Yeah, this afflicts me, too, with the free OpenOffice distributions.
I've heard that if you lay down some money for either Star Office or Ximian Office that they come with "metrically equivalent" fonts, anti-aliased and TrueType, too.
Since MyCorp has site licenses for Windows and Office already, it would be really handy if there was an easy way to get OpenOffice to use those fonts directly.
A little effort using cabextract and Microsofts limited subset of freely distributable fonts can help the ameliorate the problem.
launches quickly, and if it does use a lot of memory
How much of the speed of MS Office is gained by Windows having preloaded some of the needed DLLs?
I recall a similar speed comparison argument about IE vs Mozilla on Windows where this was a factor in the observed startup time.
And OpenOffice does start up slow. I'm thinking that somewhere in/etc/rc.d/init.d there should be launched an OpenOfficeServices Daemon to sit around like a memory hog but make user launches seem snappier.
I think they considered the costs that most people in IT don't like to think about, the costs of being further locked-in to a vendor that will later be more able to change prices at will and make up for any discounts on present day products. Like printers and inkjet cartridges.
To be fair, there are other costs associated with switching to SuSE Linux, such as all the users assimilating the differences between Windows and Linux and learning how to use Linux productively.
Overall, though, for right or wrong reasons, Munich made a gutsy choice and a choice that will, in the long run, serve them well.
Other IT organizations would do well to put in more than a superficial effort into evaluating Linux.
Why?
No, not to make FOSS advocates like me happy, but rather to save themselves money no matter whether they pick Linux or to stay with Windows!
The fact is, Linux is the only effective leveraging tool anyone in IT has in the negotiations with Microsoft.
IT managers that can demonstrate they've looked seriously at Linux can obtain valuable price concessions from Microsoft.
And, who knows, one of these months, these Linux evaluations might prove that Linux is the better choice.
Evaluating Linux is a win-win proposition for anyone facing renegotiation with Redmond.
People that haven't used a TiVo might well dismiss it as a kick-ass VCR and not be willing to pay too much for one.
For me, I only discovered exactly how much VCR hassle I was avoiding only after I bought a TiVo.
Time shifting is an indispensible part of life for people with hectic schedules.
Programming the VCR for each show, explicitly putting in the time, with pre and post slop intervals to account for inaccuracies, pre-tuning the satellite receiver to the one and only right channel, watching crappy VHS tapes, rewinding said tapes, shoving many unlabeled "temporary" tapes in and out of the VCR, were all so much hassle that has been almost eliminated by buying a TiVo.
Oh, fast-forwarding through commercials is much easier than when using VHS tapes.
And it was definitely worthwhile installing 100 GB IDE drives into the unit in place of the paltry 20 GB drives.
I could never go back to an analog VCR.
Most people underestimate the value of the TiVo until they own one.
But network connectivity and the ability to archive to DVD-R would be real plusses. I wouldn't even need the latter if network connectivity were good and I could store a couple TB of shows on a big fileserver.
First, IE and Windows help to provide a mutual lock-in, while bundling Mozilla with Windows would permit easier migration away from Windows because users would no longer have to confront Something Different as a browser.
Second, security holes have afflicted Microsoft for long enough that they simply shrug them off, claim that they'll be fixed in the next update, that premature open notification of vulnerabilities is Bad, and that Hackers are responsible for Evil.
The cumulative problem of security holes will be used as evidence for the need to have TCPA instituted as a standard, which will also cut down on Terrorism and Pedophiles as well as Bad Hackers.
No need for MS to adopt Mozilla and compromise a perfectly useful leveraging tool in IE, that now has over 90% of the market.
So Microsoft has more than enough cash on hand to buy out AOL/TW.
If the marketplace were completely free and unfettered, you'd think that Microsoft would, rather than pour money down the hole that has been MSN, simply buy out AOL with its 30 million subscribers.
But Microsoft won't do this because they know they can't; that the DoJ would immediately ask questions about unfair market consolidation were such a buyout offer made.
So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN.
As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action, and no inconvenient questions will be raised except by AOL management and stockholders.
Since MS can rely upon a steady revenue stream from Windows and Office to subsidize its efforts into taking over new markets they enjoy an advantage that AOL and other competitors simply don't have.
People buy Windows and Office like they're a standard, a necessity, that's no more avoidable than paying gasoline taxes.
Yes, Microsoft has the enviable position of just collecting taxes - like a government. And competing against the government is a no-win situation.
It is a foregone conclusion that AOL will lose. They will wither to nothing, or simply to a marginally-sized pet, like Apple, who would have died long ago if Microsoft had decided to not release Office for Mac.
While I still grapple with language idiosyncracies of LaTeX from time to time, the reason I keep coming back is that it produces the best quality output for mathematics-laden documents.
WYSIWYG systems I've hated, especially when it comes time to learn yet another gui-based equation editor with yet another set of key mappings that is not like the default emacs set I have hardwired into my brain from writing code. After you learn a few of the basics in LaTeX, like
$$
\int_0^\infty \alpha_i(x) dx = 5
$$
will produce a definite integral from 0 to infinity of greek alpha with an "i" subscript there's no going back.
Besides being free (speech & beer), I have LaTeX source files from 17 years ago that still produces nice looking documents on todays computers even after changing hardware, OSes, etc. There were popular word processing systems available back then were such files would be next to worthless.
That kind of timelessness in the age of planned product upgrades and binary proprietary formats impresses me.
If you want to do version control or searching of document, then having its native format in ASCII text permits the use of CVS and grep and doesn't obligate you to buy some product to see your document.
For the future, I'd like to see something like DocBook takeoff, but it's just not there yet, AFAICT.
When someone gets a MathML parser to render as nicely as DEK's code, then I'll consider moving from LaTeX.
Note that these competitors of Microsoft don't have:
US$4e10 cash reserves
revenue cows like Windows & Office to bring in money without lifting a finger
AOL has been scrambling to compete with MSN, surviving on razor-thin margins (Time Warner is the bigger, stronger part of the company).
Sun can't afford to develop competitive successors to its UltraSPARC hardware in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, Lintel servers are eating into the UNIX server business, making the market much smaller than it was once (the flip side is that Lintel make Wintel look expensive, even if Wintel is cheaper than Solaris/SPARC). These days, the one reason to go with Sun over Linux on clusters is for HA 64-way high throughput machines connected to SANs. Despite the margins on that class of machine, not everyone needs one, and there are ferocious competitors like IBM, HP and SGI with which to contend.
Red Hat is only now barely getting profitable, mainly selling Linux services. They certainly don't have oodles of money to throw around.
IBM is really the only financially strong player in the whole deck.
Despite my pessimistic tone, I'm a Mozilla (and now Firebird) user and wish the project success. I will continue to be a Mozilla advocate because I want to see open standards on my computer instead of yet another road to getting ruled.
First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be.
Yes, the percentage of people running test kernels is lower.
But I think the absolute numbers of people running test kernels is about the same or higher. There are just that many more Linux users now compared to the 0.99 days, so even a smaller percentage of all users can mean a greater number of testers.
A decreasing percentage is valid, though. Back in the old days, the kernel was so much less friendly to production use that the only people using it were people willing to compile source by hand, edit C code to get their hardware to work, etc.
most people barely seem to have an idea what "engineering" even means.
Yes, indeed.
It was explained to me a while back just why it is that doting mothers like to be able to say "my son the doctor" or "my son the lawyer" and not "my son the engineer" - the same reason for the lack of recognition and widespread esteem for the engineering profession.
The reason is that doctors and lawyers, professionally trained, offer their services retail direct to the public.
Engineers, professionally trained, rarely offer their services to the public, rather they offer those services in a wholesale way to large corporations, governments and other entities.
And "cost" is not just money, but intangible things that courtrooms are apt to misjudge.
When IE became distributed by default with Windows, and was difficult to remove, and one had to explicitly download NS from a website, all this makes NS effectively cost more than IE to the average consumer.
It is insufficient for Mozilla to be as good as IE. It is insufficient for Mozilla to offer more W3C standards compliance, to offer nicer features, pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing and to perform faster than IE in rendering.
Because the perceived value of those improvements does not exceed the perceived cost in the minds of the consumers, who will remain 0wn3d by IE until Something Really Great comes with Mozilla.
true impartiality of reporting because the web crawler doesn't give a shit what the inherent slant is, just what words are in the document.
Ideally, yes.
But there's still slant due to the fact that money helps to publish a lot of what is on the web. The bias isn't so bad as it is for radio, TV and newspapers, but there's still a preponderance of "news" released by sources that accept money, push ads, etc. that can potentially color the reporting.
Worse, as you begin to try to standardize coding of your configure.in and Makefile.in files, it begins to dawn on you just how much more boilerplate could be automatically generated.
However, by the time I started learning the syntax for automake and tried to figure out just exactly how libtool can magically make shared library construction and maintenance a cross-platform reality, I get tired of the whole damn business and think: there has got to be a better way.
I don't know that SCons is that better way, because the problem it has to solve is complicated.
Personally, I had high hopes that
the software carpentry project would have chosen some of the XML features of Tan by David Ascher - specifically, having a way for the build to query the system for some information about the best place to find previously installed software.
Fancy autoconf m4 macros (clever, but ugly) can indeed check for existing installations of other packages and accepting user-specified overrides, but somehow it seems to me that having some databases (XML, but simple enough to edit by hand) to describe how you want the build to look for packages is better than specifying 8 options like --with-ssl-include-dir=/some/long/path, etc.
Finally, despite being a Python fan, I've always been skeptical about whether the SCons approach to replacing Bourne shell with the admittedly more powerful language was really a good idea, mainly because of the broader availability of sh.
But time has made less relevant those systems on which Python cannot be built, so perhaps my concerns are overstated.
Nevertheless, if you want to build Python, I notice that it uses autoconf:)
Maybe if Python had a module that could crank out Bourne shell like m4 does, but without the ugly m4 syntax?
Probably a lot of those 9% could fall into these categories:
"What the hell is this they're talking about? I think I'll say that we're taking it under advisement, because that's what cool people say when they wield mighty legal shields."
"Who the hell is SCO? Are they like the Red Hat that we run? I don't want to sound stupid, so I'll say that we're taking a wait 'n see approach."
"I hope this interview gets over soon. I really need to take a dump and then go visit that hot new receptionist in marketing."
[Q] Small & Expensive = CISCRISC?
on
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When Microprocessors such as x86 were first developed during the 1970s memories were very low capacity and highly expensive. Consequently keeping the size of software down was important and the instruction sets in CPUs at the time reflected this.
So I'm puzzled. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
If CISC is particularly appropriate for memory that is
low capacity, and
highly expensive
why doesn't the same argument apply to CPU's with no main memory per se, but just a good sized L3 cache?
Modern cache memories are, guess what,
low capacity, and
highly expensive
so it would seem to follow that higher performance could be got by using a CISC model.
Since main memory latency and BW are pretty limiting, I half expect that there's good argument to make very high performance systems live completely inside a large cache.
Depending on the utility, codes specify that cables need to be buried to various minimum depths, although you can get away burying shallower if a sturdy conduit is used to contain the wires.
Also, "nice" cable layers, after trenching and placing the cable, will partially fill the trench, stop, and lay down plastic tape (like the Polic Line Do Not Cross stuff) so that J Random Backhoe has a chance of yanking up the tape before he gets to the vital stuff.
All I need to know is if you guys block off port 25
Of course you realize that the instant the phone tech support dood can answer that question is the day he goes off to get a Real Job that pays more than McMoney.
Frankly, if I got a phone support tech that was able to immediately answer rapid fire questions that run deep into the intracacies of networking, then I'd think two things:
Damn, this guy is good! I wonder if we could hire him at MyCorp.
You'd think all the C++ programmers at MS would have clued in the marketing guys that not every class nor every marketing program need implement.NET().
Otherwise, pretty soon folks will be GoingOutToLunch.NET
Don't tell me that you're dissastisfied with Microsoft's donations of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of software to schools, etc!
Why, that software alone represents a significant charitable contribution, as any tax attorney can tell you.
And a good thing, too, because the profit margins on those Windows and Office CDs make everyone else green with envy: the cost to MS of producing those donated CDs is probably almost as much as what they pay spokespeople to announce the donation.
My own general take on all this is the Moore's Law for CPU/data costs vs time will beat the decrease in network latency costs vs time and we'll generally expect to see communications protocols become more "intelligent" to compensate up for the this barrier that cannot be overcome. BW will be relatively cheap, but the cost of building up and tearing down a connection will remain high enough to discourage multi-exchange handshaking (ie., UDP model vs TCP model).
In the end, if you find that some particular part of your Python code is limiting your performance, then code it up in C or C++ and make it available as a Python object.
Then, you've obtained the best of both worlds: fast development and ability to quickly test, prototype in Python combined with the sheer speed of C exactly where it's needed and when (at the end, because [DEK] Premature optimization be the root of all evil.).
Much better to play in the much bigger world of Windows boxes.
Potentially, yes, as long as you can stay out of the way of one particularly large software company playing in that world whose growth is now contingent upon taking over new markets.
So this means that attempts to figure out [how] to program to any of a number of Windows API's are not DCMA circumvention violations?
No, the process that you describe, Windows code developers call "code development" or "debugging"; newcomers often mistakenly call this "spelunking" or "skeet shooting after sunset".
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that the Brothers Grimm collected fairy tales in germany is heavily disputed.
I don't think the Brothers Grimm could have made up all those stories.
Some of their characters resemble people I meet every day!
struggles with the fonts.
Yeah, this afflicts me, too, with the free OpenOffice distributions.
I've heard that if you lay down some money for either Star Office or Ximian Office that they come with "metrically equivalent" fonts, anti-aliased and TrueType, too.
Since MyCorp has site licenses for Windows and Office already, it would be really handy if there was an easy way to get OpenOffice to use those fonts directly.
A little effort using cabextract and Microsofts limited subset of freely distributable fonts can help the ameliorate the problem.
launches quickly, and if it does use a lot of memory
How much of the speed of MS Office is gained by Windows having preloaded some of the needed DLLs?
I recall a similar speed comparison argument about IE vs Mozilla on Windows where this was a factor in the observed startup time.
And OpenOffice does start up slow. I'm thinking that somewhere in /etc/rc.d/init.d there should be launched an OpenOfficeServices Daemon to sit around like a memory hog but make user launches seem snappier.
less expensive
I think they considered the costs that most people in IT don't like to think about, the costs of being further locked-in to a vendor that will later be more able to change prices at will and make up for any discounts on present day products. Like printers and inkjet cartridges.
To be fair, there are other costs associated with switching to SuSE Linux, such as all the users assimilating the differences between Windows and Linux and learning how to use Linux productively.
Overall, though, for right or wrong reasons, Munich made a gutsy choice and a choice that will, in the long run, serve them well.
Other IT organizations would do well to put in more than a superficial effort into evaluating Linux.
Why?
No, not to make FOSS advocates like me happy, but rather to save themselves money no matter whether they pick Linux or to stay with Windows!
The fact is, Linux is the only effective leveraging tool anyone in IT has in the negotiations with Microsoft.
IT managers that can demonstrate they've looked seriously at Linux can obtain valuable price concessions from Microsoft.
And, who knows, one of these months, these Linux evaluations might prove that Linux is the better choice.
Evaluating Linux is a win-win proposition for anyone facing renegotiation with Redmond.
People that haven't used a TiVo might well dismiss it as a kick-ass VCR and not be willing to pay too much for one.
For me, I only discovered exactly how much VCR hassle I was avoiding only after I bought a TiVo.
Time shifting is an indispensible part of life for people with hectic schedules.
Programming the VCR for each show, explicitly putting in the time, with pre and post slop intervals to account for inaccuracies, pre-tuning the satellite receiver to the one and only right channel, watching crappy VHS tapes, rewinding said tapes, shoving many unlabeled "temporary" tapes in and out of the VCR, were all so much hassle that has been almost eliminated by buying a TiVo.
Oh, fast-forwarding through commercials is much easier than when using VHS tapes.
And it was definitely worthwhile installing 100 GB IDE drives into the unit in place of the paltry 20 GB drives.
I could never go back to an analog VCR.
Most people underestimate the value of the TiVo until they own one.
But network connectivity and the ability to archive to DVD-R would be real plusses. I wouldn't even need the latter if network connectivity were good and I could store a couple TB of shows on a big fileserver.
Two things, though.
First, IE and Windows help to provide a mutual lock-in, while bundling Mozilla with Windows would permit easier migration away from Windows because users would no longer have to confront Something Different as a browser.
Second, security holes have afflicted Microsoft for long enough that they simply shrug them off, claim that they'll be fixed in the next update, that premature open notification of vulnerabilities is Bad, and that Hackers are responsible for Evil.
The cumulative problem of security holes will be used as evidence for the need to have TCPA instituted as a standard, which will also cut down on Terrorism and Pedophiles as well as Bad Hackers.
No need for MS to adopt Mozilla and compromise a perfectly useful leveraging tool in IE, that now has over 90% of the market.
So Microsoft has more than enough cash on hand to buy out AOL/TW.
If the marketplace were completely free and unfettered, you'd think that Microsoft would, rather than pour money down the hole that has been MSN, simply buy out AOL with its 30 million subscribers.
But Microsoft won't do this because they know they can't; that the DoJ would immediately ask questions about unfair market consolidation were such a buyout offer made.
So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN.
As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action, and no inconvenient questions will be raised except by AOL management and stockholders.
Since MS can rely upon a steady revenue stream from Windows and Office to subsidize its efforts into taking over new markets they enjoy an advantage that AOL and other competitors simply don't have.
People buy Windows and Office like they're a standard, a necessity, that's no more avoidable than paying gasoline taxes.
Yes, Microsoft has the enviable position of just collecting taxes - like a government. And competing against the government is a no-win situation.
It is a foregone conclusion that AOL will lose. They will wither to nothing, or simply to a marginally-sized pet, like Apple, who would have died long ago if Microsoft had decided to not release Office for Mac.
While I still grapple with language idiosyncracies of LaTeX from time to time, the reason I keep coming back is that it produces the best quality output for mathematics-laden documents.
WYSIWYG systems I've hated, especially when it comes time to learn yet another gui-based equation editor with yet another set of key mappings that is not like the default emacs set I have hardwired into my brain from writing code. After you learn a few of the basics in LaTeX, like $$ \int_0^\infty \alpha_i(x) dx = 5 $$ will produce a definite integral from 0 to infinity of greek alpha with an "i" subscript there's no going back.
Besides being free (speech & beer), I have LaTeX source files from 17 years ago that still produces nice looking documents on todays computers even after changing hardware, OSes, etc. There were popular word processing systems available back then were such files would be next to worthless.
That kind of timelessness in the age of planned product upgrades and binary proprietary formats impresses me.
If you want to do version control or searching of document, then having its native format in ASCII text permits the use of CVS and grep and doesn't obligate you to buy some product to see your document.
For the future, I'd like to see something like DocBook takeoff, but it's just not there yet, AFAICT.
When someone gets a MathML parser to render as nicely as DEK's code, then I'll consider moving from LaTeX.
AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat,
Note that these competitors of Microsoft don't have:
- US$4e10 cash reserves
- revenue cows like Windows & Office to bring in money without lifting a finger
AOL has been scrambling to compete with MSN, surviving on razor-thin margins (Time Warner is the bigger, stronger part of the company).Sun can't afford to develop competitive successors to its UltraSPARC hardware in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, Lintel servers are eating into the UNIX server business, making the market much smaller than it was once (the flip side is that Lintel make Wintel look expensive, even if Wintel is cheaper than Solaris/SPARC). These days, the one reason to go with Sun over Linux on clusters is for HA 64-way high throughput machines connected to SANs. Despite the margins on that class of machine, not everyone needs one, and there are ferocious competitors like IBM, HP and SGI with which to contend.
Red Hat is only now barely getting profitable, mainly selling Linux services. They certainly don't have oodles of money to throw around.
IBM is really the only financially strong player in the whole deck.
Despite my pessimistic tone, I'm a Mozilla (and now Firebird) user and wish the project success. I will continue to be a Mozilla advocate because I want to see open standards on my computer instead of yet another road to getting ruled.
First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be.
Yes, the percentage of people running test kernels is lower.
But I think the absolute numbers of people running test kernels is about the same or higher. There are just that many more Linux users now compared to the 0.99 days, so even a smaller percentage of all users can mean a greater number of testers.
A decreasing percentage is valid, though. Back in the old days, the kernel was so much less friendly to production use that the only people using it were people willing to compile source by hand, edit C code to get their hardware to work, etc.
most people barely seem to have an idea what "engineering" even means.
Yes, indeed.
It was explained to me a while back just why it is that doting mothers like to be able to say "my son the doctor" or "my son the lawyer" and not "my son the engineer" - the same reason for the lack of recognition and widespread esteem for the engineering profession.
The reason is that doctors and lawyers, professionally trained, offer their services retail direct to the public.
Engineers, professionally trained, rarely offer their services to the public, rather they offer those services in a wholesale way to large corporations, governments and other entities.
because they can be given to users for zero cost.
And "cost" is not just money, but intangible things that courtrooms are apt to misjudge.
When IE became distributed by default with Windows, and was difficult to remove, and one had to explicitly download NS from a website, all this makes NS effectively cost more than IE to the average consumer.
It is insufficient for Mozilla to be as good as IE. It is insufficient for Mozilla to offer more W3C standards compliance, to offer nicer features, pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing and to perform faster than IE in rendering.
Because the perceived value of those improvements does not exceed the perceived cost in the minds of the consumers, who will remain 0wn3d by IE until Something Really Great comes with Mozilla.
true impartiality of reporting because the web crawler doesn't give a shit what the inherent slant is, just what words are in the document.
Ideally, yes.
But there's still slant due to the fact that money helps to publish a lot of what is on the web. The bias isn't so bad as it is for radio, TV and newspapers, but there's still a preponderance of "news" released by sources that accept money, push ads, etc. that can potentially color the reporting.
look at the output autoconf generates
Worse, as you begin to try to standardize coding of your configure.in and Makefile.in files, it begins to dawn on you just how much more boilerplate could be automatically generated.
Ergo, automake.
However, by the time I started learning the syntax for automake and tried to figure out just exactly how libtool can magically make shared library construction and maintenance a cross-platform reality, I get tired of the whole damn business and think: there has got to be a better way.
I don't know that SCons is that better way, because the problem it has to solve is complicated.
Personally, I had high hopes that the software carpentry project would have chosen some of the XML features of Tan by David Ascher - specifically, having a way for the build to query the system for some information about the best place to find previously installed software.
Fancy autoconf m4 macros (clever, but ugly) can indeed check for existing installations of other packages and accepting user-specified overrides, but somehow it seems to me that having some databases (XML, but simple enough to edit by hand) to describe how you want the build to look for packages is better than specifying 8 options like --with-ssl-include-dir=/some/long/path, etc.
Finally, despite being a Python fan, I've always been skeptical about whether the SCons approach to replacing Bourne shell with the admittedly more powerful language was really a good idea, mainly because of the broader availability of sh.
But time has made less relevant those systems on which Python cannot be built, so perhaps my concerns are overstated.
Nevertheless, if you want to build Python, I notice that it uses autoconf:)
Maybe if Python had a module that could crank out Bourne shell like m4 does, but without the ugly m4 syntax?
What are the other 9% thinking?
Probably a lot of those 9% could fall into these categories:
When Microprocessors such as x86 were first developed during the 1970s memories were very low capacity and highly expensive. Consequently keeping the size of software down was important and the instruction sets in CPUs at the time reflected this.
So I'm puzzled. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
If CISC is particularly appropriate for memory that is
- low capacity, and
- highly expensive
why doesn't the same argument apply to CPU's with no main memory per se, but just a good sized L3 cache?Modern cache memories are, guess what,
- low capacity, and
- highly expensive
so it would seem to follow that higher performance could be got by using a CISC model.Since main memory latency and BW are pretty limiting, I half expect that there's good argument to make very high performance systems live completely inside a large cache.
Depending on the utility, codes specify that cables need to be buried to various minimum depths, although you can get away burying shallower if a sturdy conduit is used to contain the wires.
Also, "nice" cable layers, after trenching and placing the cable, will partially fill the trench, stop, and lay down plastic tape (like the Polic Line Do Not Cross stuff) so that J Random Backhoe has a chance of yanking up the tape before he gets to the vital stuff.
All I need to know is if you guys block off port 25
Of course you realize that the instant the phone tech support dood can answer that question is the day he goes off to get a Real Job that pays more than McMoney.
Frankly, if I got a phone support tech that was able to immediately answer rapid fire questions that run deep into the intracacies of networking, then I'd think two things:
You'd think all the C++ programmers at MS would have clued in the marketing guys that not every class nor every marketing program need implement .NET().
Otherwise, pretty soon folks will be GoingOutToLunch.NET
Don't tell me that you're dissastisfied with Microsoft's donations of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of software to schools, etc!
Why, that software alone represents a significant charitable contribution, as any tax attorney can tell you.
And a good thing, too, because the profit margins on those Windows and Office CDs make everyone else green with envy: the cost to MS of producing those donated CDs is probably almost as much as what they pay spokespeople to announce the donation.
Just turn the tin-foil hat inside out after you buy it. That way the mind-control device is on the outside and you can control the world.
I did turn it inside out, but the tin-foil you sold me yesterday is still not working.
The world is not obeying my wishes.
Can I get a refund?
Conclusions
Put the computation near the data.
My own general take on all this is the Moore's Law for CPU/data costs vs time will beat the decrease in network latency costs vs time and we'll generally expect to see communications protocols become more "intelligent" to compensate up for the this barrier that cannot be overcome. BW will be relatively cheap, but the cost of building up and tearing down a connection will remain high enough to discourage multi-exchange handshaking (ie., UDP model vs TCP model).
I agree completely.
In the end, if you find that some particular part of your Python code is limiting your performance, then code it up in C or C++ and make it available as a Python object.
Then, you've obtained the best of both worlds: fast development and ability to quickly test, prototype in Python combined with the sheer speed of C exactly where it's needed and when (at the end, because [DEK] Premature optimization be the root of all evil.).
Much better to play in the much bigger world of Windows boxes.
Potentially, yes, as long as you can stay out of the way of one particularly large software company playing in that world whose growth is now contingent upon taking over new markets.
So this means that attempts to figure out [how] to program to any of a number of Windows API's are not DCMA circumvention violations?
No, the process that you describe, Windows code developers call "code development" or "debugging"; newcomers often mistakenly call this "spelunking" or "skeet shooting after sunset".