"Most" urbanites and suburbanites aren't technophiles, either. Technophiles are a minority wherever you are, unless you happen to live near a place of technophile congregation.
A city with a research university, an engineering school, a large high-tech manufacturer, a big software company, a government lab, or a military base with a specifically high-tech arsenal will have more technophiles around than the average place of the same size.
Using MySpace, Flickr, GMail, and YouTube isn't technical nor geeky. It's a mainstream popular activity with a low barrier to entry and almost no learning curve.
The whole "desktop computer" metaphor and the seriously strained interactive web applications with the "Web 2.0", "AJAX", and "WebApp" monikers are ways for non-geeks to use tools that previously were used primarily by geeks. It might take geeks to make the stuff work, but it's not necessary to be a geek to use them, and that's the point.
You cannot arbitrarily revoke any license under which you published the source code of your software. If you published it under BSD, Mozilla, Apache, or whatever license then that version of the code is out there somewhere.
Sure, you can make a closed fork of the most recent version even if you've accepted valuable input from others and stop offering the older version as open source. That's an advantage to you if you plan to do that. Yet with the GPL the original author can close his original source or relicense it however he wants. He just can't close the contributions of others made under the GPL.
The GPL is a double-edged sword, as is any license. The whole point of a license is to reserve some rights while granting others. It's all a matter of which rights remain with whom and to what extent. If the specific combination of rights granted and reserved under the GPL don't suit you, then that's fine. You never have to use it.
You bashing the GPL and another guy bashing your favorite license won't make much headway with each other. If you each just code and use the license of your choice, then you can each benefit yourself and others even if the two of you don't benefit each other directly.
Well, the initial developer doesn't give anything up. It's a limit on subsequent developers of the code.
The original developer is making sure he has (and others have) the right to use whatever improvements are made to his work, which isn't secured under BSD. The original developer can even close his work but not the contributions back to it by others without negotiation, which is a trade-off for everyone involved.
Subsequent developers who choose GNU give up the right to close the original developer's work, but they get the same guarantee for their contributions that the original developer had -- that subsequent improvements stay available as source.
The BSD license and the GPL give about the same levels of freedom overall, but they guarantee them in different ways to different parties. It's all about what's more important to you.
Personally, I like supporting useful projects no matter what the license. If you prefer BSD or if someone else prefers the GPL, those are both valid preferences in my eyes.
They are taken by a government that is nominally at least elected by the people and working the will of the people. If it's the will of the people that those taxes be taken and used for relief for the permanently poor and temporarily poor then that's a charitable decision by the people.
When the US citizenry paid much less in taxes, much more went to charities. Now that taxes are higher, many more people have the GP's attitude. Others still give some, but they give less than they would or give it to people places like Haiti or Ethiopia instead of to their neighbors who are already receiving support.
In the US, if you're a Democrat, yes. If you're a Republican, still yes but less so (except the poor puritanical fundamental Christians).
If you're an agency taking money from the rich to give to the poor and receive a paycheck, yes. If you advertise on TV for donations and take a cut, yes. If you run a lottery or sell drugs, yes.
If you run a transit company in a rural area, yes. Rich people might ride public transit in big cities, but see if they'll walk a mile in the rain or snow to the closest bus stop and wait for half an hour for the next bus. In even smaller towns than that, see if they'll call a taxi by phone half an hour before they need to be picked up. In even smaller towns than that, see if they'll pitch money to some unknown local to take them in a personal vehicle to a town that has taxis. In cities and towns under a few hundred thousand people, it's primarily the poor who use public transit. "Reliable transportation" is a requirement for many jobs, even.
The working poor and welfare recipients in the US are certainly a marketing segment for big business. "Urban fashion", fake jewelry, angst-ridden music (some but not all of rap, country, R&B, heavy metal, blues, punk, grunge, and whatever's "pop" this week), cheap beer and cheap malt liquor, designer impostor sunglasses and fragrances, and most fast food and junk food are targeted at the working poor who are frustrated with their condition. Anything that's designed to sell because it identifies one as down on one's luck fits this category. Some of it is good product at a decent price, and some of the artistic works are great, honest, valuable pieces. Yet how they're marketed is often nearly predatory.
Well, it's far more empowering than some technologies for one. It has a much lower tan average marginal cost per copy (often almost nil) once the original investment is made for another.
A computer with a few peripherals, an OS on it and Internet access is like a printing press, a telephone, a photography studio, a music studio, a lab for designing more products and services, a newspaper distribution route, an arcade, a diary, a social club, a stage theater, a movie cinema, a book club, a research library, and a concierge service all in a few square feet.
If you make that affordable and customizable for the masses, with improvements shared among us, then you'll get much more return on the investment than if you feed someone some rotted rice and sprouted potatoes and pay people along the way to get those things to them.
Let's say you take FOSS, cheap but capable hardware, and add a cheap but capable CNC system and 3D spray fabricator where people have raw materials but no easy way to use them. Teach them to use the machine, and how to refill its consumables in a safe and sustainable way. That area has just gone from a consumer or agrarian lifestyle to some of its people being local producers of non-food products. That's a huge shift in the local economy. It lowers the dependence on both buying and having donated non-local goods. It also cuts down on fuel used for shipping.
Remember the old saying about teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish? Well, you can teach him to fish as much as you want, but if he doesn't have the equipment or know how to make the equipment with which you taught him, it still doesn't do much good.
Open Source software is giving people the tools they need to do things they couldn't afford to do otherwise. Sure, someone with a computer and an Internet connection probably has food, shelter, and electricity most of the time. A 486 in a shack with a solar panel or diesel generator doesn't exactly make you rich, though. If someone in a poor country can run a business instead of doing odd jobs or can write software as a freelancer instead of begging or being on the dole, then that's a permanent change in their economic status. They'll also spread some money around their community. It's not a guaranteed success, but it's a better gamble than $10 in food and shipping costs for the food.
Clean water, sanitation, and logistical efforts to get food and medical provisions into remote areas should absolutely come first. However, for those areas with clean water, sanitation, and roads/ports, what comes next? Do we keep donating to them? Do we find a more remote and poorer area and divert funding to that other area, letting the one we just finished helping crumble? Helping the developing world best is done by helping them actually develop, and in a healthful, ecologically sound environment. Open Source software is one way we can help them do that, and it helps people in the developed world, too.
In the case of Perl (the language) and perl (the language system's implementation), there's The Perl Foundation. They pay bounties, give grants for certain projects, help support sites like Perlmonks and use Perl;, and more.
The tcpdump and libpcap projects are on SourceForge, but they don't have their donations link enabled. The projects' home page isn't coming up for me ATM, so I can't say if they have anything there.
The strace project is also on SourceForge and also does not have their donations enabled. The web page listed for the project is the project's SourceForge page itself, so I don't know where else to look off the top of my head.
I'd like to note here that the SWF file format finally has a published specification. Thanks, Adobe!
Now would be a great time for a project like Gnash (or any OpenFlash-linked project) to get some funds.
OpenFlash lists IDEs, compilers, players, resusable libraries for handling SWF files, programming language bindings for working with those libraries, components, debuggers, byte code manipulators, and projects built on Flash which all could use some help right now.
Personally, I like to create my Flash primarily from a programming language rather than a time line editor, so I tend to use HaXe. Others use MTASC or other tools on the creation side. The players are pretty important for those not using Windows, OS X, or a well-packaged mainstream Linux. Perhaps the libraries that are used by many projects would be a good focus, too.
More like an immoral imperative. Buy Windows if you want to reward false marketing, buying companies that create things and calling that "innovation", stealing technology from Stac and probably others, the exclusionary licensing that killed OS/2, working on joint projects with other companies, then releasing competing projects with the technology that was cross-licensed for them, and practically giving away $3 copies of an OS to students in poor so they'll be hooked on the full-price copies later just like a crack dealer.
Oh, and unfortunately you have to buy Windows to play some of the best video games and to test your development and design work to see if it works on their badly broken yet widespread software.
MS isn't all bad, though. Bill Gates does have his charitable foundation (although having FOSS to help run the aid organizations would help, too), Paul Allen bought the Seahawks and lowered ticket prices so more people could afford to go to games, their advertising in computer magazines helps get the message out about alternatives, and Steve Ballmer keeps an entire chair factory employed single-handedly.;-)
I'd prefer it run Symbian, and preferably have the old Psion real keyed keyboard. Maybe PalmOS would be alright. One of the mobile Linux efforts should be good, too. I don't want to run XP on a 624 Mhz processor with 128 MB of memory. I'd actually prefer Windows Mobile to running XP on a system like that.
Your dad should find a movie or TV producer through a good agent. That story could be really funny on screen. Sorry for his ordeal, but it could be hilarious on, say, "Reno! 911" and he might as well make a few bucks on it.
I can't keep track of all the times someone's sat down, shifted in their seat, or bumped into someone and I got a call from them with random background noise. That's bad enough. Calling 911 with gunfire in the background, well, that's a whole different level.
A better HHGTTG reference in this situation might be that manufacturing has pretty much stopped, because everything one needs grows somewhere if you look around a big enough area.
Apple's not pitching all of its systems as high-end professional workstations, but they are hitting the top (or close to it) of each segment.
The iMac is certainly upper-end for all-in-ones. It's not the top system out there for performance workstations (which is what the Mac Pro is for). It's certainly nicer than the Dell AIO systems and the ZeroPC stuff.
The Mini has stiffer competition from Asus and Shuttle than the iMac has, but I'd say it's one of the top small form-factor machines on the market. SFF systems are very popular in certain circles, and as a SFF and a way into the headless second/subsequent system in a home with spare monitors segment it's a nice option.
Their laptops are fairly high-end in their segments, too. The Air is a really nice thin-'n'-light. The MacBook is solid, and the MacBook Pro is great. Compare any of them to a Thinkpad or a Vaio on price and features.
So Apple has a high-end SFF, a high-end AIO, strong laptops, and a high-end personal workstation. They're not pushing a low-end workstation model because that's not their game. They are pushing high-end stuff for more than one type of system instead of supporting lots of price points in one segment.
He didn't say to use regexps to split the fields. He specifically said to split on the delimiter (probably by using split() !)and then to use a regexp on the field you're wanting to match. He's talking about Perl, and that's pretty much how it'd be done in Perl.
BTW, you don't need Cygwin to have grep and egrep (and ls, find, bc, cat, gzip, bzip2, split, join, wc, cut, and more) on Windows. Cygwin is great if you need to have a Unix-like environment with the right libraries and all, but it's extreme overkill for having the most common GNU command-line tools. GNUWin32 and UNXUtils both give you enough tools to ease the pain of the Windows CLI.
There may be "libraries similar to GTK" which "don't have a Windows port", but to say it like you do is misleading. GTK+ 2.xx.x is installed and working on my XP machines at home and here at the office. It's how the GIMP on Windows works.
GLib, which was originally derived from GTK+, is also available for Windows (and used by WireShark for Windows).
Well, gdbm/ndbm files I don't think count as flat files to most people. That is one option, though. "Flat" as in "stored as a single file in the filesystem" and "flat" as in "easily human readable" are left kind of ambiguous by the OP.
If one is using Perl, there are database drivers for the DBI that work on CSV, fixed-width files, and more. DBD::CSV and DBD::RAM are two, and I think there are more. The DBI supports SQL-style relational databases, though, which the OP already said were overkill.
If the RDBM overkill is marginally acceptable, SQLite is one that works well as a local data store without a bunch of networking overhead and maintenance. There's a DBI driver for that. The files aren't exactly flat text.
Excel files (the non-OOXML ones) can be accessed through the DBI with DBD::Excel or with Spreadsheet::ReadExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel among others.
Tied hashes would seem to make good sense for this kind of data, particularly a hash of hashes or an array of hashes. It'd be a good way to work with the data no matter the storage type. Tie::RDBM allows one to tie a hash to any DBD that DBI supports. That way, the complexity of the SQL is left behind the scenes if it's the queries the OP is worried about.
If field order isn't important, XML::Simple provides an easy interface to XML files. XML::Twig is a little more complex but preserves the order.
There are YAML tools for Perl, and although I'm not a big proponent of YAML, some people are. It's certainly human readable, which is one of its big selling points.
All of these solutions assume the OP is a programmer familiar with or willing to become familiar with Perl, though.
In the OP's case, a spreadsheet program might be just the thing. IT might also be worthwhile to check into solutions like WiGLE, or look into a stumbler that actually keeps track of its findings in the first place.
There are quite a few people who think overlapped windows in GUIs are a bad idea on any display.
I prefer something that gives me multiple full-screen applications among which I can switch quickly. Give me a hotkey or a right-click menu for the OS, a program launcher, and switching among programs and give the left and middle buttons (scrollwheel) to the current program. Unfortunately, many applications are written around what they think is a reasonable GUI and use multiple windows. Using the GIMP on an interface like ION or ratpoison is almost as big a pain as using it when the windows overlap each other within the same application. With dual displays, I'd love to have two full-screen apps open and have my apps each handle everything within the one screen.
I think the interface for elementary students no matter where they live should be considered carefully around holding one's attention on the task at hand and not messing with resizing and repositioning the UI elements. The Windows, OS/2, KDE, and Gnome model seems to be overly complex when the point is the applications and not ow many of them you can overlap on the screen at once.
Taxpayer money? ITYM bondholder money. When you're spending trillions of dollars you don't have because you can't collect it in taxes the nonessential parts absolutely count as bondholder money.
Actually, the Internet itself is more dependent on IOS and JunOS than Unix. The root DNS servers are an important service, but not everything on the net uses DNS (though nearly all initial connections to a site do). A far greater portion of packets go through a router or switch than go through a DNS server. DNS as we know it is not the first and may not be the last name resolution protocol, but the network isn't a network without networking equipment.
Unix is an important server platform, and it's starting to become an important routing and firewall platform. Yet it's still not doing the job by itself. Cisco and Juniper are a huge part of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Some ISPs offer ISDN bonding, too, if you are interested in spending that much.
"Most" urbanites and suburbanites aren't technophiles, either. Technophiles are a minority wherever you are, unless you happen to live near a place of technophile congregation.
A city with a research university, an engineering school, a large high-tech manufacturer, a big software company, a government lab, or a military base with a specifically high-tech arsenal will have more technophiles around than the average place of the same size.
Using MySpace, Flickr, GMail, and YouTube isn't technical nor geeky. It's a mainstream popular activity with a low barrier to entry and almost no learning curve.
The whole "desktop computer" metaphor and the seriously strained interactive web applications with the "Web 2.0", "AJAX", and "WebApp" monikers are ways for non-geeks to use tools that previously were used primarily by geeks. It might take geeks to make the stuff work, but it's not necessary to be a geek to use them, and that's the point.
You cannot arbitrarily revoke any license under which you published the source code of your software. If you published it under BSD, Mozilla, Apache, or whatever license then that version of the code is out there somewhere.
Sure, you can make a closed fork of the most recent version even if you've accepted valuable input from others and stop offering the older version as open source. That's an advantage to you if you plan to do that. Yet with the GPL the original author can close his original source or relicense it however he wants. He just can't close the contributions of others made under the GPL.
The GPL is a double-edged sword, as is any license. The whole point of a license is to reserve some rights while granting others. It's all a matter of which rights remain with whom and to what extent. If the specific combination of rights granted and reserved under the GPL don't suit you, then that's fine. You never have to use it.
You bashing the GPL and another guy bashing your favorite license won't make much headway with each other. If you each just code and use the license of your choice, then you can each benefit yourself and others even if the two of you don't benefit each other directly.
Well, the initial developer doesn't give anything up. It's a limit on subsequent developers of the code.
The original developer is making sure he has (and others have) the right to use whatever improvements are made to his work, which isn't secured under BSD. The original developer can even close his work but not the contributions back to it by others without negotiation, which is a trade-off for everyone involved.
Subsequent developers who choose GNU give up the right to close the original developer's work, but they get the same guarantee for their contributions that the original developer had -- that subsequent improvements stay available as source.
The BSD license and the GPL give about the same levels of freedom overall, but they guarantee them in different ways to different parties. It's all about what's more important to you.
Personally, I like supporting useful projects no matter what the license. If you prefer BSD or if someone else prefers the GPL, those are both valid preferences in my eyes.
They are taken by a government that is nominally at least elected by the people and working the will of the people. If it's the will of the people that those taxes be taken and used for relief for the permanently poor and temporarily poor then that's a charitable decision by the people.
When the US citizenry paid much less in taxes, much more went to charities. Now that taxes are higher, many more people have the GP's attitude. Others still give some, but they give less than they would or give it to people places like Haiti or Ethiopia instead of to their neighbors who are already receiving support.
In the US, if you're a Democrat, yes. If you're a Republican, still yes but less so (except the poor puritanical fundamental Christians).
If you're an agency taking money from the rich to give to the poor and receive a paycheck, yes. If you advertise on TV for donations and take a cut, yes. If you run a lottery or sell drugs, yes.
If you run a transit company in a rural area, yes. Rich people might ride public transit in big cities, but see if they'll walk a mile in the rain or snow to the closest bus stop and wait for half an hour for the next bus. In even smaller towns than that, see if they'll call a taxi by phone half an hour before they need to be picked up. In even smaller towns than that, see if they'll pitch money to some unknown local to take them in a personal vehicle to a town that has taxis. In cities and towns under a few hundred thousand people, it's primarily the poor who use public transit. "Reliable transportation" is a requirement for many jobs, even.
The working poor and welfare recipients in the US are certainly a marketing segment for big business. "Urban fashion", fake jewelry, angst-ridden music (some but not all of rap, country, R&B, heavy metal, blues, punk, grunge, and whatever's "pop" this week), cheap beer and cheap malt liquor, designer impostor sunglasses and fragrances, and most fast food and junk food are targeted at the working poor who are frustrated with their condition. Anything that's designed to sell because it identifies one as down on one's luck fits this category. Some of it is good product at a decent price, and some of the artistic works are great, honest, valuable pieces. Yet how they're marketed is often nearly predatory.
Well, it's far more empowering than some technologies for one. It has a much lower tan average marginal cost per copy (often almost nil) once the original investment is made for another.
A computer with a few peripherals, an OS on it and Internet access is like a printing press, a telephone, a photography studio, a music studio, a lab for designing more products and services, a newspaper distribution route, an arcade, a diary, a social club, a stage theater, a movie cinema, a book club, a research library, and a concierge service all in a few square feet.
If you make that affordable and customizable for the masses, with improvements shared among us, then you'll get much more return on the investment than if you feed someone some rotted rice and sprouted potatoes and pay people along the way to get those things to them.
Let's say you take FOSS, cheap but capable hardware, and add a cheap but capable CNC system and 3D spray fabricator where people have raw materials but no easy way to use them. Teach them to use the machine, and how to refill its consumables in a safe and sustainable way. That area has just gone from a consumer or agrarian lifestyle to some of its people being local producers of non-food products. That's a huge shift in the local economy. It lowers the dependence on both buying and having donated non-local goods. It also cuts down on fuel used for shipping.
Remember the old saying about teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish? Well, you can teach him to fish as much as you want, but if he doesn't have the equipment or know how to make the equipment with which you taught him, it still doesn't do much good.
Open Source software is giving people the tools they need to do things they couldn't afford to do otherwise. Sure, someone with a computer and an Internet connection probably has food, shelter, and electricity most of the time. A 486 in a shack with a solar panel or diesel generator doesn't exactly make you rich, though. If someone in a poor country can run a business instead of doing odd jobs or can write software as a freelancer instead of begging or being on the dole, then that's a permanent change in their economic status. They'll also spread some money around their community. It's not a guaranteed success, but it's a better gamble than $10 in food and shipping costs for the food.
Clean water, sanitation, and logistical efforts to get food and medical provisions into remote areas should absolutely come first. However, for those areas with clean water, sanitation, and roads/ports, what comes next? Do we keep donating to them? Do we find a more remote and poorer area and divert funding to that other area, letting the one we just finished helping crumble? Helping the developing world best is done by helping them actually develop, and in a healthful, ecologically sound environment. Open Source software is one way we can help them do that, and it helps people in the developed world, too.
In the case of Perl (the language) and perl (the language system's implementation), there's The Perl Foundation. They pay bounties, give grants for certain projects, help support sites like Perlmonks and use Perl;, and more.
The tcpdump and libpcap projects are on SourceForge, but they don't have their donations link enabled. The projects' home page isn't coming up for me ATM, so I can't say if they have anything there.
The strace project is also on SourceForge and also does not have their donations enabled. The web page listed for the project is the project's SourceForge page itself, so I don't know where else to look off the top of my head.
I'd like to note here that the SWF file format finally has a published specification. Thanks, Adobe!
Now would be a great time for a project like Gnash (or any OpenFlash-linked project) to get some funds.
OpenFlash lists IDEs, compilers, players, resusable libraries for handling SWF files, programming language bindings for working with those libraries, components, debuggers, byte code manipulators, and projects built on Flash which all could use some help right now.
Personally, I like to create my Flash primarily from a programming language rather than a time line editor, so I tend to use HaXe. Others use MTASC or other tools on the creation side. The players are pretty important for those not using Windows, OS X, or a well-packaged mainstream Linux. Perhaps the libraries that are used by many projects would be a good focus, too.
Like, does yours have Val Kilmer's voice?
More like an immoral imperative. Buy Windows if you want to reward false marketing, buying companies that create things and calling that "innovation", stealing technology from Stac and probably others, the exclusionary licensing that killed OS/2, working on joint projects with other companies, then releasing competing projects with the technology that was cross-licensed for them, and practically giving away $3 copies of an OS to students in poor so they'll be hooked on the full-price copies later just like a crack dealer.
;-)
Oh, and unfortunately you have to buy Windows to play some of the best video games and to test your development and design work to see if it works on their badly broken yet widespread software.
MS isn't all bad, though. Bill Gates does have his charitable foundation (although having FOSS to help run the aid organizations would help, too), Paul Allen bought the Seahawks and lowered ticket prices so more people could afford to go to games, their advertising in computer magazines helps get the message out about alternatives, and Steve Ballmer keeps an entire chair factory employed single-handedly.
I'd prefer it run Symbian, and preferably have the old Psion real keyed keyboard. Maybe PalmOS would be alright. One of the mobile Linux efforts should be good, too. I don't want to run XP on a 624 Mhz processor with 128 MB of memory. I'd actually prefer Windows Mobile to running XP on a system like that.
One of those two weighs about twice what this thing does and is much larger.
13.2 oz for the device + 3.7 oz for the keyboard = 16.9 oz, or 1 lb, 0.9 oz.
(375 g + 104 g = 479 g).
The Eee PC 701 weighs in at 895 g (1 lb 15½ oz) for the 2G Surf or 920 g (2 lb ½ oz) for the 4G and 8G models.
This thing is almost a modern replacement for the Psion palmtops, but they had better keyboards.
Your dad should find a movie or TV producer through a good agent. That story could be really funny on screen. Sorry for his ordeal, but it could be hilarious on, say, "Reno! 911" and he might as well make a few bucks on it.
I can't keep track of all the times someone's sat down, shifted in their seat, or bumped into someone and I got a call from them with random background noise. That's bad enough. Calling 911 with gunfire in the background, well, that's a whole different level.
A better HHGTTG reference in this situation might be that manufacturing has pretty much stopped, because everything one needs grows somewhere if you look around a big enough area.
Apple's not pitching all of its systems as high-end professional workstations, but they are hitting the top (or close to it) of each segment.
The iMac is certainly upper-end for all-in-ones. It's not the top system out there for performance workstations (which is what the Mac Pro is for). It's certainly nicer than the Dell AIO systems and the ZeroPC stuff.
The Mini has stiffer competition from Asus and Shuttle than the iMac has, but I'd say it's one of the top small form-factor machines on the market. SFF systems are very popular in certain circles, and as a SFF and a way into the headless second/subsequent system in a home with spare monitors segment it's a nice option.
Their laptops are fairly high-end in their segments, too. The Air is a really nice thin-'n'-light. The MacBook is solid, and the MacBook Pro is great. Compare any of them to a Thinkpad or a Vaio on price and features.
So Apple has a high-end SFF, a high-end AIO, strong laptops, and a high-end personal workstation. They're not pushing a low-end workstation model because that's not their game. They are pushing high-end stuff for more than one type of system instead of supporting lots of price points in one segment.
He didn't say to use regexps to split the fields. He specifically said to split on the delimiter (probably by using split() !)and then to use a regexp on the field you're wanting to match. He's talking about Perl, and that's pretty much how it'd be done in Perl.
BTW, you don't need Cygwin to have grep and egrep (and ls, find, bc, cat, gzip, bzip2, split, join, wc, cut, and more) on Windows. Cygwin is great if you need to have a Unix-like environment with the right libraries and all, but it's extreme overkill for having the most common GNU command-line tools. GNUWin32 and UNXUtils both give you enough tools to ease the pain of the Windows CLI.
It's actually called DBD::CSV for anyone trying to search for it. DBI is the interface and the DBD packages are the drivers for the back ends.
There may be "libraries similar to GTK" which "don't have a Windows port", but to say it like you do is misleading. GTK+ 2.xx.x is installed and working on my XP machines at home and here at the office. It's how the GIMP on Windows works.
GLib, which was originally derived from GTK+, is also available for Windows (and used by WireShark for Windows).
Well, gdbm/ndbm files I don't think count as flat files to most people. That is one option, though. "Flat" as in "stored as a single file in the filesystem" and "flat" as in "easily human readable" are left kind of ambiguous by the OP.
If one is using Perl, there are database drivers for the DBI that work on CSV, fixed-width files, and more. DBD::CSV and DBD::RAM are two, and I think there are more. The DBI supports SQL-style relational databases, though, which the OP already said were overkill.
If the RDBM overkill is marginally acceptable, SQLite is one that works well as a local data store without a bunch of networking overhead and maintenance. There's a DBI driver for that. The files aren't exactly flat text.
Excel files (the non-OOXML ones) can be accessed through the DBI with DBD::Excel or with Spreadsheet::ReadExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel among others.
Tied hashes would seem to make good sense for this kind of data, particularly a hash of hashes or an array of hashes. It'd be a good way to work with the data no matter the storage type. Tie::RDBM allows one to tie a hash to any DBD that DBI supports. That way, the complexity of the SQL is left behind the scenes if it's the queries the OP is worried about.
If field order isn't important, XML::Simple provides an easy interface to XML files. XML::Twig is a little more complex but preserves the order.
There are YAML tools for Perl, and although I'm not a big proponent of YAML, some people are. It's certainly human readable, which is one of its big selling points.
All of these solutions assume the OP is a programmer familiar with or willing to become familiar with Perl, though.
In the OP's case, a spreadsheet program might be just the thing. IT might also be worthwhile to check into solutions like WiGLE, or look into a stumbler that actually keeps track of its findings in the first place.
There are quite a few people who think overlapped windows in GUIs are a bad idea on any display.
I prefer something that gives me multiple full-screen applications among which I can switch quickly. Give me a hotkey or a right-click menu for the OS, a program launcher, and switching among programs and give the left and middle buttons (scrollwheel) to the current program. Unfortunately, many applications are written around what they think is a reasonable GUI and use multiple windows. Using the GIMP on an interface like ION or ratpoison is almost as big a pain as using it when the windows overlap each other within the same application. With dual displays, I'd love to have two full-screen apps open and have my apps each handle everything within the one screen.
I think the interface for elementary students no matter where they live should be considered carefully around holding one's attention on the task at hand and not messing with resizing and repositioning the UI elements. The Windows, OS/2, KDE, and Gnome model seems to be overly complex when the point is the applications and not ow many of them you can overlap on the screen at once.
Taxpayer money? ITYM bondholder money. When you're spending trillions of dollars you don't have because you can't collect it in taxes the nonessential parts absolutely count as bondholder money.
Actually, the Internet itself is more dependent on IOS and JunOS than Unix. The root DNS servers are an important service, but not everything on the net uses DNS (though nearly all initial connections to a site do). A far greater portion of packets go through a router or switch than go through a DNS server. DNS as we know it is not the first and may not be the last name resolution protocol, but the network isn't a network without networking equipment.
Unix is an important server platform, and it's starting to become an important routing and firewall platform. Yet it's still not doing the job by itself. Cisco and Juniper are a huge part of the game.