I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment? Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?
I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. As a kid I'd played around with BBC BASIC but hadn't progressed very far and then proceeded to forget most of the little I had learned over the following decade. I eventually stumbled across Python and thought it might be interesting to have a play around and see how easily I could pick it up.
The best place to start is the non-programmers section of the Python site. I found Alan Gauld's free book here particularly useful. He teaches a complete non-programmer to programme using several languages but with the emphasis firmly on Python. The book focuses on learning to programme rather than learning a specific language and is a great place to start. Several of the other tutorials linked from the Python site are also worth a look.
Good luck and I hope you enjoy yourself as much as I did.
How did it win awards for which it was not nominated?
It didn't. The article is making a distinction between the Bafta awards, where the film didn't receive a single nomination, and the US Academy Awards, where it did well. The implication is that it possibly would have done better in the Bafta awards had screeners been available to the Bafta voters.
As has been known for years, academy members simply don't watch many of the movies they select. It's a huge farce. I'll bet that even though they didn't get the movie within a reasonable time, many vote for it anyway.
The article points out that this wasn't the case last year where Bafta voters weren't provided with screeners of Million Dollar Baby:
Clint Eastwood's boxing drama failed to gain a single nomination at the 2005 awards. One month later it scooped the major honours at the Academy Awards.
IMHO you should not even link to the site. Just the concept of open source software... the concept- is enough to refute his first arguement that software is inflexable and unable to adapt. What a totally moron thing to say.
You've misunderstood his points. On one level, his complaint with Linux and the current open source and Free software movements is not that we are unable to adapt the software but that we choose to build products that operate in a similar way to the closed source alternatives. He believes that we do not address issues as basic and as fundamental as the very notion of the file and the way in which we interact with computers. He expands upon this to incorporate the Internet and the need to interact with computers running current software and argues that due to the ubiquity of Windows we are now forced to operate in this way.
At another level, he is criticising the inflexibility of all computer code due to its digital nature. He argues quite correctly that natural language needs to be interpreted and can thus lead to ambiguity and the possibility of deeper meaning. Software code cannot do this - it is either right or it is wrong. He sees this as a limiting factor of current computers and argues that it will be increasingly problematic in the future. Our society does not run on a binary system of correct and incorrect and he argues that for our computing systems to play a greater role in the future neither should they.
And that is just one small part of the essay. I can understand why so many people here have seemingly read the first few paragraphs before giving up and dismissing the rest as drivel but he does raise some interesting questions. If you can get past the author's choice of style the essay is well worth a read.
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I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment? Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?
I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. As a kid I'd played around with BBC BASIC but hadn't progressed very far and then proceeded to forget most of the little I had learned over the following decade. I eventually stumbled across Python and thought it might be interesting to have a play around and see how easily I could pick it up.
The best place to start is the non-programmers section of the Python site. I found Alan Gauld's free book here particularly useful. He teaches a complete non-programmer to programme using several languages but with the emphasis firmly on Python. The book focuses on learning to programme rather than learning a specific language and is a great place to start. Several of the other tutorials linked from the Python site are also worth a look.
Good luck and I hope you enjoy yourself as much as I did.
How did it win awards for which it was not nominated?
It didn't. The article is making a distinction between the Bafta awards, where the film didn't receive a single nomination, and the US Academy Awards, where it did well. The implication is that it possibly would have done better in the Bafta awards had screeners been available to the Bafta voters.
As has been known for years, academy members simply don't watch many of the movies they select. It's a huge farce. I'll bet that even though they didn't get the movie within a reasonable time, many vote for it anyway.
The article points out that this wasn't the case last year where Bafta voters weren't provided with screeners of Million Dollar Baby:
You've misunderstood his points. On one level, his complaint with Linux and the current open source and Free software movements is not that we are unable to adapt the software but that we choose to build products that operate in a similar way to the closed source alternatives. He believes that we do not address issues as basic and as fundamental as the very notion of the file and the way in which we interact with computers. He expands upon this to incorporate the Internet and the need to interact with computers running current software and argues that due to the ubiquity of Windows we are now forced to operate in this way.
At another level, he is criticising the inflexibility of all computer code due to its digital nature. He argues quite correctly that natural language needs to be interpreted and can thus lead to ambiguity and the possibility of deeper meaning. Software code cannot do this - it is either right or it is wrong. He sees this as a limiting factor of current computers and argues that it will be increasingly problematic in the future. Our society does not run on a binary system of correct and incorrect and he argues that for our computing systems to play a greater role in the future neither should they.
And that is just one small part of the essay. I can understand why so many people here have seemingly read the first few paragraphs before giving up and dismissing the rest as drivel but he does raise some interesting questions. If you can get past the author's choice of style the essay is well worth a read.