froggero1, you asked me about that high-paying coding job that you were so anxious to secure, and I was successful! The employer wanted to have a quick interview with you and with the other applicant, and he had a preference for you. But I couldn't reach you anywhere, and your answering machine is no help. Sorry, but the job is gone because the other applicant had a cell phone and was able to come.
(this is just an example, of course; my mentioning of "high-paying coding job" should be an obvious giveaway.)
I'm glad I don't have to pay anyone $300 to put in a $15 set of brake pads.
I know people who can't install brake pads themselves (and on drum brakes it may be physically difficult.) However those same people were earning programmers' salaries while you were studying car repair, so it remains to be seen who is better off. Besides, brakes on modern hybrid cars last forever.
It's always interesting to check PDF properties; this survey was printed from Mozilla on an Apple box. I just wonder why Novell could not spend 0.5 [wo]man-hour to actually make it nice.
Since when? Well, for some designs (like yours) they are still useful, and I am glad that there is still someone out there who knows which end of the soldering iron to hold onto.
But in an industrial setting they are quickly replaced by JTAG-connected tools; ChipScope in particular (if you are a Xilinx slave) is great because it captures the signals into the local, very fast RAM, and then sends you the snapshot over a slower JTAG connection. The snapshot is true to what is really happening, and if you design a DDR controller (or faster) then just forget the external wires, they are useless at those speeds. And most of modern commercial designs push the devices to the limit. That's what makes standalone logic analyzers less appealing to a mass manufacturer. Logic analyzers in such conditions become tools of last resort, just like ICEs, where you have to spend a day just preparing your board for testing.
Myself, if I do not have an FPGA in between (and so ChipScope is not an option) then I just use an oscilloscope. I have a 4-channel, inexpensive Infiniium model, and 3 probes is the most I ever needed; staring at the schematic does the rest:-)
I see that the board has Ethernet transceiver installed, and the connector. However the SoftTEMAC IP from Xilinx is not free, and because of that you can't use Ethernet. Virtex-4 (and 5) FPGAs have HardTEMAC which is not just free, it is a hard core in the FPGA, so it is ready to use, and it can do Gigabit Ethernet as well. Because of that I may question the wisdom of picking a S3 platform that is some $ cheaper than V4 but requires a $5,000 IP to do something really useful (Ethernet connectivity is not too much to ask for these days.) Or, alternatively, write your own [T]EMAC module, it's not impossible but you need to be a decent FPGA coder to even get started.
But logic analyzers are history. If you want to debug logic today you use ChipScope. That's not just because it is easier, but because breakout connectors (Mictor etc.) are expensive, large, and they disrupt the timing of the circuit.
As memory emulator this device may be useful sometimes, but many MCUs today come with internal RAM, and those that don't - they expect DDR2 speeds, and you can't emulate that.
This can be a full-featured Microblaze development system, though, with tons of samples. I think that's its best value. MicroBlaze was always poorly supported by Linux, as opposed to Nios (which Altera itself supports.) If we have, finally, a working [uc] Linux port to MB that alone is a great achievement. When I looked a year or two ago there was only one, non-functioning, port to a hardware that did not exist.
Soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas
And the screenshots prove it. I never played it, but haven't games of that type started to get obsolete around 1990, right after the Wolfenstein 3D wiped the floor with them? As a reference, it's 2007 today:-)
In addition to that, XP could be set up to be indistinguishable from Win2K in practically all aspects, and it ran all Win2K software, and it contained some usable improvements (ClearType, more USB goodies, built-in firewall eventually, and some more.) Win2K drivers worked on XP, and there was no need to upgrade the hardware. There were only two versions of XP, clearly marked "for home" and "for work", easy to understand, and they left no room for a doubt. So there was a good reason to buy XP instead of Win2K if you were buying one of them anyway; but there was less of a reason to upgrade - and many people delayed upgrading for years.
Vista however is different from previous Windows OSes, runs fewer applications, has tons of broken drivers, has performance issues and requires hardware upgrades, and has new features that nobody asked for. XP does the same job faster, better and requires no retraining. There are so many versions, with different feature sets and prices, it creates a Buridan's donkey problem (a customer would rather buy nothing than to decide on what to buy.) Assuming that DirectX 10 is backported to XP (as it seems to be), the first and last theoretically valid reason for moving to Vista is gone.
Don't know about whether their mice / keyboards earn $$$
These products are likely to be profitable, given that a natural keyboard is sold for $75-100 and a regular MS keyboard is $30 at Fry's. However this revenue can't possibly sustain a company of MS size. If they sell a million of keyboards per year (which I doubt) the profit would be 10-20 million dollars, which is nothing on MS scale. Basically the division would be profitable and self-sustaining, but that's all.
Your family, who wants you to earn that money (if you are self-employed, a contractor for example.) Or, if you an employee of a large company, your boss may ask you to work extra on that proposal that is due on Monday morning. You can refuse, but then say goodbye to your promotion hopes.
Imagine what kind of killer product you would have
In all my Linux coding experience I never had any luck whatsoever with autoconf tools - they seem to be just archaic, and nevertheless everyone uses them... I think I managed to do one small project once, and that's it.
RPM was also unpleasant, but at least it wasn't that old, and if you follow the rules you can do it. Still, improvements could be made.
But on MSVC 2005... drag a few files into the proper folders and you can make an installation package in literally seconds; a.msi file ready for distribution (and no./configure && make install either.) For a business this is the only way to do things.
There are plenty of places that subscribe to CMM and in some markets (government/military, medical/life-related, aerospace, etc.) you can't even get a proposal out if you are not CMM/CMMI all the way through. I work for one of those markets.
I simply don't understand people who feel the need to punish themselves with gawd-awful work-related software and hardware by bringing it into the sanctuary of their private lives and homes!
When you graduate and get a job you will sometimes ask yourself what you'd like more - to go to work on Sunday, or to work at home on Sunday. It's not something that you'd do often, but when job requires it you do it - there are plenty of deadlines in every job, and people are supposed to meet them no matter what - especially if you had to spend a few business hours on a family errand earlier that week. You sometimes take, and you sometimes give.
Well, IMO Exchange is not that important; I don't have it, and I never thought I need it. Cyrus + Postfix + Thunderbird is the deal here, and it works pretty good. And I don't have IIS, Apache rules.
But what doesn't - Active Directory and inherited ACLs; I have a test OpenSuse 10.x box here, running in PDC mode, and WinXP clients don't see grayed out inherited permissions - they are all enabled, always, and if you set some of them the change is ignored. And I don't have proper security groups (I read about remapping, though) but I have some weird unix groups in the list of ACLs - WTH? I can't unleash this mess onto the users. Samba team does not hide the fact that 3.x release is not a duplicate of a proper Win2k3 DC, but that hardly helps. I guess I'm stuck with Win2k3 for the moment.
Then you'd better define what does the word "good" mean here. How do you measure goodness? One common and sensible metric is popularity, since it measures the willingness of people to use the product. Is a software that is fast and secure good, even though nobody uses it? (because the interface is command line, in Mayan for example.)
MS surely measures goodness by sales numbers and by market penetration; that flows from the fact that MS Office, [= 2003] for example, just works for most of the people. You install it, and you are in business. That's good. On the other hand, take LaTeX - it can do things that you'd have to struggle with in MS Word, but you also must be a rocket scientist (or a mathematician, which is the same) to use LaTeX. That is seen as seriously ungood.
groups who either refuse to use code from another group
How many programmers have you seen who like to use someone's else (NIH) code?
How many programmers produce code that is worth reusing?
How many programmers write structured, reusable code to begin with?
How many of the F/OSS programmers have design specifications finished and approved before the first line of code is written? Compare to the realities of commercial programming. This affects the structure of the code.
How long will it take you to find the free code instead of writing it from scratch? You need to match: license, language, interface, libraries, and other requirements. You also need a good documentation on the code that you are reusing (guess that excludes many F/OSS projects right here) because if you plan to read through the source you indeed might be better off just writing your own.
Besides, many F/OSS people write code not just because they want to produce something specific, but because they like to write the code. There are many babies in the world, but every woman wants her own, strangely enough.
What commercial coding adds is discipline. Your manager may order you to write this documentation, or to use that library - because he has a reason, good or bad. And he has power to make sure you do it. If the project requires coding an ugly routine in an ugly language a F/OSS coder would rather not do it, and he'd be right - he is not paid to suffer. But a commercial coder will do the job, even if it involves 8052 assembly language instead of Python on Planes:-) Every job has its unpleasant parts, and while a F/OSS coder can skip them a commercial coder can not; if the spec calls for an embedded testing code, for example, or Doxygen comments, you put it in.
Discipline and dictatorial approach affect the result a lot. Basically, every commercial product is designed either by one person, or by very small group of people. This person (or group) has complete control over every aspect of the product; s/he might be wrong but at least the product is consistent, and not designed by a committee as it sometimes happens.
In addition to that, commercial products pass the rigorous testing by the free market, and that testing starts when someone thinks about the very idea of a new product. The project may not go forward until there is a good plan how it will be sold, and to who, and for how much. If these numbers make no sense then the product won't be even made. In F/OSS world, for example, I am free to write - and to release into the world - yet another clone of Vi or Notepad (we have hundreds by now, probably.) These clones haven't been weeded out by the market, and so many of them are not viable - but they are out there, just polluting the set of choices because someone will pick some and will be disappointed. You can't reasonably expect a user to choose one out of so many apps? That is a problem.
And, as someone already mentioned, if you combine AbiWord, KWord and OO's Writer you still don't get MS Word, even though the combined labor that went into all three is probably comparable. Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted. But it is so hard to join efforts because compromises and agreements are needed. In a business that would not be a problem.
NATO encirclement is not a product of American aggression, but rather the product of many small nations living in fear of Russia.
You think the people of those nations have any say in the decision? The decisions are made by politicians, and then crammed down the throats of the voters one way or another. Many of those politicians act against the interests of their countries; for example, how would any country benefit from having foreign rockets installed? I can understand the advantage to the owner of the rockets, but the poor installation site would be instantly classified as a target. Do you think people of Chech Republic want to be targets? No; but since nobody asked them, it's all OK.
The main problem with NATO is that it remains an anti-Russian bloc, not a European Security bloc where all countries are welcome. Russia tried to join and was rejected, so the message is clear. And when so many EU countries, plus USA, are ganging up against you, what would you personally do? Would you like it? That's why I say that NATO is today a group of many countries, in toto far larger than Russia, joined against one country, and no surprise that it is seen as a threat - especially if it keeps creeping toward your borders and installs new rockets that have only one purpose - to neutralize your rockets. This is a strategic threat.
Russia's fundamental problem is that it has shown itself fundamentally untrustworthy
What exactly do you mean "untrustworthy"? Gorbachev promising to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and doing just that? Russia promising to pay its debts off and doing just that? NATO, on the other hand, promised to look for peaceful Yugoslavia solution and did the bombing; promised to not expand (as a consequence of dissolution of Warsaw Pact) and lied about it; promised to take Turkey into EU but drags their feet so much that Turks are furious; and there is no point in mentioning all other active wars, since Russia is not involved in any but US and NATO are.
The Cold War was not a clash of two opposing ideologies. That was only a convenient excuse. The Cold War was a method in the continuing struggle between Russia and the USA.
The USA sees Russia as a competitor and wants to "divide and conquer" it by all means possible - such as permanent colored revolutions, or paid dissidents, or by poisoning some irrelevant guy in a 3rd country, or by ordering shooting of some media figures and then blaming Putin... Instability in Russia would greatly benefit the USA.
On the other hand, Russia wants to develop normal relations with everyone else and be free of NATO encirclement. But just a few weeks ago Bush signed an edict inviting Ukraine, another country that neighbors Russia, into NATO. How peaceful... even considering that Ukraine is in turmoil, and either the president or the parliament (or both) will resign any day now, and there are demonstrations, etc. if you keep track of those things.
So to summarize, Russia has no choice but to reject US's meddling in its affairs, and that infuriates politicians, and so the spiral of tensions unwinds. Want to stop all that? Get rid of NATO, it has no purpose now other than to intimidate Russia. And, oh, to install anti-missile bases next to Russia's borders. How peaceful.
Slashdot Mirror
Contracting jobs are often awarded on a very short notice if there is a fire to be put out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead
(this is just an example, of course; my mentioning of "high-paying coding job" should be an obvious giveaway.)
I know people who can't install brake pads themselves (and on drum brakes it may be physically difficult.) However those same people were earning programmers' salaries while you were studying car repair, so it remains to be seen who is better off. Besides, brakes on modern hybrid cars last forever.
It is almost that bad in China.
It's always interesting to check PDF properties; this survey was printed from Mozilla on an Apple box. I just wonder why Novell could not spend 0.5 [wo]man-hour to actually make it nice.
But in an industrial setting they are quickly replaced by JTAG-connected tools; ChipScope in particular (if you are a Xilinx slave) is great because it captures the signals into the local, very fast RAM, and then sends you the snapshot over a slower JTAG connection. The snapshot is true to what is really happening, and if you design a DDR controller (or faster) then just forget the external wires, they are useless at those speeds. And most of modern commercial designs push the devices to the limit. That's what makes standalone logic analyzers less appealing to a mass manufacturer. Logic analyzers in such conditions become tools of last resort, just like ICEs, where you have to spend a day just preparing your board for testing.
Myself, if I do not have an FPGA in between (and so ChipScope is not an option) then I just use an oscilloscope. I have a 4-channel, inexpensive Infiniium model, and 3 probes is the most I ever needed; staring at the schematic does the rest :-)
I see that the board has Ethernet transceiver installed, and the connector. However the SoftTEMAC IP from Xilinx is not free, and because of that you can't use Ethernet. Virtex-4 (and 5) FPGAs have HardTEMAC which is not just free, it is a hard core in the FPGA, so it is ready to use, and it can do Gigabit Ethernet as well. Because of that I may question the wisdom of picking a S3 platform that is some $ cheaper than V4 but requires a $5,000 IP to do something really useful (Ethernet connectivity is not too much to ask for these days.) Or, alternatively, write your own [T]EMAC module, it's not impossible but you need to be a decent FPGA coder to even get started.
As memory emulator this device may be useful sometimes, but many MCUs today come with internal RAM, and those that don't - they expect DDR2 speeds, and you can't emulate that.
This can be a full-featured Microblaze development system, though, with tons of samples. I think that's its best value. MicroBlaze was always poorly supported by Linux, as opposed to Nios (which Altera itself supports.) If we have, finally, a working [uc] Linux port to MB that alone is a great achievement. When I looked a year or two ago there was only one, non-functioning, port to a hardware that did not exist.
And the screenshots prove it. I never played it, but haven't games of that type started to get obsolete around 1990, right after the Wolfenstein 3D wiped the floor with them? As a reference, it's 2007 today :-)
Vista however is different from previous Windows OSes, runs fewer applications, has tons of broken drivers, has performance issues and requires hardware upgrades, and has new features that nobody asked for. XP does the same job faster, better and requires no retraining. There are so many versions, with different feature sets and prices, it creates a Buridan's donkey problem (a customer would rather buy nothing than to decide on what to buy.) Assuming that DirectX 10 is backported to XP (as it seems to be), the first and last theoretically valid reason for moving to Vista is gone.
These products are likely to be profitable, given that a natural keyboard is sold for $75-100 and a regular MS keyboard is $30 at Fry's. However this revenue can't possibly sustain a company of MS size. If they sell a million of keyboards per year (which I doubt) the profit would be 10-20 million dollars, which is nothing on MS scale. Basically the division would be profitable and self-sustaining, but that's all.
Your family, who wants you to earn that money (if you are self-employed, a contractor for example.) Or, if you an employee of a large company, your boss may ask you to work extra on that proposal that is due on Monday morning. You can refuse, but then say goodbye to your promotion hopes.
In all my Linux coding experience I never had any luck whatsoever with autoconf tools - they seem to be just archaic, and nevertheless everyone uses them... I think I managed to do one small project once, and that's it.
RPM was also unpleasant, but at least it wasn't that old, and if you follow the rules you can do it. Still, improvements could be made.
But on MSVC 2005 ... drag a few files into the proper folders and you can make an installation package in literally seconds; a .msi file ready for distribution (and no ./configure && make install either.) For a business this is the only way to do things.
There are plenty of places that subscribe to CMM and in some markets (government/military, medical/life-related, aerospace, etc.) you can't even get a proposal out if you are not CMM/CMMI all the way through. I work for one of those markets.
So many people said the same about the 17 flavors of MS Vista (and they are right about that.)
When you graduate and get a job you will sometimes ask yourself what you'd like more - to go to work on Sunday, or to work at home on Sunday. It's not something that you'd do often, but when job requires it you do it - there are plenty of deadlines in every job, and people are supposed to meet them no matter what - especially if you had to spend a few business hours on a family errand earlier that week. You sometimes take, and you sometimes give.
But what doesn't - Active Directory and inherited ACLs; I have a test OpenSuse 10.x box here, running in PDC mode, and WinXP clients don't see grayed out inherited permissions - they are all enabled, always, and if you set some of them the change is ignored. And I don't have proper security groups (I read about remapping, though) but I have some weird unix groups in the list of ACLs - WTH? I can't unleash this mess onto the users. Samba team does not hide the fact that 3.x release is not a duplicate of a proper Win2k3 DC, but that hardly helps. I guess I'm stuck with Win2k3 for the moment.
Then you'd better define what does the word "good" mean here. How do you measure goodness? One common and sensible metric is popularity, since it measures the willingness of people to use the product. Is a software that is fast and secure good, even though nobody uses it? (because the interface is command line, in Mayan for example.)
MS surely measures goodness by sales numbers and by market penetration; that flows from the fact that MS Office, [= 2003] for example, just works for most of the people. You install it, and you are in business. That's good. On the other hand, take LaTeX - it can do things that you'd have to struggle with in MS Word, but you also must be a rocket scientist (or a mathematician, which is the same) to use LaTeX. That is seen as seriously ungood.
And what do you think /. is then? One choice for all your technogeeky info needs.
Besides, many F/OSS people write code not just because they want to produce something specific, but because they like to write the code. There are many babies in the world, but every woman wants her own, strangely enough.
What commercial coding adds is discipline. Your manager may order you to write this documentation, or to use that library - because he has a reason, good or bad. And he has power to make sure you do it. If the project requires coding an ugly routine in an ugly language a F/OSS coder would rather not do it, and he'd be right - he is not paid to suffer. But a commercial coder will do the job, even if it involves 8052 assembly language instead of Python on Planes :-) Every job has its unpleasant parts, and while a F/OSS coder can skip them a commercial coder can not; if the spec calls for an embedded testing code, for example, or Doxygen comments, you put it in.
Discipline and dictatorial approach affect the result a lot. Basically, every commercial product is designed either by one person, or by very small group of people. This person (or group) has complete control over every aspect of the product; s/he might be wrong but at least the product is consistent, and not designed by a committee as it sometimes happens.
In addition to that, commercial products pass the rigorous testing by the free market, and that testing starts when someone thinks about the very idea of a new product. The project may not go forward until there is a good plan how it will be sold, and to who, and for how much. If these numbers make no sense then the product won't be even made. In F/OSS world, for example, I am free to write - and to release into the world - yet another clone of Vi or Notepad (we have hundreds by now, probably.) These clones haven't been weeded out by the market, and so many of them are not viable - but they are out there, just polluting the set of choices because someone will pick some and will be disappointed. You can't reasonably expect a user to choose one out of so many apps? That is a problem.
And, as someone already mentioned, if you combine AbiWord, KWord and OO's Writer you still don't get MS Word, even though the combined labor that went into all three is probably comparable. Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted. But it is so hard to join efforts because compromises and agreements are needed. In a business that would not be a problem.
I wish I could say the same about your post :-(
NATO encirclement is not a product of American aggression, but rather the product of many small nations living in fear of Russia.
You think the people of those nations have any say in the decision? The decisions are made by politicians, and then crammed down the throats of the voters one way or another. Many of those politicians act against the interests of their countries; for example, how would any country benefit from having foreign rockets installed? I can understand the advantage to the owner of the rockets, but the poor installation site would be instantly classified as a target. Do you think people of Chech Republic want to be targets? No; but since nobody asked them, it's all OK.
The main problem with NATO is that it remains an anti-Russian bloc, not a European Security bloc where all countries are welcome. Russia tried to join and was rejected, so the message is clear. And when so many EU countries, plus USA, are ganging up against you, what would you personally do? Would you like it? That's why I say that NATO is today a group of many countries, in toto far larger than Russia, joined against one country, and no surprise that it is seen as a threat - especially if it keeps creeping toward your borders and installs new rockets that have only one purpose - to neutralize your rockets. This is a strategic threat.
Russia's fundamental problem is that it has shown itself fundamentally untrustworthy
What exactly do you mean "untrustworthy"? Gorbachev promising to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and doing just that? Russia promising to pay its debts off and doing just that? NATO, on the other hand, promised to look for peaceful Yugoslavia solution and did the bombing; promised to not expand (as a consequence of dissolution of Warsaw Pact) and lied about it; promised to take Turkey into EU but drags their feet so much that Turks are furious; and there is no point in mentioning all other active wars, since Russia is not involved in any but US and NATO are.
If the input is incorrect any sane OS (or a library) would just return an error code.
You made a perfect comment that illustrates the vicious circle of mistrust and makes self-fulfilling prophecies possible.
The USA sees Russia as a competitor and wants to "divide and conquer" it by all means possible - such as permanent colored revolutions, or paid dissidents, or by poisoning some irrelevant guy in a 3rd country, or by ordering shooting of some media figures and then blaming Putin... Instability in Russia would greatly benefit the USA.
On the other hand, Russia wants to develop normal relations with everyone else and be free of NATO encirclement. But just a few weeks ago Bush signed an edict inviting Ukraine, another country that neighbors Russia, into NATO. How peaceful... even considering that Ukraine is in turmoil, and either the president or the parliament (or both) will resign any day now, and there are demonstrations, etc. if you keep track of those things.
So to summarize, Russia has no choice but to reject US's meddling in its affairs, and that infuriates politicians, and so the spiral of tensions unwinds. Want to stop all that? Get rid of NATO, it has no purpose now other than to intimidate Russia. And, oh, to install anti-missile bases next to Russia's borders. How peaceful.