The python version can read from any iterable, which includes collections (lists, tuples, dicts), but also includes things like strings (iterate over letters), files (iterate over lines), and so on.
It can also read from generators, which are objects that retrieve data as its requested; for example, it would be trivial to write a generator that would pull data out of a database, one record (or set of records) at a time. Each time you try to iterate over a generator, it 'creates' data (e.g. from reading a file, doing calculations, accessing a database or web service, etc.). It behaves like a list, but it's really a linearly iterable interface to some data source or other.
For that matter, you could have the generator do client-side caching, so that when you first initialize it, it fetches 100 rows and caches them; each time you try to iterate over the generator, it grabs another row from the cache; when there are only 10 rows left, it fetches another 100 in the background. That way you get more responsiveness in your application and less back-and-forth.
So, for a straightforward answer, yes - Python's version can read from pretty much any data source ever, and if it can't by default it's trivial to write a wrapper (maybe a few lines?) to do it for you. That said, Python's syntax requires doing this all on the client-side â" it doesn't pass your filter over to the SQL database, if that's what you're using. That would be something you'd do when you initialize your generator.
I'm wondering how long until some company comes out with (or some government mandates) a contactless cash card with half-assed security measures, to the point where all it takes to pick a hundred thousand pockets becomes a receiver in a suitcase and a few hours in Grand Central Terminal.
I'm a big fan of new technology, the higher the better, but let's just hope that if implemented, it's implemented by those with the most to lose (e.g. banks) rather than those with the most to gain (e.g. legislators).
Assuming everyone using my level of connection (10 megabit) maxes out their connection (unlikely), they could handle about 8200 users, making their cost about $100/user⦠which is still potentially reasonable. $50/user if people average 5 megabits (far more likely), and $25 if they top out at 250 Kbyte/s on average.
Your silly statement sounds as hyperbole, but it's not far off⦠According to Safari's 'Network Timeline' feature, my Facebook 'home' page is 1.51 megabytes (990 kb of which is Javascript), which, on a maxed-out 56K modem would take about 4 minutes and 43 seconds.
So yeah. Ten minutes? Not as likely. Five minutes? Easily.
I'd wager that it's for the same reason that turning down the speed to 22.6l on my old 56k modem gave me more reliabilityâ¦Ânamely, that syncing at a higher rate meant more susceptibility to line noise and interference. Lower rates provided more room for error, since they were less dependent on forcing the most performance they could out of the line (and on dial-up, you'd have better results with a slower, more stable connection than a burst-and-die connection, since dialling back up was a bitch, and modem pools were small).
Call the CRTC and complain. While the CRTC doesn't technically have any power over internet connections, anyone regulated by them tends to be incredibly scared of them.
Failing that, the CRTC will at least tell you where you can go to talk to someone about it.
That said, Bell doesn't advertise 7 MB/s downloadsâ¦Âthey advertise up to 7 MB/s downloads. That is, you could get 7 MB/s if you were next door to the CO and had pristine shielded phone cable going straight through the wall. In actuality, your download speeds on DSL are limited by the quality of the cabling in the CO, the quality of the cabling in your building, and the distance on the line between the two.
Honestly, if you want bandwidth, go with the cable companies. If you want consistency, go with DSL. That's just the way it is.
You're right it doesn't; I think in areas where the rates do drop like that, it's a result of agreements between the power company and very high-consuming industrial customers. Basically they're getting a "bulk rate", even though there's no reason why they should -- it's not like electricity gets delivered in a dump truck. I suspect politics is involved at some point. Usually this is for reasons of overhead. When you're selling someone a metered service, overhead is usually factored into the price. At absurdly high volumes, those overheads scale up pretty far past what they actually need to be. Bulk rates cover the cost of delivering and maintaining a hundred thousand volts to one premises, rather than a hundred of them. Less workmen, less equipment, just straight current.
Mac applications are written in C and/or Objective-C, using the Cocoa or Carbon libraries to provide an interface to the user (and to the underlying OS). Games specifically are usually written using OpenGL with (optionally) a mix of other platform-specific functionality. Accessing the user (via HID), the graphics card (via OpenGL, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, etc), and the sound hardware (via CoreAudio) is all platform-specific.
Most of a specific chunk of code written for a Windows game will (most likely) be relatively portable already (with the possible exception of non-standard types). The bits that need to be rewritten to work on OS X are the same bits that would need to be rewritten to work on Linux. Porting to OS X gains Linux almost nothing.
When Doom and Doom 2 came out, the whole genre (and the way it played) was relatively new. Yet Doom 3, 11 years later, was even MORE predictable than its predecessors. My roommate at the time got a copy before release, and was playing through it while I watched. It got to the point, on the second level, where we would see a hallway and be able to tell exactly where the monsters would leap out from after you went past, with nearly 100% accuracy.
John Carmack said that Doom 3 lost millions in sales because of piracy before the official release. I'd argue that that's because people realized how crappy of a game it was. Roomie and I would have bought a copy if we hadn't known. Thanks to piracy, we discovered that it just wasn't worth paying for.
The iMac's manual is in the Guiness Book for being the simplest set of instructions, or somesuch. It has nine steps, including taking it out of the box for one, and plugging in the power cord as another. It also contains no words whatsoever, since they're not necessary.
The instructions I gave to people setting up iMacs who were worried that it would be complicated was very simple: 'Take all the pieces out of the box, and connect everything to wherever it will fit.' You can't go wrong hooking up an iMac (unless you don't know to connect the mouse to the keyboard).
If your recovery procedures involve using pre-knoppix floppy recovery tools, you shouldn't be administering any systems with important data on them.
Aside from the fact that no non-obsolete machine I've seen in the last few years has a disk drive, 'backwards compatibility with ext2' is a pretty lousy minimum requirement for a filesystem.
Heck, I can do recovery on Ext2/3, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, and more using only a few-dozen-meg Debian netinstall image. I don't even want to know what an Ubuntu or Knoppix LiveCD could recover from.
I default rm (as root) to rm -vi. Why? Not so that I can confirm every file deletion. Rather, so that when I delete something as root without using -rf (which I have made a habit), it asks me if I'm sure. I can then say 'Oops, that's not what I wanted to do!' or 'Oops, I need to use -rf'.
BTW, NTFS uses 100ns timestamp granularity, and it was designed when systems were almost 100X slower than today. So it had a similar amount of overkill, but that certainly doesn't seem to have had any negative impact on the acceptance of NTFS. Yeah, amazing but true, NTFS is actively used by as many operating systems as Ext3 is.:p
From what I've read, Reiser4 completely kills Ext4 in performance... then it disposes of ext4's kernel module, removes one of its redundant drives, and then cleans the free space left on its array.
The Motorola 68k was their first choice, but unfortunately it wasn't ready in time for them to use it for their systems. Intel's 8086 processor was their unfortunate second choice.
Great, except that latency and hops means very little in terms of throughput. As an example, being in Vancouver on Shaw, I'm likely to get better speeds from a node in Toronto on Shaw (quite a few hops away, and relatively latent) than from a Telus user here in Vancouver.
The reason? Shaw owns a national fibre network that crosses the country, and you can traverse that distance without leaving their (impressive) network. In comparision, going to Telus, which is not that far away in terms of hops and latency, requires crossing border routers which, at peak periods, are very likely saturated.
One thing I wish my torrent clients would do is stop accepting uploads from peers with worthless transfer rates. When I have three seeds sending data to me at 120 KB/s on average, and forty sending data at 0.5 KB/s on average (and not downloading at all), those connections are accomplishing pretty much nothing. I'd rather disconnect from them, and try to find other peers with whom I can exchange data faster (in both directions).
Especially on private trackers, where the 'maximum number of peers' I connect to are all downloading from me at 1 kb/s each; this actively harms my ratio, because I have to seed the torrent for weeks to hit 1:1; I'd rather connect to someone else and ship them 100 KB/s so I can get the data out there faster, and not suffer because of people with shitty routes.
That, more than anything, is what I hope for this technology.
Funny, I went from 200 spam/day to 1 spam/30 days (or less), just by implementing decent spam filtering on the mail server - and that's just the amount of mail that gets to my client. I don't have any client-side spam filtering, and I don't even use spamassassin, because frankly, we just don't need it.
I reject most messages before they ever send the payload, and I've got a few more ideas that will prevent them from getting as far as they already do (MAIL FROM/RCPT TO).
I'm cavalier with my e-mail address, giving it out pretty much anywhere, be it on forums, message boards, slashdot, 'put in your e-mail to download this software from this sketchy company', and so on. And still no spam.
I didn't really do much either, but it seems to me like it's working pretty well. Go figure.
1. Use a non-broken mail client (and yes, Thunderbird is horribly broken in this regard). Oddly enough, Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook both support specifying outgoing mail servers on a per-account basis. Apple Mail does it a little better, letting you create one group of settings for an outgoing server and apply it to as many accounts as you like. Outlook requires you to re-enter the information each time.
2. I set up postfix to *also* listen on port 1024 on my server. It allows anyone to send messages to anywhere from anywhere, if and only if you have enabled TLS and then authenticated. Otherwise, it won't send any mail. Of course, any other mail port works fine, but 1024 gets around port blocking.
I see so many people fucking e-mail up so badly that I'm seriously considering starting my own e-mail hosting company. Honestly, I couldn't do it any worse than most places.
No, you can't run modern OS X software on XP. Why? Because unlike XP, OS X has been updated. New features have been added, new capabilities implemented, libraries simplified, old APIs deprecated. Progress has continued on Apple's side, while XP largely stagnated while waiting for Vista to arrive (and fail).
All the functionality added to XP was bolted on, and poorly. Connecting to wireless networks is a joke. Security is a joke. The whole setting is laughable.
The point is not that XP is incapable, the point is that it is capable only because there has been no real progress for seven years; OS X applications are incompatible because they use the latest and greatest features to make better applications faster with less fuss, and because Mac users actually upgrade their computers pretty consistently.
A G3 _IS_ outdated, OS X is the most heavy OS I've ever used, Windows XP would live very happy on this 2.2GHz C2D, 2GB ram MBP. Probably because Windows XP is a six-and-a-half year old operating system, whereas Leopard was released six months ago. A more reasonable comparison would be either to compare XP to Mac OS X 10.0.4, or to compare Leopard to Windows Vista (but which version? I'd go with Ultimate).
Windows XP's system requirements are rooted in the cutting-edge technology of 2001, with a few increases on the way thanks to the three service packs, whereas Leopard was designed for the current and previous generation of hardware Apple has shipped.
Most of the Java apps I've used recently (high-end, enterprise-grade stuff) have all been using Java 1.3.1_**. All the Java apps I've seen that try to be reasonably up-to-date with modern JREs all compile into native (Windows) binaries anyway.
Maybe you just have to be in the right situation to care, but I've never seen something that the JREs I've had couldn't run. Then again, I avoid Java like the plague.
Never mind the fact that OS X is built on large amounts of open-source software, and can play host to a large amount more; in contrast, vast amounts of open-source software and tools either don't work or don't work properly on Windows, even with Cygwin installed.
It may not stack up to your ideals, but it's a damn sight better than anything Microsoft has to offer, even ignoring that OS X apparently scales down very well.
Slashdot Mirror
The python version can read from any iterable, which includes collections (lists, tuples, dicts), but also includes things like strings (iterate over letters), files (iterate over lines), and so on.
It can also read from generators, which are objects that retrieve data as its requested; for example, it would be trivial to write a generator that would pull data out of a database, one record (or set of records) at a time. Each time you try to iterate over a generator, it 'creates' data (e.g. from reading a file, doing calculations, accessing a database or web service, etc.). It behaves like a list, but it's really a linearly iterable interface to some data source or other.
For that matter, you could have the generator do client-side caching, so that when you first initialize it, it fetches 100 rows and caches them; each time you try to iterate over the generator, it grabs another row from the cache; when there are only 10 rows left, it fetches another 100 in the background. That way you get more responsiveness in your application and less back-and-forth.
So, for a straightforward answer, yes - Python's version can read from pretty much any data source ever, and if it can't by default it's trivial to write a wrapper (maybe a few lines?) to do it for you. That said, Python's syntax requires doing this all on the client-side â" it doesn't pass your filter over to the SQL database, if that's what you're using. That would be something you'd do when you initialize your generator.
I'm wondering how long until some company comes out with (or some government mandates) a contactless cash card with half-assed security measures, to the point where all it takes to pick a hundred thousand pockets becomes a receiver in a suitcase and a few hours in Grand Central Terminal.
I'm a big fan of new technology, the higher the better, but let's just hope that if implemented, it's implemented by those with the most to lose (e.g. banks) rather than those with the most to gain (e.g. legislators).
Assuming everyone using my level of connection (10 megabit) maxes out their connection (unlikely), they could handle about 8200 users, making their cost about $100/user⦠which is still potentially reasonable. $50/user if people average 5 megabits (far more likely), and $25 if they top out at 250 Kbyte/s on average.
So all in all, not so bad.
lol omg 2rite! kthx
Don't forget the iPod Price Index (and Swivel has the numbers). A more 'modern' version of the Big Mac Index.
Your silly statement sounds as hyperbole, but it's not far off⦠According to Safari's 'Network Timeline' feature, my Facebook 'home' page is 1.51 megabytes (990 kb of which is Javascript), which, on a maxed-out 56K modem would take about 4 minutes and 43 seconds.
So yeah. Ten minutes? Not as likely. Five minutes? Easily.
I'd wager that it's for the same reason that turning down the speed to 22.6l on my old 56k modem gave me more reliabilityâ¦Ânamely, that syncing at a higher rate meant more susceptibility to line noise and interference. Lower rates provided more room for error, since they were less dependent on forcing the most performance they could out of the line (and on dial-up, you'd have better results with a slower, more stable connection than a burst-and-die connection, since dialling back up was a bitch, and modem pools were small).
Call the CRTC and complain. While the CRTC doesn't technically have any power over internet connections, anyone regulated by them tends to be incredibly scared of them.
Failing that, the CRTC will at least tell you where you can go to talk to someone about it.
That said, Bell doesn't advertise 7 MB/s downloadsâ¦Âthey advertise up to 7 MB/s downloads. That is, you could get 7 MB/s if you were next door to the CO and had pristine shielded phone cable going straight through the wall. In actuality, your download speeds on DSL are limited by the quality of the cabling in the CO, the quality of the cabling in your building, and the distance on the line between the two.
Honestly, if you want bandwidth, go with the cable companies. If you want consistency, go with DSL. That's just the way it is.
Mac applications are written in C and/or Objective-C, using the Cocoa or Carbon libraries to provide an interface to the user (and to the underlying OS). Games specifically are usually written using OpenGL with (optionally) a mix of other platform-specific functionality. Accessing the user (via HID), the graphics card (via OpenGL, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, etc), and the sound hardware (via CoreAudio) is all platform-specific.
Most of a specific chunk of code written for a Windows game will (most likely) be relatively portable already (with the possible exception of non-standard types). The bits that need to be rewritten to work on OS X are the same bits that would need to be rewritten to work on Linux. Porting to OS X gains Linux almost nothing.
When Doom and Doom 2 came out, the whole genre (and the way it played) was relatively new. Yet Doom 3, 11 years later, was even MORE predictable than its predecessors. My roommate at the time got a copy before release, and was playing through it while I watched. It got to the point, on the second level, where we would see a hallway and be able to tell exactly where the monsters would leap out from after you went past, with nearly 100% accuracy.
John Carmack said that Doom 3 lost millions in sales because of piracy before the official release. I'd argue that that's because people realized how crappy of a game it was. Roomie and I would have bought a copy if we hadn't known. Thanks to piracy, we discovered that it just wasn't worth paying for.
The iMac's manual is in the Guiness Book for being the simplest set of instructions, or somesuch. It has nine steps, including taking it out of the box for one, and plugging in the power cord as another. It also contains no words whatsoever, since they're not necessary.
The instructions I gave to people setting up iMacs who were worried that it would be complicated was very simple: 'Take all the pieces out of the box, and connect everything to wherever it will fit.' You can't go wrong hooking up an iMac (unless you don't know to connect the mouse to the keyboard).
Kudos to Apple for making it simple.
If your recovery procedures involve using pre-knoppix floppy recovery tools, you shouldn't be administering any systems with important data on them.
Aside from the fact that no non-obsolete machine I've seen in the last few years has a disk drive, 'backwards compatibility with ext2' is a pretty lousy minimum requirement for a filesystem.
Heck, I can do recovery on Ext2/3, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, and more using only a few-dozen-meg Debian netinstall image. I don't even want to know what an Ubuntu or Knoppix LiveCD could recover from.
I default rm (as root) to rm -vi. Why? Not so that I can confirm every file deletion. Rather, so that when I delete something as root without using -rf (which I have made a habit), it asks me if I'm sure. I can then say 'Oops, that's not what I wanted to do!' or 'Oops, I need to use -rf'.
The more PEBKAC I can prevent, the better.
From what I've read, Reiser4 completely kills Ext4 in performance... then it disposes of ext4's kernel module, removes one of its redundant drives, and then cleans the free space left on its array.
The Motorola 68k was their first choice, but unfortunately it wasn't ready in time for them to use it for their systems. Intel's 8086 processor was their unfortunate second choice.
Great, except that latency and hops means very little in terms of throughput. As an example, being in Vancouver on Shaw, I'm likely to get better speeds from a node in Toronto on Shaw (quite a few hops away, and relatively latent) than from a Telus user here in Vancouver.
The reason? Shaw owns a national fibre network that crosses the country, and you can traverse that distance without leaving their (impressive) network. In comparision, going to Telus, which is not that far away in terms of hops and latency, requires crossing border routers which, at peak periods, are very likely saturated.
One thing I wish my torrent clients would do is stop accepting uploads from peers with worthless transfer rates. When I have three seeds sending data to me at 120 KB/s on average, and forty sending data at 0.5 KB/s on average (and not downloading at all), those connections are accomplishing pretty much nothing. I'd rather disconnect from them, and try to find other peers with whom I can exchange data faster (in both directions).
Especially on private trackers, where the 'maximum number of peers' I connect to are all downloading from me at 1 kb/s each; this actively harms my ratio, because I have to seed the torrent for weeks to hit 1:1; I'd rather connect to someone else and ship them 100 KB/s so I can get the data out there faster, and not suffer because of people with shitty routes.
That, more than anything, is what I hope for this technology.
Funny, I went from 200 spam/day to 1 spam/30 days (or less), just by implementing decent spam filtering on the mail server - and that's just the amount of mail that gets to my client. I don't have any client-side spam filtering, and I don't even use spamassassin, because frankly, we just don't need it.
I reject most messages before they ever send the payload, and I've got a few more ideas that will prevent them from getting as far as they already do (MAIL FROM/RCPT TO).
I'm cavalier with my e-mail address, giving it out pretty much anywhere, be it on forums, message boards, slashdot, 'put in your e-mail to download this software from this sketchy company', and so on. And still no spam.
I didn't really do much either, but it seems to me like it's working pretty well. Go figure.
My solutions to these problems:
1. Use a non-broken mail client (and yes, Thunderbird is horribly broken in this regard). Oddly enough, Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook both support specifying outgoing mail servers on a per-account basis. Apple Mail does it a little better, letting you create one group of settings for an outgoing server and apply it to as many accounts as you like. Outlook requires you to re-enter the information each time.
2. I set up postfix to *also* listen on port 1024 on my server. It allows anyone to send messages to anywhere from anywhere, if and only if you have enabled TLS and then authenticated. Otherwise, it won't send any mail. Of course, any other mail port works fine, but 1024 gets around port blocking.
I see so many people fucking e-mail up so badly that I'm seriously considering starting my own e-mail hosting company. Honestly, I couldn't do it any worse than most places.
No, you can't run modern OS X software on XP. Why? Because unlike XP, OS X has been updated. New features have been added, new capabilities implemented, libraries simplified, old APIs deprecated. Progress has continued on Apple's side, while XP largely stagnated while waiting for Vista to arrive (and fail).
All the functionality added to XP was bolted on, and poorly. Connecting to wireless networks is a joke. Security is a joke. The whole setting is laughable.
OS X, on the other hand, has progressed. New features like hardware accelerated graphics have been added. Exposé, spaces, APIs like CoreAnimation, CoreGraphics, and CoreData. Spotlight, Time Machine, the list goes on. OS X has continued to improve and add features, while XP has stagnated and floundered as Microsoft devoted all its resources into an epic falilure instead of building incrementally on the product it already had working.
The point is not that XP is incapable, the point is that it is capable only because there has been no real progress for seven years; OS X applications are incompatible because they use the latest and greatest features to make better applications faster with less fuss, and because Mac users actually upgrade their computers pretty consistently.
Windows XP's system requirements are rooted in the cutting-edge technology of 2001, with a few increases on the way thanks to the three service packs, whereas Leopard was designed for the current and previous generation of hardware Apple has shipped.
It's just not that good of a comparison.
Most of the Java apps I've used recently (high-end, enterprise-grade stuff) have all been using Java 1.3.1_**. All the Java apps I've seen that try to be reasonably up-to-date with modern JREs all compile into native (Windows) binaries anyway.
Maybe you just have to be in the right situation to care, but I've never seen something that the JREs I've had couldn't run. Then again, I avoid Java like the plague.
Never mind the fact that OS X is built on large amounts of open-source software, and can play host to a large amount more; in contrast, vast amounts of open-source software and tools either don't work or don't work properly on Windows, even with Cygwin installed.
It may not stack up to your ideals, but it's a damn sight better than anything Microsoft has to offer, even ignoring that OS X apparently scales down very well.