Re:Backwards compatibility? Yes, backwards!
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the correction. It is confusing to me to read other's perspective - but I've been using the terms as specified to me by a major computer manufacturer 20 years ago. So maybe I have been wrong for 20 years. But it is the way I was taught by someone who should know. And this definition is consistent with everyone I have communicated with over years of interfacing with many customers.
We may be saying the same thing, though:
I was really looking at the compatibility of the software, not of Python (since the GP post asked "Will 2.4 modules and code still work?" and this is forward compatibility of the modules and code. Moving 2.4 modules and code onto 2.5 is moving them forward, not backwards.
So maybe I was wrong, but that was my logic. I think it's relative to the software that you are speaking about (are you moving the code forward, or are you moving Python backwards?). But thanks for pointing it out; it caused me to read other's perspective (on Wikipedia, etc).
Wikipedia:...a product is said to be backward compatible... when it is able to take the place of an older product, by interoperating with other products that were designed for the older product.
Can the code or module, designed to interoperate with 2.5, interoperate with 2.4? That's what I see as backward compatibility of the code.
I think you are asking about forward compatibility. 2.4 modules and code working under 2.5 is forward compatibility, and for the most part, I imagine every attempt has been made to facilitate this compatibility.
Backwards compatibility, running 2.5 code on 2.4 will really depend on whether you take advantage of the new features.
However... I bet one can easily conjure up examples of 2.4 code that performs differently on 2.5. Since, in python, you can programatic evaluations of syntax, you could easily create (meaningless) code that evaluates some 2.5 python code, within a try/except block that will jump to the except block in 2.4, and not execute the except block in 2.5. Something like this:
While I have no reason not to believe your assertion, I think it's important to point out that the linked article was dated January 1984 - more than a lifetime ago, for most marriages.
Equally interesting to me was the title: "LIFE IN HIGH-STRESS SILICON VALLRY TAKES A TOLL" with the word Valley misspelled. I wonder if it was scanned in by the NY Times.
I always thought regular expressions were garbage code in perl. Non-maintainable.
Multi-line regular expressions in Python are actually easy to use and easy to maintain. Then again, this shouldn't be a surprise - it's Python after all. (I WISH we were encouraged to use Python on the job!)
As a side note, I bought this book, and thought it was great. But got laughed at by my co-workers, who couldn't believe I'd waste time reading a book about a topic that is covered in one page in Wikipedia.
I just responded: "Read the book, and you'll get it. You'll understand why my code works and yours doesn't, why my code is fast and yours is slow."
And at the end "Is there anything else you would like to add?" That one often has a surprizing answer.
Agree! It's amazing, even those people who are not allowed to give ANY information, will go through a prepared question list answering very cautiously. Then the open ended one at the end, they spill it! Like they have been holding back, and feel guilty.
My favorite one, when hiring a bookkeeper: "Would you trust this person with your personal checking account?"
"If this candidate were elegible, would you hire them again?"
"Would you entrust your business to this person's programming skills?"
"If you had a difficult technical problem with a key customer, would you turn it over to this person?"
"Would you stake your professional career on this person's ability to [program | show up on time | meet a deadline | deliver against a commitment]?
"Would you entrust this person to write the software to control a device that would mean life-or-death to you?"
Perhaps I am biased, as a developer for sales, but I don't particularly see a problem with timeline and budget being overriding constraints of the specification.
In fact, our most successful projects are those that are time driven. The question is what are the minimal features to be included in this system, knowing that we cannot exceed one month development time.
It's similar to the old HP calculator specification "Build me a calculator that fits in my shirt pocket". That sort of constraint (or time or budget) has a tendency to limit feature-creep.
Your attempt to illustrate the idea of repeating seems to be missing the target though. Repeating works only when there is really a chance of grabbing the attention with the first showing. Ads need to satisfy the the aesthetic demands of the consumer. They need to give something: nice colors, a beach, a tree.
Show me something and then I will read the repetition.
How many times do you need to hear/see an advert for it to sink in?
This system is geared for that once only viewing:
As each passing device has a unique Bluetooth signal, this enables the screen to identify different individuals passing by. It builds a record of the adverts those people have been previously been shown to make sure messages are not repeated.
Surely advertisers want you to be paying enough attention to get the product information but to not drill it in 500 times a day.
Seems like a good idea, but the privacy advocates will go bananas (and demand it dismantled when all thats needed is to take out your bluteeth)
How many times do you need to hear/see an advert for it to sink in?
This system is geared for that once only viewing:
As each passing device has a unique Bluetooth signal, this enables the screen to identify different individuals passing by. It builds a record of the adverts those people have been previously been shown to make sure messages are not repeated.
Surely advertisers want you to be paying enough attention to get the product information but to not drill it in 500 times a day.
Seems like a good idea, but the privacy advocates will go bananas (and demand it dismantled when all thats needed is to take out your bluteeth)
How about learning all of the above: Ruby, Rails, Python, IronPython, and then choosing the right tool for the job. I don't know about you, but personally, I want all my tools to improve, as well as my skills using various tools to improve.
Thanks for the link. I'm confused, though. You say that Second from the Left is Pluto and Charon. I think you mean this animation. But the caption under the 5th image (zoomed here) says that it's a diagram of the Pluto-Charon system. (I should mention that my references to "2nd" and "5th" and "the caption" are talking about the link that you provided.)
Could Wikipedia be wrong?!??!!
The Pluto page has a diagram which is more like the 2nd one - indicating that you are correct, and the caption is wrong. I'd like to change Wikipedia, but I don't know enough about the subject matter.
In other news, Ceres is being renamed Mickey, Charon is being renamed Daffy, and Disney/Pixar has a new movie coming out with the clever name of "2003 UB313".
Corporate sponsorship is running rampant... how did they get naming rights to the 9th planet in the first place?
In four years, a crop of graduates will be coming out of college that will be taking jobs, and many of them know NOTHING about IT.
In ten years, the people coming out of college include that 12-year old brat that lives next door. They'll be doing things with techniques and technologies that haven't been invented yet. One of those 12 year olds will be the next Gates/Jobs/Packard/Ellison...
It's never too late. Devote yourself to something (in technology), and between 4 and ten years, you can easily be at a marketable level, perhaps at an expert level.
the answer better not be "posting another 'Ask Slashdot'...;-)
Unfortunately, in four years, he'll probably be posting an 'Ask Digg' question.
Re:I got into med school at 28, finished training
on
How Old is Too Old?
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· Score: 1
I got into med school at 28, finished training @39
You probably didn't intend to be taken literally, but I'd be disappointed if you consider yourself finished with your training.
My wife works with a lot of physicians, and it's scary how many don't keep up with the latest developments. Sadly, the pharmaceutical industry is kept up-to-date much better than your average physician who has been out of school for a few years.
Please don't consider yourself finished with training!
I did a search on there this morning, and it displays the SQL statement for me, which is very handy...
Select SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS * from search_data WHERE match (anon_id,query,click_url) against ('4417749 ') LIMIT 0,30
Interestingly, if you do the standard SQL injection, searching for something like "4417749') LIMIT 0,30; DROP TABLE SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS;--", I bet you will screw it up for them. Kids, don't try this at home. I'd never encourage people to do something illegal!
The point of this posting is:
Learn about SQL Injection, and protect against it.
Don't display your SQL query to your users.
If you don't know what SQL injection is, try a simple example: Search for "1','0" (skip the double quotes, but not the single quotes) and you'll see it in action without causing harm.
He's got a little more than Jack. He's got a company. And it has value. You seem to think that until it's converted to money, it's not worth anything. Oddly, you call that paper, when in fact, that's all that money is - paper.
Question, if you have a million dollars in dollar bills, or you have a million dollars in ownership of a company which can easily be sold for that - and there's a liquid market - what's the difference?
Digg could EASILY be sold for a million. Easily 3-4 million. No Question about it. No one with half-a-brain would doubt it. So, Kevin 30-40% of 3 or 4 million. The article speculates that it could be sold for $200M. Clearly it's more than 3 or 4. So I think that he has something more than "jack shite", as you say.
Know anything about physics? Potential Energy > No Energy. Well Potential Cash > jack shite.
Slashdot Mirror
We may be saying the same thing, though:
I was really looking at the compatibility of the software, not of Python (since the GP post asked "Will 2.4 modules and code still work?" and this is forward compatibility of the modules and code. Moving 2.4 modules and code onto 2.5 is moving them forward, not backwards.
So maybe I was wrong, but that was my logic. I think it's relative to the software that you are speaking about (are you moving the code forward, or are you moving Python backwards?). But thanks for pointing it out; it caused me to read other's perspective (on Wikipedia, etc).
Wikipedia: ...a product is said to be backward compatible... when it is able to take the place of an older product, by interoperating with other products that were designed for the older product.
Can the code or module, designed to interoperate with 2.5, interoperate with 2.4? That's what I see as backward compatibility of the code.
Backwards compatibility, running 2.5 code on 2.4 will really depend on whether you take advantage of the new features.
However... I bet one can easily conjure up examples of 2.4 code that performs differently on 2.5. Since, in python, you can programatic evaluations of syntax, you could easily create (meaningless) code that evaluates some 2.5 python code, within a try/except block that will jump to the except block in 2.4, and not execute the except block in 2.5. Something like this:
try:
....eval("some 2.5 -specific code")
....print "2.5"
except:
....print "2.4"
Therefore it IS possible to create weird examples that are not forward-compatible.
Equally interesting to me was the title: "LIFE IN HIGH-STRESS SILICON VALLRY TAKES A TOLL" with the word Valley misspelled. I wonder if it was scanned in by the NY Times.
Multi-line regular expressions in Python are actually easy to use and easy to maintain. Then again, this shouldn't be a surprise - it's Python after all. (I WISH we were encouraged to use Python on the job!)
As a side note, I bought this book, and thought it was great. But got laughed at by my co-workers, who couldn't believe I'd waste time reading a book about a topic that is covered in one page in Wikipedia.
I just responded: "Read the book, and you'll get it. You'll understand why my code works and yours doesn't, why my code is fast and yours is slow."
My favorite one, when hiring a bookkeeper: "Would you trust this person with your personal checking account?"
"If this candidate were elegible, would you hire them again?"
"Would you entrust your business to this person's programming skills?"
"If you had a difficult technical problem with a key customer, would you turn it over to this person?"
"Would you stake your professional career on this person's ability to [program | show up on time | meet a deadline | deliver against a commitment]?
"Would you entrust this person to write the software to control a device that would mean life-or-death to you?"
Hand this problem to the person you are planning to eat with. While he's solving the puzzle, scarf down the pizza.
Eat, don't cut.In fact, our most successful projects are those that are time driven. The question is what are the minimal features to be included in this system, knowing that we cannot exceed one month development time.
It's similar to the old HP calculator specification "Build me a calculator that fits in my shirt pocket". That sort of constraint (or time or budget) has a tendency to limit feature-creep.
ok, you asked for it.
How many times do you need to hear/see an advert for it to sink in?
This system is geared for that once only viewing:
As each passing device has a unique Bluetooth signal, this enables the screen to identify different individuals passing by. It builds a record of the adverts those people have been previously been shown to make sure messages are not repeated.
Surely advertisers want you to be paying enough attention to get the product information but to not drill it in 500 times a day.
Seems like a good idea, but the privacy advocates will go bananas (and demand it dismantled when all thats needed is to take out your bluteeth)
How about learning all of the above: Ruby, Rails, Python, IronPython, and then choosing the right tool for the job. I don't know about you, but personally, I want all my tools to improve, as well as my skills using various tools to improve.
Say we're trying to do a comparison between A and B in BASIC:
Syntax error.Always fun to correct those who correct others. :) You're turn. (sic)
No no no.
The Enquirer is a Cincinnati newspaper. You're thinking of the NATIONAL Enquirer.
Could Wikipedia be wrong?!??!!
The Pluto page has a diagram which is more like the 2nd one - indicating that you are correct, and the caption is wrong. I'd like to change Wikipedia, but I don't know enough about the subject matter.
Corporate sponsorship is running rampant... how did they get naming rights to the 9th planet in the first place?
In four years, a crop of graduates will be coming out of college that will be taking jobs, and many of them know NOTHING about IT.
In ten years, the people coming out of college include that 12-year old brat that lives next door. They'll be doing things with techniques and technologies that haven't been invented yet. One of those 12 year olds will be the next Gates/Jobs/Packard/Ellison...
It's never too late. Devote yourself to something (in technology), and between 4 and ten years, you can easily be at a marketable level, perhaps at an expert level.
My wife works with a lot of physicians, and it's scary how many don't keep up with the latest developments. Sadly, the pharmaceutical industry is kept up-to-date much better than your average physician who has been out of school for a few years.
Please don't consider yourself finished with training!
Uhh.. Not to nit-pick... ok, yes, to nit-pick (sorry!), I think Yahoo's competitors are saying "Don't be evil" not "Do no evil".
You're not the only one making this mistake.
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
I did a search on there this morning, and it displays the SQL statement for me, which is very handy...
Select SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS * from search_data WHERE match (anon_id,query,click_url) against ('4417749 ') LIMIT 0,30
Interestingly, if you do the standard SQL injection, searching for something like "4417749') LIMIT 0,30; DROP TABLE SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS;--", I bet you will screw it up for them. Kids, don't try this at home. I'd never encourage people to do something illegal!
The point of this posting is:
Learn about SQL Injection, and protect against it.
Don't display your SQL query to your users.
If you don't know what SQL injection is, try a simple example: Search for "1','0" (skip the double quotes, but not the single quotes) and you'll see it in action without causing harm.
Question, if you have a million dollars in dollar bills, or you have a million dollars in ownership of a company which can easily be sold for that - and there's a liquid market - what's the difference?
Digg could EASILY be sold for a million. Easily 3-4 million. No Question about it. No one with half-a-brain would doubt it. So, Kevin 30-40% of 3 or 4 million. The article speculates that it could be sold for $200M. Clearly it's more than 3 or 4. So I think that he has something more than "jack shite", as you say.
Know anything about physics? Potential Energy > No Energy. Well Potential Cash > jack shite.
So a Brat Packer would be one who either packs the meat into the brat casing, or packs the brat into someplace that I don't want to think about.