I can vouch for Flask, at least for simple projects. It's immature, sure, but it's also pretty bare-bones (I say this as an upside), allowing you to roll-your-own just about anything. For simple stuff, it gets out of your way and lets you do what you like, however you like it. It really depends on what you're going to be doing with the framework, though.
Hmm, using hg for Windows last summer, it never failed to do exactly the opposite of what I described. Perhaps its just a Windows thing, or the version of Mercurial I was using.
"GUI" is never explicitly mentioned, but after re-reading, I'm still not sure he _didn't_ mean a GUI, but neither am I sure that he certainly meant the CLI. I've never had a problem with the git CLI, I actually preferred it over the hg one (git pipes the log into 'less' for example, and lists entries in a sane reverse order so that the most recent log entry is on top). Maybe I'm just sensitive?
Am I the only one who thinks picking a DVCS tool based on the GUI is a bad idea? It seems to me that hg and git were designed to be used from a command line, and (for git at least) it works brilliantly. The GUI DVCS frontends try to hide a lot of the complexity of various tasks from you, but in that insulation you also end up with a clouded view of how things actually work, leading to the branching/merging mistakes the author talks about.
This reminds me how most people seem to see programming as some sort of black magic that only happens when the stars align just-so. If only they were aware of how different things actually are...
The best free issue tracker I've used is the one on Google Code. I use GitHub for hosting, but the Google Code issue tracker has plenty of options, and can fit just about any bill you want it to. It also has a built-in wiki! Since there's no requirement to actually host your code there, it works out pretty well.
From http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s074.htm:
"the wrongful or willful taking of money or property belonging to someone else with intent to deprive the owner of its use or benefit either temporarily or permanently. No particular type of movement or carrying away is required."
From Merriam-Webster:
intransitive verb:
"to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice"
transitive verb:
"to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully <stole a car>"
A friend of a friend who works for the government apparently was recently doing some work on high-speed interactions between orbiting bodies. Orbiting bodies like satellites and space planes? Time will tell...
This stands as an important lesson: no matter how loudly anyone screams that the sky is falling, things rarely turn out as anyone expected. Who would have thought that iTunes would come along? Certainly not the RIAA...
"How is it that a CS major pays tens of thousands of dollars for a degree, and has little to no concept of version control, project roles, design documentation, functional specs, or a bug tracker?"
Simple: this isn't what Computer Science is about! A fundamental misconception about computer science seems to be that is is software engineering. This couldn't be further from the truth. CS is about algorithms: their efficiency, their provable correctness, and their applicability to actual problems. None of that necessitates version control.
Dijkstra said, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It seems to me that version control, bug trackers, and wikis are about software, not Computer Science. These things are important, to be sure, but they're not Computer Science.
Xmarks is a prime example of why it's better to be lucky than good sometimes. Had these guys bothered to ask for money before simply deciding to pull the plug, they may simply never have raised the necessary funds and gone under like a ship in the night. Perhaps the only reason they don't have to pull the plug now is because they decided to throw in the towel too early, generating loads of buzz and getting their users on board. They tried their best to fail, and fate would have none of it :)
You know, I'm always impressed with the clarity that the EFF posts explain their situations and how they affect them/us. If every group took such trouble to explain their cause, they'd have more supporters by the simple virtue that people could actually understand what they're saying, rather than wading though mountains of misdirection and propaganda.
Or maybe I'm just so used to wading through the EFF's particular brand of misdirection and propaganda that I don't notice it anymore...
The only problem with this argument is that it's made only with regard to you, the consumer, vs. the content creator/distributor. If theft is defined only as the removal of a physical good from one individual to another without consent, then indeed, it's not theft in that sense. However, if theft is defined as depriving an individual of what they are due for providing some product/service, then this is theft.
One way or another, somebody took the time to learn to play some instrument, write a song, record that song, then get it distributed in some manner. All of that costs both time and money, just like designing and building a car or a laptop or any other physical good. If depriving someone of compensation for something they worked to create and distribute isn't theft, I don't know what is.
That was indeed the point. I took the "learn what you like" route and was not rewarded for that as much as I could have been rewarded for gaming the system.
I think this is something many high school seniors realize at some point or another: had we known how easy it really was to game the system, we might have started playing the game earlier and earned more points. We aren't rewarded for interests, or how we approach things, or even for helping our fellow students; we're rewarded for scoring as many points as we can to the detriment of all other things.
My favorite reaction to bpython was showing it to somebody, watching them use it for about 30 seconds, and them watching them alias it to 'python' without even thinking :) It blows the default python interpreter environment out of the water: it remembers history between sessions, autocompletes just about everything, and even has a shortcut for dumping code out to Pastebin.
From what I hear, it seems like a good introduction to the principles of programming, if nothing else. I didn't learn to program until my freshman year of college (and had no prior CS experience), but found that some similar-sounding software I had used for a long time had prepared me for actual programming in a surprising way ("Game Maker", for what it's worth). If the App Inventor ends up being anything like that, and actually useful for creating apps, it will certainly be a good reinforcement for basic programming concepts. On the other hand, by its very design it will be limited in what it can accomplish. How much is a matter to be seen!
For many I think it comes down to one number: GPA. When companies screen applicants who don't meet minimum GPA requirements and most measures of performance are based solely on the grades put down on paper, there is little incentive to actually learn the material, and a lot of incentive to simply earn a better "high score".
That's what prompted me to look him up. I caught parts of the interview while browsing the web, and decided that he sounded interesting enough to warrant a quick search, and this article turned out to be better than the interview (at least from an information perspective).
It's a shame that most of my Comp Sci peers don't seem to take much pride in actually building readable code. Building something that works is important, of course, but so is how it looks on the inside. Kind of analogous to building a house: sure, you can build something that keeps the rain off and the sun out in a relatively short time, but building it to stand the test of time is at least as important as keeping out the elements, if not more so.
This is an elegant solution to a common problem I didn't even realize I had. You'd think the number of times I've cd'ed to the same directory or misspelled 'emacs' as 'enacs' or 'emac s...' would have prompted me to alias them to something useful, but at least now I can figure out what I've been missing!
J Moore has been working on computer proof systems for some time, and has built one that he used to prove the AMD K12 architecture correct:
http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html
As a side note, he teaches a good introduction to logic course :)
This would be beautiful. I have an ASUS EEE 901, and Chrome runs far better on it than Firefox ever could. It takes up less screen space, launches faster, and runs faster. For running a full-featured web browser with constrained resources, Chrome can't be beat.
Ha, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's mind wanders during those things! I've come to believe that it's more a function of having an extremely active mind that prefers to interact over simply receiving information passively. Same thing happens to me during lectures in class. I try to engage my mind with what's being said, looking up relevant passages and asking myself questions about the validity of what's being said.
Also, there's no incompatibility between believing in a higher power and being able to reason. I'm a Christian in his third year of a Computer Science degree at a major university, and I like to think I have some capacity for reason :p
Mmm, coding with mere hours (nay, minutes!) left has caused me to produce simultaneously some of the msot awful and cleverest code I've ever written. But you know what they say about clever code...