F-1, that they will offer to file the H-1B and later do the Labor Certification for a Green Card. CAVEAT: a *lot* of the foreigner-friendly companies out there are H-1B slave-shops that will dangle the LCA and the Green Card in front of you for as long as they can while they'll pay you a 1/2-1/3 of the average in your position. Be especially careful when they are located in places without a kick-ass job market...
There are ways around the H-1B and the LCA: multinational companies can hire you out of a European, say, subsidiary and bring you back in the country with an L-1 or even a visitor's visa. Some off-shore contracting firms can bring you to work in the US while paying you in the home country. In this case you are not stuck in the LCA process (which can be brutal, long (2-3 yrs) and during which you really can't leave your employer unless you start all over again) but you will be stuck with the lower salary anyway, and you are not gonna get that Green Card...
If you qualify (i.e. you are not from one of the high-immigration countries, namely India, China, etc), do the Visa Lottery. The odds are pretty good for Europeans in particular (that's how I got out of the H-1B hole) and the process will take much less time and money than the LCA (2 years max).
What you need is an on-the-fly encryption program (OTF). OTFs create a container file (a 'volume') that allows you to store any kind of file within it in an encrypted format. There are a buncha free (beer, speech) OTF encryptors out there: the most popular and most powerful is Scramdisk. However Scramdisk only works with Windows 9x. For NT/2k your best option, IMHO, is E4M (Encryption 4 the Masses).
Pretty good, mounts the encrypted volume as a Windows drive and uses industrial strength algorithms (I am partial to Twofish). If you go for it, also look for SecureTrayUtil, which will let you do all the E4M-related grunt work through the Windows Tray.
I am paranoid about losing my laptop with customer information myself...
Hey, give King a break (I am a fan too); he maybe not going around it the "correct" way, but he *is* trying and he definitely has the market clout to pull it off. You also have to realize King ain't that techno-savvy. Back in '96 or so when I frequented alt.books.fan.stephen-king it was well known that King kept intentionally away from the Net (or so his good friend Peter Straub said). I dunno when he changed his mind, but judging from his various stories on typewriters and reluctance to use a word-processor, I am guessing pretty recently.
I also think King would have gotten a better response if the whole e-buying process was smoother (maybe hook up with PayPal or Yahoo! BillPay or something ask for $.50 a part) instead of the clunky way he did part I (I notice know he has switched to Amazon --maybe he had a beer with Steve Jobs).
True (I have Telocity myself), but the infrastructure put in place for the Olympics pretty much guarantees a 'clean' copper line to the BellSouth central office. Coworkers living in other parts of Atlanta (Midtown, Buckhead, Brookhaven, never mind the 'burbs), can't quite clock the 1.2Mbps cruising speed (peaks at 1.5) I get at home. I tend to think that that has something to do with the cleaner lines around Tech.
The solution, IMHO, would be a small enough cell-phone with a built-in modem you can hook up to your PDA over IR (no extra cables). My favorites in this area are the Nokia 89xx series, particularly the 8990. I just got my V, and I am lusting after the 8990 now (costs almost as much:-(...
Take a short trip down to Home Park (roughly the neighborhood between 10th and 16th Streets north of Ga Tech). Take a look at git.ads or the campus newspaper for people looking for housemates or to rent a house with.
Home Park is full of houses of Ga Tech people very eager to have/share a high speed connection. Also it's damn close to the GT campus itself which is one of the most wired places in the country thanks to the 1996 Olympics (fiber, fiber everywhere), so I am sure DSL will be easy to find.
I am not a wreck anymore (pun intended) but I do live about 2 miles north of Tech and my ADSL happily clocks at 1.5Mbps down:-)...
Here I was, making a stupid sarcastic post --yeah the rip on RMS was cheap, but so is this thread, me thinks-- and someone had to actually consider my joke on its technical merits. I like that.
So, yes I am pretty sure/dev/web is doable (no, I aint working on it), and probably already done in Inferno or Plan 9. Probably a hack involving wget (or actually, Python:-) would go a long way there.
As for the Vim browser: no I haven't done it (I am happily surfing on IE 5.5, thanks), but somewhere on vim.org, I have seen a vim-with-embedded-python. And python does allow you to send and receive stuff through http transparently, so yes, it is theoretically possible to built an entire browser within vi. Why? I dunno. I am using IE, remember?
Neah... they're just feeding the Christians to the lions so to speak. How newsworthy is a bug in Mozilla? Half the people will repeat the many-eyes, shallow bugs thing all over again and then the page views would die down. Besides, the Slashdot Queue would have nothing else.
Of course, they (that conglomerator of OSS sites, Andover.Net Inc) would much rather throw a beefy, meaty Microsoft bug at the starving flamers, err.../.ers I meant.
I mean you have to go *three* dialogs down to turn that feature off! Unbelievable! If RMS had designed IE, there would have been an option right there in ~/.ierc! Of course it would have been tab-sensitive and in ~/.ierc's unique little syntax, but you could definitely find it with a good man page and a text editor...
Hmm... so you're suggesting that MS should have locked all input devices coming in to the box, when you hit "Lock computer". I guess that would include the NIC, mouse and keyboard. Unlocking the machine would be a tad challenging then, I imagine.
Surely the blame doesn't lie with the manufacturer of the device that doesn't check with the OS for what it should do. Or the author of the program. Because "they" are Palm Computing, which is a *good* monopoly, because of course they are not Microsoft.
I personally have taken the version of VIM with embedded Python, spliced in Python's built-in HTTP client classes, and use vi to view the source text, with the garbage tags stripped out.
I would've used Emacs for this, but I cannot trust LISP (the language's emphasis on parenthesies is antithetical to a prototypical architecture of a secure steganographical system) and I am worried that RMS may one day demand that the pages I view be switched to the GPL since I am using a GPL program to look at them.
I am now working on a kernel patch for/dev/web, which would map the Web's raw feed to a device that I can just cat to my standard out.
Amen... I don't see many people arguing that doctors' advice should be free (well, there is that whole welfare state thing in Europe, but people do pay for it) or lawyers' counsel, or --much closer to home-- software consulting.
Information *doesn't* want to be free. Information is knowledge, and knowledge costs money; either through the experience of trial and error or through the time in education. The fact that some (a lot of) people offer information for free (on the web or as OSS) is great, but they *volunteer* to do so. On Napster, the artists (starving or mega-millionaires) *don't*. That makes it theft. If you're cool with theft, so be it, but making it sound like a revolutionary call or something, that's hypocricy.
One of Python's strengths is its license, which is very BSD-like. It allows people to redistribute modified Python as part of their project, embed Python as a built-in language and extend it with their own C-based modules. I have been trying to convince my own employer to use Python for some products, and the license is a big plus in that fight --let's face it; businesses are more amenable to the BSD-family of licensing than the GPL.
If the Python people follow TrollTech onto the GPL bandwagon it will probably hurt Python in the long run... Before you know it, RMS will be arguing that products using Python as a scripting language or based on Python extensions (and there are quite a few) will have to switch to GPL...
Fixed prices are a thing of the past already in the 'brick' world; you, us, can't tell as easily as with the 'click' world though, because comparison shopping isn't as easy. But, consider these tricks regular --offline-- retailers pull:
By far the most similar to Amazon's flexible pricing: checkout coupons. You know the little coupons you get printed on a tape similar to your bill at a super market? that is a checkout coupon and the contents of those are directly linked to what you just bought (I forget the name of the company who backs these things up with databases).
Membership cards and private credit cards: e.g. a Target card, or say a Macy's card can be used to track your purchases and then target spam (old fashioned direct mail) at you. That has been around for ages and most people are aware of those. Well, what happens when Macy's sends you a catalog with some coupons inside? that is variable pricing, directly aimed at getting you to the store.
Daily discounts. Thin-margin retailers (i.e. grocery stores) will routinely heavily discount --and heavily advertise-- a popular item to get people in the store. Those prices may vary from store to store, and day to day. Again, that is used for promotion, and is an entire science.
The list goes on really... and yes, retailers already use massive databases and cutting-edge data-mining (I should know; you can figure out why). You can't really blame them though; they are plagued by ever decreasing margins, competition by nimbler online stores, and more and more demanding customers (as evidenced by this very thread).
To make you feel better though, let me tell you that I've never seen a retailer that will consciously raise a price to a loyal customer, something that I doubt even Amazon will dare pull. The reasoning is simple: a loyal (i.e. a repeat) customer is far too valuable to loose for a coupla percentage points of profit. Word of mouth and future sales volume is far, far more important.
It didn't really take RMS. BSD had a complete OS way before GNU came around. What are the major additions to OSS by GNU? GCC which was effectively saved by Cygnus, Emacs which has splintered again and again (have you wondered why?) and a number of small utilities that were basically given to FSF rather than came from it.
Don't take me wrong; I respect GNU and I use FSF programs all the time. However, they are not the only source of OSS (no pun intended) or even the biggest one. BSD, X, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, the Apache Group, and others I am probably forgetting have given as much or more code to the community and, more importantly, have rallied people around them, without turning people off or away from OSS. And from those I mentioned by name, only Linus' code is GPL'ed. The BSD, X and Artistic licenses have been, historically, as successful (if not more so) as the GPL.
People act like RMS is the leader of OSS. He isn't; noone is and noone should be. He is just the most (by far) vocal, while being one of the least productive in terms of completed/successful projects from the people that do stand out.
PS: Now, some will argue that it was because of the GPL that Linux succeeded where FreeBSD failed, i.e. challenging MS on x86. Bull; for those that weren't around back then, let me remind you of the little AT&T lawsuit against the BSDs. If FreeBSD could have taken advantage of the commoditization of x86 hardware and widespread acceptance/importance of the Internet that coincided around 91-92, the/. groupies would be worshipping the demon now, not the Penguin. (BTW, I use Linux, not BSD; I just have my history straight).
I never thought I would be saying this about a guy who wrote emacs, for crying out loud --maybe I did; I use vi:-)...-- but RMS needs to grow up.
I've asked this before: why the leaders of other, more succesful OSS projects than anything FSF has thrown together have managed to pump out great code without alienating more than half of the community? Why isn't Linus despised by a good chunk of developers (even BSDers:-)? why can Larry Wall command respect even by people who don't like Perl? I believe the reason is that those guys are sociable, gracious guys who can obviously both inspire people and manage a large project succesfully.
Would you like Linus as your boss? Larry Wall as your supervisor? Brian Behendorf as your team leader? Now, would you like RMS as your co-worker?
I'd just like to point out that the most successful OSS projects out there are not managed or led by people that are as unsociable and well, stubborn (to put it mildly) as RMS.
Here's TrollTech, effectively surrendering to the hordes of Gnomes --that kept complaining about a great product, covered under a certified OSS license-- and this man doesn't just give a congrats, "welcome to the team" message, but has to remind us the history of KDE/Qt. He's effectively saying "It doesn't matter what they're doing now; it doesn't matter that I have won, that they have asked for forgiveness. We should still beat them to a painful merge with Gnome, because they dared to release software under a license other than my own". Yuck. He may be justified in his beliefs, he may be actually morally right (and I do agree with him on a lot of things), but if RMS was my boss, I'd quit my job in a nano-second.
Look at Linus, look at Larry Wall, the Apache Group (really the prototype for an OSS effort); they have made great software without alienating anybody, much less half of the community. Would you work for Linus Torvalds? I would. Would you take a job with Larry Wall as your supervisor? In a minute. Would you take orders from Brian Behlendorf? Most probably.
Would you want to be in the same code team as RMS? Would you?
OK, I don't know that much about Modula, but wrt your comment, I got to say that at least Python has (reportedly) borrowed a lot from Modula-2. So, if you haven't already, take a look. Python is a programmer's and sys-admins answer to a lot of prayers...
Please try to get 8-way SMP Intel boxes to do any serious inter-process communication. They suck! memory contention issues and bus-speed (not to mention sucky Linux SMP) make 8-way (and actually most 4-way SMP) machines *much* slower than 8 single-cpu Pentium boxes. The best bang for the buck is probably a cluster of dual PIII-Xeons with the new 133MHz buses.
Yes, you can kick a Cray's ass with that thing, but a) you are gonna need some fast (gigabit speeds) iterconnects that aint cheap, and b) you need software that will take advantage of the setup. And still, if you re-write your software to be vector-friendly (not trivial, but not the hardest thing in the world either) a Cray can still kick some serious Beowulf butt.
Yep... once, a long time ago, I was playing on a Cray-YMP. I mean literally playing: I got XTetris to compile on that thing, renamed the binary something scientific sounding and played one game for like 1:30 hours (yes, one CPU is very-very slow:-)... The kicker: I was on the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time:-) I got some really weird looks from people wondering why a Reality Engine (probably the best graphics machine series ever) couldn't keep up with XTetris:-)...
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed; Python doesn't need as much standardization for modules as Perl :-)... And the distutils package is indeed a great idea, ...BUT: you still have to find that module/distro in order to install it.
:-) where you can search not only the description of the code, or browse through an index but actually search through the doc-strings as well --the self-documenting functionality is there, why not use it?
:-) or the quality of their contents, but unfortunately that's how people judge...
I am thinking more of a site (even a Zope-powered one
And a final peeve: I am indeed a Python evangelist now, but when my colleagues ask me if there is stuff out there for Python and where to get them, I really don't want to send them to Starship or Parnassus: neither one looks well-organized or proffessionally made. I know that has very little to do with their usefulness (well, the organized part does
When I first heard of Python, I thought it was a joke; I mean, whitespace-sensitive? what is this Fortran? However, it just so happened that my company was looking for a RAD language we could use on Unix and NT. So, I started using Python as a punchline as in "Be careful, or I am gonna write this in Python". After using that joke too many times, I actually started looking into the language. Python kicks ass. It's a RAD Java, a clean Perl, a consistent PHP. So, I am now this Python evangelist.
However, Python is severely lacking in the modules dept: Don't get me wrong the distro libraries are great, but occasionally you need a quick hack that you *know* someone else has already written. We need a CPAN for Python. Starship and the Vaults of Parnassus are OK, but they're nothing more than an index, without organization or consistency.
I hope Digital Creations actually tries something like that...
Put your system files in one partition --enough for the system to boot up and your data files in another one, encrypted by a strong on-the-fly encryptor (I recommend E4M as ScramDisk is stuck on Win9x).
Go through your important applications and make sure they put even less important stuff (like temporary files) into the encrypted partition --Outlook .pst files, and %tempdir% come to mind; you don't want Word leaving whole copies of your business plan on C:/temp. You'll see a slow-down, but it's worth it.
Do not store passwords for anything in non-secure media (i.e. anything short of an encrypted file on a non-networkable machine or a PDA). I use Secret! on my Palm to store passwords and PINs I don't remember.
Go active: write a little hidden app (a batch file should do even) that will 'call home'. If you lose the laptop and the thief is stupid enough to go on the Net, the machine should start giving info about its wherabouts.
Most important: find a foreigner-friendly company. If a company has the processes in place to support foreign workers, your life will be much easier. This usually means that they won't mind hiring you in the training period of the F-1, that they will offer to file the H-1B and later do the Labor Certification for a Green Card. CAVEAT: a *lot* of the foreigner-friendly companies out there are H-1B slave-shops that will dangle the LCA and the Green Card in front of you for as long as they can while they'll pay you a 1/2-1/3 of the average in your position. Be especially careful when they are located in places without a kick-ass job market...
There are ways around the H-1B and the LCA: multinational companies can hire you out of a European, say, subsidiary and bring you back in the country with an L-1 or even a visitor's visa. Some off-shore contracting firms can bring you to work in the US while paying you in the home country. In this case you are not stuck in the LCA process (which can be brutal, long (2-3 yrs) and during which you really can't leave your employer unless you start all over again) but you will be stuck with the lower salary anyway, and you are not gonna get that Green Card...
If you qualify (i.e. you are not from one of the high-immigration countries, namely India, China, etc), do the Visa Lottery. The odds are pretty good for Europeans in particular (that's how I got out of the H-1B hole) and the process will take much less time and money than the LCA (2 years max).
In any case, good luck!
What you need is an on-the-fly encryption program (OTF). OTFs create a container file (a 'volume') that allows you to store any kind of file within it in an encrypted format. There are a buncha free (beer, speech) OTF encryptors out there: the most popular and most powerful is Scramdisk. However Scramdisk only works with Windows 9x. For NT/2k your best option, IMHO, is E4M (Encryption 4 the Masses).
Pretty good, mounts the encrypted volume as a Windows drive and uses industrial strength algorithms (I am partial to Twofish). If you go for it, also look for SecureTrayUtil, which will let you do all the E4M-related grunt work through the Windows Tray.
I am paranoid about losing my laptop with customer information myself...
Hey, give King a break (I am a fan too); he maybe not going around it the "correct" way, but he *is* trying and he definitely has the market clout to pull it off. You also have to realize King ain't that techno-savvy. Back in '96 or so when I frequented alt.books.fan.stephen-king it was well known that King kept intentionally away from the Net (or so his good friend Peter Straub said). I dunno when he changed his mind, but judging from his various stories on typewriters and reluctance to use a word-processor, I am guessing pretty recently.
I also think King would have gotten a better response if the whole e-buying process was smoother (maybe hook up with PayPal or Yahoo! BillPay or something ask for $.50 a part) instead of the clunky way he did part I (I notice know he has switched to Amazon --maybe he had a beer with Steve Jobs).
I am thinking of going that route myself (have the Palm, *want* the 8890 :-)... Any tips/pitfalls you'd like to share?
I guess my biggest concern is: can you sync the Nokia with the Palm?
True (I have Telocity myself), but the infrastructure put in place for the Olympics pretty much guarantees a 'clean' copper line to the BellSouth central office. Coworkers living in other parts of Atlanta (Midtown, Buckhead, Brookhaven, never mind the 'burbs), can't quite clock the 1.2Mbps cruising speed (peaks at 1.5) I get at home. I tend to think that that has something to do with the cleaner lines around Tech.
The solution, IMHO, would be a small enough cell-phone with a built-in modem you can hook up to your PDA over IR (no extra cables). My favorites in this area are the Nokia 89xx series, particularly the 8990. I just got my V, and I am lusting after the 8990 now (costs almost as much :-(...
Take a short trip down to Home Park (roughly the neighborhood between 10th and 16th Streets north of Ga Tech). Take a look at git.ads or the campus newspaper for people looking for housemates or to rent a house with.
:-)...
Home Park is full of houses of Ga Tech people very eager to have/share a high speed connection. Also it's damn close to the GT campus itself which is one of the most wired places in the country thanks to the 1996 Olympics (fiber, fiber everywhere), so I am sure DSL will be easy to find.
I am not a wreck anymore (pun intended) but I do live about 2 miles north of Tech and my ADSL happily clocks at 1.5Mbps down
OSD (Open Software Description), implemented by Microsoft in XML. Of course, it is the work of Satan.
Here I was, making a stupid sarcastic post --yeah the rip on RMS was cheap, but so is this thread, me thinks-- and someone had to actually consider my joke on its technical merits. I like that.
/dev/web is doable (no, I aint working on it), and probably already done in Inferno or Plan 9. Probably a hack involving wget (or actually, Python :-) would go a long way there.
So, yes I am pretty sure
As for the Vim browser: no I haven't done it (I am happily surfing on IE 5.5, thanks), but somewhere on vim.org, I have seen a vim-with-embedded-python. And python does allow you to send and receive stuff through http transparently, so yes, it is theoretically possible to built an entire browser within vi. Why? I dunno. I am using IE, remember?
Neah... they're just feeding the Christians to the lions so to speak. How newsworthy is a bug in Mozilla? Half the people will repeat the many-eyes, shallow bugs thing all over again and then the page views would die down. Besides, the Slashdot Queue would have nothing else.
/.ers I meant.
Of course, they (that conglomerator of OSS sites, Andover.Net Inc) would much rather throw a beefy, meaty Microsoft bug at the starving flamers, err...
I mean you have to go *three* dialogs down to turn that feature off! Unbelievable! If RMS had designed IE, there would have been an option right there in ~/.ierc! Of course it would have been tab-sensitive and in ~/.ierc's unique little syntax, but you could definitely find it with a good man page and a text editor...
Double standards; not just for Redmond any more.
Hmm... so you're suggesting that MS should have locked all input devices coming in to the box, when you hit "Lock computer". I guess that would include the NIC, mouse and keyboard. Unlocking the machine would be a tad challenging then, I imagine.
Surely the blame doesn't lie with the manufacturer of the device that doesn't check with the OS for what it should do. Or the author of the program. Because "they" are Palm Computing, which is a *good* monopoly, because of course they are not Microsoft.
I see now.
I personally have taken the version of VIM with embedded Python, spliced in Python's built-in HTTP client classes, and use vi to view the source text, with the garbage tags stripped out.
/dev/web, which would map the Web's raw feed to a device that I can just cat to my standard out.
I would've used Emacs for this, but I cannot trust LISP (the language's emphasis on parenthesies is antithetical to a prototypical architecture of a secure steganographical system) and I am worried that RMS may one day demand that the pages I view be switched to the GPL since I am using a GPL program to look at them.
I am now working on a kernel patch for
Explorer kicks ass, BTW.
Amen... I don't see many people arguing that doctors' advice should be free (well, there is that whole welfare state thing in Europe, but people do pay for it) or lawyers' counsel, or --much closer to home-- software consulting.
Information *doesn't* want to be free. Information is knowledge, and knowledge costs money; either through the experience of trial and error or through the time in education. The fact that some (a lot of) people offer information for free (on the web or as OSS) is great, but they *volunteer* to do so. On Napster, the artists (starving or mega-millionaires) *don't*. That makes it theft. If you're cool with theft, so be it, but making it sound like a revolutionary call or something, that's hypocricy.
One of Python's strengths is its license, which is very BSD-like. It allows people to redistribute modified Python as part of their project, embed Python as a built-in language and extend it with their own C-based modules. I have been trying to convince my own employer to use Python for some products, and the license is a big plus in that fight --let's face it; businesses are more amenable to the BSD-family of licensing than the GPL.
If the Python people follow TrollTech onto the GPL bandwagon it will probably hurt Python in the long run... Before you know it, RMS will be arguing that products using Python as a scripting language or based on Python extensions (and there are quite a few) will have to switch to GPL...
By far the most similar to Amazon's flexible pricing: checkout coupons. You know the little coupons you get printed on a tape similar to your bill at a super market? that is a checkout coupon and the contents of those are directly linked to what you just bought (I forget the name of the company who backs these things up with databases).
Membership cards and private credit cards: e.g. a Target card, or say a Macy's card can be used to track your purchases and then target spam (old fashioned direct mail) at you. That has been around for ages and most people are aware of those. Well, what happens when Macy's sends you a catalog with some coupons inside? that is variable pricing, directly aimed at getting you to the store.
Daily discounts. Thin-margin retailers (i.e. grocery stores) will routinely heavily discount --and heavily advertise-- a popular item to get people in the store. Those prices may vary from store to store, and day to day. Again, that is used for promotion, and is an entire science.
The list goes on really... and yes, retailers already use massive databases and cutting-edge data-mining (I should know; you can figure out why). You can't really blame them though; they are plagued by ever decreasing margins, competition by nimbler online stores, and more and more demanding customers (as evidenced by this very thread).
To make you feel better though, let me tell you that I've never seen a retailer that will consciously raise a price to a loyal customer, something that I doubt even Amazon will dare pull. The reasoning is simple: a loyal (i.e. a repeat) customer is far too valuable to loose for a coupla percentage points of profit. Word of mouth and future sales volume is far, far more important.
It didn't really take RMS. BSD had a complete OS way before GNU came around. What are the major additions to OSS by GNU? GCC which was effectively saved by Cygnus, Emacs which has splintered again and again (have you wondered why?) and a number of small utilities that were basically given to FSF rather than came from it.
/. groupies would be worshipping the demon now, not the Penguin. (BTW, I use Linux, not BSD; I just have my history straight).
Don't take me wrong; I respect GNU and I use FSF programs all the time. However, they are not the only source of OSS (no pun intended) or even the biggest one. BSD, X, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, the Apache Group, and others I am probably forgetting have given as much or more code to the community and, more importantly, have rallied people around them, without turning people off or away from OSS. And from those I mentioned by name, only Linus' code is GPL'ed. The BSD, X and Artistic licenses have been, historically, as successful (if not more so) as the GPL.
People act like RMS is the leader of OSS. He isn't; noone is and noone should be. He is just the most (by far) vocal, while being one of the least productive in terms of completed/successful projects from the people that do stand out.
PS: Now, some will argue that it was because of the GPL that Linux succeeded where FreeBSD failed, i.e. challenging MS on x86. Bull; for those that weren't around back then, let me remind you of the little AT&T lawsuit against the BSDs. If FreeBSD could have taken advantage of the commoditization of x86 hardware and widespread acceptance/importance of the Internet that coincided around 91-92, the
Have you tried Xitami? it's free, it's lite-weight and highly configurable. Definitely reccommended (sorry, no link off the top of my head).
I never thought I would be saying this about a guy who wrote emacs, for crying out loud --maybe I did; I use vi :-)...-- but RMS needs to grow up.
:-)? why can Larry Wall command respect even by people who don't like Perl? I believe the reason is that those guys are sociable, gracious guys who can obviously both inspire people and manage a large project succesfully.
I've asked this before: why the leaders of other, more succesful OSS projects than anything FSF has thrown together have managed to pump out great code without alienating more than half of the community? Why isn't Linus despised by a good chunk of developers (even BSDers
Would you like Linus as your boss? Larry Wall as your supervisor? Brian Behendorf as your team leader? Now, would you like RMS as your co-worker?
I'd just like to point out that the most successful OSS projects out there are not managed or led by people that are as unsociable and well, stubborn (to put it mildly) as RMS.
Here's TrollTech, effectively surrendering to the hordes of Gnomes --that kept complaining about a great product, covered under a certified OSS license-- and this man doesn't just give a congrats, "welcome to the team" message, but has to remind us the history of KDE/Qt. He's effectively saying "It doesn't matter what they're doing now; it doesn't matter that I have won, that they have asked for forgiveness. We should still beat them to a painful merge with Gnome, because they dared to release software under a license other than my own". Yuck. He may be justified in his beliefs, he may be actually morally right (and I do agree with him on a lot of things), but if RMS was my boss, I'd quit my job in a nano-second.
Look at Linus, look at Larry Wall, the Apache Group (really the prototype for an OSS effort); they have made great software without alienating anybody, much less half of the community. Would you work for Linus Torvalds? I would. Would you take a job with Larry Wall as your supervisor? In a minute. Would you take orders from Brian Behlendorf? Most probably.
Would you want to be in the same code team as RMS? Would you?
OK, I don't know that much about Modula, but wrt your comment, I got to say that at least Python has (reportedly) borrowed a lot from Modula-2. So, if you haven't already, take a look. Python is a programmer's and sys-admins answer to a lot of prayers...
Please try to get 8-way SMP Intel boxes to do any serious inter-process communication. They suck! memory contention issues and bus-speed (not to mention sucky Linux SMP) make 8-way (and actually most 4-way SMP) machines *much* slower than 8 single-cpu Pentium boxes. The best bang for the buck is probably a cluster of dual PIII-Xeons with the new 133MHz buses.
Yes, you can kick a Cray's ass with that thing, but a) you are gonna need some fast (gigabit speeds) iterconnects that aint cheap, and b) you need software that will take advantage of the setup. And still, if you re-write your software to be vector-friendly (not trivial, but not the hardest thing in the world either) a Cray can still kick some serious Beowulf butt.
Yep... once, a long time ago, I was playing on a Cray-YMP. I mean literally playing: I got XTetris to compile on that thing, renamed the binary something scientific sounding and played one game for like 1:30 hours (yes, one CPU is very-very slow :-)... The kicker: I was on the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time :-) I got some really weird looks from people wondering why a Reality Engine (probably the best graphics machine series ever) couldn't keep up with XTetris :-)...