If this keeps up Linux becomes a solid games platform.
VirtualBox 2.x (2.1? not sure) recently got 3d acceleration support. Most of the other open source VMs (as well as the proprietary ones) are also going to accelerated 3d. Combined with the general move towards multiple cores and hardware support for virtualisation, this is pretty much guaranteed to bring decent windows (and OS X) app and gaming support to Linux. If physics acceleration takes off more, it'll be the next milestone, but there's still time for that, and the 3d acceleration technology combined with things like OpenCL should help to make physics accel support a smaller/faster project.
Madness. Python 3 is excellent, with improvements all around. Even the unicode changes alone are enough to make me want to switch. I just wish distros and other packages had kept up with the alphas, so I could move as soon as 3 came out.
Actually, that's one (the only) area where I agree on your KDE4 comparison: KDE4 failed to keep its python APIs up to date with its C++ platform. As a result, the KDE3 apps I'd written couldn't be ported in time for KDE4. Perhaps if they'd supported their developers (if not their users), they'd have a decent platform now. As it stands, I've switched back to GNOME after many years away. Horrible release management all around for KDE4 I'm afraid. They really need to drop that whole "x.3 is the REAL release" B.S.
Thanks for this summary, it made interesting reading. I can see you approached this in a moderate, thoughtful, and reasonable manner.
However, I think you missed an important aspect of your own "jump ship of their own accord" argument: the fact that people using more recent third-party 2.6+ python modules will also have to start considering whether django itself is keeping up with their needs. For me, this is the main concern. I've been waiting on decent unicode support, amongst other things, in python for years. Now that it's finally here and stable, I really hate the idea of having to keep coding to the older apis for the sake of django etc. If my projects can target 2.6/3.x, and django is the only thing holding it back from that, then I'm quite likely to abandon django for those projects. It'd be a shame, as django *is* the nicest web platform I've found for most things, and it has at least made the transition to __unicode__(). Still, when it comes to developing new code, it makes little sense to target platforms that are already behind the times.
Ideally, I would have liked to see django have a branch targetting 3.x as soon as there was a 2.6/3.x alpha available, with the port being merged and released in sync with the 3.x release. That's how it should be done, assuming enough manpower. Failing that, I think it's advisable to port ASAP. Waiting years is pretty bad. In fact, it's the kind of bad release syncing that made me give up on KDE 4 as a dev platform too: they simply didn't release python APIs in time for developers to target the platform. As a result, KDE4 hasn't been targetted much.
Exactly. If you really enjoy computing, but have found the industry isn't what the hobby was, and you're a people person (which it sounds like you are), then you might enjoy a different application of your skills, like teaching IT (or even teaching math). But for god's sake, get out of the subject altogether, if it doesn't interest you. Sometimes it's hard enough to enjoy when you have a passion for it.
I specifically referred to "the idea of a particular person owning a particular piece of land" as my subject scope. Anything you read into it beyond that is your hangup, not mine. Anyway, you're becoming angry and offensive now (which, admittedly, I may have encouraged a little; sorry), so I'm dropping this discussion here.
Hardware support in Linux works well if you build your own machines, or happen to get one with supported hardware. How do you find a system that is fully supported and for which distributions?
That was true --- in the past. If anything, I find that the opposite to be true these days: installing linux on a machine tends to make it just work. Installing windows, on the other hand, is a nightmare... occasionally, I find that my network card is unsupported without drivers, which is a real hassle by the time you get windows or some app to tell you what chip's involved, download drivers on some other machine and transfer them etc. Then you have printers, mice, graphics cards, etc. which are often unsupported by the standard drivers, or have limited features. Instead, they come with something that installs services, tray icons, etc., all with horrible UIs and advertising, together with scary warnings about the driver being unsigned. Granted, HP printers on Linux are just as regarding their use of using a non-standard UI, but most Linux stuff works much more nicely, with much less hassle, and bugs actually get fixed, keeping up with the rest of the OS.
if the Patent Office receives an application for an identical patent from a third party, they will reveal the NSA's patent and officially grant it to the NSA for the full term on that date.
That sounds a lot like:
Registrar: Which domain would you like?
Customer: 4jhh43gh.com
Registrar: 4jhh43gh.com? Let's see... *registers domain* Oh, sorry, that's just gone. Luckily, our agent knows exactly who owns it. Would you like to buy it for $1499?
Capitalism is hardly responsible for it. No private company did this, until the Ansari X Prize subsidized them. That prize money was donated, making SS1 of charitable origins. Capitalism is anything but charitable. In fact, between the charity money and the academic foundation that dreamed up the whole thing, it's closer to a centralised, socialist model.
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." -- John Maynard Keynes
Our system is "supposed" to foreclose on people only while they have a reasonable chance of making it, but don't work hard enough. The idea is to push people a little, so everyone works for the benefit of others, instead of lying in bed. Essentially, it's a big, fun game, that we all agree to play.
BUT, when someone gets so anal about the rules that people stop having fun in the game, then one of two things can happen: a) we all get real and treat each other decently again b) the underdogs get pissed off and show the rest exactly what they can do with their game. You (probably) don't want a society of millions or a global society of billions that suddenly decides to stop playing. Not unless you're tired of capitalism, and in favor of some years of chaos until a better system is agreed on, at least.
Yes, and they're called stone tablets. Luckily, computer researchers seem to be picking up on this, now that they're using graphite. Unfortunately it sounds like "etched in stone" will soon mean "subject to formatting".
That sounds a lot like my experience ordering from Dell actually. I'll never forget that "world shortage of glass" line they gave me as an excuse for my monitors being delayed. They were flatpanels.
Ahh, but this particular style of ashtray has roared into the sky, exploded, killed people, and shocked a nation. Not to mention costing a fortune, causing endless controversy, and having really crap tiles.
Yes, what an impossible thing. To think, that humans, the pathetic little barely-smarter-than-a-chimp creatures on a rock in the middle of nowhere might have... *gasp* limits;)
Slashdot Mirror
So... it's just a chair-throwing competition?
VirtualBox 2.x (2.1? not sure) recently got 3d acceleration support. Most of the other open source VMs (as well as the proprietary ones) are also going to accelerated 3d. Combined with the general move towards multiple cores and hardware support for virtualisation, this is pretty much guaranteed to bring decent windows (and OS X) app and gaming support to Linux. If physics acceleration takes off more, it'll be the next milestone, but there's still time for that, and the 3d acceleration technology combined with things like OpenCL should help to make physics accel support a smaller/faster project.
Madness. Python 3 is excellent, with improvements all around. Even the unicode changes alone are enough to make me want to switch. I just wish distros and other packages had kept up with the alphas, so I could move as soon as 3 came out.
Actually, that's one (the only) area where I agree on your KDE4 comparison: KDE4 failed to keep its python APIs up to date with its C++ platform. As a result, the KDE3 apps I'd written couldn't be ported in time for KDE4. Perhaps if they'd supported their developers (if not their users), they'd have a decent platform now. As it stands, I've switched back to GNOME after many years away. Horrible release management all around for KDE4 I'm afraid. They really need to drop that whole "x.3 is the REAL release" B.S.
Thanks for this summary, it made interesting reading. I can see you approached this in a moderate, thoughtful, and reasonable manner.
However, I think you missed an important aspect of your own "jump ship of their own accord" argument: the fact that people using more recent third-party 2.6+ python modules will also have to start considering whether django itself is keeping up with their needs. For me, this is the main concern. I've been waiting on decent unicode support, amongst other things, in python for years. Now that it's finally here and stable, I really hate the idea of having to keep coding to the older apis for the sake of django etc. If my projects can target 2.6/3.x, and django is the only thing holding it back from that, then I'm quite likely to abandon django for those projects. It'd be a shame, as django *is* the nicest web platform I've found for most things, and it has at least made the transition to __unicode__(). Still, when it comes to developing new code, it makes little sense to target platforms that are already behind the times.
Ideally, I would have liked to see django have a branch targetting 3.x as soon as there was a 2.6/3.x alpha available, with the port being merged and released in sync with the 3.x release. That's how it should be done, assuming enough manpower. Failing that, I think it's advisable to port ASAP. Waiting years is pretty bad. In fact, it's the kind of bad release syncing that made me give up on KDE 4 as a dev platform too: they simply didn't release python APIs in time for developers to target the platform. As a result, KDE4 hasn't been targetted much.
Exactly. If you really enjoy computing, but have found the industry isn't what the hobby was, and you're a people person (which it sounds like you are), then you might enjoy a different application of your skills, like teaching IT (or even teaching math). But for god's sake, get out of the subject altogether, if it doesn't interest you. Sometimes it's hard enough to enjoy when you have a passion for it.
Correction: all they needed was a large enough, functional, external disk.
Finding functional external drive products isn't so easy, I've discovered.
Yes, hangup.
I specifically referred to "the idea of a particular person owning a particular piece of land" as my subject scope. Anything you read into it beyond that is your hangup, not mine. Anyway, you're becoming angry and offensive now (which, admittedly, I may have encouraged a little; sorry), so I'm dropping this discussion here.
That was true --- in the past. If anything, I find that the opposite to be true these days: installing linux on a machine tends to make it just work. Installing windows, on the other hand, is a nightmare... occasionally, I find that my network card is unsupported without drivers, which is a real hassle by the time you get windows or some app to tell you what chip's involved, download drivers on some other machine and transfer them etc. Then you have printers, mice, graphics cards, etc. which are often unsupported by the standard drivers, or have limited features. Instead, they come with something that installs services, tray icons, etc., all with horrible UIs and advertising, together with scary warnings about the driver being unsigned. Granted, HP printers on Linux are just as regarding their use of using a non-standard UI, but most Linux stuff works much more nicely, with much less hassle, and bugs actually get fixed, keeping up with the rest of the OS.
Neither I nor my comment implied any such thing. You're still projecting, and your logic is flawed.
2. I implied no such thing. Please don't project your issues onto my comments.
Not really if you think about it.
Kind of missed the point there.
Of course, "dollars" is the operative word in this statement.
Of course, the idea of a particular person owning a particular piece of land is a bit crazy to begin with.
Which amounts to simple behaviourism. Nothing new here.
ISPs used to provide news as a bundled service. It was called usenet. They got bored policing it.
Depends how many you use, and whether they get distracted writing the complete works of Shakespeare.
That sounds a lot like:
Registrar: Which domain would you like?
Customer: 4jhh43gh.com
Registrar: 4jhh43gh.com? Let's see... *registers domain* Oh, sorry, that's just gone. Luckily, our agent knows exactly who owns it. Would you like to buy it for $1499?
Capitalism is hardly responsible for it. No private company did this, until the Ansari X Prize subsidized them. That prize money was donated, making SS1 of charitable origins. Capitalism is anything but charitable. In fact, between the charity money and the academic foundation that dreamed up the whole thing, it's closer to a centralised, socialist model.
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." -- John Maynard Keynes
Our system is "supposed" to foreclose on people only while they have a reasonable chance of making it, but don't work hard enough. The idea is to push people a little, so everyone works for the benefit of others, instead of lying in bed. Essentially, it's a big, fun game, that we all agree to play.
BUT, when someone gets so anal about the rules that people stop having fun in the game, then one of two things can happen: a) we all get real and treat each other decently again b) the underdogs get pissed off and show the rest exactly what they can do with their game. You (probably) don't want a society of millions or a global society of billions that suddenly decides to stop playing. Not unless you're tired of capitalism, and in favor of some years of chaos until a better system is agreed on, at least.
Yes, and they're called stone tablets. Luckily, computer researchers seem to be picking up on this, now that they're using graphite. Unfortunately it sounds like "etched in stone" will soon mean "subject to formatting".
That sounds a lot like my experience ordering from Dell actually. I'll never forget that "world shortage of glass" line they gave me as an excuse for my monitors being delayed. They were flatpanels.
Ahh, but this particular style of ashtray has roared into the sky, exploded, killed people, and shocked a nation. Not to mention costing a fortune, causing endless controversy, and having really crap tiles.
Yes, what an impossible thing. To think, that humans, the pathetic little barely-smarter-than-a-chimp creatures on a rock in the middle of nowhere might have... *gasp* limits ;)