Reminds me of this clip from the classic Father Ted where Father Liam is breaking all of Ted's furniture, claiming the quality is poor.
"These won't last. You could talk them into coming down."
Whitespace code indentation doesn't mean anything about the people you're going to be working with. Sometimes Python is used simply because it's an excellent tool.
As far as I know Python has always had multiline strings. I don't know of any limitations in the multi-line strings that would preclude using them for things like SQL queries. They begin and end with """. I suspect you already knew that though.
Python's indentation mirrors natural indentation anyway (braces would be superfluous), so in most cases, the code just looks normal, natural, and pretty darn close to executable pseudocode. That's why people like Python. You don't have to use or like Python, though. You can always use "Python with Braces!" http://www.pythonb.org/
IRC is just a bad medium for mature discussion to begin with (but forums suck in many other ways, so where does that leave us). The IRC channel for most *any* project is unnecessarily toxic. Just because Araq is on the IRC channel doesn't mean the whole project is polluted by the ramblings of one or two fans/hecklers/wannabe devs.
My view of Nim from the web pages presented in the summary, and the online docs is very different from your IRC-centric view. I've personally been very impressed with the quality of the documentation, tutorials, and papers I've read so far. I don't think I've seen as friendly and readable documentation for any project in a long time. Perhaps quality will drop as Nim becomes more popular and people concentrate on developing. But for a project that has seemingly come out of nowhere, this really impressed me. Not only is Araq apparently a decent programmer, he's also a good writer too.
Thank you to the submitter for submitting this. I had never heard of Nim before today. Adding it to my short list of very interesting new languages to follow.
Ahh interesting. Makes sense, but I disagree about that being the right way to do it. The way you describe is hackish, having to run a client. We need the ability to simply remote log into a machine and run the binary and have it work. This is disappointing, if this is indeed the way they've chosen to go. Shouldn't matter what widget set an app uses; it should work (by some definition of the word "work") whether locally, or on a remote machine.
After it was announced a year or two ago, I have heard nothing about RDP support in Wayland. Is it getting to the point that Wayland will have first-class support for transparently remoting apps with RDP? Anyone know the status on this? There's precious little info about this on the interwebs, and no real information on what the workflow looks like, say with ssh forwarding.
I doubt it will be. Sounds to me that Windows fits you just fine. That being the case, you have little incentive to really try Linux, so I don't think 2015 will be much different for you than any of the previous years. True Linux distros have gotten better and easier--Linux Mint would probably work for you right now out of the box without having to mess with browser plugins or tweaking audio. But you don't seem to have much motivation to try Linux, so much smaller issues are going to be stumbling blocks for you. Which is just fine. Use what works for you.
As for me, my experiences with Windows seem to mirror your experiences with Linux. Just getting Windows installed, patched, all the basic software going, takes hours and hours. And if your hardware isn't quite up to date, chasing down drivers on random scary sites, hardware incompatibilities, etc. Never gives me a good impression of Windows. Windows only appears to work if it came with your computer and if you never do anything to change that computer. Rinse and repeat. Been this way for years. Since Windows has little to offer me, I, like you with Linux, don't spend a lot of time messing around with it.
Okay, so as an exercise to the reader, add that cleanup code to the example. Now do you understand?
In languages without goto or some other kind of construct such as a context manager, every time you want to return from a function you have to clean up all the threads, release memory, release handles, etc. This is error-prone (a prime source of leaks), and is wasteful and leads to difficult-to-read code. Whereas if you have a cleanup section that you can jump to, then every exit from the function goes to one place where the cleanup is properly executed. Hope this makes it clearer. As the article states, this is a very common idiom in C. Every good C programmer does this, and it's all throughout the Linux kernel. Sure if there were good, standard facilities for doing context management or a way of doing atexit handling for individual functions it would not be necessary, and maybe cleaner.
But if you're familiar with the concept, when you see it in the code you understand exactly what's going on.
Well when you post flame bait what do you expect, especially when it's FUD pure and simple. If you've used systemd, or done even a little bit of research you would know that 99% of systemd's suite of services does not run in pid 1. I think at this point pid 1 is rather stable and unchanging. It's the ancillary (and I might add mostly optional) components that are getting the updates lately it seems. I've run put in several updates for systemd since RHEL7 and Centos 7 came out, and *none* of them have required an reboot so far. Kernels update more frequently I might add, which did require a reboot until now. With systemd updates, individual subsystems can restart after an update. Only the little init 1 process would need a reboot to replace, but that's the case for *any* init system. And I'm sure the linux kernel could be modified to restart init 1 some day.
Just heading off the FUD at the pass here.
The sad thing is, the obvious answer the car industry is going to come up with is to encrypt the canbus and use DRM to control access to the bus. This will provide a (false) sense of security, while locking out those pesky people that want to mod their vehicles and add all those cheaper after market parts like remote starts. And in the end this is bad thing for all of us.
Sketchup Pro is not a Google product, so begging Google to release it for free is not likely to go anywhere. Now why Trimble bought Sketchup from Google in the first place I'll never know. Setting up Google Earth Pro to be free *before* Google sells it off is probably a good move for users. Too bad they didn't do that with Sketchup before they sold it.
Didn't Grooveshark lose a massive copyright infringement case recently? I notice they are still online had have a lot of music there, some of which I know is ripped because one album they have has never been released on any digital music service that I know of (and they still have Taylor Swift...). Why are they still around? I'm glad they are but I can't see how they can justify their existence.
Just to be clear, and responding to the NMEA comment, when it comes to mapping and field prescriptions, all the major systems will accept GPS from just about any receiver via a serial connection (NMEA or some other). It's the guidance part of the computer that is locked to vendor-specific receivers. There's no reason at all for this vendor lock except to guarantee you will be paying a subscription for correction signals from the vendor. In my mind this area is ripe for disruption. The sooner we can get cheap RTK GPS positioning the better. And even if it means replacing the hydraulic steering valve, if there's an open. hackable GPS guidance system out there, I and many farmers will move to it.
One guy using a laptop and arduino made his own GPS guidance system. Very cool stuff:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index....
So it's still possible to do incredibly cool hacks.
That said, the proprietary solutions do work very well and are well-integrated
Interoperability is increasing, but it's not being done in an open way in my opinion. Rather it's being done with cross-licensing of protocols, file formats, etc. Each major machinery company wants to get people into their ecosystem, their cloud. And for GPS each company wants to lock me into a subscription to their service, which I can't easily switch without changing out all the hardware. If you think proprietary software subscriptions are bad (office 365, etc), it's worse here!
There are some standards including ISO 11783 (known as IsoBus) that standardize the way implements talk to the tractor, to the mapping system, and to the variable rate systems (GPS is involved, but not in a guidance fashion). Though in practice, interoperability is somewhat hit and miss. The other day I plugged my air seeder cart (New Holland) into my John Deere tractor's isobus (we've been using a NH computer monitor added to our other John Deere tractor as an external display), but the Deere computer could only see one of the two devices the cart puts on the bus. Some kind of incompatibility. Pretty sure NH sells a little converter box to tweak the baud rate or something to make it work with Deere's monitor. So it's a bit of a crap shoot.
A couple of years ago I thought it would be nice to interface a device like a raspberry pi with isobus. There's a GPL library for implementing ISOBUS protocol on Linux. But accessing the ISO documents themselves cost a fair amount of money. Just trying to break into this world to get information seems very difficult. I'm still unsure of the exact nature of the electrical interface. It's a proprietary connector, and I think the signalling is j1939. It's hard to find out without buying expensive SDKs and such. Very frustrating.
I spent nearly 15 years in IT before returning to the family farm to work with my brothers. We farm several thousand acres of irrigated land with some large, expensive machines, so I have some experience in this. This article really hits home for me. Forgive some of the jargon, but this is slashdot; you can deal with it.
Coming from the open source world, computer technology in farming, both in the machines themselves, and the software farmers use, is like stepping back in time 20 years or more. Farm software is a niche market, and companies are pretty jealous of their profits. So mapping software is very expensive and interoperability is a bit difficult. Right now I can pull maps off my machines (Case, John Deere), but they each use different native formats so if I want to do any work in QGIS I have to use the company's individual software (which ironically enough is DRMd even though it comes for free with the machine) to export the data in SHAPE format. Software packages like the SMS mapper can read some manufacturers' data files directly because they licensed the formats. But there's very little info out there on hacking these formats and very few open source hackers know enough about farming and these systems to bring expertise to bear.
Even worse, all the companies are talking about cloud-based mapping solutions, but that's even more proprietary and closed.
Companies talk about "open standards" but what they really mean is they export SHAPE files from a computer program. It's really frustrating, but with interest in UAVs, perhaps people will finally crack this barrier.
As to the machines themselves, there are a number of issues. One is government regulations. Adjusting the timing as the farmer in the article wanted to do is extremely illegal and can get you a huge fine from the EPA if you are caught, which you will be. Because unlike in the automotive world, there aren't a any third-party repair shops with access to the parts, let alone diagnostic equipment. Apparently the EPA requires the manufacturer to report any deviations from the the approved program, and they levy fines. Sounds orwellian, but the EPA doesn't mess around when it comes to pollution regs (and I'm okay with that in theory). Suppose the manufacturers want to cover themselves.
Someone asked why a company can't spring up to develop hackable machines? There are efforts to this effect.
But for larger scale farming, it's harder. In the case of engines, the EPA would simply never allow them to market if the parameters that cause an engine to meet EPA regs are allowed to be changed. Regulatory capture has made modern diesels so expensive to develop now, including licensing patented pollution control technologies like the urea injection systems, that it's cheaper for companies to buy an existing engine than to develop their own. So even if I started a hackable tractor company I'd still need to use an engine with an extremely proprietary ECU, and would have to license canbus info to simply connect a transmission to the engine.
The other part of machines that is jealously guarded is the main canbus that links everything on the tractor. We're talking engine control, transmission control, hydraulic remotes, cab systems, and most importantly, the GPS receiver, guidance computer, and steering valve. The commands that flow on this bus are not yet encrypted (they will be soon, starting in cars I predict), but they are highly proprietary and protected by NDAs. You'd think that with a modern tractor I could take anyone's GPS receiver, mate it with anyone's guidance computer, and control any tractor's steering. Well it's not like that. On John Deere, for example, if I want to use anything other than GreenStar for GPS and guidance (a $10-$20k touch by the way, plus yearly fees for RTK), I have to physically replace the steering valve system with one that the 3rd party system is compatible with. There was a company that reverse-engineered JD's canbus commands for the GPS, and they make their own RTK GPS receiver that spoofs the original receiver to give you cheaper, more accurate positioning (maybe $5k instead of $10k). Pretty ingenious, I thought. They were sued by John Deere, but I'm not sure what happened. So far as I know they are still in business. So it is possible to route around the damage somewhat.
Physically, though, farmers are able to do a lot of repairs on machines still. On a combine, for example there are a lot of bearings, belts, hydraulic hoses, pumps, filters, and valves, all of which I can work on. So it's not all bad. Despite the computer being locked down, most of the problems I have on machines I can repair myself because they are the same problems that have happened for the last hundred years. Moving parts break and need to be welded or replaced. I've certainly done my fair share of that and saved thousands of dollars in dealer costs. Dealer charges around $200 an hour I think.
My bad. The X200 is a much older laptop. The X220 is what I have and it's practically identical to the X230, which is the latest shipping version that has the chicklet keyboard that I can't stand.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
