Ruby was inspired by Perl, among other languages. It was in particular not inspired by Python, at least according to it's creator: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ab...
While limited writes are certainly a factor, they probably aren't going to be a major issue for basic consumer use.
Most SSD storage drivers these days automatically spread the writes around the drive, so to hit the write limit you will need to write the equivalent of the capacity of the drive multiplied by the write limit of any particular register. Assuming 2 million write cycles per register, and the low-end 256 GB drive, that's 500,000 TB of writing before you burn out every register. Obviously the user would see some degradation before that, but there's still lots of room to play with.
Neither Rogers or Bell offer anything but cell phones in over half the country. If you live in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba in the west, and much of eastern Canada as well, you cannot get TV or Internet via Rogers with the exception of 3/4g at 500mb for $50 a month. It is the same with Bell. But you claim to have an idea of Canadian culture.
Just because a company does not operate nation-wide, that does not mean that it cannot be a monopoly/duopoly. You just need to change your market definition from "Canada-wide Internet Access" to "Internet Access in B.C." or "Internet Access in Ontario." In fact, Shaw and Rogers did a swap back in 2000 to concentrate their networks along these lines: http://www.businessedge.ca/archives/article.cfm/shaw-and-rogers-in-4-billion-swap-4992
What the original poster meant was that, in any given market in Canada, there are at most two companies then own lines into someone's home. If you're in BC, it's Telus and Shaw. If you're in Ontario, it's Bell and Rogers. In any case, these two companies are doing their best to ensure there is not a third line coming into the house, so they can keep their prices artificially high for as long as possible.
While the PDF is not free, the core content is freely available on the Internet as a "Reference Document" under the terms of the Open Game License. Paizo hosts all of the details from most of their books themselves (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/), but there are many other websites that reproduce and compile details from different sources, including third party content (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ is one).
Under the terms of the license, all of the core rules can be re-packaged and sold in your own game. Only the proper names unique to the Pathfinder setting (characters, deities, etc) are copyrighted and cannot be used.
Although you are correct in that it is not a literal power outage, it is far more than just the "INTARWEBS", because so much in the North depends on Satellite communication.
From the article: "People in Iqaluit are reporting they are without cell phone service and long-distance calling, bank machines and debit-card machines. At least one bank in the city has not opened today as a result. Flights are also being delayed."
Amazon has been beta testing running Windows servers on EC2, and from what I've heard from Amazon, one of the challenges is creating a Microsoft license that will allow Microsoft to capture revenue from this and similar projects elsewhere.
I wouldn't be surprised if they used a business model similar to Red Hat's cloud image, where Red Hat gets a tiny payment for every hour the server is running.
It is definitely possible to do branch/merge work with CVS/SVN, but you need to track the merge points yourself, and be aware not to merge the same changeset twice. Git and Mercurial make the process far easier by tracking merge points for you.
Also, one big thing distributed source control gives you is the ability to "clone" or "fork" your own copy of the repository. This lets you make small, incremental changes that you can roll-back and merge back as you like, and then you can "push" all of your commits back to another fork (presumably a dev trunk somewhere). As an example, check out this visual representation of the many forks of the Rails project on Github: http://github.com/rails/rails/network
I would like to see a companion site, wikimath or some such, that integrates well with wikipedia but contains the things that wikipedia should not.
In fact, Wikimedia also has other projects for more learning-based content, such as WikiBooks for textbook-style works, and Wikiversity for "learning resources" that appear to be a course-like concept. These resources can be linked to from the Wikipedia article as more of a learning resource as opposed to a quick look-up Wikipedia page.
I've found in my experiences that the "small company" vibe that some people like doesn't necessarily grow in 20 people companies, and sometimes appears in larger companies as well (although I have far more experience with the former rather than the latter).
I've worked for a smallish company with dozens of people, and it had the culture of a big company. Lots of politics, multiple performance tracking systems, and an admin guy with too much time on his hands to create new policies that makes your life more difficult.
I agree with the idea of the post that smaller organizations tend to focus more on people rather than politics, but it is by no means a hard and fast rule.
Hey, you know the part of the license that talks about versions? The part that goes:
"If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." (from the v3 draft)
This means that if you release it under GPLv2, people only have to look at the v2 restrictions. If someone wants to fork the code, and it doesn't break some other law, you could create a code base under the v3 license, but you don't have to, and that's key. No one's forcing you to use v3. That's why Linus has been criticizing parts of the GPLv3, and saying Linux might not switch to it.
CBC has various weekly podcasts, including regional news highlights podcasts. It might not be what you or I would define as "regular", but they've at least been consistent.
One of the main problems with Sun's Java was there distribution restrictions that forced admins everywhere to download the JRE or JDKs and be forced to trust the Sun installer.
Since lifting these restrictions a couple of months ago, Sun's java has made it into Debian's Universe repositories. It's even in the multiverse repository for the latest version of Ubuntu. Installing is now as simple as:
apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
or
apt-get install sun-java5-jre
And you're done. If Sun properly open-sources Java like they are claiming, these might even make it into the main repositories.
They actually have a disclaimer designed for this:
Online games that include user-generated content (e.g., chat, maps, skins) carry the notice "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" to warn consumers that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB.
A couple of gaming websites posted some details on the Metroid demo from this event (along with some other games they had there). 1UP, for instance, gives a brief breakdown of the controls. IGN elaborated with some speculation on how they imagine the controls will work based on the demo.
In any case, the scheme that was demoed for the presentation involved using the wand for looking, aiming and shooting, while the nunchuck attachment was used for movement. However, Red Steel seems to incorporate a few more ideas.
What you should be asking yourself, is what can CVS/Subversion be used for?
Modern wiki software is really just a subset of what any good repository offers (versioning, resolving conflicts, moving files around, etc.). The only difference is that they provide a nice LaTeX-like syntax and a pretty front-end with an on-the-fly interpreted syntax.
Really, LaTeX backed by CVS would give you many of the same features. The possiblities of a repository-backed work are virtually endless!
However, the front-end on Wikis make them extremely nice for collaboration on numerous distinct text-based documents. The inter-linking and (relatively) simple syntax allow users to focus on sharing their knowledge. I think the next step for Wikis would be WYSIWYG editing, to de-emphasize any kind of syntax at all. This would make them truely user-focused.
The days when one or two programmers could make a game just as good as anyone else's in their spare time, and proclaim it a big success if they sold 1000 copies and made $20,000 out of it are long gone. Nowadays, partially _because_ of the photorealism, game budgets are in the millions range, so you need a publisher.
The little guys aren't dead yet! Every once in a while there's a game developed by a small company that either sells like crazy, or gets a lot of industry buzz. In fact, because these companies don't have the money to focus on photo-realistic graphics, they put more focus on gameplay.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but Nintendo has a serious image issue going on right now.
They're last two consoles, despite doing reasonably well, were not the popular successes Nintenfo fans hoped they would be.
Video Game stores don't want to sell consoles that will end up being returned. If it turns out the console given doesn't play GTA, the potential sale (along with the salesperson's comission) could be lost. So they often go with the safest option.
Most video game specialty stores I've been too ask one or two probing questions to get a feel for who will be using the system. But in the end, they are trying to make a sale, and the GameCube isn't a guaranteed sale like the PS2 is.
Of course, they could be just idiots (i.e. the ToysRUs crowd)
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby was inspired by Perl, among other languages. It was in particular not inspired by Python, at least according to it's creator:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ab...
The creator of Ruby (the language) was named as an honour to Perl, which Ruby borrows some (but not all) ideas from.
Source: http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ruby-...
They already are working on that: Automatic Train Control.
While limited writes are certainly a factor, they probably aren't going to be a major issue for basic consumer use.
Most SSD storage drivers these days automatically spread the writes around the drive, so to hit the write limit you will need to write the equivalent of the capacity of the drive multiplied by the write limit of any particular register. Assuming 2 million write cycles per register, and the low-end 256 GB drive, that's 500,000 TB of writing before you burn out every register. Obviously the user would see some degradation before that, but there's still lots of room to play with.
Some more sample calculations are available here: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
Neither Rogers or Bell offer anything but cell phones in over half the country. If you live in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba in the west, and much of eastern Canada as well, you cannot get TV or Internet via Rogers with the exception of 3/4g at 500mb for $50 a month. It is the same with Bell.
But you claim to have an idea of Canadian culture.
Just because a company does not operate nation-wide, that does not mean that it cannot be a monopoly/duopoly. You just need to change your market definition from "Canada-wide Internet Access" to "Internet Access in B.C." or "Internet Access in Ontario." In fact, Shaw and Rogers did a swap back in 2000 to concentrate their networks along these lines: http://www.businessedge.ca/archives/article.cfm/shaw-and-rogers-in-4-billion-swap-4992
What the original poster meant was that, in any given market in Canada, there are at most two companies then own lines into someone's home. If you're in BC, it's Telus and Shaw. If you're in Ontario, it's Bell and Rogers. In any case, these two companies are doing their best to ensure there is not a third line coming into the house, so they can keep their prices artificially high for as long as possible.
While the PDF is not free, the core content is freely available on the Internet as a "Reference Document" under the terms of the Open Game License. Paizo hosts all of the details from most of their books themselves (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/), but there are many other websites that reproduce and compile details from different sources, including third party content (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ is one).
Under the terms of the license, all of the core rules can be re-packaged and sold in your own game. Only the proper names unique to the Pathfinder setting (characters, deities, etc) are copyrighted and cannot be used.
Although you are correct in that it is not a literal power outage, it is far more than just the "INTARWEBS", because so much in the North depends on Satellite communication.
From the article:
"People in Iqaluit are reporting they are without cell phone service and long-distance calling, bank machines and debit-card machines. At least one bank in the city has not opened today as a result. Flights are also being delayed."
Why not, say, Forest Green, or Taupe?
I wonder in 20 years how these "networks" will compare to the Morgantown PRT.
Amazon has been beta testing running Windows servers on EC2, and from what I've heard from Amazon, one of the challenges is creating a Microsoft license that will allow Microsoft to capture revenue from this and similar projects elsewhere.
I wouldn't be surprised if they used a business model similar to Red Hat's cloud image, where Red Hat gets a tiny payment for every hour the server is running.
It is definitely possible to do branch/merge work with CVS/SVN, but you need to track the merge points yourself, and be aware not to merge the same changeset twice. Git and Mercurial make the process far easier by tracking merge points for you.
Also, one big thing distributed source control gives you is the ability to "clone" or "fork" your own copy of the repository. This lets you make small, incremental changes that you can roll-back and merge back as you like, and then you can "push" all of your commits back to another fork (presumably a dev trunk somewhere). As an example, check out this visual representation of the many forks of the Rails project on Github: http://github.com/rails/rails/network
I haven't heard much about new episodes of ELH, I'm just glad that I can catch the old episodes online.
I would like to see a companion site, wikimath or some such, that integrates well with wikipedia but contains the things that wikipedia should not.
In fact, Wikimedia also has other projects for more learning-based content, such as WikiBooks for textbook-style works, and Wikiversity for "learning resources" that appear to be a course-like concept. These resources can be linked to from the Wikipedia article as more of a learning resource as opposed to a quick look-up Wikipedia page.
I've found in my experiences that the "small company" vibe that some people like doesn't necessarily grow in 20 people companies, and sometimes appears in larger companies as well (although I have far more experience with the former rather than the latter).
I've worked for a smallish company with dozens of people, and it had the culture of a big company. Lots of politics, multiple performance tracking systems, and an admin guy with too much time on his hands to create new policies that makes your life more difficult.
I agree with the idea of the post that smaller organizations tend to focus more on people rather than politics, but it is by no means a hard and fast rule.
It's actually in Debian, so you can go the gems route if you want. It's even in stable (even though it's slightly out-of-date)!b ygems
http://packages.debian.org/stable/interpreters/ru
Hey, you know the part of the license that talks about versions? The part that goes:
"If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." (from the v3 draft)
This means that if you release it under GPLv2, people only have to look at the v2 restrictions. If someone wants to fork the code, and it doesn't break some other law, you could create a code base under the v3 license, but you don't have to, and that's key. No one's forcing you to use v3. That's why Linus has been criticizing parts of the GPLv3, and saying Linux might not switch to it.
no matter how well imitated, where is Linux innovation in GUI?
The innovation is happening in projects like Beryl and Compiz. (It also looks like they're merging!)
CBC has various weekly podcasts, including regional news highlights podcasts. It might not be what you or I would define as "regular", but they've at least been consistent.
One of the main problems with Sun's Java was there distribution restrictions that forced admins everywhere to download the JRE or JDKs and be forced to trust the Sun installer.
Since lifting these restrictions a couple of months ago, Sun's java has made it into Debian's Universe repositories. It's even in the multiverse repository for the latest version of Ubuntu. Installing is now as simple as:
apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
or
apt-get install sun-java5-jre
And you're done. If Sun properly open-sources Java like they are claiming, these might even make it into the main repositories.
Help can be found on the Ubunutu wiki:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java
They actually have a disclaimer designed for this:
Online games that include user-generated content (e.g., chat, maps, skins) carry the notice "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" to warn consumers that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB.
http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
A couple of gaming websites posted some details on the Metroid demo from this event (along with some other games they had there). 1UP, for instance, gives a brief breakdown of the controls. IGN elaborated with some speculation on how they imagine the controls will work based on the demo.
In any case, the scheme that was demoed for the presentation involved using the wand for looking, aiming and shooting, while the nunchuck attachment was used for movement. However, Red Steel seems to incorporate a few more ideas.
What you should be asking yourself, is what can CVS/Subversion be used for?
Modern wiki software is really just a subset of what any good repository offers (versioning, resolving conflicts, moving files around, etc.). The only difference is that they provide a nice LaTeX-like syntax and a pretty front-end with an on-the-fly interpreted syntax.
Really, LaTeX backed by CVS would give you many of the same features. The possiblities of a repository-backed work are virtually endless!
However, the front-end on Wikis make them extremely nice for collaboration on numerous distinct text-based documents. The inter-linking and (relatively) simple syntax allow users to focus on sharing their knowledge. I think the next step for Wikis would be WYSIWYG editing, to de-emphasize any kind of syntax at all. This would make them truely user-focused.
The days when one or two programmers could make a game just as good as anyone else's in their spare time, and proclaim it a big success if they sold 1000 copies and made $20,000 out of it are long gone. Nowadays, partially _because_ of the photorealism, game budgets are in the millions range, so you need a publisher.
The little guys aren't dead yet! Every once in a while there's a game developed by a small company that either sells like crazy, or gets a lot of industry buzz. In fact, because these companies don't have the money to focus on photo-realistic graphics, they put more focus on gameplay.
Two examples that come to mind include Snood, and Alien Hominid.
Well, you're not the only one waiting for it...
I don't know if you're aware of this, but Nintendo has a serious image issue going on right now.
They're last two consoles, despite doing reasonably well, were not the popular successes Nintenfo fans hoped they would be.
Video Game stores don't want to sell consoles that will end up being returned. If it turns out the console given doesn't play GTA, the potential sale (along with the salesperson's comission) could be lost. So they often go with the safest option.
Most video game specialty stores I've been too ask one or two probing questions to get a feel for who will be using the system. But in the end, they are trying to make a sale, and the GameCube isn't a guaranteed sale like the PS2 is.
Of course, they could be just idiots (i.e. the ToysRUs crowd)