Python is attractive to different people for different reasons. My reasons:
Almost as powerful and expressive versatile as lisp
Libraries are powerful and well documented
Easy to create bindings to C/C++
Deployment is easy
Good cross-platform support
Syntax is easy for uninitiated to decypher
Large and growing "mindshare"
The last two are related and are actually key.
Lisp is really the gold standard of "expressive and versatile" but you just can't jump in and be productive in a day or two like you can in Python.
Perl looks pretty ugly to the uninitiated.
Ruby looks better in a lot of ways but it's not enough better to overcome Python's lead.
I wish I really Dylan was ready. It's a real shame that Gwydion Dylan hasn't made it to production quality yet. It's a classic example of the losing end of worse-is-better. The design gets almost everything "right" which of course makes the initial implementation too difficult.
I wouldn't argue with you that interoperability and unification helps but it has had only a minor role to play in Microsoft's dominance. They were handed the DOS platform monopoly by IBM and they've been aggressively maintaining it ever since.
If you mean that illegal product advertising is being weeded out, then, yes, it's getting closer to broadcast television. The online pharmacies we're talking about often require nothing more than a credit card to order whatever drug a person wishes. Like it or not, that's not the way we've decided to do things in the USA because we've decided that there are too many dangerous drugs to let the public have them willy-nilly without a doctor's supervision.
We decided no such thing. The people with money who buy our politicians decided it for us.
Yeah, getting married is definitely the easiest way to get things organized. For example I went looking for a VGA cable the other day only to discover that all my cables had been sorted, detangled and stored in large ziplock freezer bags to prevent retangling. I found the cable I wanted in like 20 or 30 seconds instead of the 10 or 15 minutes of digging around that it usually takes.
I've skimmed through the FCC's PDF report and read a few other sources but this is the first thing I've seen that says that new VCRs won't play old tapes. Is there something in the rule that says all content must have a flag? Is flag-less content presumed to be pirated?
Obviously it's bad because government imposed DRM is pretty much pure evil, but the fact that it is a standard with NO ENCRYPTION which will be pretty much set in stone for the rest of our lives is great. If there ever is an IP-rights revolution, it can be purely legal since there won't be any technological roadblock to overcome.
It still sucks though. I work with this stuff for a living and DRM and the IP industry make some of my days very frustrating.
Don't pay the windows tax (or the Apple tax for that matter).
I settled on a Sager 4060 from PCTorque. It's heavier than the toughbook but all its included devices are well supported under linux and it's got a lot of nice features for the price.
Interesting. I hadn't considered drive heat. On opening the case I now observe that the drives in question are Really Fucking Hot!. I'll try to figure out some way to cool them down and see what happens.
I have an HPT374 on my AT7MAX and I did briefly use the highpoint drivers. I don't recall any specific problems except for the annoying extra manual steps required everytime I did anything to the kernel.
I've been using the linux ATA drivers since some 2.4.21 prepatch and I'm up to 2.4.22-ac1 now. I have had consistent problems of system lockup after anywhere from a few hours to a few days if I keep my RAID volume mounted. The lockup is preceded by some error messages from the kernel about 20 or 30 seconds before. I've forgotten the details now but I sent a nice bug report to the address listed on http://www.linux-ide.org/. I never heard back or could tell that anyone even got it so I am guessing you are right that no one really cares about this.
I'm tired of messing with it and I'm thinking of just buying another 3ware card. I've got one already in my main fileserver. They're pricey but they provide fewer headaches.
3ware has a ~$400 card which will support 8 ATA drives in raid-5 and make it look like a single scsi disk. This is well supported under linux. You can buy 160-200G drives for less than $1/G. Get 8 of whichever one you can afford. For $100 you can get a mobo+processor with ethernet. Another $50 gets you a case and PS. That's about $1500. Then you either take a few weekends figuring it out and setting it up or you find someone who will do it for $100/hour = $800-1500. Hmmm. Maybe I have myself a business plan here....
Perhaps it would be easier to send it out through a joystick port. You could easily wire one of those to the parallel port on a more modern computer and write some software to read it in. There are many schematics and bits of code on the net which could be adapted to such a purpose.
Case #4
Shared email address books with LDAP. I want to run an LDAP server with slapd to provide shared email address books, but I don't want to use LDAP for any sort of network authentication. I just want users to be able to create folders and contacts and move the contacts around in the folders (and add, change, delete and update them, of course.) Apparently, I'm the only person that ever thought of doing this because I haven't found ANY docs anywhere that describe this sort of thing.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Oh man. I've made so many attempts at this but I've never had enough time to sit down and figure it all out.
SCO needs money to fund it's lawsuit. Microsoft has an interest in the case. This is the easiest way for them to funnel cash to the effort without anyone crying "foul".
True. But no one is claiming that OE is something you should depend on. It's main purpose is to make the job of snoops with no resources a lot harder.
The real weakness in this scheme is that very few admins will go to the trouble of registering keys with DNS due to laziness or lack of perceived value.
All I want to know, basically, is whether this will create the possibility of a computer that can be sold with preinstalled software that the user cannot remove without getting an authorization or breaking the security scheme.
I'm sure that the MS rep will deny that it will keep other OS's from being installed. What I want is a public admission that it will make it possible for preinstalled software to require authorization from someone other than the owner of the machine before blowing it away and replacing it with something else.
It seems obvious to me that for Palladium to really have the qualities they imply it will have, that it will have to support this sort of lockout functionality.
This could lead to some fun followup questions such as: "if some virus/trojan/malware defeats the security of the installed Palladium executive, could it then lock everything down and turn the computer into a boat anchor permanently?"
Unless you could convince someone it was a satire:-)
Redistribution is OK as long as it is not for profit. This means that someone completely unaffiliated with any arguably profit-making venture that might use the fonts could set up a server and all the installers could point to that. I suppose a non-profit could be set up and run on donations.
But that would require time and resources better spent hiring a typographer to make some good free fonts.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard of XM but MIDI and MOD are formats for playback. MusicXML is all about supporting notation for humans to read.
- Some calendar functionality. (display and alarm would be sufficient but data entry capability would be nice.)
- Sync data with PC. Must not use secret proprietary protocol (e.g. the Timex watches)
- Battery life of at least one year
In addition to the minimum it needs one or more of the following:- Almost as powerful and expressive versatile as lisp
- Libraries are powerful and well documented
- Easy to create bindings to C/C++
- Deployment is easy
- Good cross-platform support
- Syntax is easy for uninitiated to decypher
- Large and growing "mindshare"
The last two are related and are actually key.Lisp is really the gold standard of "expressive and versatile" but you just can't jump in and be productive in a day or two like you can in Python.
Perl looks pretty ugly to the uninitiated.
Ruby looks better in a lot of ways but it's not enough better to overcome Python's lead.
I wish I really Dylan was ready. It's a real shame that Gwydion Dylan hasn't made it to production quality yet. It's a classic example of the losing end of worse-is-better. The design gets almost everything "right" which of course makes the initial implementation too difficult.
I wouldn't argue with you that interoperability and unification helps but it has had only a minor role to play in Microsoft's dominance. They were handed the DOS platform monopoly by IBM and they've been aggressively maintaining it ever since.
SFS performs quite well. I recommend it but AFAICT it's only for linux and bsd ATM.
We decided no such thing. The people with money who buy our politicians decided it for us.
Yeah, getting married is definitely the easiest way to get things organized. For example I went looking for a VGA cable the other day only to discover that all my cables had been sorted, detangled and stored in large ziplock freezer bags to prevent retangling. I found the cable I wanted in like 20 or 30 seconds instead of the 10 or 15 minutes of digging around that it usually takes.
I'm trying on my debian box but it must depend on different versions of python/qt/kde/g++ than what's in unstable.
I've skimmed through the FCC's PDF report and read a few other sources but this is the first thing I've seen that says that new VCRs won't play old tapes. Is there something in the rule that says all content must have a flag? Is flag-less content presumed to be pirated?
Obviously it's bad because government imposed DRM is pretty much pure evil, but the fact that it is a standard with NO ENCRYPTION which will be pretty much set in stone for the rest of our lives is great. If there ever is an IP-rights revolution, it can be purely legal since there won't be any technological roadblock to overcome.
It still sucks though. I work with this stuff for a living and DRM and the IP industry make some of my days very frustrating.
There's a nice list of non-windows x86 laptop vendors at mcelrath.org/laptops.html
Don't pay the windows tax (or the Apple tax for that matter).
I settled on a Sager 4060 from PCTorque. It's heavier than the toughbook but all its included devices are well supported under linux and it's got a lot of nice features for the price.
Interesting. I hadn't considered drive heat. On opening the case I now observe that the drives in question are Really Fucking Hot!. I'll try to figure out some way to cool them down and see what happens.
The headaches are what I had with the Highpoint. The 3ware solution has been reliable and trouble-free.
I have an HPT374 on my AT7MAX and I did briefly use the highpoint drivers. I don't recall any specific problems except for the annoying extra manual steps required everytime I did anything to the kernel.
I've been using the linux ATA drivers since some 2.4.21 prepatch and I'm up to 2.4.22-ac1 now. I have had consistent problems of system lockup after anywhere from a few hours to a few days if I keep my RAID volume mounted. The lockup is preceded by some error messages from the kernel about 20 or 30 seconds before. I've forgotten the details now but I sent a nice bug report to the address listed on http://www.linux-ide.org/. I never heard back or could tell that anyone even got it so I am guessing you are right that no one really cares about this.
I'm tired of messing with it and I'm thinking of just buying another 3ware card. I've got one already in my main fileserver. They're pricey but they provide fewer headaches.
3ware has a ~$400 card which will support 8 ATA drives in raid-5 and make it look like a single scsi disk. This is well supported under linux. You can buy 160-200G drives for less than $1/G. Get 8 of whichever one you can afford. For $100 you can get a mobo+processor with ethernet. Another $50 gets you a case and PS. That's about $1500. Then you either take a few weekends figuring it out and setting it up or you find someone who will do it for $100/hour = $800-1500. Hmmm. Maybe I have myself a business plan here....
Not quite as slick but a lot more amusing.
Perhaps it would be easier to send it out through a joystick port. You could easily wire one of those to the parallel port on a more modern computer and write some software to read it in. There are many schematics and bits of code on the net which could be adapted to such a purpose.
This (linux-sxs) seems like it fits the bill. I'm going to give it a go. I wonder why I've never seen it before.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Oh man. I've made so many attempts at this but I've never had enough time to sit down and figure it all out.
SCO needs money to fund it's lawsuit. Microsoft has an interest in the case. This is the easiest way for them to funnel cash to the effort without anyone crying "foul".
True. But no one is claiming that OE is something you should depend on. It's main purpose is to make the job of snoops with no resources a lot harder.
The real weakness in this scheme is that very few admins will go to the trouble of registering keys with DNS due to laziness or lack of perceived value.
meanwhile.songfight.net
Check out the archives and the discussion board.
I'm sure that the MS rep will deny that it will keep other OS's from being installed. What I want is a public admission that it will make it possible for preinstalled software to require authorization from someone other than the owner of the machine before blowing it away and replacing it with something else.
It seems obvious to me that for Palladium to really have the qualities they imply it will have, that it will have to support this sort of lockout functionality.
This could lead to some fun followup questions such as: "if some virus/trojan/malware defeats the security of the installed Palladium executive, could it then lock everything down and turn the computer into a boat anchor permanently?"
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/
Unless you could convince someone it was a satire :-)
Redistribution is OK as long as it is not for profit. This means that someone completely unaffiliated with any arguably profit-making venture that might use the fonts could set up a server and all the installers could point to that. I suppose a non-profit could be set up and run on donations.
But that would require time and resources better spent hiring a typographer to make some good free fonts.