I would say that they are generally reliable, though not indistructable. I have an AlphaSmart 3000 that my wife used to take notes all through law school.
Physically, the 3000 is a small full-sized (or nearly so) keyboard with a 4x80 (I think) character cell display. It runs FOREVER on 4AA batteries and can paste text to a PC or Mac via USB or IR. (Some models ISTR have different connectors). No pasting mode is quick (19.2kbaud?), but it works just fine.
The pastica case is relatively tough, and if not beautiful, at least not butt-ugly. My wife essentially tosed it in her backpack for 3 years and it had 0 problems as far as I know. It is probably not waterproof, but I would not fear it geting damp or even a bit of rain on the outside. It has few phsyical ports onit for junk to get inside, and no moving parts other than the keyboard.
My only reservation for travel work is that it's not exactly small. It is relative light (700g?), but it will take up as much space as a very portable laptop.
If you have room for it, though, it would make a great travel log. The text editing software works reasonably well (more featurers than pico, fewer than Wordpad/TextEdit).
This is a small anecdote based solely on my experience and not at all on reading the article...
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I stayed with relatives in Minnesota. My aunt is (essentially) a teacher's assistant for a rural school district.
Her (Kindergarten!) students would spend 2 hours of their half-days of school multiple times a week using computers. As she described the system, the computers worked quite well. The official pace of the class was set by the teacher. Students could practice letter identification, counting, money arithmatic, basic reading, etc. Students who were ahead of the class could keep busy. Students who were at or below level could be easily identified and the specific skills they were lacking would be exercised by the software.
I have no idea of what platform, software, initiative, etc. were at work here, but in the eyes of one Kindergarten teacher, this system was a good thing.
I was surprised. My instinct is that computers in the classroom are hard to get right--especially at such an early age.
Bogus. While the question is theoreticlly undecidable, that means that you can't be 100% sure. Certainly you could scan the code for (let's say) calls to gets. It's easy to imagine much more complicated schemes involving calculating a control flowgraph for the code in an executable and looking for paths that contain uninitialized variables.
After all, isn't most code going to be generated by a C compiler anyway? We're probably not talking about people writing encrypted, self-modifying software here.
Perhaps it is arrogant to assume, but I think I may be the undergraduate named at the top of Dijkstra Paper 1298. Indeed, my parents were born in 1954.. What a wonderful man.
I received my computer science degree from the University of Texas, where Dr. Dijkstra taught before retiring. I never took the undergraduate class he offered (I was kind of intimidated at the time), but the professor who taught my Software Engineering class had him come in to lecture one day.
This software engineering class was very pragmatic, emphasizing methodical design, implentation, and testing. As I recall, Dr. Dijkstra gave his lecture near the end of our semester, by which time we had been heavily involved in something resembling a team development evironment for a few months.. There was a very corporate feeling to our regimen of meetings and reports.
So one day we all go to the faculty lounge to hear the esteemed professor speak. He comes in the door of the lounge appearing to me most unlike the kind of man who could write so forcefully about programming, dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt with a distinctly old-grandfather look on his face.
In his very soft-spoken manner, he told us that he beleived that the main problem with programmers was a lack of rigor. People were so concerned with coding and testing that they never learned how to write something correctly the first time. He asked us to prove the correctness of the code for a binary search and spent the next half-hour proceeding glumly as we slowly worked through the process with him.
I got the impression we were a vaguely dissapointing group of students who he could tell were not convinced of the validity of his approach. It wasn't even a bitter dissapointment, though. I felt as though he was someone who had totally convinced himself that he knew how to make the world a better place, but that noone was listening.
He answered our questions about "gotos considered harmful" (it was his editor's idea to give it the cute title) with what I considered obvious patience. He talked about how he really only was able to keep up on the research that people referred to him these days. And then the lecture was over.
Our professor and Dr. Dijkstra were good friends, and I hung around after class talking with them about computer science and Dijksta's past. I ended up in his office after a while and we chatted about the current state of the industry as he saw it, why he really liked Texas, and so on. He was so intelligent in his conversation--asked so many probling questions--that by the time I was done I felt both touched and exhausted. He put on his cowboy hat and walked out of the office with me and headed off to his next appointment.
That was the last time I saw Esdgar Dijkstra--the only real time I ever talked to him. But I feel that the world has lost a quiet crusader, and I feel a tug in my heart thinking about this old dean of computer science with his cowboy hat.
IDE RAID is a wonderful thing, to be sure. In cases where you are concerned about storage and reliability over random-access speed, Linux software RAID or an IDE RAID controller can do wonders.
We're putting together a pair of backup servers, and $90 80gb 5400rpm IDE drives in RAID-5 configuration make a fine solution. For the size of my company, 160gb or 240gb allows us to backup everything at a very attractive price.
The system I'm putting together is a rackmount PII with a Promise Ultra100TX2 (two-channel IDE) and 3 80gb Maxtor 5400RPM IDE drives. The drives run $90 at Pricewatch. My total cost was about $300 for 160gb of somewhat redundant storage. Each of these drives will do about 30MB/sec sequental access if you saturate the IDE bus 2 drives. 36MB/sec if you use 1 drive per channel. 3 drives almost max out the PCI bus in this machine.
And if you're just recording or backing up, even that speed is overkill.
There was a good article in Last Month's Scientific American that explained how optical interferometry workas and gave some past and present examples of its use.
Thirty years after the moon landing I can't even get Windows 98 to
work without crashing and we can put a man effortlessly on the moon
and bring him back. I can't even get a conversation going between
Juno Alaska and Portland Oregon without a 2-second delay, but in
1969 astronauts can reply incredibly fast from 250,000 miles away
with no problems. Not to mention the clearness of the astronauts
voices in 1969. Thirty years later you get into a blind area and
your Cell Phone dies in rush hour traffic.
I've heard many conspiracy theories surrounding Windows, but never this.
Jeff is the "former exec of Novel" referenced here.
He has been an active contributor to (at least) the discussion on the linux-kernel mailing list for the last year or so. Check out his entry in the Kernel TrafficPeople index.
It's very interesting to watch his interaction with the community, since he came in from a large software house and seem(ed, s) to not "get" the way Linux development works. Some of the discussions he's brought up really seem bizarre in the Linux world (incorporate fsck into the kernel, like w2k, or this little diatribe), but others have led to very positive developments (NTFS help, legal help,...).
Some times this guy seems like he just doesn't get it, but then again he provides a very active *different* voice in l-k land. And the best part is that due to the nature of the project, people can basically ignore him when he rants and maybe still pick up some useful ideas along the way.
Directly related to this story, I'm not sure how much use an open NW-alike is, but hey, it's a free world.
As a backgroud for this message, I work for a medium-small software company in Austin (not speaking for them, blah blah blah) doing software QA work.
Even if the development effort for porting to a new platform is small, other factors may make this a difficult proposition. For example, test, support, and even documentation efforts have at least some dependance on the number of distinct platforms supported. So, especially for commercial software houses, it's not always an issue of "OK, we'll just run make and ship the thing."
Of course, some software products have "unspoorted" releases, and many open-source software projects don't have quite the same requirements for a dedicated support envionment, but there are often hidden costs involved.
I do have to admit, though, that the idea of having a slick gui sitting on top of all this wonderful ressurected NeXT technology is starting to make me seriously consider purchasing a Apple box for the first time, ever. When this stuff GA's I think it should be really fun.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft at all, but I do have to take issue with the fact that everyone keeps referring to the fact that Microsoft is trying to hide the fact that they are basically fronting this FIN group.
Oh really? If I was going to trying to hide my involvement in an orginization I wouldn't give them a web address off of my company's homepage or an email address pointing straight back to me. They may be trying to position this as something larger than their company, but they're surely not trying to hide their involvement, either.
Don't get me wrong--I don't agree with their premises at all, but you can't really claim that they're doing total astroturf as in previous instances. I guess they got burnt too badly.
Yep, the writing is pretty spotty. Take a look at the first sentance:
It's official: Computers are now at the epicenter of our lives.
help! my computer is causing an earthquake.
When I post with bad grammar or usage, at least I have the excuse of being a simple user on a geek discussion board. These people claim to be journalists.
Note that devfs is currently an *optional* feature, though there are inklings that in the future (i.e. 2.5/2.6) it may be optional in the sense that procfs is, i.e. you don't have to have it configured, but you loose functionality if it's not.
Richard Gooch has been working on getting devfs included in the kernel for ages, it is nice to see it actually show up.
But the reason you write comments is not because you couldn't have read it 6 months ago, but because you think you won't be able to in 6 months' time, or because some other chap won't be able to, surely?
I guess I was trying to imply that similar newbies (even ones who were very familiar with programming in C and Bourne shell, as I was, for example) would have a hard time figuring out what was going on. But a even remotely seasoned Perl programmer would glance by the line and immediately know what was going on. That Perl for you--full of so many great idioms that the uninititated can be thoroughly confused.
I don't believe in comments particularly. I'm firmly of the "if you can't read it and it's valid perl, that's your sad loss" mentality.
Well--what if they can read the Perl, but for some other reason it's not clear what's going on? That's my basic rational for commenting--I assume you syntatically and to some extetent semantically understand what's going on--but it's a lot clearer if I write
# wait for job complete
before some 10 line code that goes out, runs a Unix command, and runs a couple of regexps against it.
But I often feel my need to comment my Perl code beyond that level, to point out the idioms and things . . . Maybe I'm just an insecure Perl coder:-)
By way of introduction, I work with Perl daily. My 'ork-place uses it extensively as part of our product (yep, we ship a complete perl5 tree with every copy) and in the test group we use Perl as glue to write all sort of automated tests.
This summer I went out and bought a copy of Learning Perl and I begen my trek down the road of Perl enlightenment. Now, since then I've written.. probably a few thousand lines of Perl code. I bought the Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl. I read comp.lang.perl.moderated, and generally and starting to really get into the Perl way of thinking. I enjoy thinking in Perl . . .
But now, I look at my scripts, and think "six months ago, I would never have been able to read this." I wouldn't have a clue how my code works. I have comments about the general flow and intent my programs, so that one could at least identify where things happen. But I've always ahered to the idea that one should not write comments like:
i++;/* increment i */
in C. But I feel the desire to write things like:
while (<>) { # code that operates on STDIN or the command line arguments }
in my Perl.
What's a concientious coder to do? Comment for the newbie and end up with over-commented code? Comment for someone who has read Programming Perl? Comment for the "Just another Perl hacker" crowd?
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that they are generally reliable, though not indistructable. I have an AlphaSmart 3000 that my wife used to take notes all through law school.
Physically, the 3000 is a small full-sized (or nearly so) keyboard with a 4x80 (I think) character cell display. It runs FOREVER on 4AA batteries and can paste text to a PC or Mac via USB or IR. (Some models ISTR have different connectors). No pasting mode is quick (19.2kbaud?), but it works just fine.
The pastica case is relatively tough, and if not beautiful, at least not butt-ugly. My wife essentially tosed it in her backpack for 3 years and it had 0 problems as far as I know. It is probably not waterproof, but I would not fear it geting damp or even a bit of rain on the outside. It has few phsyical ports onit for junk to get inside, and no moving parts other than the keyboard.
My only reservation for travel work is that it's not exactly small. It is relative light (700g?), but it will take up as much space as a very portable laptop.
If you have room for it, though, it would make a great travel log. The text editing software works reasonably well (more featurers than pico, fewer than Wordpad/TextEdit).
Like decaffinated coffee.. de THCed weed? hm.
Forget encrypted. How about just signed? (NB: I've never signed a message before)
In this case, all the teaching per se was done by the teachers. The computers were just really efficient ways of doing busy work..
This is a small anecdote based solely on my experience and not at all on reading the article...
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I stayed with relatives in Minnesota. My aunt is (essentially) a teacher's assistant for a rural school district.
Her (Kindergarten!) students would spend 2 hours of their half-days of school multiple times a week using computers. As she described the system, the computers worked quite well. The official pace of the class was set by the teacher. Students could practice letter identification, counting, money arithmatic, basic reading, etc. Students who were ahead of the class could keep busy. Students who were at or below level could be easily identified and the specific skills they were lacking would be exercised by the software.
I have no idea of what platform, software, initiative, etc. were at work here, but in the eyes of one Kindergarten teacher, this system was a good thing.
I was surprised. My instinct is that computers in the classroom are hard to get right--especially at such an early age.
Take a look at this link.
The paper claims in its conclusion a speedup of ~800 (for DES encrpytion) and ~1600 times (for DES breaking) over C code for the P4.
I wonder who would be interested in that?!
Bogus. While the question is theoreticlly undecidable, that means that you can't be 100% sure. Certainly you could scan the code for (let's say) calls to gets. It's easy to imagine much more complicated schemes involving calculating a control flowgraph for the code in an executable and looking for paths that contain uninitialized variables.
After all, isn't most code going to be generated by a C compiler anyway? We're probably not talking about people writing encrypted, self-modifying software here.
Well, except for DLL's and the occasional misbehaved uninstaller.
But, of course, that's not Microsoft's fault.
see the list archives.
The short answer is yes, but it's an issue that is being looked at.
Perhaps it is arrogant to assume, but I think I may be the undergraduate named at the top of Dijkstra Paper 1298. Indeed, my parents were born in 1954.. What a wonderful man.
I received my computer science degree from the University of Texas, where Dr. Dijkstra taught before retiring. I never took the undergraduate class he offered (I was kind of intimidated at the time), but the professor who taught my Software Engineering class had him come in to lecture one day.
This software engineering class was very pragmatic, emphasizing methodical design, implentation, and testing. As I recall, Dr. Dijkstra gave his lecture near the end of our semester, by which time we had been heavily involved in something resembling a team development evironment for a few months.. There was a very corporate feeling to our regimen of meetings and reports.
So one day we all go to the faculty lounge to hear the esteemed professor speak. He comes in the door of the lounge appearing to me most unlike the kind of man who could write so forcefully about programming, dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt with a distinctly old-grandfather look on his face.
In his very soft-spoken manner, he told us that he beleived that the main problem with programmers was a lack of rigor. People were so concerned with coding and testing that they never learned how to write something correctly the first time. He asked us to prove the correctness of the code for a binary search and spent the next half-hour proceeding glumly as we slowly worked through the process with him.
I got the impression we were a vaguely dissapointing group of students who he could tell were not convinced of the validity of his approach. It wasn't even a bitter dissapointment, though. I felt as though he was someone who had totally convinced himself that he knew how to make the world a better place, but that noone was listening.
He answered our questions about "gotos considered harmful" (it was his editor's idea to give it the cute title) with what I considered obvious patience. He talked about how he really only was able to keep up on the research that people referred to him these days. And then the lecture was over.
Our professor and Dr. Dijkstra were good friends, and I hung around after class talking with them about computer science and Dijksta's past. I ended up in his office after a while and we chatted about the current state of the industry as he saw it, why he really liked Texas, and so on. He was so intelligent in his conversation--asked so many probling questions--that by the time I was done I felt both touched and exhausted. He put on his cowboy hat and walked out of the office with me and headed off to his next appointment.
That was the last time I saw Esdgar Dijkstra--the only real time I ever talked to him. But I feel that the world has lost a quiet crusader, and I feel a tug in my heart thinking about this old dean of computer science with his cowboy hat.
You know, I live in Chicago and I love to give this address out. I wonder just how much spam Wrigley Field gets? :-)
IDE RAID is a wonderful thing, to be sure. In cases where you are concerned about storage and reliability over random-access speed, Linux software RAID or an IDE RAID controller can do wonders.
We're putting together a pair of backup servers, and $90 80gb 5400rpm IDE drives in RAID-5 configuration make a fine solution. For the size of my company, 160gb or 240gb allows us to backup everything at a very attractive price.
The system I'm putting together is a rackmount PII with a Promise Ultra100TX2 (two-channel IDE) and 3 80gb Maxtor 5400RPM IDE drives. The drives run $90 at Pricewatch. My total cost was about $300 for 160gb of somewhat redundant storage. Each of these drives will do about 30MB/sec sequental access if you saturate the IDE bus 2 drives. 36MB/sec if you use 1 drive per channel. 3 drives almost max out the PCI bus in this machine.
And if you're just recording or backing up, even that speed is overkill.
There is even an obligatory quote from a BMG exec about not being able to pin down what the problem is.
He has been an active contributor to (at least) the discussion on the linux-kernel mailing list for the last year or so. Check out his entry in the Kernel Traffic People index.
It's very interesting to watch his interaction with the community, since he came in from a large software house and seem(ed, s) to not "get" the way Linux development works. Some of the discussions he's brought up really seem bizarre in the Linux world (incorporate fsck into the kernel, like w2k, or this little diatribe), but others have led to very positive developments (NTFS help, legal help, ...).
Some times this guy seems like he just doesn't get it, but then again he provides a very active *different* voice in l-k land. And the best part is that due to the nature of the project, people can basically ignore him when he rants and maybe still pick up some useful ideas along the way.
Directly related to this story, I'm not sure how much use an open NW-alike is, but hey, it's a free world.
Even if the development effort for porting to a new platform is small, other factors may make this a difficult proposition. For example, test, support, and even documentation efforts have at least some dependance on the number of distinct platforms supported. So, especially for commercial software houses, it's not always an issue of "OK, we'll just run make and ship the thing."
Of course, some software products have "unspoorted" releases, and many open-source software projects don't have quite the same requirements for a dedicated support envionment, but there are often hidden costs involved.
I do have to admit, though, that the idea of having a slick gui sitting on top of all this wonderful ressurected NeXT technology is starting to make me seriously consider purchasing a Apple box for the first time, ever. When this stuff GA's I think it should be really fun.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft at all, but I do have to take issue with the fact that everyone keeps referring to the fact that Microsoft is trying to hide the fact that they are basically fronting this FIN group.
Oh really? If I was going to trying to hide my involvement in an orginization I wouldn't give them a web address off of my company's homepage or an email address pointing straight back to me. They may be trying to position this as something larger than their company, but they're surely not trying to hide their involvement, either.
Don't get me wrong--I don't agree with their premises at all, but you can't really claim that they're doing total astroturf as in previous instances. I guess they got burnt too badly.
When I post with bad grammar or usage, at least I have the excuse of being a simple user on a geek discussion board. These people claim to be journalists.
It does a little explaining, though I'm not sure there is an absolute justification given. Again, as you said, if you don't like it, don't use it.
Note that devfs is currently an *optional* feature, though there are inklings that in the future (i.e. 2.5/2.6) it may be optional in the sense that procfs is, i.e. you don't have to have it configured, but you loose functionality if it's not.
Richard Gooch has been working on getting devfs included in the kernel for ages, it is nice to see it actually show up.
But I often feel my need to comment my Perl code beyond that level, to point out the idioms and things . . . Maybe I'm just an insecure Perl coder :-)
By way of introduction, I work with Perl daily. My 'ork-place uses it extensively as part of our product (yep, we ship a complete perl5 tree with every copy) and in the test group we use Perl as glue to write all sort of automated tests.
This summer I went out and bought a copy of Learning Perl and I begen my trek down the road of Perl enlightenment. Now, since then I've written .. probably a few thousand lines of Perl code. I bought the Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl. I read comp.lang.perl.moderated, and generally and starting to really get into the Perl way of thinking. I enjoy thinking in Perl . . .
But now, I look at my scripts, and think "six months ago, I would never have been able to read this." I wouldn't have a clue how my code works. I have comments about the general flow and intent my programs, so that one could at least identify where things happen. But I've always ahered to the idea that one should not write comments like:
in C. But I feel the desire to write things like: in my Perl.What's a concientious coder to do? Comment for the newbie and end up with over-commented code? Comment for someone who has read Programming Perl? Comment for the "Just another Perl hacker" crowd?