Please forgive my picking nits, but I really don't like it when people express this idea incorrectly.
Rights do not "no longer exist". You may have them or not have them, but they don't vanish because they are ideas. They are central to the human experience, and it's only thru collective will (or the end of a gun) do we decide who gets to exercise them and who does not.
It's like that song that says "and I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me". Those men didn't give me my rights - a higher power did. The founders of the USA realized this -- that these rights are inalienable.
Only thru systematic, Orwellian control of language and thought can rights "no longer exist".
Let me tell you something: kids aren't "little adults". Their brains are simply not developed to the point that yours and mine are. They're incapable of reasoning the same as a full grown human.
Simple: greed. The force that drives people to become investors in the first place is the same force that clouds judgement, the same force that says "don't sell it, the stock price will go back up!", the same force that makes people believe in things that are too good to be true.
I work for an ISP, and we've implemented this as our anti-spam and anti-virus solution for our subscribers. It could not have worked out better -- we make money, our customers get less spam (almost none, really, and very few false positives), and our platform is much more healthy because the crap is blocked before it gets to our network.
The only downside is that it must be implemented by the mail provider -- individuals can't sign up for the service directly. Other than that, it's win-win.
is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
The space debris committee is a long way off. First, the UN must pass at least a dozen toothless resolutions over a ten-year period calling for the voluntary dismantling of space debris.
When that doesn't happen and the USA decides it's a matter of national security to do something about it, France, Germany, and other dictator-loving countries will protest loudly that the space debris must be inspected more vigorously (which is a sham, of course, as French space companies a vested interest in maintaining their billion-euro contracts with the space debris).
Actors will protest. "What about the children of the space debris?" they will ask. Communist and socialist sympathizers, along with their friends at CNN, will complain loudly "America is ignoring the voice of the world community!" Dan Rather will come to our rescue when he proclaims "Like it or not, he's still our President". Of special note will be the [un]American Democratic Party, which will profess to have a plan of it's own that calls for billions and billions of taxes (gathered only from the rich, of course) to be spent on a government program investigating the habitat of space debris.
And finally, a good ol' boy from Texas will have enough balls to do something about it. The rest of the world will hate him for it, even if they do sleep easier.
This is an issues with how wxPython has been developed, not with the wxWindows library itself.
Not really. The wxPython package wraps wx classes in rigid parallel. For almost every wxPython class, there is an underlying wxWindows class. Both packages all but force the programmer to reuse the library with inheritance.
BTW, dynamic callbacks aren't what I need - I can and do use those on my own. What I'd rather have is a wxPython/wxWindows interface that can be used to construct a GUI thru composition. Silly, simplified, contrived example:
I've been coding for wxPython for months now. It's a great gui library, it's fast, it's portable, and it has tons of controls. It's flexible, and it's free. The docs are good, too. I cannot imagine switching to pygtk or pyqt at this point.
My only bitch is this: the development model all but forces the programmer to reuse thru inheritance, not composition. I realize that inheritance was the preferred method of OO reuse when wx was originally conceived and written, but reusing wx types thru inheritance is painful because it leads to lots of (very similar) code.
I understand your frustration, as I too have hit the limitations imposed by the GIL. I don't think it's as bleak as you make it sound; most Python programmers don't even know it exists.
In the short term, there are plenty of ways around it -- the easiest being to move some code to a separate instance of Python and then use an RPC mechanism for communication. It's simple and effective.
In the long run, I can't imagine that the GIL will be in Python 3.0. That's a ways away yet, of course, but I'd be very surprised to see it make it that far.
The announcement was only made 4 days ago. It's available on comp.lang.python.announce: link here
There isn't much yet beyond a mailing list (here) and a lot of discussion on c.l.p, but the folks involved are notable Python contributors. I have no doubt the project will be successful.
Just a few days ago, the "Minimalist Python" project was announced. Its goal is to two fold: reduce the distribution to a central core and to re-write as much of it as possible in Python. By doing so, and by including Psyco the Python specializing compiler , the folks working on the Minimalist distribution hope to have a Python that outperforms C (initial tests show that Python+Psyco does outperform C code in many cases). I've used Psyco a bit, and it is a marvel. The idea of a Python compiler, written in Python, becomes possible, and has recently been discussed quite actively on comp.lang.python.
Even with the speed improvements, the Real Benefit(tm) of Python is in not saving machine time, it's in saving my time as a developer, because I'm far, far more expensive to employ than a server.
The cash paid by the Defendants, after the payment of attorneys' fees, litigation and Settlement administration costs, shall be distributed to consumers who purchased Music Products. The number of claims filed will determine the actual amount of the individual refund but will not exceed $20.00 per claimant. If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers. Rather, the cash portion of the Settlement shall be distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products. IMPORTANT - If you are a member of the Settlement Group, you can only file one claim per person no matter how many Music Products you purchased.
So, let's see. Between '95 and '00 I've purchased at least 100 CDs (that's only 20 a year, but I'm being conservative in my estimate). 100 discs, 20 bucks for the settlement. That's a whopping 20 cents per disc.
Python is a decent language. But it has a number of problems
Python is a great language. It has problems, but not those you mention.
It does not have a clear cross-platform GUI (Tkinter doesn't work on OS X, wxPython isn't a standard part of the platform binary distributions).
Those that actually care about client GUI libs can install their own. In this respect, Python is no different from C, and in fact, has more GUI bindings than C!
Many packages rely on native code in shared libraries.
And your point is...? That's like saying "many parts of my house rely on the shared frame".
Python byte code is orders of magnitude slower than Java or C# code.
For real-world tasks, Python execution speed is more than fast enough. When it's not, the bottlenecks can be easily identified and moved to C, or optimized away by the machine using Psyco. Using Psyco, my neural net code ran 5x faster. But the real thing you're missing here is this: developer time is more valuable than machine time, as machine time can be saved using other methods.
Python does not have optional static type checking.
And I thank God it does not! Static type checking solves a very narrow programming problem and requires a tremendous amount of coding for the developer.
It is hard to make standalone, self-contained applications out of it.
No, it's not hard to make stand-alone, or to embed it in other applications. There are multiple proven techniques to bundle the interpreter with a parts of the standard library and third-party code. That you don't know this makes me believe you don't really know python, either.
Python does not have a well-defined language standard, nor does it have multiple independent implementations.
Oh, my! The language definition is quite well-defined and very consistent. And there are two open-source implementations on separate platforms: python in C and python on Java
Python could be more of a contender if someone built a good native code compiler for it. None of the current attempts are very good or result in much speedup.
Psyco speeds up python by optimizing chunks of code at run time. The neat thing is that it does this against python code, so python becomes faster by more of it being written in python.
The way it is, Python is good for many scripting and prototyping applications. But for a general-purpose, high-quality programming language, we still have to look elsewhere.
I'm gonna get flamed for sounding like a big fat meanie for saying this but, come on! Shatner is an actor. Actors act, they don't know squat about science, foreign policy, or the price of tea in China. (for the most part, of course, please excuse my generalization).
Granted, actors are people too *cough*, and they're entitled to their incorrect opinion just like the rest of us. But to ask them questions on subjects based on their acting resume is just plain foolish. Shatner doesn't have some keen insight into the nature of the Universe because he played a star ship captain.
If you're talking about a serious piece of software (as opposed, to say, a web app for a shopping cart or something similarly as silly), flexibility isn't an issue.
Flexibility is always an issue because requirements always change. To think and to code otherwise is folly and professional laziness. Anytime you get a set of requirements and code to them blindly without considering the ramifications on maintenance and future business objectives you invite disaster.
You simply don't go around switching databases for say, a bank or a credit card company or a health care provider.
Of course you cannot when they've been coded as you suggest. It's simply not practical, and maybe even not possible under your guidelines. If you code to SQL-92 whenever it can be done, switching databases becomes a real possibility.
Any IT guy that says "let's switch databases" mid-stream for no good reason is incompetent.
Straw man. Of course if there is "no good reason" it would indicate incompetence. However, there are often many good reasons to switch databases, such as constantly shifting licensing terms *cough*Oracle*cough*, ridiculous licensing fees *cough*Oracle*cough*, lack of standards *cough*Oracle*cough*, etc.
It sounds like you're used to working on smaller, perhaps not misson-critial projects for smaller companies. Terrabyte+ databases are very common in most Fortune 500 companies, gov't institutions, etc.
The original poster said "most companies", and "most companies" are not Fortune 500 or even Fortune 1000 companies. I thus stand by my statement that most companies do not have database systems in the terabyte range. And it sounds like instead of refuting my original points, you'd rather try to dismiss them by suggesting I don't have experience with mission critical systems. Fact is, the databases and applications I design, develop and deploy are carrier-class because they have to be.
Given your repeated mention of Oracle, it sounds like you're actually an Oracle developer as opposed to a SQL developer. That's okay, I suppose, as everyone needs to have a job.
Hell, I know of many instances where companies stay with the same *version* of database for 5+ years.
Uh-huh. And do the same companies have to maintain their code? How about extend it? Thought so.
Slashdot Mirror
Please forgive my picking nits, but I really don't like it when people express this idea incorrectly.
Rights do not "no longer exist". You may have them or not have them, but they don't vanish because they are ideas. They are central to the human experience, and it's only thru collective will (or the end of a gun) do we decide who gets to exercise them and who does not.
It's like that song that says "and I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me". Those men didn't give me my rights - a higher power did. The founders of the USA realized this -- that these rights are inalienable.
Only thru systematic, Orwellian control of language and thought can rights "no longer exist".
You don't have kids, do you?
Let me tell you something: kids aren't "little adults". Their brains are simply not developed to the point that yours and mine are. They're incapable of reasoning the same as a full grown human.
I want my jetpack, dammit!
And tens of thousands of children want just enough food so that today isn't the day they starve to death.
Think about it.
but how did he pop the firewall?
Given your sig, it scares me that you knew about that site.
Somebody explain this to me!
Simple: greed. The force that drives people to become investors in the first place is the same force that clouds judgement, the same force that says "don't sell it, the stock price will go back up!", the same force that makes people believe in things that are too good to be true.
Check out Postini: http://www.postini.com/
I work for an ISP, and we've implemented this as our anti-spam and anti-virus solution for our subscribers. It could not have worked out better -- we make money, our customers get less spam (almost none, really, and very few false positives), and our platform is much more healthy because the crap is blocked before it gets to our network.
The only downside is that it must be implemented by the mail provider -- individuals can't sign up for the service directly. Other than that, it's win-win.
is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
The space debris committee is a long way off. First, the UN must pass at least a dozen toothless resolutions over a ten-year period calling for the voluntary dismantling of space debris.
When that doesn't happen and the USA decides it's a matter of national security to do something about it, France, Germany, and other dictator-loving countries will protest loudly that the space debris must be inspected more vigorously (which is a sham, of course, as French space companies a vested interest in maintaining their billion-euro contracts with the space debris).
Actors will protest. "What about the children of the space debris?" they will ask. Communist and socialist sympathizers, along with their friends at CNN, will complain loudly "America is ignoring the voice of the world community!" Dan Rather will come to our rescue when he proclaims "Like it or not, he's still our President". Of special note will be the [un]American Democratic Party, which will profess to have a plan of it's own that calls for billions and billions of taxes (gathered only from the rich, of course) to be spent on a government program investigating the habitat of space debris.
And finally, a good ol' boy from Texas will have enough balls to do something about it. The rest of the world will hate him for it, even if they do sleep easier.
1. Copy URL to clipboard
2. Start browser
3. Paste URL into address bar
There you go: no referer.
[...] what choice does the user have?
fdisk
'nuff said.
Um, no. They only have to release their changes if they also distribute said changes.
Not really. The wxPython package wraps wx classes in rigid parallel. For almost every wxPython class, there is an underlying wxWindows class. Both packages all but force the programmer to reuse the library with inheritance.
BTW, dynamic callbacks aren't what I need - I can and do use those on my own. What I'd rather have is a wxPython/wxWindows interface that can be used to construct a GUI thru composition. Silly, simplified, contrived example:
I've been coding for wxPython for months now. It's a great gui library, it's fast, it's portable, and it has tons of controls. It's flexible, and it's free. The docs are good, too. I cannot imagine switching to pygtk or pyqt at this point.
My only bitch is this: the development model all but forces the programmer to reuse thru inheritance, not composition. I realize that inheritance was the preferred method of OO reuse when wx was originally conceived and written, but reusing wx types thru inheritance is painful because it leads to lots of (very similar) code.
I understand your frustration, as I too have hit the limitations imposed by the GIL. I don't think it's as bleak as you make it sound; most Python programmers don't even know it exists.
In the short term, there are plenty of ways around it -- the easiest being to move some code to a separate instance of Python and then use an RPC mechanism for communication. It's simple and effective.
In the long run, I can't imagine that the GIL will be in Python 3.0. That's a ways away yet, of course, but I'd be very surprised to see it make it that far.
The announcement was only made 4 days ago. It's available on comp.lang.python.announce: link here
There isn't much yet beyond a mailing list (here) and a lot of discussion on c.l.p, but the folks involved are notable Python contributors. I have no doubt the project will be successful.
These are exiting times for Python programmers.
Just a few days ago, the "Minimalist Python" project was announced. Its goal is to two fold: reduce the distribution to a central core and to re-write as much of it as possible in Python. By doing so, and by including Psyco the Python specializing compiler , the folks working on the Minimalist distribution hope to have a Python that outperforms C (initial tests show that Python+Psyco does outperform C code in many cases). I've used Psyco a bit, and it is a marvel. The idea of a Python compiler, written in Python, becomes possible, and has recently been discussed quite actively on comp.lang.python.
Even with the speed improvements, the Real Benefit(tm) of Python is in not saving machine time, it's in saving my time as a developer, because I'm far, far more expensive to employ than a server.
Thank you, laywers! I can retire now.
Fuck with it at your own peril.
No, fuck with it at our peril.
Python is a decent language. But it has a number of problems
Python is a great language. It has problems, but not those you mention.
It does not have a clear cross-platform GUI (Tkinter doesn't work on OS X, wxPython isn't a standard part of the platform binary distributions).
Those that actually care about client GUI libs can install their own. In this respect, Python is no different from C, and in fact, has more GUI bindings than C!
Many packages rely on native code in shared libraries.
And your point is...? That's like saying "many parts of my house rely on the shared frame".
Python byte code is orders of magnitude slower than Java or C# code.
For real-world tasks, Python execution speed is more than fast enough. When it's not, the bottlenecks can be easily identified and moved to C, or optimized away by the machine using Psyco. Using Psyco, my neural net code ran 5x faster. But the real thing you're missing here is this: developer time is more valuable than machine time, as machine time can be saved using other methods.
Python does not have optional static type checking.
And I thank God it does not! Static type checking solves a very narrow programming problem and requires a tremendous amount of coding for the developer.
It is hard to make standalone, self-contained applications out of it.
No, it's not hard to make stand-alone, or to embed it in other applications. There are multiple proven techniques to bundle the interpreter with a parts of the standard library and third-party code. That you don't know this makes me believe you don't really know python, either.
Python does not have a well-defined language standard, nor does it have multiple independent implementations.
Oh, my! The language definition is quite well-defined and very consistent. And there are two open-source implementations on separate platforms: python in C and python on Java
Python could be more of a contender if someone built a good native code compiler for it. None of the current attempts are very good or result in much speedup.
Psyco speeds up python by optimizing chunks of code at run time. The neat thing is that it does this against python code, so python becomes faster by more of it being written in python.
The way it is, Python is good for many scripting and prototyping applications. But for a general-purpose, high-quality programming language, we still have to look elsewhere.
NASA. ILM. Google. Please.
Does anyone know if the membership fees are tax-deductible (in the US)? I didn't see mention of it on the FSF web site.
aye, as if Sun(tm) Java(tm) did not already have enough baggage. java needs many things, but Yet Another Framework or TLA (YAFTLA) is not one of them.
there was no NT 3. the first release was 3.1, so named to align it with the most current (at the time) windows version number.
I'm gonna get flamed for sounding like a big fat meanie for saying this but, come on! Shatner is an actor. Actors act, they don't know squat about science, foreign policy, or the price of tea in China. (for the most part, of course, please excuse my generalization).
Granted, actors are people too *cough*, and they're entitled to their incorrect opinion just like the rest of us. But to ask them questions on subjects based on their acting resume is just plain foolish. Shatner doesn't have some keen insight into the nature of the Universe because he played a star ship captain.
Wow! An operating system defined as a VARCHAR field. Betcha it runs quick!
Or is the OS column defined as a CHAR? You know those types waste space...
If you're talking about a serious piece of software (as opposed, to say, a web app for a shopping cart or something similarly as silly), flexibility isn't an issue.
Flexibility is always an issue because requirements always change. To think and to code otherwise is folly and professional laziness. Anytime you get a set of requirements and code to them blindly without considering the ramifications on maintenance and future business objectives you invite disaster.
You simply don't go around switching databases for say, a bank or a credit card company or a health care provider.
Of course you cannot when they've been coded as you suggest. It's simply not practical, and maybe even not possible under your guidelines. If you code to SQL-92 whenever it can be done, switching databases becomes a real possibility.
Any IT guy that says "let's switch databases" mid-stream for no good reason is incompetent.
Straw man. Of course if there is "no good reason" it would indicate incompetence. However, there are often many good reasons to switch databases, such as constantly shifting licensing terms *cough*Oracle*cough*, ridiculous licensing fees *cough*Oracle*cough*, lack of standards *cough*Oracle*cough*, etc.
It sounds like you're used to working on smaller, perhaps not misson-critial projects for smaller companies. Terrabyte+ databases are very common in most Fortune 500 companies, gov't institutions, etc.
The original poster said "most companies", and "most companies" are not Fortune 500 or even Fortune 1000 companies. I thus stand by my statement that most companies do not have database systems in the terabyte range. And it sounds like instead of refuting my original points, you'd rather try to dismiss them by suggesting I don't have experience with mission critical systems. Fact is, the databases and applications I design, develop and deploy are carrier-class because they have to be.
Given your repeated mention of Oracle, it sounds like you're actually an Oracle developer as opposed to a SQL developer. That's okay, I suppose, as everyone needs to have a job.
Hell, I know of many instances where companies stay with the same *version* of database for 5+ years.
Uh-huh. And do the same companies have to maintain their code? How about extend it? Thought so.