As much as I like gimp for small web usage (face it, nobody out there gives a rat ass about color calibration of his/her monitor), to do proper photo work, the lack of profile import/conversion is a showstoper. So I recently took the time to hand pick various softwares and integrate them into a workflow. First, ufraw to get a decent 16 bits tiff out of my *ist, with custom icc profile converted to proper sRGB colorspace ; then krita (can work on those tiffs and keep colorimetry info), inkscape, scribus and quanta+. Most of KDE apps are cms aware and can output cmyk. No excuse to shell out an ungodly amount of money for a casual usage, and no need to pirate anymore.
Virtually every piece of software in corporate use right now is MS based. Unless you were raised on an island, the first computer the average person uses is a windows box. People will buy what is most familiar to them. If there was any VALID give a damn among the general populace about security, mac wouldn't be as far in the hole as they are.
I worked in a (very big) bookstore last month, and the sales on Vista books have been terrible. On an initial order of 250 for a title, due to be sold in a month, we barely hit 70 in two months. At the same time, the demand on Mac books (one tiny shelve at the moment) have sky rocketed ; publishers can't deliver at the rate they are sold. I can't know if that's a lasting trend, but ordinary people at the moment are jumping the windows train by boatloads toward Mac safety.
Furthermore, what's the proof for this? Who says that? The US goverment itself? You must be kidding. Bring the proof. You can't claim things up in the air.
considering what happened last time the US showed "proofs" of something to the world, I wouldn't be in a hurry to see those ones.
Just to nitpick, but Galileo Galilei wasn't the first nor the only one to describe heliocentrism - Nicolas Copernic was the forethinker of that system, and Galileo Galilei main discoveries (Saturn's rings, Jupiter's satellites, physics of the pendulum etc.) weren't in the line at his trial. Actually, most of the learned scholars of the time knew for a fact that heliocentrism gave far more accurate mathematicals results to build sailing tables.
Galileo Galilei faced troubles because he wrote that helliocentrism was the physical TRUTH. He would have escaped any trial (and was offered a plea bargain as a matter of fact) had he accepted to write that heliocentrism was a mere hypothesis. But he refused and the rest is history. As to know why he was so stubborn, we now know there was a mix of self-pride, and insurance he received from high profile individuals among the Catholic Church that the Pope was considering adopting a progressive doctrine. That turned out to be deceptive. Basically, he was caught in the middle of a political fight, and sided with the wrong persons.
I totaly agree with you ; having used a DOS / windows PC between 1990 and 1998 for lack of credible alternative, I indulged in Quick Basic, qbasic and VB (along various other languages too) and when that's the only possibility you get to toy with your computer, they're better than nothing. But since then I went on linux, and I had a good panel of other fine languages - but no useful basic. Until Gambas. Today, I use Gambas for most of my prototyping, and it's really a lot of fun.
Yes, that's the crux of the problem when people (not to single you out) tend to promote nearly any Microsoft product : they have no outside reference to similar system / language / application, because they only used Microsoft idea of those applications. MS-Basic is a classic symptom of that. Burned in ROM in those 8 bits time, with other languages (sometimes just other basic dialects) coming at a premium, most people tended to stay with what they had at hand, had fun with it and mostly found it to be "the way to go". But for those who had exposure to true basic incarnations, MS-Basic was already an unbearable antic in its prime.
Just for your information, C-Basic was the brainchild of G. Eubanks, later CEO of symantec, and the first p-code Basic. It stands for Commercial basic as numerical computations were conducted internaly in Binary Coded Decimal (BCD), therefore wasting memory but giving great accuracy. C-Basic was targeted at and very successful in business applications, much like cobol (without the hassles) on minicomputers. C-Basic came with a true compiler too, giving a very professional finishing touch to your programs. In a sense, today's basics, VB /.Net included, owe their legacy more to C-Basic than to MS-Basic.
I understood what he said, and I stand on my position : Visual Basic appart (not so great but still a real leap forward), all previous attempts from MS were crappy considering what was available from other vendors, especially basics running with CP/M. Most already had dual modes (sequential / compiled), ISAM file access, ON... GOSUB statements instead of GOTOs, etc.
Yes, I used all of them. My favourite was and for some features still is Sord's BASIC-II (released in 1983). qbasic and quickbasic 2.0 were still a good light year behind that one, and not until VB arrived was it outclassed.
Pardon me, but back in those times, you never tried CBasic dialects, did you ? If you had, you surely wouldn't mention MS-Basic as a good product from Microsoft, focused on users. Even then, most other basics had already dropped line numbering in favor of non-sequential numeric labels at worst, alpha labels at best. And to nail it, no other basics of reputation I know of had computational bugs in floating point arithmetics.
Your statement is both true and false ; true, if you leave a suitcase or a bag in a public place, you'd most certainly trigger a bomb squad intervention. False, because you won't make any news coverage for it unless it' a real bomb (and even then, it's unsure a word of it would leak before any arrest is made), and a prankster wouldn't be charged for "attempted terrorism" for a prank. At most, a good slap on the wrists and that's all. No mass paranoia fueled by irresponsible media channels chasing for audience, no war waging politicians going to exploit it for self promotion.
IANAMD, but in non life threatening conditions (infections in odd places like deep sinus), you generally suffer for months before any cure proves efficient, so what's a couple hours more ?
It's not worldwide practice ; in France, it's the merchant's responsability to be able to give the exact amount of change, because he is the one who dictates prices. We now have a 1 cent euro coin, so the problem has vanished, but when we still had Francs, the lowest coin was 5 centimes. In the highlighted case, there would have been no nearest rounding between the seller and the buyer. Instead, the consumer would have been protected up to 1.99, because the seller would have had to give the nearest possible change without exeeding the price tag : 5 cents, making the price an effective 1.95 FF. Otherwise it would have been considered unfair advertising to display a price tag lower than the forced true paid price.
We left the caves a long time ago, seems like maybe it might be nice to leave the medieval period some time soon. But I guess the aristocracy isn't quite willing to give that up yet.
If only you were right ! But imnsho, we're entering e-medieval times. Let me explain : european nobility began as a class of warriors badly needed to protect small populations left behind by the collapse of the roman empire. This class was rewarded (feeded) for this job by the population they were protecting. Things got out of control when european countries began to stabilize and civilize enough for populations to be mostly safe, and nobles became a heavy burden. But as they had seized political power, this situation lasted for centuries until the french revolution. We're on the verge of letting software editors seize the political power of letting us use our computer as we see fit in exchange of a protection insurance. If we let that happen, then we'll be back in medieval times for good, and that will last probably a very, very long time. Just say NO.
I read this story earlier on el reg, and since then I really feel sick for this teacher. Facing 40 years in jail for what appears to the most casual internet user as bad luck is so way out of reality touch it's totaly unbelievable.
Her case desserves the world's attention and help ; I'm wondering wether it couldn't be brought to some NGO attention such as Amnesty international, for it looks like a violation of her human rights. This could help her finding a competent lawyer.
I'm really upset a person's life can be shred to pieces that way, just to fulfill some obvious political ambitions.
The French tried to change that after their revolution. It went down in failure because there was only one day of rest per nine work days.
This is only part of the reason. In addition to the off-work sundays, there were many holydays throughout the year in the gregorian calendar, and they were removed from the new one. Truly, the 'old' calendar was very well suited to farming labour, managing time between activity periods and rest periods. The 'new' calendar was much more bend toward the industrial needs, impervious to seasons change as well as human needs (it's easier to organize production teams in various shifts). But it came too soon as farming was still (and for at least another century) the dominant activity. Hence the reject.
What's not funny at all is to think about what China could do in a really near future. For instance, selling millions of EDV players for peanuts. Hiring 2nd zone occidental actors or singers to reenact classic films or make near copies of popular music styles. Our western entertainement industry is headind toward a major crisis, and I fear a shift of economic power in the next 15 years, because he who owns factories owns the business, ultimately.
You may add that windows changes a lot between versions, unlike linux. Tools change of name, menus change of place / look, even clicking is not that straight forward. Every "improvement" in windows needs a lot of learning, while if you can't remember what GUI does what in linux, you can always roll up your sleeves and do it the old way with xterm, man, and vi.
though you seem more interested in hating on Americans than rational thinking.
Certainly not ; it's not because I don't sing every chance I get the stars and stripes that I hate America. There are a lot of things I actually like about your country, but your legal system happens to not be part of those things, simply because it's retarded, fucked up, cruel, and illogical. Oh, and it's now the only one among democratic countries that violates the UN Humans Rights charter by structure rather than by exception. Overall, a very pityfull mess. I personaly would use your so hyped 1st amendment right to protest every weekend if my country happened to have a judicial system in the same league as China and Libya.
Your flawed premise is that a nonconviction is a judgment of innoncence
I beg to differ ; I know the difference. But whatever your efforts, you're only showing that the US system puts emphasis on the personnal revenge (of the victim) rather than social peace. That's the hallmark of a pre-christian germanic, tribe based, family enforced, system, in which the common law is still rooted. Sing it the way you like, that's completely backward in the modern age.
And if we now look at your examples, then for case (1) why doesn't the State be liable for its failure ? For case (2), why would a jury be reluctant to convict a proven criminal, if not for lack of proof ? (recursively see point 1 to find the liability). Case (3) proves just that the system is flawed, giving 2 conflicting answers to a single question, thank you for the help.
And, he was essentially tried twice, with the second trial being a civil case, where he lost.
This in itself is a proof of how wrong the US legal system is. In most countries, at least, there cn't be a contradiction beteen the outcome of the criminal prosecution and the civil case. Criminal justice being generaly favoured over private interests, if the criminal verdict is "not guilty", then the civil case is terminated. How can you be held liable for something the society said you didn't do ? You have to look hard at some primitive tribes to find similar discrepensies, but at least they have the excuse to believe in magical forces and surnatural power, and the necessity for a scapegoat to restore balance in the universe, either with his life or his money (see for instance Maus and evy-Struss works).
Of course, one could argue that many US citizens have a very primitive cosmology, too, this maybe explaining that.
Blood found in his mother's house and a sleeping bag found in his car match his former wife's
For the sleeping bag, ever heard that french song by singer Camille : "les ex c'est sexy" (ex-es are sexy) ? There might be tons of reasons for soon-to-be divorced couples to have consensual sex, even in the middle of an otherwise bad fight (yes, been there done that - a good lover remains a good lover even if the person's an asshole). Obviously, you don't want the children to witness, so you take a sleeping bag, put a Disney on TV, and go anywhere slightly remote. And for the bleeding, well, shit happens every day. You cut yourself on things,...
For the dismantled seat, tool set, bags, tape, crime novels and all the other stuff, I bet more than half the slashdot crowd is in deep trouble if there's a crime nearby, because most of us have already all of those items in our trunks, and most of us have been driving in less than pristine cars.
Circumstantial evidences are no evidence at all, except evidence of poor police job.
For what we know, sex offenders are like other offenders ; many are just your once-in-a-lifetime (because they had oppotunity or whatever) type, a few are true maniacs in the medical meaning of the word. While the first type desserve a sentence, and don't need more attention than anybody else afterward, and probably less than a DIU convict, the latter type are mentaly ill persons, and they need constant medical attention instead of jail ; and they should be held in hospital until proven safe for release. Jail only prevent them from accessing adequate cure for their condition. The social pressure for a trial is in fact at the root of their early release (because neither a judge nor a jury is a qualified MD). This is medieval justice at its near best, if you don't count capital punishment.
From what you wrote, you really really really should give Gambas some consideration ; while certainly a bit "young" to fill all your needs, you'd be amazed at what it can do for you now, and a casual look at the dev list would give you an inside glimpse of how it's going to be truly amazing soon.
At the moment, Gambas can use perl regexp, raw sockets (tcp, udp, icmp, local), embeds libcurl (http, ftp, smtp, [soon] telnet), can work as a CGI with apache, can act as a standalone server, has xml / xml-rpc / xsl native capabilities, integrates seamlessly with MySQL, Postgresql, sqllite, firebird ; and this is only a small subset of Gambas abilities. In fact, it's dead easy to write a C++ wrapper around any shared library to use it with gambas.
It may sound like proselytism, but I've been really stunned by the power of Gamabs and the easyness of programming with it.
If I had mod points, I'd gladly give them all to you ; I'm not a programmer by education, but I've always programmed tools since I have a computer. Basic could be abused in the past (in fact it was more or less a requirement with MS-BASIC on 8 bits computers - 48 Kb RAM !) but since OOP has become widespread, you just can't beat that language for day to day scripting, SQL access etc. Even in the mid 80s, if you were lucky enough to have a better PC than the average plastic toy, you could go with Basic-E or CBasic, which were by many aspects precursors to Java.
The sad truth is today's Basics (VB, Gambas...) have an unfounded bad reputation ; you can't really abuse them anymore, and with a bit of care, they make a very good entry point in the programming realm for everybody. And if Linux is to become relevant on the desktop, it needs power users to be able to switch the enormous base of custom applications made in VB for every business out there on Linux. The VB6 converter in Gambas might become soon the killer app of Linux, in that respect, combined with superior DB access and tight KDE integration (yes, you can use DCOP in Gambas).
To me, Gambas, being free software, fills the same spot MBasic was fulfilling on Amstrad CPC or Commodore 64. It gives control to the user, and that is priceless. Since my 8 bits days, I've learned bits of x86 ASM, Clipper, C, C++, perl, and liked the extra power it gave me ; but I've indulged in Gambas for a couple of months, and realisticaly, it's the only way to create a cool looking, desktop integrated application on spare time in a pinch. If I were again the teen I was, I'd like to begin programming with it because it would be the quickest rewarding experience in programming. You get to love programming cool things you can show to the world before you actually begin to like programming correctly for the sake of it.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I like gimp for small web usage (face it, nobody out there gives a rat ass about color calibration of his/her monitor), to do proper photo work, the lack of profile import/conversion is a showstoper. So I recently took the time to hand pick various softwares and integrate them into a workflow. First, ufraw to get a decent 16 bits tiff out of my *ist, with custom icc profile converted to proper sRGB colorspace ; then krita (can work on those tiffs and keep colorimetry info), inkscape, scribus and quanta+. Most of KDE apps are cms aware and can output cmyk. No excuse to shell out an ungodly amount of money for a casual usage, and no need to pirate anymore.
I worked in a (very big) bookstore last month, and the sales on Vista books have been terrible. On an initial order of 250 for a title, due to be sold in a month, we barely hit 70 in two months. At the same time, the demand on Mac books (one tiny shelve at the moment) have sky rocketed ; publishers can't deliver at the rate they are sold. I can't know if that's a lasting trend, but ordinary people at the moment are jumping the windows train by boatloads toward Mac safety.
considering what happened last time the US showed "proofs" of something to the world, I wouldn't be in a hurry to see those ones.
Just to nitpick, but Galileo Galilei wasn't the first nor the only one to describe heliocentrism - Nicolas Copernic was the forethinker of that system, and Galileo Galilei main discoveries (Saturn's rings, Jupiter's satellites, physics of the pendulum etc.) weren't in the line at his trial. Actually, most of the learned scholars of the time knew for a fact that heliocentrism gave far more accurate mathematicals results to build sailing tables.
Galileo Galilei faced troubles because he wrote that helliocentrism was the physical TRUTH. He would have escaped any trial (and was offered a plea bargain as a matter of fact) had he accepted to write that heliocentrism was a mere hypothesis. But he refused and the rest is history. As to know why he was so stubborn, we now know there was a mix of self-pride, and insurance he received from high profile individuals among the Catholic Church that the Pope was considering adopting a progressive doctrine. That turned out to be deceptive. Basically, he was caught in the middle of a political fight, and sided with the wrong persons.
I totaly agree with you ; having used a DOS / windows PC between 1990 and 1998 for lack of credible alternative, I indulged in Quick Basic, qbasic and VB (along various other languages too) and when that's the only possibility you get to toy with your computer, they're better than nothing. But since then I went on linux, and I had a good panel of other fine languages - but no useful basic. Until Gambas. Today, I use Gambas for most of my prototyping, and it's really a lot of fun.
Yes, that's the crux of the problem when people (not to single you out) tend to promote nearly any Microsoft product : they have no outside reference to similar system / language / application, because they only used Microsoft idea of those applications. MS-Basic is a classic symptom of that. Burned in ROM in those 8 bits time, with other languages (sometimes just other basic dialects) coming at a premium, most people tended to stay with what they had at hand, had fun with it and mostly found it to be "the way to go". But for those who had exposure to true basic incarnations, MS-Basic was already an unbearable antic in its prime.
Just for your information, C-Basic was the brainchild of G. Eubanks, later CEO of symantec, and the first p-code Basic. It stands for Commercial basic as numerical computations were conducted internaly in Binary Coded Decimal (BCD), therefore wasting memory but giving great accuracy. C-Basic was targeted at and very successful in business applications, much like cobol (without the hassles) on minicomputers. C-Basic came with a true compiler too, giving a very professional finishing touch to your programs. In a sense, today's basics, VB / .Net included, owe their legacy more to C-Basic than to MS-Basic.
I understood what he said, and I stand on my position : Visual Basic appart (not so great but still a real leap forward), all previous attempts from MS were crappy considering what was available from other vendors, especially basics running with CP/M. Most already had dual modes (sequential / compiled), ISAM file access, ON... GOSUB statements instead of GOTOs, etc.
Yes, I used all of them. My favourite was and for some features still is Sord's BASIC-II (released in 1983). qbasic and quickbasic 2.0 were still a good light year behind that one, and not until VB arrived was it outclassed.
Pardon me, but back in those times, you never tried CBasic dialects, did you ? If you had, you surely wouldn't mention MS-Basic as a good product from Microsoft, focused on users. Even then, most other basics had already dropped line numbering in favor of non-sequential numeric labels at worst, alpha labels at best. And to nail it, no other basics of reputation I know of had computational bugs in floating point arithmetics.
Your statement is both true and false ; true, if you leave a suitcase or a bag in a public place, you'd most certainly trigger a bomb squad intervention. False, because you won't make any news coverage for it unless it' a real bomb (and even then, it's unsure a word of it would leak before any arrest is made), and a prankster wouldn't be charged for "attempted terrorism" for a prank. At most, a good slap on the wrists and that's all. No mass paranoia fueled by irresponsible media channels chasing for audience, no war waging politicians going to exploit it for self promotion.
I think you're speaking of "bleeding", and it has been incorporated in scribus a couple of rev. ago.
IANAMD, but in non life threatening conditions (infections in odd places like deep sinus), you generally suffer for months before any cure proves efficient, so what's a couple hours more ?
It's not worldwide practice ; in France, it's the merchant's responsability to be able to give the exact amount of change, because he is the one who dictates prices. We now have a 1 cent euro coin, so the problem has vanished, but when we still had Francs, the lowest coin was 5 centimes. In the highlighted case, there would have been no nearest rounding between the seller and the buyer. Instead, the consumer would have been protected up to 1.99, because the seller would have had to give the nearest possible change without exeeding the price tag : 5 cents, making the price an effective 1.95 FF. Otherwise it would have been considered unfair advertising to display a price tag lower than the forced true paid price.
If only you were right ! But imnsho, we're entering e-medieval times. Let me explain : european nobility began as a class of warriors badly needed to protect small populations left behind by the collapse of the roman empire. This class was rewarded (feeded) for this job by the population they were protecting. Things got out of control when european countries began to stabilize and civilize enough for populations to be mostly safe, and nobles became a heavy burden. But as they had seized political power, this situation lasted for centuries until the french revolution. We're on the verge of letting software editors seize the political power of letting us use our computer as we see fit in exchange of a protection insurance. If we let that happen, then we'll be back in medieval times for good, and that will last probably a very, very long time. Just say NO.
mod parent up !
I read this story earlier on el reg, and since then I really feel sick for this teacher. Facing 40 years in jail for what appears to the most casual internet user as bad luck is so way out of reality touch it's totaly unbelievable.
Her case desserves the world's attention and help ; I'm wondering wether it couldn't be brought to some NGO attention such as Amnesty international, for it looks like a violation of her human rights. This could help her finding a competent lawyer.
I'm really upset a person's life can be shred to pieces that way, just to fulfill some obvious political ambitions.
Note that it is only in English that the measure of distance is spelt "metre". Other languages (e.g. German, French) use "meter"
In french, you write "mètre", and if you're an english native speaker, there's a high probability you just can't pronounce it right.
The French tried to change that after their revolution. It went down in failure because there was only one day of rest per nine work days.
This is only part of the reason. In addition to the off-work sundays, there were many holydays throughout the year in the gregorian calendar, and they were removed from the new one. Truly, the 'old' calendar was very well suited to farming labour, managing time between activity periods and rest periods. The 'new' calendar was much more bend toward the industrial needs, impervious to seasons change as well as human needs (it's easier to organize production teams in various shifts). But it came too soon as farming was still (and for at least another century) the dominant activity. Hence the reject.
What's not funny at all is to think about what China could do in a really near future. For instance, selling millions of EDV players for peanuts. Hiring 2nd zone occidental actors or singers to reenact classic films or make near copies of popular music styles. Our western entertainement industry is headind toward a major crisis, and I fear a shift of economic power in the next 15 years, because he who owns factories owns the business, ultimately.
You may add that windows changes a lot between versions, unlike linux. Tools change of name, menus change of place / look, even clicking is not that straight forward. Every "improvement" in windows needs a lot of learning, while if you can't remember what GUI does what in linux, you can always roll up your sleeves and do it the old way with xterm, man, and vi.
There are a couple of very simple answers,
"simplistic" is more adequate here.
though you seem more interested in hating on Americans than rational thinking.
Certainly not ; it's not because I don't sing every chance I get the stars and stripes that I hate America. There are a lot of things I actually like about your country, but your legal system happens to not be part of those things, simply because it's retarded, fucked up, cruel, and illogical. Oh, and it's now the only one among democratic countries that violates the UN Humans Rights charter by structure rather than by exception. Overall, a very pityfull mess. I personaly would use your so hyped 1st amendment right to protest every weekend if my country happened to have a judicial system in the same league as China and Libya.
Your flawed premise is that a nonconviction is a judgment of innoncence
I beg to differ ; I know the difference. But whatever your efforts, you're only showing that the US system puts emphasis on the personnal revenge (of the victim) rather than social peace. That's the hallmark of a pre-christian germanic, tribe based, family enforced, system, in which the common law is still rooted. Sing it the way you like, that's completely backward in the modern age.
And if we now look at your examples, then for case (1) why doesn't the State be liable for its failure ? For case (2), why would a jury be reluctant to convict a proven criminal, if not for lack of proof ? (recursively see point 1 to find the liability). Case (3) proves just that the system is flawed, giving 2 conflicting answers to a single question, thank you for the help.
And, he was essentially tried twice, with the second trial being a civil case, where he lost.
This in itself is a proof of how wrong the US legal system is. In most countries, at least, there cn't be a contradiction beteen the outcome of the criminal prosecution and the civil case. Criminal justice being generaly favoured over private interests, if the criminal verdict is "not guilty", then the civil case is terminated. How can you be held liable for something the society said you didn't do ? You have to look hard at some primitive tribes to find similar discrepensies, but at least they have the excuse to believe in magical forces and surnatural power, and the necessity for a scapegoat to restore balance in the universe, either with his life or his money (see for instance Maus and evy-Struss works).
Of course, one could argue that many US citizens have a very primitive cosmology, too, this maybe explaining that.
Blood found in his mother's house and a sleeping bag found in his car match his former wife's
For the sleeping bag, ever heard that french song by singer Camille : "les ex c'est sexy" (ex-es are sexy) ? There might be tons of reasons for soon-to-be divorced couples to have consensual sex, even in the middle of an otherwise bad fight (yes, been there done that - a good lover remains a good lover even if the person's an asshole). Obviously, you don't want the children to witness, so you take a sleeping bag, put a Disney on TV, and go anywhere slightly remote. And for the bleeding, well, shit happens every day. You cut yourself on things, ...
For the dismantled seat, tool set, bags, tape, crime novels and all the other stuff, I bet more than half the slashdot crowd is in deep trouble if there's a crime nearby, because most of us have already all of those items in our trunks, and most of us have been driving in less than pristine cars.
Circumstantial evidences are no evidence at all, except evidence of poor police job.
Statistically, sex offenders have a very high commit-it-again rate.
Complete BS. http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060516_predat or_panic.html
For what we know, sex offenders are like other offenders ; many are just your once-in-a-lifetime (because they had oppotunity or whatever) type, a few are true maniacs in the medical meaning of the word. While the first type desserve a sentence, and don't need more attention than anybody else afterward, and probably less than a DIU convict, the latter type are mentaly ill persons, and they need constant medical attention instead of jail ; and they should be held in hospital until proven safe for release. Jail only prevent them from accessing adequate cure for their condition. The social pressure for a trial is in fact at the root of their early release (because neither a judge nor a jury is a qualified MD). This is medieval justice at its near best, if you don't count capital punishment.
From what you wrote, you really really really should give Gambas some consideration ; while certainly a bit "young" to fill all your needs, you'd be amazed at what it can do for you now, and a casual look at the dev list would give you an inside glimpse of how it's going to be truly amazing soon.
At the moment, Gambas can use perl regexp, raw sockets (tcp, udp, icmp, local), embeds libcurl (http, ftp, smtp, [soon] telnet), can work as a CGI with apache, can act as a standalone server, has xml / xml-rpc / xsl native capabilities, integrates seamlessly with MySQL, Postgresql, sqllite, firebird ; and this is only a small subset of Gambas abilities. In fact, it's dead easy to write a C++ wrapper around any shared library to use it with gambas.
It may sound like proselytism, but I've been really stunned by the power of Gamabs and the easyness of programming with it.
If I had mod points, I'd gladly give them all to you ; I'm not a programmer by education, but I've always programmed tools since I have a computer. Basic could be abused in the past (in fact it was more or less a requirement with MS-BASIC on 8 bits computers - 48 Kb RAM !) but since OOP has become widespread, you just can't beat that language for day to day scripting, SQL access etc. Even in the mid 80s, if you were lucky enough to have a better PC than the average plastic toy, you could go with Basic-E or CBasic, which were by many aspects precursors to Java.
The sad truth is today's Basics (VB, Gambas...) have an unfounded bad reputation ; you can't really abuse them anymore, and with a bit of care, they make a very good entry point in the programming realm for everybody. And if Linux is to become relevant on the desktop, it needs power users to be able to switch the enormous base of custom applications made in VB for every business out there on Linux. The VB6 converter in Gambas might become soon the killer app of Linux, in that respect, combined with superior DB access and tight KDE integration (yes, you can use DCOP in Gambas).
To me, Gambas, being free software, fills the same spot MBasic was fulfilling on Amstrad CPC or Commodore 64. It gives control to the user, and that is priceless. Since my 8 bits days, I've learned bits of x86 ASM, Clipper, C, C++, perl, and liked the extra power it gave me ; but I've indulged in Gambas for a couple of months, and realisticaly, it's the only way to create a cool looking, desktop integrated application on spare time in a pinch. If I were again the teen I was, I'd like to begin programming with it because it would be the quickest rewarding experience in programming. You get to love programming cool things you can show to the world before you actually begin to like programming correctly for the sake of it.