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Linux

Linux Mint 13 (Maya) Has Arrived 216

New submitter OceanMan7 writes "Linux Mint 13 (Maya) has just been released. DVDs come in four flavors — MATE (with and without codecs) and Cinnamon (with and without codecs) — in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The codec-free versions comply with U.S. and Japanese IP regulations. MATE 1.2 is Linux Mint's community-powered extension of Gnome 2. Cinnamon 1.4 is built upon Gnome 3, but has a more traditional look and feel. As with Ubuntu 12.04, upon which Linux Mint draws, all editions come with Long-term support (LTS) until April, 2017. The release notes provide a list of changes.

Comment IAMA PDL user (Score 5, Insightful) 94

I was happy to be reading /. on my lunch break and see PDL mentioned. I use PDL and am glad to see it get some notice.
I am disappointment in the comments so far though. The anti-Perl froth is strong in this thread and I am not sure why?
Here is my point of view:
        -Use whatever programming language suits you and your task the best. Maximize for total productivity which is a function of both of these things in varying degrees.
        -Perl suits me best, personally, as a comfortable tool This is kind of squishy...it just feels right to me. MANY MANY people agree with me. But maybe you don't. meh.
        -My tasks involve (a) parsing data from a variety of sources and (b) number crunching. Perl is already fantastic at (a). PDL makes Perl fantastic at (b).
        -The people behind PDL use it for even more numerically complex tasks than I. Check out the docs and mailing lost archives and see. http://pdl.perl.org/?page=mailing-lists
        -If you are already writing code in C, Python, Fortran or whatever else than you should stick with it. Moving over to PDL just because it exists doesn't make any sense, of course.
Now, as a Perl and PDL user could someone please explain to me the string visceral reaction shown by people in these comment threads whenever it is mentioned? Did Larry Wall challenge you to a bar fight once or something? (Probably not, I met him once and he doesn't seem like a bar fight kind of guy.)

Comment Re:"many developers are so intrigued" (Score 1) 434

I have personally seen python run very very well on an open-mosix cluster.
I have no idea of python's inherent support for multiple processors but
with open-mosix it migrates the jobs to the different processes for you anyway.
This use of python with open-mosix is fairly common within various high throughput computing
niches. Or at least it was. I haven't worked in a scientific workplace in many years.

Businesses

Software Piracy At the Workplace? 1006

An anonymous reader writes "What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat 'We don't pirate software,' and 'We must have paid for it at some point.' Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key, and that version of Office is on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions. As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money. Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?"

Comment Netbeans! (Score 1) 1055

Netbeans is the best IDE I have ever used. Netbeans is written in java so it will run on multiple platforms. While it has lost some
"street cred" to Eclipse it is still wildly popular and attracts developers to volunteer their time to add support for many languages.
Plus, Netbeans in and of itself is a development platform which can help you create some very nice apps.

Comment Definition: trifecta (Score 1) 188

A "trifecta" is a wager whereas you win money if you correctly bet on the way the top three "performers" finish. So, suppose there is a horse race and horses Joe, Bob, and Sam finish 1,2,3 and you bet on Joe, Bob, and Sam to finish in that order YOU WIN!
The "trifecta" bet is used in greyhound, horses, and jai-alai. There are variants such as "boxing" and "wheeling" but these are advanced lessons...

The Internet

Jurassic Web 430

theodp writes "It wasn't so long ago, but Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes that The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. No YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, Gawker, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web and were paying for the Internet by the hour. Today, Nielsen says we spend about 27 hours a month online (present company excepted, of course!)." I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.
Education

Are My Ideas Being Stolen? If So, What Then? 508

BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."

Comment Mission Statement: "Let's re-invent the wheel!" (Score 1) 102

Does nobody in IT have any sort of long term memory?
Why is it, like, 3 people in total have called them out for producing junk? Campfire is irc in a web page!

For the past ten years I have seen group after group re-invent the wheel in the language du jour. Remember jThis and jThat followed by pyThis and pyThat? Well now we have This and That implemented in Ruby. Genius!

Movies

Kaleidescape Triumphant in Court Case, DVD Ripping Ruled Legal 213

Jim Buzbee writes "Ever wanted to rip all your DVDs to a big network server so that you could select and play them back to your TV? Up until now, manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they've been afraid a lawsuit. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, 'nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs. Nothing requires that a DVD be present during playback.' Kaleidescape has finally won their long-standing lawsuit, a case we first talked about early in 2005."

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