It's always fascinating to see what questions are asked on the internet - and get answers!
Privacy advocates are not enthusiastic about Google Desktop Search 3:
On February 9, 2006, a beta version of Google Desktop Search was released, which allows you to find documents stored on different computers. This is achieved by storing the relevant files on the Google server, so you need to have and use a Google account to use this feature.
Great idea. Of course, I'll put data from my workplace on a Google server. Where it's readily available for anyone who gains access to the boxes. Very big idea. Google may have the motto "don't be evil" - but they should also think about the motto "don't be stupid" ...
Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles is a rather interesting article by Guido van Rossum about the impossibility of an elegant syntax for multi-line lambdas in Python. Worth reading, and in large parts I agree with him. However, I then stumble over such a last paragraph:
And there's the rub: there's no way to make a Rube Goldberg language feature appear simple. Features of a programming language, whether syntactic or semantic, are all part of the language's user interface. And a user interface can handle only so much complexity or it becomes unusable. This is also the reason why Python will never have continuations, and even why I'm uninterested in optimizing tail recursion. But that's for another installment.
I am quite willing to accept that continuations are complex - but not because of the interface. For the interface for continuations, you only need the callcc call to bind the continuation and a simple function syntax to trigger the continuation. The main problem with continuations lies in the cooperation with generators and exceptions - what happens when a continuation is triggered within a generator? What happens when an exception is triggered within a continuation? These are the difficult aspects - which, by the way, also make Scheme implementers sweat, which is why exceptions are not particularly popular there (the same problem, just viewed from the other direction).
So okay, no continuations in Python - even though we already have poor-man's continuations with pickable generators (or with greenlets, or with cloneable coroutines, or one of the many other approaches to obtain subsets of continuation features).
But what on earth is complex about tail-call optimization (because it's not just about tail recursion)? It is so primitive that it can be implemented transparently for the programmer - if a tail call is present, do not note a return address on the stack, but reload the parameters in the stack frame and note a simple jump. If you want to be nice, you can introduce a pseudo-function "tailcall" that throws an exception if it is not to be executed in a tail call position. There may be further conditions under which tail calls cannot be optimized - but these can also be incorporated into a corresponding check.
It is precisely the function overhead that makes some algorithms only awkwardly implementable in scripting languages. And tail-call optimization would definitely help here. Especially in situations where you have a chain of small function calls. As far as I'm concerned, it can also be an optimization that is only activated at -O (or -O2 or something else).
Powerful Remote X Displays with FreeNX - interesting for remote servers, as it has significantly better responses and lower bandwidth requirements than X or VNC.
Sin City I somehow didn't manage to watch in the cinema - every time we wanted to there were either no tickets, or no one could, or then the movie was no longer in the cinema. Quite stupid - but now I bought it on DVD. Wow. Impressive - absolutely impressive. Of course, the plot is like in the comics - relatively little demand, relatively much violence. But the implementation is gigantic.
By the way, I now also know why the Apple cinema displays are called that.
VMware Server is now free like free beer - and it should remain so after the beta. Great deal, because VMware is after all still the undisputed king among virtualizers - even under Linux. The open-source projects still have a lot to offer to get close to what VMware Server offers.
But if you want to try it out on your own host (which is quite easy due to the simple installation): make sure that the host does not have any other user accounts. Because VMware Server mercilessly uses all accounts that are set up on the system itself. Every user with whom you can log in - and that can indeed be a trivial mail user - can then create virtual machines and control public virtual machines (which are basically all created as root) and delete them.
The whole permission management is generally a bit of a hairy topic with VMware Server - it is decided based on the system permissions for the configuration file of the virtual machine. This is convenient - you just need the known tools - but also quite unintuitive during a first installation. And for example, I couldn't get the permission management for creating machines activated (for this, a special check file is created, whose permissions then say whether a user is allowed to create a new machine or not).
But once it's running smoothly (I had more trouble with X11 on the Mac - ssh -Y instead of ssh -X is the answer), it's a fine thing. Debian guests use minimal memory through the VMware tools, at least when they are not actively in use - and the management with the graphical console or the web interface is also quite nice. I think with a new machine this could really appeal to me - especially since you can then set up such a machine from the beginning with minimal users and push all services into the virtual machines.
However, I have already noticed that my simon is somewhat underpowered when it comes to virtualization. But a Hetzner DS 5000 or 7000 with extra storage could fit quite well there.
