"It's probably now at the point where new projects are better off starting with Python 3, to ease the pain of upgrading later, unless there's a library they really need. Starting with a mature (but depreciated) platform is not a great idea."

Unless you want to use Python on Google App Engine, where Python 2.7 is what you get. And given that Guido himself works for Google on this project, that's not exactly encouraging.

Or unless you want a Python app to work out of the box on, well, just about anything, but OSX is the example that bit me.

I remember discussing Python 3 on /. when it came out. The decision not to even try to ensure backwards compatibility struck me as disastrous. The response was "No, because Python will never have a cruft problem because we are not Perl coders", or something like that. Many years on, I still think it was disastrous. Python now has a bigger legacy code problem than Perl - seen much Perl 4 recently? - precisely because the upgrade path is such a pain.

Killing Python 2 is going to be like killing IE6 and Windows XP - a noble goal that turns out to take decades. And it's a totally self-inflicted wound by the Python community.

For households that heat electrically, incandescent lighting in winter has to be an excellent idea. You get the light, and in the end all the electricity turns into heat, which is distributed really efficiently across the room. Replacing the light bulbs just means the electric heating is going to work that much harder.

I was reading "The mythical man-month" only this weekend, which starts with the observation that "everyone knows" that two kids in a garage can do more than a corporate development team, and then points out that, if this was actually true without caveats, corporations would hire two kids in a garage every time. There's a difference between producing a standalone program and developing/maintaining a product system.

If you want to organise your address book with a joystick or find the nearest restaurant to your television, not at all. But if we're talking about games, I don't think there are "millions" of great games for Android. ISPs who already resell TV channels may have one or two ideas about how to licence games. For example, you don't need to read French to spot the logos and brands on this ISP's website

In France, where almost all domestic broadband is "triple play" (phone, TV and Internet), at least two of the major ISPs offers gaming as part of the functionality of their latest glorified router package. You can't get much easier to install than "It's already there", and the ISPs already have a distribution model that they use to sell view-on-demand video.

The assumption in TFA seems to be that PHP does something that couldn't be done otherwise now, or does it more easily, or something. But I don't think that's true. There are alternative languages and alternative ecosystems now. IMO, most PHP coders don't use PHP because they have looked at the alternatives and decided PHP is the best choice, or the least bad choice, or any other choice. People use PHP because either

1: It was forced upon them for some reason or

2: It was the first thing they found and it was good enough

If that's the case, it's irrelevant how fantastic the alternatives are.

Also, while PHP code can be truly terrible, people who are determined to write terrible code will do so whatever the tool. You can use almost anything as a hammer if you try hard enough. The myth that The One Right Language somehow makes bad programmers good is still alive, especially within the Python community, but it's stll a myth.

When good programmers have no choice but to use PHP, they'll find a way to build something that is workmanlike even if it isn't beautiful. When bad programmers program, the result is going to be bad regardless of the language.

That is a truly terrible article.

To summarise the logic of TFA, America doesn't do well at standardised international tests, but the average level of scientific education is clearly dazzling because of Silicon Valley in general and the iPad in particular. Except that, last time I looked, the iPad was using a processor core designed in Cambridge, UK. I believe there are one or two other foreign contributions to Silicon Valley.

And, even if that were not the case, what percentage of people resident in the US work in Silicon Valley?!

My impression of US education is that, like many other aspects of America, the bell curve is very wide. The best of US education is possibly the best in the world. The worst is very bad. So, if "American education" means "the best of American education", there's nothing to worry about. If it means "what 90% of Americans have understood about science", or even "median American comprehension of science", the answer might be different. Or not. But the quality of science is not about whether or not a huge multinational with most of its labour outsourced can ship a commercial product.

(FWIW, I'm writing this in France, and I don't get the impression that science teaching here is great either.)

Both unsecured connections I can see here in France are from ISP-provided routers - one of them is mine. This is how French ISPs provide roaming wifi for their clients - leach a bit of bandwidth of domestic connections and make it available via a locked-down open wifi connection.

From TFA, this is apparently a huge improvement on previous attempts, but it's still not exactly dazzling. What sort of self-correcting protocol do you need to handle 499 of every 500 bits being lost?

If Mercedes has cracked the trick of 100% successful upgrades over air, great! If not, I'd prefer to know that the systems controlling almost everything on the Mercedes hurtling towards me is not going to die at some arbitrary moment. Bricked iPhones are inconvenient. Bricked 2-ton vehicles moving at 70mph are very inconvenient!

... the candidates could ask the person sitting next to them. Or maybe get a contractor to do the work for them. Or... at some point, exams have to stop being exactly like the real world. Otherwise, you need an exam that looks like and lasts as long as the career the candidate might take up on passing the exam.

Sorry for coming back to this old theme, but it seems to me that Mandriva just didn't have a niche to fill. Debian/RedHat have different parts of the server market. Suse has always had a niche market, and deals with other vendors might help. Ubuntu has pretty much cleaned up the "Just works on the desktop" market (whether or not that reputation is justified). Mandriva seemed to be aiming at something like the Ubuntu market, but there just wasn't enough room for two.

Yes, yes, yes to all the technically valid points about how distros are largely collections of files from elsewhere, about how any distro can therefore do anything if you hack it enough, etc. But, if we're talking about markets, what you get when you open the box is quite important. And what you seemed to get with Mandriva, at least at first glance, was "Like Ubuntu but with less resources behind it."

And yes to the possibility and maybe even the desirability of a thousand distros. But I can't see how more than a few of those distros can make serious money at any one time.

Exactly. A lot of the alleged technical commentary above is basically a worked example of how "free markets" do old-style protectionism.

Also, the computer revolution really took off because computers became ever cheaper and easier to manufacture. The problem with Babbage's design was that a lifetime wasn't long enough to build one without CAD/CAM. So, even if he'd worked twice as fast and got the thing working, it would have been a one-off for another few decades.

If Babbage had succeeded, it would have sparked the "man as machine" line of thought that has changed so much in our society, and that could have changed the course of history in all sorts of ways. Maybe we would have had wetware trials rather than monkey trials. But I don't see mechanical computing ever getting past the early mainframe stage in terms of numbers of machines or direct relevance to the average person's life. The Babbage Clone industry would really have struggled.

Apart from the observation above that this story is from the Daily Mail (which, among other things, campaigned against vaccinations for many years - hardly a pro-science position), there are lots of reasons to walk out of a lecture. In the case of Richard Dawkins, the man is intentionally offensive about all forms of religious belief, to a point that many atheists in Britain do not want to be associated with his rhetoric. Presenting evolution is one thing. Littering that presentation with, eg describing religious faith as if it is a psychiatric disorder. (Before everyone agrees with him on this point, could we remember that this was the pretext for the forced "treatment" of thousands of people in the former USSR, and that something similar happened to homosexuals in many countries. In other words, it's an argument that lays the foundations for some shocking human rights abuses.)

Walking out during a Richard Dawkins rant may, in some cases, be a statement *for* reasonable intellectual dialogue rather than tub-thumping atheist fundamentalism.