I write applications for rugged handheld devices. On my desk I currently have a couple of TDS Ranger handhelds. the screen is 320x240 and tiny. But they do get 22-24 hours of continuous use including wireless out of the battery's. Of course the battery pack is close to 2 lbs on it's own...
It's nice to know which is best for the desktop but I'm not wanting to switch away from XP with outlook and office yet. I'm still at the stage of wanting to switch away from small business server 2000 which we use for SQL server, exchange, domain controller and file serving.
Now I know that all of the features can be replaced for the file serving via samba, and I'm sure that we can set up a domain controller somehow, but will postgres or mysql directly replace sql server and allow my apps to work without changes? That's the easy part in my mind. What replaces exchange in such a way the outlook never notices? I get the feeling I'm locked into this crap for awhile longer yet.
Here's a cut and paste from a different forum where I was measuring my electric usage trying to track down why my bill was so high.
Initial measurements of the PC are interesting
the monitor draws 3 watts when turned off. it draws 60 watts when turned on and in text mode it draws 88 watts when in graphical mode. effectively the monitor is turned off for 17 hours a day and is in graphical the remainder so thats 0.667 kwh/day or about 4 cents. this is 20 kwh/month or $1.2/month
The cable modem draws 13 watts when online, 11 when offline it's almost always online and has no off switch. so 0.312 kwh/day or 9.36 kwh/month which is 57 cents/month
"The main box is interesting. I will leave the meter running longer to get a true average for use but right now it looks like it's at 146 watts when idle and about 160 when working. It's at 10w when turned off. It runs 24 hours/day and is idle almost always. so thats 3.5kwh/day or 105 kwh/month this works out to $6.35/month If I shutdown when at work and in bed I can cut this to 1.2 kwh/day or 36 kwh/month $2.18/month saving me a little over $4/month. However given where I live and the amount of sunlight I recieve in a day just turning the PC off when I'm not home would probably save me on buying 1 large solar panel if I was trying to become energy independant. "
so basically my pc costs me a little over $8/month to run. By simply turning it off when I'm not sitting in front of it I can cut that in half. so thats $48/year I'd save.
I thought all of the phone companies qualify as common carriers and are not responsible for whats on their networks because they can't and shouldn't control it. Now that they have filtering ability for somethings they should be charged for every copied song and every piece of child porn moving on their wires.
Actually natural gas is worse then regular gasoline. Gasoline comes from oil and is easy to transport. Just load up a tanker with oil and send it over from the middle east if you don't have enough in north america. Even gasoline can be transported as is currently happening. It just can't be stored forever. natural gas needs to be pressurized and cooled in order to transport it on ships so very little is moved this way.
The way the wells work also differ. Oil comes out fast at first, then slows and you pump it and gradually less and less comes out each day.
Natural gas comes out as soon as the hole is opened. It comes out at basically the same rate each day until at the very end it just stops. You get very little warning and no gradual slow down.
As for the current supplies Natural gas has been in steady decline for years. A couple of winters ago the pipelines almost lost pressure we where so close to running out. $14 natural gas is going to seem damn cheap in the not too distant future
I'm in BC. Telus is not available at my current location so I'm on shaw. Shaw calls at 30 gb/month total. telus I had no issues with at my old house doing 80+ gb/month but their service was brutal and they where starting to have outages.
Why exactly are they doing this? If the book slips out a few hours early it's not like it will be ripped and reprinted in illegal copies before the real version officially goes on sale. I just don't see the point of this much security.
Are parents really going to line up at midnight to buy a kids book? Why bother? the kid should be in bed at that time anyways.
Shaw recently increased their speeds and for only $15 more per month I could be getting much faster speeds. Of course they only increased the cap by about 10 gig/month so I'd be going from fast and able to blow my monthly transfer cap in 4 days to really fast and able to blow my cap in 3 days.
I don't care if I'm only getting 2 mbit instead of 30 mbit, let me max it out and leave it there forever without penalties and threats of kicking me off the network. Hell I'd pay the higher fees for a slower but truely unlimited connection.
You can get even faster. I used to download Buffy the vampire slayer from newsgroups. The version on there was originally captured off of the satelite broadcast to England which took place before the show aired in North America. I Could download the show and watch it usually 1 day before it officially aired. It also didn't have the stupid station logo in the bottom corner yet. I collected most of the series that way but these days I've just bought the DVD's entirely for the extra material.
Yes I'm coming across as a troll here but I'm still pissed about having bought a 9200 and the need to fight it to get it working reasonably under linux. TV out should not have taken a days worth of work. Until ATI gets it together and starts releasing good drivers for something other then windows my cards will be nvidia.
As someone who used to write commercial POS software that cost about $20,000 for the server and then $10,000 per station afterwords I can safely tell you that paying that kind of money is a full and total rip off. I met a fair number of people in the industry over the years and found that the vast majority of these companies run things the same way.
Testing is the customers problem 90% of the time. If they lose data thats their issue.
There is absolutely no legal recourse should the program fail to do something like collect and calculate taxes correctly and the government comes after you.
I quit when the company milked a used bookstore for $80,000 in custom development knowing full well that it wouldn't work in the end. The lawsuit came in and the owner was so experienced at being sued he just had his lawyer send back the standard response that said if we go to court we'll probably win and you'll never get the money back anyways.
These days they are still doing well selling software but to keep costs down have moved the company back into the owners basement.
If you have the choice between paying for commercial specialized software or paying to have the open source stuff developed pay for the open source. The odds of being screwed and ending up with nothing are much lower.
No It's a question of physics. Oil sands take about 2 barrels of oil to make 3 barrels of oil. so you're gaining oil. The more difficult it becomes to get to the sand the more oil required to get it out. My understanding of oil shale is it's much closer to a 1-1 ratio or a net lose in energy then the tar sands. Same goes for that ultra deep water oil. It's not a question of money it's a question of the energy required to get it out.
My current job is building a program for a handheld device. Because the unit will be used outdoors while the users are wearing gloves in winter I also came up with the idea of really big buttons on screen.
The secret to writing easy to use applications for CE.Net or mobile devices is to completely ignore the programming standards as recommended by mircrosoft.
Out main issue is finding hardware that is robust enough (IP67 should be tough enough, IP65 is not) with all the bells and wistles and most importantly they need a good keyboard for lots of data entry. The industry seems to be moving away from keyboard entry but if you're doing lots of data entry it is the only way to go. I've also found that units are failing tests that they are rated to survive easily.
At this point It's almost looking like having custom units built is the way to go
well most men I know started using firefox because it cured that little popup issue they had while surfing for porn. Most women I know don't complain anywhere near as much about popups and I've always assumed they don't hunt for porn as much.
I know thats why I switched and i wouldn't be shocked if I'm not the only one.
You seem to be mistaken the quote very clearly states consumer behaviour not customer behaviour. Most companies have long ago stopped seeing you as anything other then an income source.
I think most projects go over their budgets in both time and money. I believe this is because the project wouldn't be feasible if the true costs where announced.
I've seen arenas being built that where quoted to the tax payer at 10 million when it was well known that it would be at least 14 million. But 10 million was the number presented. When the vote said build it, it took 2 months before the cost was increased and they haven't even broke ground yet.
I've also been on software projects that involved weeks of work but was radically underestimated to get the job. In the end the customer gets screwed and the programmers get ragged on for taking too long.
It's all done to get the initial cheque. After your in there you can just ramp up the costs
Re:Author is on crack
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Well lets see, 1995 I was just starting my compsci degree. Things going on in the labs mostly consisted of online gaming, Collecting vast amounts of porn (pictures some movies) and some mp3 piracy but most machines could barely play them. Burnt CD's are amazing and pricy but there are some. Windows 95 rules.
Jump forward 2 years to 97 and it was pretty much the same but mp3 piracy was much more common. Everyone on the dorm network had thousands of songs and everyone left it all available to anyone who wanted it. Porn was now mostly video but most clips where under 50 meg. Cartoon series are available but pretty crappy, it was still cool to see the transformers again after all of those years. making mixed Cd's is common, but still not cheap. Yep I'm still on win 95
Jump forward 2 more years to 1999. I've got my own place but highspeed is available so I'm on DSL. Gaming isn't as common but you actually have to work at this point. Mp3's are common, everyone has any song they ever wanted, new stuff is spread almost instantly. I've cancelled my cable to save money and I'm downloading good quality copies of the two shows I watched. I'm not the only one but it's still rare. Anime is starting to be available in good quantity on the networks. For the first time I'm able to download full size rips of movies but they are few and far between. I remember being at a bar and having a discussion with a musician/friend about these great "new" Mp3 things. She thought it was great. I've switched to win 98 and for class I dual boot to redhat. It took me 2 months to get sound working under redhat.
Jump ahead another 2 years to 2001, I've since graduated but am working in the industry so here's what I see when talking with other programmers. Mp3's are old news, it's like the radio but you get to pick what you want to listen to. The market is slowing down and hardware upgrades aren't as common so I didn't see much in new gaming taking place. Counter strike was big. Movie downloading was really taking off though. once you could get a movie on a cd with good quality is was nice. swapping at work took place but most grabbed off of kazza. Everyone has highspeed connections now. For some reason porn is still mostly smaller clips, but they are in the 100 meg range now, high quality copies of complete scenes. Burnt Cd's are common place. I'm back to straight windows 98.
It's now 2003, mp3's are actually risky to download but I didn't find much want to dl anyways(and no I didn't buy a single cd that year, or any year since 2000 for that fact). Kazza has gone to shit and there isn't a lot out there to replace it with. the market is bleak around here but you can get some work now and again. I'm rally into anime at this point and it's all over the P2P networks, it just takes awhile to collect. The guys in the office also like anime but we don't trade just recommend and then download. I've basically given up completely on tv at this point except for 1 show. Cable is free so I watch it on tv. I learned that year that I almost prefered the ripped versions with the commercials removed. They are available 1 day after the show aired though. Near the end of the year I get an Ipod, All music (ripped or bought)cd's are now stored in boxes. I run win2000 and suse, later I switch to gentoo. linux is the primary desktop at this point.
jump ahead to this year. I have a great new job and lots of extra spending money. I'm watching lots of movies in theaters but not renting any I find. The PPV on cable is pretty good and if they don't carry it bittorrent is just a few clicks away. I've stopped burning cd's completely unless needed for install. All media is stored on the harddrives and available on my network. I have a capture card to collect new shows but I barely use it. The tv sits on BBC 90% of the time for the news and I'm thinking of cancelling cable again. At work all the rage are online games like final fantasy. Everyone seems to play a different one
having gone back and checked the service packs you may be correct that SP3 includes SP2. I can't find any evidence either way however I do know that SP3 consists of 3 files to update different parts, and combined they are not as large as SP2 so I have my doubts that it contains everything in the other one.
And yes my complain is that I had to install some software.
Having heard for so long how hard linux is to install software in I'm horrified by the "easy" windows installation. A real package management system would go a hell of a long way in this OS. And I really do hope that longhorn corrects whatever is forcing reboots after an install. I'm always rebooting it seems.
The job requires a small handheld device with a full keyboard a fair amount of space and a fair chunk of processor on it. This is not a pocket PC or PDA type application, the hardware that this will have to work on in $3000- $4000 per unit.
In the end I haven't found a single manufacturer that builds units like this that run linux. Trust me, I'd love to be paid to work in linux, but the hardware says it's windows CE.Net, DOS or proprietary. CE.net seemed like less of a dead end.
Now that I think about it I'm curious to see if what I write will work at all with mono in the end or not. Perhaps I'll give that a try this weekend.
I'm in the middle of learning to create a program on a windows CE device. Since it's going to be used to aquire data I figured it would be nice to install some form of DB on it. Sure enough there is SQL 200 CE for the ce.net devices. So Here I am thinking this is great I'll install that and away we go. 1 day later I'm still working on that install.
First I already have visual studio.Net installed and I really can't complain about it. Best IDE I've ever used hands down.
Second I know that I need SQL server to replicate the DB's with so I head off to MSDN and grab it. 500 or so meg later and I burn it to a CD(my media versions of the subscription haven't arrived yet) and start the install. Installation doesn't appear to do anything. After messing with it for a bit I remove it. Remove the desktop edition, and remove the old sql client tools. run the install again and it works. Fine I can live with that. So I install sql 2000 CE It tells me that I need sql 2000 SP1 installed. I assumed that the newest version on MSDN would have the service pack installed already but I would be wrong.
So 430 meg later I have downloaded SP2 (sp1 is rolled into it) and another 120 or so meg and I have SP3. Install those. Reinstall sql CE. I get further but I now need to install IIS so that the two can comunicate. It didn't come preinstalled on this XP pro SP2 PC so I get to track the program down, set it up then get the database installed then I can get back to the 20 minute tutorial I was following..Net on CE devices may work nicely but the hours of hoops to jump through just to get started is a real pain in the ass. By far the best part of this exercise has been visual studio. I added the necessary parts as a reference and away it goes.
Deploying programs to the device is trivial. If all the rest of the software was at the same level as visual studio I wouldn't be using linux as my desktop at home.
Man does that bring back memories. Back in my IRC days on undernet Around 95 or so It was common practice to routinely take over other peoples channels mostly for the sake of doing it.
To test new attacks the common target was always the channels distributing kiddy porn. You would start you 100 clones up and drop them into the channel then go to town. Message floods, ping floods... Almost all the "new" DDOS attacks of the late 90's had been seen on IRC for years.
Anyways The OPS on the servers never cared when we where attacking these channels. It wasn't until the attacks started to destabalize the complete networks that they stepped in.
I'm not trying to troll here but I'm not overly interested in rebooting just to go browse and see what they have. Is it possible to at least browse the store under linux or is it mac or windows only?
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I write applications for rugged handheld devices. On my desk I currently have a couple of TDS Ranger handhelds. the screen is 320x240 and tiny. But they do get 22-24 hours of continuous use including wireless out of the battery's. Of course the battery pack is close to 2 lbs on it's own...
Well I learned something new. Something I really didn't want to know but something new.
It's nice to know which is best for the desktop but I'm not wanting to switch away from XP with outlook and office yet. I'm still at the stage of wanting to switch away from small business server 2000 which we use for SQL server, exchange, domain controller and file serving.
Now I know that all of the features can be replaced for the file serving via samba, and I'm sure that we can set up a domain controller somehow, but will postgres or mysql directly replace sql server and allow my apps to work without changes? That's the easy part in my mind. What replaces exchange in such a way the outlook never notices? I get the feeling I'm locked into this crap for awhile longer yet.
Here's a cut and paste from a different forum where I was measuring my electric usage trying to track down why my bill was so high.
Initial measurements of the PC are interesting
the monitor draws 3 watts when turned off.
it draws 60 watts when turned on and in text mode
it draws 88 watts when in graphical mode.
effectively the monitor is turned off for 17 hours a day and is in graphical the remainder so thats
0.667 kwh/day or about 4 cents. this is 20 kwh/month or $1.2/month
The cable modem draws 13 watts when online, 11 when offline it's almost always online and has no off switch. so 0.312 kwh/day or 9.36 kwh/month which is 57 cents/month
"The main box is interesting. I will leave the meter running longer to get a true average for use but right now it looks like it's at 146 watts when idle and about 160 when working. It's at 10w when turned off. It runs 24 hours/day and is idle almost always. so thats 3.5kwh/day or 105 kwh/month this works out to $6.35/month If I shutdown when at work and in bed I can cut this to 1.2 kwh/day or 36 kwh/month $2.18/month saving me a little over $4/month. However given where I live and the amount of sunlight I recieve in a day just turning the PC off when I'm not home would probably save me on buying 1 large solar panel if I was trying to become energy independant. "
so basically my pc costs me a little over $8/month to run. By simply turning it off when I'm not sitting in front of it I can cut that in half. so thats $48/year I'd save.
I thought all of the phone companies qualify as common carriers and are not responsible for whats on their networks because they can't and shouldn't control it. Now that they have filtering ability for somethings they should be charged for every copied song and every piece of child porn moving on their wires.
Actually natural gas is worse then regular gasoline. Gasoline comes from oil and is easy to transport. Just load up a tanker with oil and send it over from the middle east if you don't have enough in north america. Even gasoline can be transported as is currently happening. It just can't be stored forever. natural gas needs to be pressurized and cooled in order to transport it on ships so very little is moved this way.
The way the wells work also differ. Oil comes out fast at first, then slows and you pump it and gradually less and less comes out each day.
Natural gas comes out as soon as the hole is opened. It comes out at basically the same rate each day until at the very end it just stops. You get very little warning and no gradual slow down.
As for the current supplies Natural gas has been in steady decline for years. A couple of winters ago the pipelines almost lost pressure we where so close to running out. $14 natural gas is going to seem damn cheap in the not too distant future
You mean a solar powered ice maker like this?
http://homepower.com/files/solarice.pdf
I'm in BC. Telus is not available at my current location so I'm on shaw. Shaw calls at 30 gb/month total. telus I had no issues with at my old house doing 80+ gb/month but their service was brutal and they where starting to have outages.
Why exactly are they doing this? If the book slips out a few hours early it's not like it will be ripped and reprinted in illegal copies before the real version officially goes on sale. I just don't see the point of this much security.
Are parents really going to line up at midnight to buy a kids book? Why bother? the kid should be in bed at that time anyways.
Shaw recently increased their speeds and for only $15 more per month I could be getting much faster speeds. Of course they only increased the cap by about 10 gig/month so I'd be going from fast and able to blow my monthly transfer cap in 4 days to really fast and able to blow my cap in 3 days.
I don't care if I'm only getting 2 mbit instead of 30 mbit, let me max it out and leave it there forever without penalties and threats of kicking me off the network. Hell I'd pay the higher fees for a slower but truely unlimited connection.
You can get even faster. I used to download Buffy the vampire slayer from newsgroups. The version on there was originally captured off of the satelite broadcast to England which took place before the show aired in North America. I Could download the show and watch it usually 1 day before it officially aired. It also didn't have the stupid station logo in the bottom corner yet. I collected most of the series that way but these days I've just bought the DVD's entirely for the extra material.
Yes I'm coming across as a troll here but I'm still pissed about having bought a 9200 and the need to fight it to get it working reasonably under linux. TV out should not have taken a days worth of work. Until ATI gets it together and starts releasing good drivers for something other then windows my cards will be nvidia.
As someone who used to write commercial POS software that cost about $20,000 for the server and then $10,000 per station afterwords I can safely tell you that paying that kind of money is a full and total rip off. I met a fair number of people in the industry over the years and found that the vast majority of these companies run things the same way.
Testing is the customers problem 90% of the time. If they lose data thats their issue.
There is absolutely no legal recourse should the program fail to do something like collect and calculate taxes correctly and the government comes after you.
I quit when the company milked a used bookstore for $80,000 in custom development knowing full well that it wouldn't work in the end. The lawsuit came in and the owner was so experienced at being sued he just had his lawyer send back the standard response that said if we go to court we'll probably win and you'll never get the money back anyways.
These days they are still doing well selling software but to keep costs down have moved the company back into the owners basement.
If you have the choice between paying for commercial specialized software or paying to have the open source stuff developed pay for the open source. The odds of being screwed and ending up with nothing are much lower.
No It's a question of physics. Oil sands take about 2 barrels of oil to make 3 barrels of oil. so you're gaining oil. The more difficult it becomes to get to the sand the more oil required to get it out. My understanding of oil shale is it's much closer to a 1-1 ratio or a net lose in energy then the tar sands. Same goes for that ultra deep water oil. It's not a question of money it's a question of the energy required to get it out.
My current job is building a program for a handheld device. Because the unit will be used outdoors while the users are wearing gloves in winter I also came up with the idea of really big buttons on screen.
.Net or mobile devices is to completely ignore the programming standards as recommended by mircrosoft.
The secret to writing easy to use applications for CE
Out main issue is finding hardware that is robust enough (IP67 should be tough enough, IP65 is not) with all the bells and wistles and most importantly they need a good keyboard for lots of data entry. The industry seems to be moving away from keyboard entry but if you're doing lots of data entry it is the only way to go. I've also found that units are failing tests that they are rated to survive easily.
At this point It's almost looking like having custom units built is the way to go
well most men I know started using firefox because it cured that little popup issue they had while surfing for porn. Most women I know don't complain anywhere near as much about popups and I've always assumed they don't hunt for porn as much.
I know thats why I switched and i wouldn't be shocked if I'm not the only one.
You seem to be mistaken the quote very clearly states consumer behaviour not customer behaviour. Most companies have long ago stopped seeing you as anything other then an income source.
I think most projects go over their budgets in both time and money. I believe this is because the project wouldn't be feasible if the true costs where announced.
I've seen arenas being built that where quoted to the tax payer at 10 million when it was well known that it would be at least 14 million. But 10 million was the number presented. When the vote said build it, it took 2 months before the cost was increased and they haven't even broke ground yet.
I've also been on software projects that involved weeks of work but was radically underestimated to get the job. In the end the customer gets screwed and the programmers get ragged on for taking too long.
It's all done to get the initial cheque. After your in there you can just ramp up the costs
Well lets see, 1995 I was just starting my compsci degree. Things going on in the labs mostly consisted of online gaming, Collecting vast amounts of porn (pictures some movies) and some mp3 piracy but most machines could barely play them. Burnt CD's are amazing and pricy but there are some. Windows 95 rules.
Jump forward 2 years to 97 and it was pretty much the same but mp3 piracy was much more common. Everyone on the dorm network had thousands of songs and everyone left it all available to anyone who wanted it. Porn was now mostly video but most clips where under 50 meg. Cartoon series are available but pretty crappy, it was still cool to see the transformers again after all of those years. making mixed Cd's is common, but still not cheap. Yep I'm still on win 95
Jump forward 2 more years to 1999. I've got my own place but highspeed is available so I'm on DSL. Gaming isn't as common but you actually have to work at this point. Mp3's are common, everyone has any song they ever wanted, new stuff is spread almost instantly. I've cancelled my cable to save money and I'm downloading good quality copies of the two shows I watched. I'm not the only one but it's still rare. Anime is starting to be available in good quantity on the networks. For the first time I'm able to download full size rips of movies but they are few and far between. I remember being at a bar and having a discussion with a musician/friend about these great "new" Mp3 things. She thought it was great. I've switched to win 98 and for class I dual boot to redhat. It took me 2 months to get sound working under redhat.
Jump ahead another 2 years to 2001, I've since graduated but am working in the industry so here's what I see when talking with other programmers. Mp3's are old news, it's like the radio but you get to pick what you want to listen to. The market is slowing down and hardware upgrades aren't as common so I didn't see much in new gaming taking place. Counter strike was big. Movie downloading was really taking off though. once you could get a movie on a cd with good quality is was nice. swapping at work took place but most grabbed off of kazza. Everyone has highspeed connections now. For some reason porn is still mostly smaller clips, but they are in the 100 meg range now, high quality copies of complete scenes. Burnt Cd's are common place. I'm back to straight windows 98.
It's now 2003, mp3's are actually risky to download but I didn't find much want to dl anyways(and no I didn't buy a single cd that year, or any year since 2000 for that fact). Kazza has gone to shit and there isn't a lot out there to replace it with. the market is bleak around here but you can get some work now and again. I'm rally into anime at this point and it's all over the P2P networks, it just takes awhile to collect. The guys in the office also like anime but we don't trade just recommend and then download. I've basically given up completely on tv at this point except for 1 show. Cable is free so I watch it on tv. I learned that year that I almost prefered the ripped versions with the commercials removed. They are available 1 day after the show aired though. Near the end of the year I get an Ipod, All music (ripped or bought)cd's are now stored in boxes. I run win2000 and suse, later I switch to gentoo. linux is the primary desktop at this point.
jump ahead to this year. I have a great new job and lots of extra spending money. I'm watching lots of movies in theaters but not renting any I find. The PPV on cable is pretty good and if they don't carry it bittorrent is just a few clicks away. I've stopped burning cd's completely unless needed for install. All media is stored on the harddrives and available on my network. I have a capture card to collect new shows but I barely use it. The tv sits on BBC 90% of the time for the news and I'm thinking of cancelling cable again. At work all the rage are online games like final fantasy. Everyone seems to play a different one
Perhaps the general state of information has gone down hill lately, but how the hell did this get rated +5 informative? Funny yes, informative no
having gone back and checked the service packs you may be correct that SP3 includes SP2. I can't find any evidence either way however I do know that SP3 consists of 3 files to update different parts, and combined they are not as large as SP2 so I have my doubts that it contains everything in the other one.
And yes my complain is that I had to install some software.
Having heard for so long how hard linux is to install software in I'm horrified by the "easy" windows installation. A real package management system would go a hell of a long way in this OS. And I really do hope that longhorn corrects whatever is forcing reboots after an install. I'm always rebooting it seems.
I'm all for emerge or apt-get
.Net, DOS or proprietary. CE .net seemed like less of a dead end.
The job requires a small handheld device with a full keyboard a fair amount of space and a fair chunk of processor on it. This is not a pocket PC or PDA type application, the hardware that this will have to work on in $3000- $4000 per unit.
In the end I haven't found a single manufacturer that builds units like this that run linux. Trust me, I'd love to be paid to work in linux, but the hardware says it's windows CE
Now that I think about it I'm curious to see if what I write will work at all with mono in the end or not. Perhaps I'll give that a try this weekend.
I'm in the middle of learning to create a program on a windows CE device. Since it's going to be used to aquire data I figured it would be nice to install some form of DB on it. Sure enough there is SQL 200 CE for the ce .net devices. So Here I am thinking this is great I'll install that and away we go. 1 day later I'm still working on that install.
.Net installed and I really can't complain about it. Best IDE I've ever used hands down.
.Net on CE devices may work nicely but the hours of hoops to jump through just to get started is a real pain in the ass. By far the best part of this exercise has been visual studio. I added the necessary parts as a reference and away it goes.
First I already have visual studio
Second I know that I need SQL server to replicate the DB's with so I head off to MSDN and grab it.
500 or so meg later and I burn it to a CD(my media versions of the subscription haven't arrived yet) and start the install. Installation doesn't appear to do anything. After messing with it for a bit I remove it. Remove the desktop edition, and remove the old sql client tools. run the install again and it works. Fine I can live with that.
So I install sql 2000 CE It tells me that I need sql 2000 SP1 installed. I assumed that the newest version on MSDN would have the service pack installed already but I would be wrong.
So 430 meg later I have downloaded SP2 (sp1 is rolled into it) and another 120 or so meg and I have SP3. Install those. Reinstall sql CE. I get further but I now need to install IIS so that the two can comunicate. It didn't come preinstalled on this XP pro SP2 PC so I get to track the program down, set it up then get the database installed then I can get back to the 20 minute tutorial I was following.
Deploying programs to the device is trivial. If all the rest of the software was at the same level as visual studio I wouldn't be using linux as my desktop at home.
Man does that bring back memories. Back in my IRC days on undernet Around 95 or so It was common practice to routinely take over other peoples channels mostly for the sake of doing it.
To test new attacks the common target was always the channels distributing kiddy porn. You would start you 100 clones up and drop them into the channel then go to town. Message floods, ping floods... Almost all the "new" DDOS attacks of the late 90's had been seen on IRC for years.
Anyways The OPS on the servers never cared when we where attacking these channels. It wasn't until the attacks started to destabalize the complete networks that they stepped in.
I'm not trying to troll here but I'm not overly interested in rebooting just to go browse and see what they have. Is it possible to at least browse the store under linux or is it mac or windows only?