Along with the other responces to your post, I couldn't disagree more. You're either not very experienced at it, or not very good. I've seen groups of guys play tight and straight, where you don't bet unless your almost garunteed to win, and it drives me insane. Maybe you've just been playing like that.
However, bluffing, betting smart and reading actions are where the real skill comes in. Any shmuck can get a full house. But it takes skills to bluff someone into folding that full boat when you don't even have a pair. And it takes skill to adjust the relative values of cards from start till finish. Is there lots of luck? Sure. Do good players consistently win? You bet'cha.
And your needs are enough to drive an industry built on corporate workstations and home e-mail boxes. Right. Most people don't need the power they already have.
The point is that faster hardward becomes increasingly esoteric to the average consumer. Ok, so there's games, but console gamers outwieght computer gamers by a longshot and their hardware is cheaper and runs more reliably. Believe me, I worked at CompUSA, and only once did I ever get a person who came in for just gaming.
But with redundant relatively cheap clusters available, these types of things aren't worth the $$$ they used to be.
This is a myth is see on slashdot alot. Yes, it is partly true, and there are also many cases where it just makes sense to have the big iron. For one thing when you are doing distributed stuff on clusters there's a whole lot more network stuff going on. And sun had it right, the network is the computer. If you can't talk to anybody else, you can't get work done. Meaning if your network is fubared, it doesn't matter how many boxes you have.
So if you have dozens more switches and routers to maintain, not to mention more boxen, you may have to require a dedicated network engineer. And if you have to hire an extra person, then the big iron alternative gets real cheap real quick. And all that cicso stuff isn't that simple, that's why CCNE's are so popular to get these days.
This is not to mention that for some tasks, such as some database setups, are better at big systems, like Sun's with their high throughput, than a bunch of networked intels.
There is cost/benefit to every choice in IT, and the "throw more boxen at it" philosophy can get you in trouble real quick if that's all you ever consider.
Erm... it's still in the mozilla family. Besides there are lot's of other slashdot icons that should change before firefox/thunderbird get their due.
Oh, like maybe an SCO icon. Or maybe a less derisive Microsoft icon. It would be a great feature that for story submittals that a user could upload an appropriate icon. The editors could then use that one or a stock icon. I know it's asking alot, but "Come on, guys".
Back on topic, I've downloaded it and put it in place of the previous thunderbird directory, no hitches. I do like it alot. But two minor quibbles, why does the deault download binary not have the version in the filename. They also went back to gzip from bzip2. Contrast:
And while we're on the note of mozilla in general, how come the user directory for firefox is still.pheonix?? Yeah, yeah, name change stuff, but if you change the name, shouldn't you change all of it. You could still search for other spellings, but "Come on, guys".
Man I really hate that too, not to mention the fact that bsdgrrl's account looks like it was created as a troll account. And rkz's account looks like the classic karma whore, lots of -1 with +5 every now and then. They steal posts, and post early and high in threads in order to be a more effictive troll.
Come on mod's spend points where they are needed. I don't care if this is OT, I hate kharma whores. No wonder/. took away the numberical kharma ranking.
Ok, more ontopic: if this technology succeeds then there becomes even less of a need for music companies. You get live music at the show, studio music from their website or iTunes, radio stations actually have to go out and look for good music, and people can request anything.
Music companies are on their way down, there's no need. The only way they can survive is to change their profit model drastically. Oil companies didn't sue electric light makers, they moved on to suppling the need for automobiles. And litigation is never a profit model.
A well written resume will indicate their familiarity will different skills. I personally, (as a developer with ~5 year exp.) have "Expert", "Proficient", and "Familiar With" quantifiers with my skills. I only have a couple under expert and a half dozen at Proficient, but a couple dozen under "familiar with".
My point is don't automatically disqualify people who learn quickly and like to pick up new things. However, I would agree with you if they didn't quantify their expirience with each and had a whole crap load of listings.
Let's get interoperable so we can compete - THEN we can extend into a new arena.
The problem with reimplementing the Microsoft interface (Office,desktop,.NET) is that you never get 100% interoperable. Microsoft is too smart to let that happen, and they'll keep it that way unless they are forced too.
If the F/OSS community doesn't give some effort towards independant R&D, then we are always playing catch up. We need to have innovation that isn't available anywhere else on closed-source platforms. Until Linux (BSD,etc) has the mythical killer-app, then there is not a compelling reason for people to switch from Microsoft. And, no, as we have seen, security isn't a compelling reason, being more powerful and being cheaper also are not compelling reasons.
Yes, we are making headway and GNU/Linux is one of the faster (the fastest?) growing operating systems. We are getting some powerful backers, and Microsoft is giving us precious time to innovate, but we need to sieze that time.
As a developer I can't help but drool over the new developement platform features that Longhorn has, but until we can get Windows programmers to do the same, GNU/Linux will never reach market saturation.
It also depends on what he is coding in, and what tools he is using. The thing that drives me up the wall with CVS is that it's hard to do moves and renames, both of which are crucial to refactoring-friendly languages like Java. Also the lack of atomic commits can be truely infuriating. Same with lack of change sets. You shouldn't pick a SCCS (source code control system) without understanding why all these things are good.
However CVS does have whole lot more tools available for it than SVN does. However, since he's just supporting himself, why not go out and buy a BitKeeper license. Sure it's a couple hundred dollars but it's included GUI tools are worth it. It's got a windows client and you can try before you buy. With a large code base like this guy has, it's really worth,
In conclusion, there are two main SCCS philosophies now, those who want to replace CVS, like SVN, and those who want to improve upon SCCS in general, a la BitKeeper.
and it is natural not to capitalize the article. Taken as the registered corporate name, it's SUSE. Both are right, though currently you'll see more SUSE.
IBM's backplane CAN increase sustained throughput as faster CPUs are installed, for better overall system scalability.
If I understand the backplane as the CPU->CPU bus, then wouldn't a multi-core CPU reduce dependency on the backplane? For applications that require low latency and high throughput how can you get higher transfer rates that what's available on the CPU itself?
As per the second point: Wouldn't a multicore-multithread multi-CPU server offer more flexibility for load balancing and on-damand peak handling (ie, move CPU2 Cores 1-3 from mail/fileserver duties to httpd to handle slashdotting)?
It seems the differences you are stating are about the overhead of managing multiple physical CPUs, but with this new chip a 4 way could handle what a 16 or 32-way did before. Thus the intra-CPU differences between IBM/HP and Sun are fairly irrelevent. Maybe I'm missing your point.
I'm not sure about #1, but I always thought Sun had a much more vast throughput than Intels. I'm also not sure what you mean by "backplane", a quick wikipedia seems to suggest that it a simple bus of 1-1 pin mapping. Where is this used? Why does it matter? Even Mid-range Sun servers have a 9.6 GB/sec sustained throughput (Sun Fire Interplane Connect),
2. As with all things, there are cost/benefits to every feature. I'm sure there are applications that are better suited with greater hardware independance. Still I'm not sure what you mean here, are you advocating more manageability between CPU's and different domains (which is good for managing severals VM's?)? With a processor that has eight cores, you'd assume that one would be able to put a vm on each one with that vm, having four hardware threads available. How is IBM/HP's offering different?
but by default ICQ comes with logging enabled, which the guy must have known, and thus, that was his form of concent of recording the conversation.
I use gaim. How does the person using MSN on the other end know what my defaults are? Am I liable if I use another chatting software than who I'm talking to even if my app logs by default?
Besides, Apple already provides an acceptable (By most users and the record labels) method of removing the DRM... burn it to a CD.
They did this so people could play the music in their CD player which is a big precondition of people actually using this system. Providing this was necessary not because of a way to get around the DRM, but because then a lot of people wouldn't even use it.
If someone provided a utility to write the music to a CD-RW then automatically reencode off of it into DRM-free MP3, then I'd bet you they'd go after that too.
If you don't like it, don't purchase your music there. But this is a clear violation of iTMS's terms of service and use.
The TOS here may be moot because of the fair use laws. If I payed for the music, they can't stop me from playing it however I want. I don't share with other people, I just want to listen on my Linux box. If they made a DRM Linux Client, I would use it, as that would be one more reason not to boot into windows.
TOSs and EULAs have not really been tested in court. Apple, however, is fully within their rights to not provide you their service anymore if you violate their TOS,(that's what terms of service means, if you violate it, then they terminate your service) however there are fair use laws that superceede much of that, even if such laws conflict with others like the DCMA.
I believe it is fully within my rights to listen to the music I paid for however I so choose.
Well, the only reason I didn't think it wouldn't scale "well" (in comparision to Java) was that it didn't have static type checking which makes it harder to read APIs. However, I have seen less type error in Python than other languages with no static type checking.
Also, my python programming isn't quite yet "pythonic" so my concerns are likely unjustified, and it does remain on my short list of implementation languages.
Yes, the poor are poor because their lazy asses don't want to be rich. It's not that they can't get ahead and get nice things, they're just lazy and stupid.
Aside from bolding your entire statement which is REALLY annoying, you took the grand-parent post wrong. In fact he stated that many poor people deserve not to be poor. They work hard, clean lives and add to the community. He also said that many rich people deserve not to be rich. I don't understand the reason behind your comment.
The american dream is to work hard and become "rich". We already have it that "rich" people pay most of the taxes in the US, and support poor people, and although there is room for much improvement, there is a limit to how far you can take it.
Would you suggest? Put a limit on how much a person could make, say $300K/yr? What incentive would that person have for continuing work after they reached their limit? Just take the rest of the year off? Also who would pay for "luxury" items if no one could afford them? If Bill Gates wasn't making Billions he also couldn't be giving billions to charity.
I know this sounds a lot like trickle down economics (support the rich and the poor will follow) and I personally believe against it (along with all of the D.C. crap with corporations), but the fact is with capitalism you are going to have to accept having stinking filthy rich people.
I know it sounds stupid to "blame the game not the player", but you really should be talking about reforming our economy than blasting rich people. Again I am far from rich but I look forward to the day and appriciate the possibility that I could be.
In conclusion how about suggesting how to "make sure the bottom x% have sufficient resources to survive" rather than blindly insulting people.
First off, I had mod points and I feel bad about not modding you up, and you don't deserve a 0:offtopic score.But I though a responce would be better.
Can someone help me understand why I would want to use Python as opposed to Java?
Python is not just about brevity, but I think you underestimate writing less lines of code. Take the fact that if you are writing twice as much code, you're probably writing twice as many bugs. Also a consise 50K LOC program is much easier to get around in than a 200K program.
But anyway, Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language., where as Java is only the last of those three. Python also has dynamic documentation, meaning that the documentation string can be inspected at run-time, without the need to maintain a separate doc tree, ie Javadoc.
Classes are dynamic ie. you can change their behavior at runtime. All python objects can be marshalled or serialized, while in Java you have to define the interface, and account for anything that you use that can't be serialized.
There are also thing which I am indifferent about like tabbed blocks, and some things which I don't like, like not having enough compile time type checking. IMHO you should always define the type of a function parameter, it makes learning the API faster.
In general, Python is great for script-strength stuff, ie. in situations where you would use perl. I can see it getting unwieldly as it got bigger but it generally scales much better then perl. Java tends to be too complex and too restrictive. In short there are many situations where you would choose one over the other.
Except that if you use your friends you can pay them with two cases of beer and a couple pizzas, plus the joy of working with big stuff and using chainsaws.
Hmmm... beer... chainsaws... yeah, better go with the professionals.
The only person looking to by Sun Hardware is Captain Ahab.
I don't think you know how well regarded Sun is in the server environment. Linux is young in the server environment, and the only reason Linux is favorable to Sun is beacause Linux runs on everything. So you must be talking about Sun hardwardware vs. x86 arch.
And yes, while cheap, the x86 platform has a number of shortcomings when you are doing heavy lifting.
At work we just bought yet another Sun workstation, and when you are sharing a box with ~50 other people, you start to see the different between hardware. And yes I daily work on Linux/x86, Linux/pa-risc(HP), HP-UX/pa-risc, HP-UX/IA64, and Sun/sparc. And yes I can tell when I run on the sun. So you might say, "throw more cheap boxen at the problem", which is a good solution a lot of times, but then again there are situations when it just makes things more complicated and complex.
You must be totally ignorant of Sun's position. And your assertion that they move to Win64/.net? Care to back that up? Yeah, because you have no idea what you are talking about.
Which brings us upon an interesting question. Even if you didn't bring the same exact code, you're the same exact person. If you implement the code in the same way, if you have a good memory it could be almost verbatim. Same class/file name, variable etc.
Is that illegal? To be legal can I never write a program with similar functionality? Or do I just have to do it in a different way? How different does it need to be to be legal?
If you can defend reimplementing something very similar, then how different is that then copying the file exactly?
I guess my point is that at some point a reimplementation by the same person for the same thing looks like you copied it exactly then changed things around.
Good point. I think a lot of people forget that it was IBM's actions that originated the term FUD. Even though they've seen the advantage of walking the straight and narrow, doesn't mean that they won't come back and bite the F/OSS community in the future.
Just look at how many patents IBM has. AFAIK, more than anybody else. Their IP library is huge and could probably sue any large computing company for patent violation if they so choose.
It's good that they are taking the benevolent stance here, but let's just remember that Big Blue only has its own best intentions in mind when it comes down to crush time.
Slashdot Mirror
Along with the other responces to your post, I couldn't disagree more. You're either not very experienced at it, or not very good. I've seen groups of guys play tight and straight, where you don't bet unless your almost garunteed to win, and it drives me insane. Maybe you've just been playing like that.
However, bluffing, betting smart and reading actions are where the real skill comes in. Any shmuck can get a full house. But it takes skills to bluff someone into folding that full boat when you don't even have a pair. And it takes skill to adjust the relative values of cards from start till finish. Is there lots of luck? Sure. Do good players consistently win? You bet'cha.
Yeah I was expecting something bigger ("biggest fibreglass boat!"), but I guess they don't need anything too huge.
Anybody who wants to see a another good article about the ship, with lots of pictures, try, here.
And your needs are enough to drive an industry built on corporate workstations and home e-mail boxes. Right. Most people don't need the power they already have.
The point is that faster hardward becomes increasingly esoteric to the average consumer. Ok, so there's games, but console gamers outwieght computer gamers by a longshot and their hardware is cheaper and runs more reliably. Believe me, I worked at CompUSA, and only once did I ever get a person who came in for just gaming.
There just isn't the demand anymore.
But with redundant relatively cheap clusters available, these types of things aren't worth the $$$ they used to be.
This is a myth is see on slashdot alot. Yes, it is partly true, and there are also many cases where it just makes sense to have the big iron. For one thing when you are doing distributed stuff on clusters there's a whole lot more network stuff going on. And sun had it right, the network is the computer. If you can't talk to anybody else, you can't get work done. Meaning if your network is fubared, it doesn't matter how many boxes you have.
So if you have dozens more switches and routers to maintain, not to mention more boxen, you may have to require a dedicated network engineer. And if you have to hire an extra person, then the big iron alternative gets real cheap real quick. And all that cicso stuff isn't that simple, that's why CCNE's are so popular to get these days.
This is not to mention that for some tasks, such as some database setups, are better at big systems, like Sun's with their high throughput, than a bunch of networked intels.
There is cost/benefit to every choice in IT, and the "throw more boxen at it" philosophy can get you in trouble real quick if that's all you ever consider.
Erm... it's still in the mozilla family. Besides there are lot's of other slashdot icons that should change before firefox/thunderbird get their due.
.pheonix?? Yeah, yeah, name change stuff, but if you change the name, shouldn't you change all of it. You could still search for other spellings, but "Come on, guys".
Oh, like maybe an SCO icon. Or maybe a less derisive Microsoft icon. It would be a great feature that for story submittals that a user could upload an appropriate icon. The editors could then use that one or a stock icon. I know it's asking alot, but "Come on, guys".
Back on topic, I've downloaded it and put it in place of the previous thunderbird directory, no hitches. I do like it alot. But two minor quibbles, why does the deault download binary not have the version in the filename. They also went back to gzip from bzip2. Contrast:
thunderbird-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz
thunderbird-0.5-i686-pc-linux-gtk2-gnu.tar.bz2
And while we're on the note of mozilla in general, how come the user directory for firefox is still
Man I really hate that too, not to mention the fact that bsdgrrl's account looks like it was created as a troll account. And rkz's account looks like the classic karma whore, lots of -1 with +5 every now and then. They steal posts, and post early and high in threads in order to be a more effictive troll.
/. took away the numberical kharma ranking.
Come on mod's spend points where they are needed. I don't care if this is OT, I hate kharma whores. No wonder
Ok, more ontopic: if this technology succeeds then there becomes even less of a need for music companies. You get live music at the show, studio music from their website or iTunes, radio stations actually have to go out and look for good music, and people can request anything.
Music companies are on their way down, there's no need. The only way they can survive is to change their profit model drastically. Oil companies didn't sue electric light makers, they moved on to suppling the need for automobiles. And litigation is never a profit model.
No, we just didn't have any proof that it couldn't be endless. You ask why, scientists ask why not?
A well written resume will indicate their familiarity will different skills. I personally, (as a developer with ~5 year exp.) have "Expert", "Proficient", and "Familiar With" quantifiers with my skills. I only have a couple under expert and a half dozen at Proficient, but a couple dozen under "familiar with".
My point is don't automatically disqualify people who learn quickly and like to pick up new things. However, I would agree with you if they didn't quantify their expirience with each and had a whole crap load of listings.
Let's get interoperable so we can compete - THEN we can extend into a new arena.
The problem with reimplementing the Microsoft interface (Office,desktop,.NET) is that you never get 100% interoperable. Microsoft is too smart to let that happen, and they'll keep it that way unless they are forced too.
If the F/OSS community doesn't give some effort towards independant R&D, then we are always playing catch up. We need to have innovation that isn't available anywhere else on closed-source platforms. Until Linux (BSD,etc) has the mythical killer-app, then there is not a compelling reason for people to switch from Microsoft. And, no, as we have seen, security isn't a compelling reason, being more powerful and being cheaper also are not compelling reasons.
Yes, we are making headway and GNU/Linux is one of the faster (the fastest?) growing operating systems. We are getting some powerful backers, and Microsoft is giving us precious time to innovate, but we need to sieze that time.
As a developer I can't help but drool over the new developement platform features that Longhorn has, but until we can get Windows programmers to do the same, GNU/Linux will never reach market saturation.
It also depends on what he is coding in, and what tools he is using. The thing that drives me up the wall with CVS is that it's hard to do moves and renames, both of which are crucial to refactoring-friendly languages like Java. Also the lack of atomic commits can be truely infuriating. Same with lack of change sets. You shouldn't pick a SCCS (source code control system) without understanding why all these things are good.
However CVS does have whole lot more tools available for it than SVN does. However, since he's just supporting himself, why not go out and buy a BitKeeper license. Sure it's a couple hundred dollars but it's included GUI tools are worth it. It's got a windows client and you can try before you buy. With a large code base like this guy has, it's really worth,
In conclusion, there are two main SCCS philosophies now, those who want to replace CVS, like SVN, and those who want to improve upon SCCS in general, a la BitKeeper.
Err... I've seen it manys ways both ways. Taken as an acronym suse is:
Software und System Entwicklung
Entwicklung = development
und = and
and it is natural not to capitalize the article. Taken as the registered corporate name, it's SUSE. Both are right, though currently you'll see more SUSE.
I'm surprised you didn't plug the rest of the books in your series. I've look at a couple and they're really quite good.
.pdf's look here.
For those interested in those that have been released as
IBM's backplane CAN increase sustained throughput as faster CPUs are installed, for better overall system scalability.
If I understand the backplane as the CPU->CPU bus, then wouldn't a multi-core CPU reduce dependency on the backplane? For applications that require low latency and high throughput how can you get higher transfer rates that what's available on the CPU itself?
As per the second point: Wouldn't a multicore-multithread multi-CPU server offer more flexibility for load balancing and on-damand peak handling (ie, move CPU2 Cores 1-3 from mail/fileserver duties to httpd to handle slashdotting)?
It seems the differences you are stating are about the overhead of managing multiple physical CPUs, but with this new chip a 4 way could handle what a 16 or 32-way did before. Thus the intra-CPU differences between IBM/HP and Sun are fairly irrelevent. Maybe I'm missing your point.
I'm not sure about #1, but I always thought Sun had a much more vast throughput than Intels. I'm also not sure what you mean by "backplane", a quick wikipedia seems to suggest that it a simple bus of 1-1 pin mapping. Where is this used? Why does it matter? Even Mid-range Sun servers have a 9.6 GB/sec sustained throughput (Sun Fire Interplane Connect),
2. As with all things, there are cost/benefits to every feature. I'm sure there are applications that are better suited with greater hardware independance. Still I'm not sure what you mean here, are you advocating more manageability between CPU's and different domains (which is good for managing severals VM's?)? With a processor that has eight cores, you'd assume that one would be able to put a vm on each one with that vm, having four hardware threads available. How is IBM/HP's offering different?
Huh? Why don't you make like a tree and get out of here.
but by default ICQ comes with logging enabled, which the guy must have known, and thus, that was his form of concent of recording the conversation.
I use gaim. How does the person using MSN on the other end know what my defaults are? Am I liable if I use another chatting software than who I'm talking to even if my app logs by default?
Besides, Apple already provides an acceptable (By most users and the record labels) method of removing the DRM... burn it to a CD.
They did this so people could play the music in their CD player which is a big precondition of people actually using this system. Providing this was necessary not because of a way to get around the DRM, but because then a lot of people wouldn't even use it.
If someone provided a utility to write the music to a CD-RW then automatically reencode off of it into DRM-free MP3, then I'd bet you they'd go after that too.
If you don't like it, don't purchase your music there. But this is a clear violation of iTMS's terms of service and use.
The TOS here may be moot because of the fair use laws. If I payed for the music, they can't stop me from playing it however I want. I don't share with other people, I just want to listen on my Linux box. If they made a DRM Linux Client, I would use it, as that would be one more reason not to boot into windows.
TOSs and EULAs have not really been tested in court. Apple, however, is fully within their rights to not provide you their service anymore if you violate their TOS,(that's what terms of service means, if you violate it, then they terminate your service) however there are fair use laws that superceede much of that, even if such laws conflict with others like the DCMA.
I believe it is fully within my rights to listen to the music I paid for however I so choose.
Well, the only reason I didn't think it wouldn't scale "well" (in comparision to Java) was that it didn't have static type checking which makes it harder to read APIs. However, I have seen less type error in Python than other languages with no static type checking.
Also, my python programming isn't quite yet "pythonic" so my concerns are likely unjustified, and it does remain on my short list of implementation languages.
Yes, the poor are poor because their lazy asses don't want to be rich. It's not that they can't get ahead and get nice things, they're just lazy and stupid.
Aside from bolding your entire statement which is REALLY annoying, you took the grand-parent post wrong. In fact he stated that many poor people deserve not to be poor. They work hard, clean lives and add to the community. He also said that many rich people deserve not to be rich. I don't understand the reason behind your comment.
The american dream is to work hard and become "rich". We already have it that "rich" people pay most of the taxes in the US, and support poor people, and although there is room for much improvement, there is a limit to how far you can take it.
Would you suggest? Put a limit on how much a person could make, say $300K/yr? What incentive would that person have for continuing work after they reached their limit? Just take the rest of the year off? Also who would pay for "luxury" items if no one could afford them? If Bill Gates wasn't making Billions he also couldn't be giving billions to charity.
I know this sounds a lot like trickle down economics (support the rich and the poor will follow) and I personally believe against it (along with all of the D.C. crap with corporations), but the fact is with capitalism you are going to have to accept having stinking filthy rich people.
I know it sounds stupid to "blame the game not the player", but you really should be talking about reforming our economy than blasting rich people. Again I am far from rich but I look forward to the day and appriciate the possibility that I could be.
In conclusion how about suggesting how to "make sure the bottom x% have sufficient resources to survive" rather than blindly insulting people.
First off, I had mod points and I feel bad about not modding you up, and you don't deserve a 0:offtopic score.But I though a responce would be better.
Can someone help me understand why I would want to use Python as opposed to Java?
Python is not just about brevity, but I think you underestimate writing less lines of code. Take the fact that if you are writing twice as much code, you're probably writing twice as many bugs. Also a consise 50K LOC program is much easier to get around in than a 200K program.
But anyway, Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language., where as Java is only the last of those three. Python also has dynamic documentation, meaning that the documentation string can be inspected at run-time, without the need to maintain a separate doc tree, ie Javadoc.
Classes are dynamic ie. you can change their behavior at runtime. All python objects can be marshalled or serialized, while in Java you have to define the interface, and account for anything that you use that can't be serialized.
There are also thing which I am indifferent about like tabbed blocks, and some things which I don't like, like not having enough compile time type checking. IMHO you should always define the type of a function parameter, it makes learning the API faster.
In general, Python is great for script-strength stuff, ie. in situations where you would use perl. I can see it getting unwieldly as it got bigger but it generally scales much better then perl. Java tends to be too complex and too restrictive. In short there are many situations where you would choose one over the other.
Except that if you use your friends you can pay them with two cases of beer and a couple pizzas, plus the joy of working with big stuff and using chainsaws.
Hmmm... beer... chainsaws... yeah, better go with the professionals.
The only person looking to by Sun Hardware is Captain Ahab.
I don't think you know how well regarded Sun is in the server environment. Linux is young in the server environment, and the only reason Linux is favorable to Sun is beacause Linux runs on everything. So you must be talking about Sun hardwardware vs. x86 arch.
And yes, while cheap, the x86 platform has a number of shortcomings when you are doing heavy lifting.
At work we just bought yet another Sun workstation, and when you are sharing a box with ~50 other people, you start to see the different between hardware. And yes I daily work on Linux/x86, Linux/pa-risc(HP), HP-UX/pa-risc, HP-UX/IA64, and Sun/sparc. And yes I can tell when I run on the sun. So you might say, "throw more cheap boxen at the problem", which is a good solution a lot of times, but then again there are situations when it just makes things more complicated and complex.
You must be totally ignorant of Sun's position. And your assertion that they move to Win64/.net? Care to back that up? Yeah, because you have no idea what you are talking about.
Which brings us upon an interesting question. Even if you didn't bring the same exact code, you're the same exact person. If you implement the code in the same way, if you have a good memory it could be almost verbatim. Same class/file name, variable etc.
Is that illegal? To be legal can I never write a program with similar functionality? Or do I just have to do it in a different way? How different does it need to be to be legal?
If you can defend reimplementing something very similar, then how different is that then copying the file exactly?
I guess my point is that at some point a reimplementation by the same person for the same thing looks like you copied it exactly then changed things around.
Good point. I think a lot of people forget that it was IBM's actions that originated the term FUD. Even though they've seen the advantage of walking the straight and narrow, doesn't mean that they won't come back and bite the F/OSS community in the future.
Just look at how many patents IBM has. AFAIK, more than anybody else. Their IP library is huge and could probably sue any large computing company for patent violation if they so choose.
It's good that they are taking the benevolent stance here, but let's just remember that Big Blue only has its own best intentions in mind when it comes down to crush time.