Peter Kirn: "The iPad, in a single device, embodies the exact opposite of all the reasons I’ve invested so much time in computing for the last 25 years."
Well said. Looks like a seducingly beautiful device, though.
For a different (optimistic) angle, read Stephen Fry's iPad About. The key point for me: let's hope that the iPad also delivers a "100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie" to the market.
Take, for example, Lenovo's IdeaPad U1. On the one hand, it's a beautifully engineered device, hardware-wise, that easily matches (if not beats) the iPad in specs. Looking at the IdeaPad's tablet user interface, on the other hand, gives me the creeps: could it really be more awful and sluggish?
Apple, having total control, end-to-end, from hardware to software is obviously at a distinct advantage here. But it is also this very control and general locked-down-ness that makes me wholeheartedly agree to Peter Kirn as quoted above. And I don't think that Apple's advantage is too big to overcome, in general. Let the smartphone market be my witness for this: no, an Android phone will probably never completely match an iPhone in sleekness. But 90% of the sleekness coming along with a more open ecosystem makes the whole package vastly more compelling to me.
So I, for one, am hoping for the "taser shot up the jacksie" to bootstrap an exciting market.
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Sonntag, 24. Januar 2010 link
"The Internet 2009 in numbers" -- Executive summary: Internet 2009 = Facebook + YouTube + Email Spam (+ BitTorrent).
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Montag, 11. Januar 2010 link
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-- Bertrand Russel
Chromium Issue #31482: "What is the expected result? I expected Google Chrome to teleport maybe three, maximum five goats!"
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Donnerstag, 31. Dezember 2009 link
Onward!
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Roughly a year after the last release (2008-12-12), beanstalkc 0.2.0 is out! This release comes with a few minor incompatible API changes, which are detailed in the release announcement.
Here's the unabridged list of changes:
$ git log --reversed --pretty=format:"[%h] %s (%an)" v0.1.1..v0.2.0
[0049ffb] Minor nit: make Job inherit from object (Eric Florenzano)
[4160b3c] Remove unused time import. (Eric Florenzano)
[ce041e5] Fix typo in -p command in Getting Started section of tutorial (Chris Scott)
[7880eaa] Fix for Python 2.4 (Andreas Bolka)
[943d572] Fixed typo (Andreas Bolka)
[a4e7d1a] Prefix private methods with an underscore (Andreas Bolka)
[d04cfb1] Fix delete to expect a NOT_FOUND response (Andreas Bolka)
[ac7c037] Fix beanstalkd command in tutorial (Andreas Bolka)
[6e282a0] Change YAML-related names for clarity (Andreas Bolka)
[92ed027] Document our PyYAML dependency and alternatives (Andreas Bolka)
[0053c5b] Document job priorities (Andreas Bolka)
[f7a32d4] Update beanstalkd URL (Andreas Bolka)
[2f5f61c] Mention PyYAML dependency in readme (Andreas Bolka)
[89583b1] Correct typo (Andreas Bolka)
[65a279f] Job priorities are documented now (Andreas Bolka)
[37a67c1] Use socket#sendall to fail faster (Andreas Bolka)
[23eaf7a] Make silent socket errors explicit (Andreas Bolka)
[a49928f] Wrap all socket exceptions in SocketError (Andreas Bolka)
[2f0a663] Update copyright notice (Andreas Bolka)
[b1c5f40] Wrap long line (Andreas Bolka)
[a494e1d] Gracefully handle missing PyYAML (Andreas Bolka)
[38122ab] Relax doctest to cope with more stats info (Andreas Bolka)
[c076e4c] Prefix parse_yaml, socket, socket_file with _ (Andreas Bolka)
[56b0e00] Implement pause-tube support (Andreas Bolka)
[d970f04] Release version 0.2.0 (Andreas Bolka)
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Sometimes, a simple
flatten zip a b goes tragically wrong:mixin: funco [a [series!] b [series!] /local v][
parse a: copy a [
some [skip if (v: first+ b) insert v] a:]
]
head clear a
]
WTH?
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Donnerstag, 17. Dezember 2009 link
{$\x#,(1 1f;1 0f)}3 comments (by headcore, earl)
Montag, 14. Dezember 2009 link
Sometimes I'm just amazed at how much Amazon's AWS team seems to get it: "Today we launched a new option for acquiring Amazon EC2 Compute resources: Spot Instances. Using this option, customers bid any price they like on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long their bid exceeds the current 'Spot Price'."
And as I wondered immediately while reading above: spot prices are determined by the resources available, not the bids.
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Carl Sassenrath released a first Linux version of the "REBOL 3 Host Kit", which "allows developers to compile and link an R3 executable". And yes, it even compiles on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (after adding
-m32 to the makefile):$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./core -q --do 'print system/version'
System object protected
2.100.96.4.2
It's roughly 7300 (
wc -l) lines of C (including headers), some of it autogenerated, along with a 400K binary blob (libr3.so) making up the interpreter core.0 comments
Donnerstag, 10. Dezember 2009 link
Bruce Schneier: "We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need."
bpython is a fancy Python REPL in ~3.5k LOC pure Python that comes with automatic syntax highlighting (courtesy of Pygments) and lots of ncursesy goodness. Before it can possibly replace my beloved IPython, it'll need a real readline (<C-r> and friends) and some of IPython's nice shortcuts (
?, ??, _, and leaving off parens for the outermost function), though.0 comments
Freitag, 27. November 2009 link
Today, two sets of slides on parallelism definitely worth your time. First up, Guy Steele's "Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution", given at ICFP09:
"Don't split a problem into 'the first' and 'the rest.' Instead, split a problem into roughly equal pieces; recursively solve subproblems, then combine subsolutions."
And then, Guy Blelloch's "Parallel Thinking" from PPoPP09:
def interleave(xs, ys):
for x, y in zip(xs, ys):
yield x
yield y
def scan(f, xs):
if len(xs) < 2:
return [0]
sums = [f(xs[2*i], xs[2*i+1]) for i in range(len(xs)/2)]
evens = scan(f, sums)
odds = [f(evens[i], xs[2*i]) for i in range(len(xs)/2)]
return interleave(evens, odds)
# (transliterated from NESL into Python)
Quintessentially: think trees!
6 comments (by themel, earl)
James Hague: "I still see people obsessed with picking a programming language that's at the top of the benchmarks, and they obsess over the timing results the way I used to obsess over disassembled listings. It's a dodge, a distraction... and it's irrelevant."
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