cdavid

84 ms·

781.
by cdavid 16y ago
(I am the bento author) Let me first note that I love the apt system - I think it is a great system. And one of the rationale for bento is to make debian (and linux) packaging easier. Bento supports the same options as autoconf for integrat
782.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think the problem is that python 3 is just different, without much improvements over 2 for many people. For example, the things which IMO were worth fixing at backward incompatibility price (like the import system, improved C API with ABI
783.
by cdavid 16y ago
it is kind of there if you use the trunk, actually
784.
by cdavid 16y ago
I don't think this is an issue, at least in academia. The one case where patent has been an issue is speech synthesis, where the PSOLA method has been patented and was the state of the art for quite some time. I am not an expert on speech r
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by cdavid 16y ago
Most of those things could as well help business. Without data, it is rather difficult to say, especially since a lot of the points you raised are easy to see as cost, and their advantages less obvious to observe.
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by cdavid 17y ago
As far as I am concerned, ubuntu releases have gone downhill ever since 2006 or so. A lot of old issues which have been reported, and are easy to fix, have been hanging forever. But when I had to reluctantly install the 10.04 beta on my new
787.
by cdavid 17y ago
Looking at the battery management on the 10.04 beta, the options seem very similar to the ones on my mac book. What do feel is missing ?
788.
by cdavid 17y ago
That has been unnecessary for a long time. The only time I edit config files is for things that an average user would not use (vim, shell, etc...). Which file do you feel are necessary to edit by hand in Linux ?
789.
by cdavid 17y ago
The point is that it is actually fairly easy to trace information back to a user. People who are not familiar with this kind of data just don't realize how little you need to uniquely identify someone. I am a little surprised to see that pe
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by cdavid 17y ago
Maybe I am missing the irony, in which case I will look like a fool, but P.K. Dick is one of the most significant SF writer, and one of his book is the inspiration for Blade Runner. Several of his books are master pieces, and quite a few ha
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by cdavid 17y ago
I can only relate to my own experience (6 years in Japan now), but I have never been in a position where I had to drink. I have never been in a very big Japanese corporate company, but in both University, gvt labs and start up, there have a
792.
by cdavid 17y ago
It depends on the context as well. It is much more likely to find a bug in gfortran for solaris sparc than gcc on x86 linux, for example. The only time I keep the compiler bug in mind is when working with gcc 4.x compiler on windows. I don'
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by cdavid 17y ago
It depends on the implementation. In C, it is quite easy to have n != n optimized away when compilers have their compiler flags set on. That's why you should use isnan to test nan instead of any other techniques when using C or C++.
794.
by cdavid 17y ago
Before 1.5, svn had no real merge capability. In particular, it could not detect that you merged something already when merging a changeset. Also, the merge command effectively "squashed" everything - you could use svnmerge and co to get so
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by cdavid 17y ago
The big advantage of branches is to allow to break your commits into smaller things. When working on two new features which takes many commits, if you work on the same branch, the history becomes inter winded, and that's a nightmare to unde
796.
by cdavid 17y ago
There are many situations where branches are the standard, conventional way of doings things: release managements, legacy development. Making branch hard does not make much sense - svn (with maybe cvs) are the only systems which make branch
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by cdavid 17y ago
The whole centralized vs distributed debate does not make much sense anyway, the choice of words is very poor. You almost always want to work on a common repository when working with other people - but the whole point of DVCS is that this c
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by cdavid 17y ago
(disclaimer, I am a Numpy/scipy dev) I think the language is just part of it. I would go as far as saying that from a purely "technical" POV, lisp and ML (e.g. OCAML) are superior languages to python in almost every way. Nevertheless, I thi
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by cdavid 17y ago
neither is scheme AFAIK, at least on OS X. But to be fair, none of those implementations are usable for most scientific work, as numpy is only available on CPython, at least today.
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by cdavid 17y ago
They most likely use jgit, since they require a JRE, and jgit is under the BSD.
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by cdavid 17y ago
Removing the GIL is easy if you remove compatibility requirements with C extensions. A lot of complex C extensions rely on the exact python ref counting semantics. That's why unladen swallow is interesting in the first place.
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by cdavid 17y ago
There are many ways to exploit multi-cores, multi-threading is just one of them. Many other techniques exist. Also, one thing to realize is that if speed really matters (like in scientific apps), you will get much higher speed increase by r
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by cdavid 17y ago
Concerning the practical issue of repeatability, that's why most fields require a new fact to be independently repeated by several people. At last year Scientific Python Conference, A. Martelli made an interesting point about verifiable sof
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by cdavid 17y ago
Verifiability in science is not a matter of having one program checked by different people. The reality is much more complex than that. This so called climate-gate says more about the perception of research than climate science (although it
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by cdavid 17y ago
This has to be the stupidest critic I have seen yet on this whole thing. In particular, complaining that the code is not commercial quality is laughable. Most of the scientific code is awful, in climate science and elsewhere, because the co
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by cdavid 17y ago
It cannot, at least not ATM and not out of the box. I am by no mean knowledgeable in those areas, but my understanding is that using specialized hardware/aggressively optimized code in numpy (or similar tools) would be very hard, though. On
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by cdavid 17y ago
Yes, cabal is the thing to steal. Improving distutils is worthwhile, but a temporary stop gap, most fundamental issues cannot be solved from improving distutils. Distutils itself is only 10 000 LOC of bad code, without good API, and you can
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by cdavid 17y ago
The problem is more complicated than just C code being more difficult to build. The whole distutils infrastructure is messy and badly designed. It takes care of everything from build up to installation and packaging, and all those parts are