As I noted in passing , Python frame objects alsohave a vaguely mysterious f_builtins member. On one level, frameobjects have this member because they are more or less representationsof the CPython (code) frame structure, and the C-level code framestructure has an f_builtins field. So, what is this field?

(Quite a lot of the Python internal objects work this way; they have themembers that they do mostly because they're Python representations of Cstructures).

We can

I've written before about Ubuntu'ssubstandard kernel update management; what I didn't say then (partlybecause I didn't fully understand it) is that this is just amanifestation of a general problem with kernel packaging in Ubuntu (andDebian, which it inherits from).

The fundamental problem for packaging kernels on Debian and Ubuntu isthat there are two unfortunate design choices in dpkg , the Debianpackage system: you can only every have one version of a packageinstalled at once, and there

I am generally not a fan of hardware accelerators of various sorts (thestereotypical example is hardware RAID cards). One of the reasonswhy is that historically (with one important exception), hardwareaccelerators generally just haven't been very good.

By not very good I mean that, well (generally):

• they haven't accelerated things very much.
• they haven't sped up actual important bottlenecks , except in rare circumstances.
• they almost invariably cost a significant amount of money.
• even when they manage to