Quite the contrary - I got one of the newish Atom netbooks (dual core), and its battery life is just perfect, provided I don't do anything really squirrelly, like sudo renice -19 -p $$ && sudo ionice -c 1 -p $$ && make -j12. At which point, I'd reasonably expect the battery life to drop on just about anything, given a complex enough code base.

Might be a silly question, but have you given Cython a shot? It sounds like you're doing something very similar to what their project was built to do.

Why not? Use the right tool for the job. Though I'm curious if the parent has tried Cython. It seems like it might be a better fit for what they're doing.

Indeed, D2 looks amazing. And as I've said before, I love C++.

I'm curious as to how the C and C++ interop fronts are for D, though. I mean, one of the big reasons C++ hasn't gone away is the enormous amount of libraries written in it. Lua has Luabind, Python has Boost.Python ... how does one connect D to these marvelous wonders that keep us from diving head first into NIH syndrome?

Serious question - I haven't had a chance to look into it myself.

That's not quite true. But close.

Indeed. Add onto all of those the fact that, AFAIK, on Linux, completely static linking a project is damn near impossible.

If you know otherwise, please let me know. I love the hell out of the language (yes, yes, I'm insane) but this kind of shit kills me. Is it so much to ask, to want to be able to compile a program and simply drop it onto another machine, without having to worry about what version of the standard libraries that machine has installed?

I can understand the issue with network libraries - C has issues with those, as well. But for basic applications - a non-networked game, for instance - this sort of limitation is annoying.

This works, until you find that the version of $LIBRARY available in your distribution's repo is old as dirt - and the unofficial ones floating around online aren't much better - and you want to write software that has the latest features, bug fixes, etc. Then it's back to compiling and dependency tracking... :D

While I won't say that it does make them a server admin, everyone has to start somewhere, and a lot of schools these days leave out a lot when it comes to technology. A friend of mine graduated with a Comp Sci degree a few years ago, and had barely touched anything *nix at all. I think they might have had them log into an old RHEL VM and use pico, perhaps start and stop apache, but that was it. This isn't to say that he wasn't smart, it's just that they didn't teach him anything outside of VB.NET and (how it use it to work with) XML.

I've since met and worked with others who had similar experience, if you s/VB.NET/Java/

Not precisely what I'd consider a broad range of education.

I'm curious as to why you wouldn't disable telnet on those devices, if you don't use it.

I'm sure you realize this now, but for the sake of anyone else reading this you could have saved yourself a trip to the server room had you left 22 open; most OSX services can stopped and started via command line, just like any other *nix. I could be wrong (I don't use Mac's often), but I think they stick them in /System/Library/CoreServices, or somewhere similar.

As far as not using sudo, I think it depends on what you're doing. For example, if you're just running a single command, it makes sense to sudo (e.g., editing /etc/hosts, restarting a service, etc), but if you're going to be working with root privileges for a while, it just makes more sense, and saves you some keystrokes, to use su.