I was going to say "support is for wimps", but my more considered answer is that any significant piece of software used by a real "enterprise" (i.e. not a basement shop but 100's or 1,000's or 10,000's of users) generally needs a fair amount of expertise in-house.
When I look around at my corporate clients I tend to see IT staffs which include subject / software experts for every major piece of software that they use. A big shop is going to have quite a lot of, say, Windows experience, Active Directory, IP networking and such.
They'd need to do the same with OSS, and their external support costs are likely to be somewhat lower (levering the community which tends to surround big pieces of OSS).
For example, if I run into a bizzare driver level issue with NT / XP, its going to take a lot of searching, then $$ and patience before I'm likely to hunt down the answer. With FreeBSD or Linux, its at least fairly likely that a post to a mailing list will result in an answer.
Personally I think big vendor support isn't as valuable as many make it out to be, but perhaps that's my own experience with same talking rather than a broad representation.
AMK puts out a "What's New in Python X.X" doc for each release, and within the doc is a "Porting to..." section that highlights any issues.
From what I've seen, the broadest "gotya" likely to hit folks are those with non-ascii characters in their names who have attribution in python code files. ASCII is now the default encoding for modules (easily overridden) and unlike before, non-ASCII within a file raises an exception unless you've changed the encoding.
Sounds worse than it is. You umlaut folks be warned, however.
Re:Easy transition from Python to Ruby?
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Migrate? And give up significant whitespace?
NEVER.
Aside from the accurate observation from another here that Python's documentation is superior and its stdlib much more complete, the readability of Python is far superior, For some this isn't a big issue, but for others, it will be *the* issue.
Re:Learning Python... add pyrepl to the interprete
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
PS: For those that don't read docs or code, following installation of pyrepl, to launch a pyrepl-enhanced interpreter, at the command prompt: pythoni
Learning Python... add pyrepl to the interpreter.
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Tip #1: I highly recommend adding pyrepl to your Python environment. It enhances functionality of the interactive interpreter such that you can easily edit multi-line code snippets. Forward and back (control-n, control-p) through history. Control-r (then start typing) to find something back in history. Very useful. http://codespeak.net/pyrepl/
Tip #2: Avail yourself of the help() function in the interpreter. help(SomeObjectOrFunction) i.e. help(open) will return the docstrings associated; help(SomeModule) i.e. import sha; help(sha) will return the module docs.
You know you've become a vim addict when you try to ESC Y p to copy and paste a line in a/. comment box.
Fortunately you can have your stinkin' html textarea AND vim too. Mozex adds a popup menu to Mozilla variants including Firefox and Seamonkey that 'sends' the text area to vim, and a:wq and revisit of the textarea updates same. Very neat. Never make another speeling mistake again;-)
vim properly configured, is an excellent Python dev environment. Favorite feature? tags.
Unfortunately, vim, properly configured, will take you weeks! But... its worth it.
Let it not go unsaid (sorry if others have brought this up) that RSS is a crappy standard to build upon, but then, Micrsoft liked SOAP enough to mangle it. RSS is a defacto standard thanks to the wide userbase; but it was ill-conceived from the start. What kind of 'standard' needs an extension just to be able to account for more than one author of a piece of content?
Atom would have been a far better building block...
here's one SQLObject user who has always appreciated its ability to be driven by the Database schema -- a real benefit when working with legacy systems.
My first blush take on rails was "hey, we've seen active record before, in python: its called SQLObject"
I'm mostly impressed with the head of steam Rails has; lots of people working together can knock off more innovations and that's cool.
But, try as I might, I can't bring myself to enjoy programming in Ruby. I find python amply expressive, less cluttered to look at and less obtuse. If Rails offered some whizbang feature that the python world didn't have, that difference would not last for long.
now if ruby would only drop all those end statements;-)
We are on a freight train running at a brick wall of our own making. If we can't look after our own planet, one infinitely easier to coexist with than Mars (or any other planet) then who can say we will make a good job of it on another?
- What happens when we get into a nuclear war?
Ditto.
I certainly hope you aren't imagining some utopian future society will evolve, Star-Trek-like, out of the ashes of a crumbling society that is more likely than not going to engineer our species own demise.
And even if preserving the species from some unknown fate was deemed worthy of spending trillions of dollars and decades of time and focus, do you really have any faith that the "species" would be preserved in a meaningful way?
Do you believe those who control access to the new world on some new world will be apolitical? That's hardly likely, as the same folks building the new world will be from the same organizations, governments and companies that end up destroying our world. Think about it.
- What happens when earth starts naturally changing it's weather pattern to something that threatens or survival?
I'm sure in 10,000 years we'll have figured that out, or perhaps come to the conclusion that leaving nature to its own is a good thing. I know I won't care by then.
- can't you see we *NEED* to invest time into getting out of here so our species can survive.
I see that we *need* to invest time in preserving our home planet. If we screw up this world we don't deserve a second chance.
Death is inevitable - who says mankind deserves to continue for ever and ever?
I hope this rock hits our planet. I really do.
This may be the spur humanity needs to get us up off our collective keisters and establish a viable off-planet colony before it's too late.
Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on keeping the planet we live on viable. If some big rock later undoes the hard work, so be it.
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
I wasn't expecting enlightenment myself - not from Langa anyway - and from my cursory examination of some of the facts employed by Langa, it appears that objectivity is too much to expect as well.
IMO Fred Langa of InformationWeek fame wrote a deliberately misleading article suggesting that those concluding IE is less secure than Firefox are being duped by hype, while unsurprisingly he uses selective facts to paint Firefox / Mozilla in a light it doesn't really deserve to be under.
My quick observation:
Langa has IMO published one of the more misleading articles in some time suggesting in its tone and opening narrative that Firefox is no more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Balance would be nice, but his use of deception to make a point calls into question his objectivitity.
While using selective quotation of the Symantec report, Mr. Langa ignores a parabolic increase in Win32 specific threats from viruses and worms over the past five years even though Windows growth itself is not so parabolic.
Port based attacks, according to Symantec, designed to exploit 445 and 135 (Microsoft file sharing and RPC mechanisms) account for 52% of the top attacked ports, with no other port service - Microsoft or otherwise - accounting for more than 8% of the total.
The issue has been discussed before, so perhaps the spin on this is a discussion over Langa's motivations. Factual representation (evening being fair to both sides) clearly wasn't his objective or met if it was.
You *do* have to be geeky, but *don't* need loads of spare time at all. Python:
>>> datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(1111111111) da tetime.datetime(2005, 3, 18, 1, 58, 31)
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
on
The DotCom Crash Revisited
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Nasdaq did indeed crash, in every sense of the word. Just look at the declines in ALL the big names, and most of the small names, top to bottom. Many former $100, 200$ stocks traded to oblivion or a fraction of their former highs. Look at former high fliers like CMGI for an example, or RBAK perhaps even better!
QCOM (post split) 100 to 11, 90% decline. RBAK Now 6.52. When you factor in all the splits it was something like 14,000. CMGI - was 163ish now 1.92. JNPR now 22.34. Sounds like an ok stock, until you realize its high was almost 245$.
And the list goes on. And on.
These examples are the definition of a bubble and a crash, a (hopefully) once in a generation event.
The only "ethically challenged" group we can assert and assume with any certainty is the company providing the Apply Yourself services.
Its ethically criminal to provide a confidential service on the internet with virtually no security.
From (almost) the horses mouth: Noted web application developer and MIT professor Phillip Greenspun notes on his Harvard weblog:
The ApplyYourself code had a bug such that editing the
URL in the "Address" or "Location" field of a Web browser window would
result in an applicant being able to find out his admissions status
several weeks before the official notification date. This would
be equivalent to a 7-year-old being offered a URL of the form http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20030817-utah-a ir-to-air/and editing it down to http://philip.greenspun.com/images/ to see what else of interest might be on the server.
Someone figured this out and posted the URL editing idea on
the BusinessWeek discussion forum, where all B-school hopefuls hang out
and a bunch of curious applicants tried it out.
Liable and culpable? Apply Yourself and the B-Schools who outsourced to a cheesy service provider without, apparently, commissioning even a basic security audit.
Its of no consequence - no doubt there is at least one bright former-B-school student wannabe now contracting the services of a lawyer to sue Haavard - not for denying them access, but for allowing confidential information to be exposed to the internet. Seems to me such a suit is likely to return more than the cost of tuition to any other school in the world...
Maybe browsers should expose a method which sites can call "isUserEverGonnaClickOnTheFarkingPopupAdd()" and if the response is "not-in-a-million-years", pass...
Not knowing how the planet really works should be reason enough to employ common sense and prudence then.
Common sense suggests that pumping thousands of millions of tons of Green House Gasses (GHG) into the atmosphere annually is going affect global climate and ecosystems in some manner.
After all, following much ballyhoo over many decades, its now universally accepted that pumping far less (on a millions of tons basis) in the way of CFCs into the atmosphere directly impacts the protective ozone layer.
Common sense suggests that ever growing GHG emmissions will also disrupt some important aspect of climate or ecology, once we are collectively smart enough to understand the impacts.
Rarely (if ever) have we later discovered that what first appears on a common sense basis to be harmful abuse of the environment or nature to in fact be a good thing.
If common sense tends to prevail, why should the GHG issue be any different in this regard?
had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction."
Dang! Extinction has an upside -- it would be nice to start over and ditch the red-state, blue-state stuff and perhaps come out better for starting anew. Maybe the next batch of primordial ooze will grow up smarter than us, and perhaps along the way find something less verbose than XML in the process!
Slashdot Mirror
A skilled craftsman does not blame the tools.
No, a skilled craftsman blames the project manager.
(and then skips on off to the pub)
Obviously the Perl folks are happy because they don't have to use .NET and the rest...
Obligatory language flame: Imagine how much happier they'd be if only they used Python!
Ruby faster than Python? Hogwash.
Ruby is easily, measurably, slower than Python - its a big topic of discussion in the Ruby community and the subject of numerous projects to address.
I was going to say "support is for wimps", but my more considered answer is that any significant piece of software used by a real "enterprise" (i.e. not a basement shop but 100's or 1,000's or 10,000's of users) generally needs a fair amount of expertise in-house.
When I look around at my corporate clients I tend to see IT staffs which include subject / software experts for every major piece of software that they use. A big shop is going to have quite a lot of, say, Windows experience, Active Directory, IP networking and such.
They'd need to do the same with OSS, and their external support costs are likely to be somewhat lower (levering the community which tends to surround big pieces of OSS).
For example, if I run into a bizzare driver level issue with NT / XP, its going to take a lot of searching, then $$ and patience before I'm likely to hunt down the answer. With FreeBSD or Linux, its at least fairly likely that a post to a mailing list will result in an answer.
Personally I think big vendor support isn't as valuable as many make it out to be, but perhaps that's my own experience with same talking rather than a broad representation.
AMK puts out a "What's New in Python X.X" doc for each release, and within the doc is a "Porting to..." section that highlights any issues. From what I've seen, the broadest "gotya" likely to hit folks are those with non-ascii characters in their names who have attribution in python code files. ASCII is now the default encoding for modules (easily overridden) and unlike before, non-ASCII within a file raises an exception unless you've changed the encoding. Sounds worse than it is. You umlaut folks be warned, however.
Migrate? And give up significant whitespace?
NEVER.
Aside from the accurate observation from another here that Python's documentation is superior and its stdlib much more complete, the readability of Python is far superior, For some this isn't a big issue, but for others, it will be *the* issue.
PS: For those that don't read docs or code, following installation of pyrepl, to launch a pyrepl-enhanced interpreter, at the command prompt: pythoni
Tip #1: I highly recommend adding pyrepl to your Python environment. It enhances functionality of the interactive interpreter such that you can easily edit multi-line code snippets. Forward and back (control-n, control-p) through history. Control-r (then start typing) to find something back in history. Very useful. http://codespeak.net/pyrepl/
Tip #2: Avail yourself of the help() function in the interpreter. help(SomeObjectOrFunction) i.e. help(open) will return the docstrings associated; help(SomeModule) i.e. import sha; help(sha) will return the module docs.
You know you've become a vim addict when you try to ESC Y p to copy and paste a line in a /. comment box.
:wq and revisit of the textarea updates same. Very neat. Never make another speeling mistake again ;-)
Fortunately you can have your stinkin' html textarea AND vim too. Mozex adds a popup menu to Mozilla variants including Firefox and Seamonkey that 'sends' the text area to vim, and a
http://mozex.mozdev.org/
vim properly configured, is an excellent Python dev environment. Favorite feature? tags. Unfortunately, vim, properly configured, will take you weeks! But... its worth it.
Let it not go unsaid (sorry if others have brought this up) that RSS is a crappy standard to build upon, but then, Micrsoft liked SOAP enough to mangle it. RSS is a defacto standard thanks to the wide userbase; but it was ill-conceived from the start. What kind of 'standard' needs an extension just to be able to account for more than one author of a piece of content?
Atom would have been a far better building block...
Don't tell me only 'C' developers need apply. Talk about limiting your audience.
With Python I can develop responsive cross platform UI using wxWidgets, PyGTK, QT... can I do that with Gorm?
(Gorm sounds like the noise Gollum makes when choking on his tongue)
here's one SQLObject user who has always appreciated its ability to be driven by the Database schema -- a real benefit when working with legacy systems.
;-)
My first blush take on rails was "hey, we've seen active record before, in python: its called SQLObject"
I'm mostly impressed with the head of steam Rails has; lots of people working together can knock off more innovations and that's cool.
But, try as I might, I can't bring myself to enjoy programming in Ruby. I find python amply expressive, less cluttered to look at and less obtuse. If Rails offered some whizbang feature that the python world didn't have, that difference would not last for long.
now if ruby would only drop all those end statements
- What happens with global warming is killing us?
We are on a freight train running at a brick wall of our own making. If we can't look after our own planet, one infinitely easier to coexist with than Mars (or any other planet) then who can say we will make a good job of it on another?
- What happens when we get into a nuclear war?
Ditto.
I certainly hope you aren't imagining some utopian future society will evolve, Star-Trek-like, out of the ashes of a crumbling society that is more likely than not going to engineer our species own demise.
And even if preserving the species from some unknown fate was deemed worthy of spending trillions of dollars and decades of time and focus, do you really have any faith that the "species" would be preserved in a meaningful way?
Do you believe those who control access to the new world on some new world will be apolitical? That's hardly likely, as the same folks building the new world will be from the same organizations, governments and companies that end up destroying our world. Think about it.
- What happens when earth starts naturally changing it's weather pattern to something that threatens or survival?
I'm sure in 10,000 years we'll have figured that out, or perhaps come to the conclusion that leaving nature to its own is a good thing. I know I won't care by then.
- can't you see we *NEED* to invest time into getting out of here so our species can survive.
I see that we *need* to invest time in preserving our home planet. If we screw up this world we don't deserve a second chance.
Death is inevitable - who says mankind deserves to continue for ever and ever?
Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on keeping the planet we live on viable. If some big rock later undoes the hard work, so be it.
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
I wasn't expecting enlightenment myself - not from Langa anyway - and from my cursory examination of some of the facts employed by Langa, it appears that objectivity is too much to expect as well.
IMO Fred Langa of InformationWeek fame wrote a deliberately misleading article suggesting that those concluding IE is less secure than Firefox are being duped by hype, while unsurprisingly he uses selective facts to paint Firefox / Mozilla in a light it doesn't really deserve to be under.
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableAr
http://ses.symantec.com/pdf/ThreatReportVII.pdf
http://langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-04-18.htm#
http://www.forums.informationweek.com/jive3/threa
My quick observation:
Langa has IMO published one of the more misleading articles in some time suggesting in its tone and opening narrative that Firefox is no more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Balance would be nice, but his use of deception to make a point calls into question his objectivitity.
While using selective quotation of the Symantec report, Mr. Langa ignores a parabolic increase in Win32 specific threats from viruses and worms over the past five years even though Windows growth itself is not so parabolic.
Port based attacks, according to Symantec, designed to exploit 445 and 135 (Microsoft file sharing and RPC mechanisms) account for 52% of the top attacked ports, with no other port service - Microsoft or otherwise - accounting for more than 8% of the total.
The issue has been discussed before, so perhaps the spin on this is a discussion over Langa's motivations. Factual representation (evening being fair to both sides) clearly wasn't his objective or met if it was.
Before reading your post the very first thing that popped into my mind was... Mandrivel .
Poor choice of names imo.
You *do* have to be geeky, but *don't* need loads of spare time at all. Python:
The Nasdaq did indeed crash, in every sense of the word. Just look at the declines in ALL the big names, and most of the small names, top to bottom. Many former $100, 200$ stocks traded to oblivion or a fraction of their former highs. Look at former high fliers like CMGI for an example, or RBAK perhaps even better!
QCOM (post split) 100 to 11, 90% decline.
RBAK Now 6.52. When you factor in all the splits it was something like 14,000.
CMGI - was 163ish now 1.92.
JNPR now 22.34. Sounds like an ok stock, until you realize its high was almost 245$.
And the list goes on. And on.
These examples are the definition of a bubble and a crash, a (hopefully) once in a generation event.
Stevelaniel sez: It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol ...
...And that's why it won't gain sufficient traction to make a difference, rather like the tepid SharePoint portal.
...sez /me, who knows the only thing good about Microsoft SharePoint is the cool fleece V-neck sweater /me got for going to the tech launch!
exactly. Details: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/08#a772 6
The only "ethically challenged" group we can assert and assume with any certainty is the company providing the Apply Yourself services.
Its ethically criminal to provide a confidential service on the internet with virtually no security.
From (almost) the horses mouth: Noted web application developer and MIT professor Phillip Greenspun notes on his Harvard weblog:
Liable and culpable? Apply Yourself and the B-Schools who outsourced to a cheesy service provider without, apparently, commissioning even a basic security audit.
Its of no consequence - no doubt there is at least one bright former-B-school student wannabe now contracting the services of a lawyer to sue Haavard - not for denying them access, but for allowing confidential information to be exposed to the internet. Seems to me such a suit is likely to return more than the cost of tuition to any other school in the world...
Maybe browsers should expose a method which sites can call "isUserEverGonnaClickOnTheFarkingPopupAdd()" and if the response is "not-in-a-million-years", pass...
Not knowing how the planet really works should be reason enough to employ common sense and prudence then.
Common sense suggests that pumping thousands of millions of tons of Green House Gasses (GHG) into the atmosphere annually is going affect global climate and ecosystems in some manner.
After all, following much ballyhoo over many decades, its now universally accepted that pumping far less (on a millions of tons basis) in the way of CFCs into the atmosphere directly impacts the protective ozone layer.
Common sense suggests that ever growing GHG emmissions will also disrupt some important aspect of climate or ecology, once we are collectively smart enough to understand the impacts.
Rarely (if ever) have we later discovered that what first appears on a common sense basis to be harmful abuse of the environment or nature to in fact be a good thing.
If common sense tends to prevail, why should the GHG issue be any different in this regard?
had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction."
Dang! Extinction has an upside -- it would be nice to start over and ditch the red-state, blue-state stuff and perhaps come out better for starting anew. Maybe the next batch of primordial ooze will grow up smarter than us, and perhaps along the way find something less verbose than XML in the process!