Are you on crack or just an idiot? SuSE employs more Linux developers than any other Linux company, and they have never gone out of business. They were the ones who ported Linux to Itanium, just to mention one contribution beyond "some work on X".
Actually, there are usually large blocks that are the same. You can generally assume that all the boxen in one room are the same. One reason is the ability to apply one drive image to as many systems as possible is incredibly important in that environment. Another is that schools usually get a large single grant to buy new computers every 3 years or so, anywhere from $20-100k, and it's a lot easier to buy in bulk.
I totally agree about XP though. Not only is the new interface useless, it's also butt-ugly.
I have a child in kindergarten who is learning to read. Most of his classmates are not. Why? Because the school has reading software that paces itself to the student.
I was reading at the 1st grade level when I started kindergarten, as were 90% of the kids that went to my preschool. Not because we were super genius kids, but because one middleaged woman named Norma decreed that all the kids would gather together for 5 minutes a day and sing the alphabet song twice; once the usual way and once phonetically (making the sounds rather than saying the names of the letters. Try it sometime. It sounds awkward and silly, which of course means kids love it) while following along on a big alphabet chart stapled to the wall. The younger kids picked it up from the older kids by hearing it everyday and could usually sing the whole thing in a couple of weeks. In the process they began to make the connections between the sounds they heard every day and the arcane symbols that make up our writen language, the first steps toward reading and writing. If we wanted to read and had trouble with a word, we asked for help, but that usually happened at home rather than at school. No computer necessary, easily repeatable in any school environment.
Please don't think I'm belittling your childs achievment. He's obviously doing very well with the tools he has available and the system he has been put in. But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system. Kids are ready to read at around 4 years old, the problem is that nobody's really trying to teach them.
The drives in most schools (at least for the lab boxen) get reimaged at least once a month. How will that be effected by product activation? If product activation gets in the way of reimaging at the drop of a hat school IT departments are going to be very unhappy.
Most schools keep their licensing up to date, yes, but having to prove it everytime some kid installs AOL Instant Messanger on a lab PC places an undue burden on an already stretched IT staff. (When I worked in a school lab AIM was the most common reason for reimaging. It hosed up the Algebra package we used, which was the primary purpose of those PCs.)
It is precisely the need to keep all their licensing ducks in a row that prevents schools from buying the corporate version of their chosen Windows flavor. The corporate version is generally at least $100 more per station, and schools simply can't afford that. In my experience, schools generally have maybe 20 boxen running corporate (if they have some sort of admin class, otherwise there's no justification for the added expense in the eyes of the school board) and the rest run the home version.
Seriously though, the Linux distos I've installed recently have had excellent cd-boot, much better than Windows. The only reason you'd need a floppy is if you're BIOS doesn't support boot from CD.
Definately have to agree about the sorry state of Windows "PnP", though.
But it's certainly reasonable to expect a high school or even grade school level programming instructor to use source as instructional aids; either as real world examples or as projects for the students to work on.
Assuming that their existing hardware is fairly homogenous (not much of a stretch, since most schools buy their PCs in $50-100k chunks) they could deal with the install the same way they deal with their current Windows installs: One drive image that get's cloned to whatever drive needs it. Anyone who doesn't believe that school computers get reimaged at least once a month is living in a fantasy land. Kids are remarkably ingeneous when it comes to hosing up computers. The idea of relying on a preinstall with rescue disks in that environment is insane. They'd have to have techs working 24/7.
Personally, I'd be perfectly comfortable handing Mom my SuSE 7.3 disks and letting her install it herself (I think my grandma could could handle it, too, provided she survived the initial panic-induced heart attack). All the people who think Linux is too hard to install and manage need to try some of the modern distros out there. The current version of YaST is rediculously easy to use, much easier than Windows 2000s install and admin tools, and SuSE pro comes with enough documentation to keep a small army warm for the winter.
Red Hat isn't the be-all/end-all of Linux distros, in fact it's not even one of the best ones. (They do a lot of good work for the community and they work hard to gain visibility for themselves and Linux in general. That's great and I appreciate them doing it, but the Red Hat distro just isn't that good.)
I guess my point is, anyone who can install Windows can install Linux. If you're putting something together for someone who isn't capable of installing Windows, Linux is probably a better choice for them since you can set it up right and feel reasonably secure in the knowledge that it's going to stay that way. I've been using Windows for a long time, and I've never seen a Windows system that didn't need a reinstall within a year. Conversely, the only reason I reinstalled Linux was because I wanted to switch to reiserfs. (Yes I know win2k will upgrade your fat32 to ntfs without a hitch, I've done it about 20 times. e3fs will upgrade e2fs without a hitch, too, or so I'm told, but I wanted reiser.)
Sorry for the rambling. My basic point is that you're right. I guess I should know better than to post before coffee.
Install an alternative UNIX: FreeBSD or Linux . Write an essay on the differences between installing i386 UNIX and Windows.
My favorite CS prof is trying to get approval for a bunch of systems with hot-swap drive bays in the computer lab. His plan is to have everyone in the unix admin class do an install from scratch (how in-depth he wants to go, I have no idea. I would guess he's a slackware guy.) The students would have to buy the drive and chassis, but they can get the full experience without having to really hose up anyone's box (either the schools or their own).
Anyway, it's a great idea and some teachers are already trying to implement it.
My answer to that is have some way to go back to a point before the mistake was made. Maybe a sort of checkpoint that autosaves before you get to an area where destroying something will make the game impossible. Maybe a back buffer of saves that the player can select from.
Or maybe, since we're talking about games with realistic physics, give them some way to remove/get around the obstacle, such as being able to climb over it, or blast it with an improvised explosive which would perhaps cost them a lot of their ammo, or dig their way out with a shovel.
Or, there could be limits placed on what can or cannot be destroyed based on the difficulty level the user selects.
My point is that there are plenty of other ways of dealing with these sorts of problems. They may cause a lot of headaches for the coders, but so will realistic physics.
Where I'd personally like to see realistic physics is in space flight simulators. It really iritates me that the majority of them ignore the basic mechanics of movement in the absence of gravity and atmosphere. Given that gravity and atmosphere produce most of the complications in dynamics, it doesn't make much sense to me why they do that, other than that it's cheaper to slap new graphics over an existing flight sim engine than to create a new one that actually works right.
the environment would have to be created in such a way that it doesn't close off any critical paths when collapsed
Why? If somebody does something stupid and they get stuck it's their own fault. That's how it is in real life, why should we expect anything different from a realistic game? Otherwise you have to define what can and cannot be destroyed, and you end up with something just like the "deformable" terrain we currently have in some games, except it's got a whole lot of unnecessary math chewing up your clock cycles.
I've been very happy with SBC as well (through Pacific Bell). I've had their service for over 1.5 years, and I've had only one problem (which turned out to be my NIC going flakey) and their customer service and tech support have been excellent.
Nothing new there, that's how all MS updates are. Hell, I can't install MS Office SP2 or some of the SP1 security fixes because our CDs aren't SP1. They're all SP0, and we upgraded to SP1 from windowsupdate.
Strangely, it actually seems to be faster. I can't say I've ever had that experience when upgrading a Microsoft product. Could just be that new code smell going to my head though...
I just ran into a similar situation at work. Our support subscription just expired on our CAD package, and now I can't even download the service packs (they're currently at SP13 for their 2001 version). We paid a lot of money for their software and they expect us to pay more for the bug fixes. The bullshit the software industry gets away with is really incredible to me.
Also every math text I ever used from middle school algebra through Calc I in undergrad sucked
Nobody learns math from books, you have to have a good teacher. By the time I got to Calc III I had gotten to the point where I could figure out from the book how to solve most of the problems, but I didn't really understand the concepts until they were explained to me by someone who really knew them.
I think part of the problem was that my teachers seemed to be 'naturals' at math so it was hard for them to translate for the 'un-naturals', so to speak.
This is really an excellent point. One of the things that made me a good tutor was that I actually had to work at it myself, and it hadn't been so long that I couldn't remember how hard it had been. One of the things I always told my most struggling students was that I took Calc I 4(!) times. The first 3 times I don't feel too bad about dropping. In each of those classes there were over 40 students the first day, and no more than 3 ever took the final. I transfered to a different school before I took it again, and I passed with little difficulty.
I think mathematicians make terrible teachers. All the good math teachers I've had were Engineers and Physicists by training. Understanding the connection between math and the real world is essential to teaching math. For the record, my first 3 Calc I teachers were mathematicians, the last was a Nuclear Engineer.
I'm sorry, but I draw the "geekiness" line at pissing away your time writing silly crap like that for a calculator.
A large part of hacking is making something that's not meant to do cool stuff do cool stuff. Are you suggesting that hacking isn't geeky?
It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams.
So? There's no reason high school math students need graphing calculators. In fact, with the possible exception of Trig functions, they shouldn't need calculators at all. As a college level math tutor I think it's unfortunate that high school math teachers encourage the use of calculators. I've watched too many freshman flounder in Calculus because they never really understood Algebra. That's certainly not entirely because their high school teachers let them use calculators, but it's certainly a contributing factor. It's really sad to see someone who claimed to get A's in math all through high school who can't even multiply by 10's without picking up their calculator.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time? They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation.
That would explain their popularity, or lack thereof. Personally I despise RPN, for the same reasons I despise Newtons notations for Calculus. Oh well, I guess if your going to be wrong you might as well be wrong about everything...
With the low margins on all memory types, even 3% is a significant hit.
That is true from the point of view of profit margins, but 3% is insignificant in relation to the price differential between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, which was what I was trying to explain.
Yes, I realize that the price difference is not as extreme as it once was, I was mostly speaking from historical perspective.
The patent drove the cost of DDR RAM up so much relative to competing technologies that the tech died.
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
Compaq Presario computer came with the same kind of stripped down answering machine software. I never met anyone who actually used it.
I've tried a few telephony packages, and they have all sucked. The first was whatever came with my dad's computer (Acer Pentium 100, should give you an idea of the time frame) which was real crap. All it had to offer was a bunch of "wacky" prerecorded greetings, basically the same stuff being sold on late-night TV commercials at the time (the 30 second spots, not the spiffy paid programs). Then we tried WinFax Pro (7.0 I think) and it sucked too. It was difficult to configure and not very reliable. It was always confusing voice and fax calls. As an added bonus, it sent the fax handshake before the voice greeting. I'm sure you can imagine how much my Grandmother liked that!
Probably the biggest problem, though, was that with only 1GB HDDs there wasn't that much room for the messages, especially since they were all being recorded at stereo CD quality (roughly 10MB/minute)! Not really an issue these days, especially if the software compressed the messages to MP3 or something.
Anyway, I tried a few of the internet telephony packages when that started up. My conclusion is that there's a pretty good reason you don't hear much about that anymore. I couldn't actually get any of them to work.
The PC entertainment system has interested me for a while, but the remote control problem is definately a barrier, as well as boot time (although since the local power company killed our TV and we've inherited my in-laws old one, I'm not sure it would be that noticable). Of course, as I got older the realization that my life doesn't really require a 24/7 soundtrack crept in and my MP3 collection has seen a lot less use, so the appeal is somewhat diminished. I still like the home theater aspect, though, particularly with a high-res projector. It never occured to me to care about TV res until I got a job testing professional digital video equipment. Full res HDTV is really jaw-dropping.
Hmm... kinda strayed from my point, but I guess that just means I only have to post once on this topic:)
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The right decision would be to invalidate Microsoft's Windows trademark because it's a common word.
Panasonic, on the other hand, is not a common word, so that's a pretty stupid comparison, isn't it?
I totally agree about XP though. Not only is the new interface useless, it's also butt-ugly.
I was reading at the 1st grade level when I started kindergarten, as were 90% of the kids that went to my preschool. Not because we were super genius kids, but because one middleaged woman named Norma decreed that all the kids would gather together for 5 minutes a day and sing the alphabet song twice; once the usual way and once phonetically (making the sounds rather than saying the names of the letters. Try it sometime. It sounds awkward and silly, which of course means kids love it) while following along on a big alphabet chart stapled to the wall. The younger kids picked it up from the older kids by hearing it everyday and could usually sing the whole thing in a couple of weeks. In the process they began to make the connections between the sounds they heard every day and the arcane symbols that make up our writen language, the first steps toward reading and writing. If we wanted to read and had trouble with a word, we asked for help, but that usually happened at home rather than at school. No computer necessary, easily repeatable in any school environment.
Please don't think I'm belittling your childs achievment. He's obviously doing very well with the tools he has available and the system he has been put in. But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system. Kids are ready to read at around 4 years old, the problem is that nobody's really trying to teach them.
Other than that I totally agree with you.
Most schools keep their licensing up to date, yes, but having to prove it everytime some kid installs AOL Instant Messanger on a lab PC places an undue burden on an already stretched IT staff. (When I worked in a school lab AIM was the most common reason for reimaging. It hosed up the Algebra package we used, which was the primary purpose of those PCs.)
It is precisely the need to keep all their licensing ducks in a row that prevents schools from buying the corporate version of their chosen Windows flavor. The corporate version is generally at least $100 more per station, and schools simply can't afford that. In my experience, schools generally have maybe 20 boxen running corporate (if they have some sort of admin class, otherwise there's no justification for the added expense in the eyes of the school board) and the rest run the home version.
What kind of barbarian are you?!?!?
Seriously though, the Linux distos I've installed recently have had excellent cd-boot, much better than Windows. The only reason you'd need a floppy is if you're BIOS doesn't support boot from CD.
Definately have to agree about the sorry state of Windows "PnP", though.
Assuming that their existing hardware is fairly homogenous (not much of a stretch, since most schools buy their PCs in $50-100k chunks) they could deal with the install the same way they deal with their current Windows installs: One drive image that get's cloned to whatever drive needs it. Anyone who doesn't believe that school computers get reimaged at least once a month is living in a fantasy land. Kids are remarkably ingeneous when it comes to hosing up computers. The idea of relying on a preinstall with rescue disks in that environment is insane. They'd have to have techs working 24/7.
Red Hat isn't the be-all/end-all of Linux distros, in fact it's not even one of the best ones. (They do a lot of good work for the community and they work hard to gain visibility for themselves and Linux in general. That's great and I appreciate them doing it, but the Red Hat distro just isn't that good.)
Rock Linux is hard. SuSE and Mandrake are easy. Red Hat and Slackware are somewhere in the middle.
I guess my point is, anyone who can install Windows can install Linux. If you're putting something together for someone who isn't capable of installing Windows, Linux is probably a better choice for them since you can set it up right and feel reasonably secure in the knowledge that it's going to stay that way. I've been using Windows for a long time, and I've never seen a Windows system that didn't need a reinstall within a year. Conversely, the only reason I reinstalled Linux was because I wanted to switch to reiserfs. (Yes I know win2k will upgrade your fat32 to ntfs without a hitch, I've done it about 20 times. e3fs will upgrade e2fs without a hitch, too, or so I'm told, but I wanted reiser.)
Sorry for the rambling. My basic point is that you're right. I guess I should know better than to post before coffee.
My favorite CS prof is trying to get approval for a bunch of systems with hot-swap drive bays in the computer lab. His plan is to have everyone in the unix admin class do an install from scratch (how in-depth he wants to go, I have no idea. I would guess he's a slackware guy.) The students would have to buy the drive and chassis, but they can get the full experience without having to really hose up anyone's box (either the schools or their own).
Anyway, it's a great idea and some teachers are already trying to implement it.
Or maybe, since we're talking about games with realistic physics, give them some way to remove/get around the obstacle, such as being able to climb over it, or blast it with an improvised explosive which would perhaps cost them a lot of their ammo, or dig their way out with a shovel.
Or, there could be limits placed on what can or cannot be destroyed based on the difficulty level the user selects.
My point is that there are plenty of other ways of dealing with these sorts of problems. They may cause a lot of headaches for the coders, but so will realistic physics.
Where I'd personally like to see realistic physics is in space flight simulators. It really iritates me that the majority of them ignore the basic mechanics of movement in the absence of gravity and atmosphere. Given that gravity and atmosphere produce most of the complications in dynamics, it doesn't make much sense to me why they do that, other than that it's cheaper to slap new graphics over an existing flight sim engine than to create a new one that actually works right.
Why? If somebody does something stupid and they get stuck it's their own fault. That's how it is in real life, why should we expect anything different from a realistic game? Otherwise you have to define what can and cannot be destroyed, and you end up with something just like the "deformable" terrain we currently have in some games, except it's got a whole lot of unnecessary math chewing up your clock cycles.
No, they said they were only supplying a patch for 6.0 and 5.5SP2. Everyone else has to upgrade before they can apply the patch.
Nobody learns math from books, you have to have a good teacher. By the time I got to Calc III I had gotten to the point where I could figure out from the book how to solve most of the problems, but I didn't really understand the concepts until they were explained to me by someone who really knew them.
I think part of the problem was that my teachers seemed to be 'naturals' at math so it was hard for them to translate for the 'un-naturals', so to speak.
This is really an excellent point. One of the things that made me a good tutor was that I actually had to work at it myself, and it hadn't been so long that I couldn't remember how hard it had been. One of the things I always told my most struggling students was that I took Calc I 4(!) times. The first 3 times I don't feel too bad about dropping. In each of those classes there were over 40 students the first day, and no more than 3 ever took the final. I transfered to a different school before I took it again, and I passed with little difficulty.
I think mathematicians make terrible teachers. All the good math teachers I've had were Engineers and Physicists by training. Understanding the connection between math and the real world is essential to teaching math. For the record, my first 3 Calc I teachers were mathematicians, the last was a Nuclear Engineer.
A large part of hacking is making something that's not meant to do cool stuff do cool stuff. Are you suggesting that hacking isn't geeky?
It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams.
So? There's no reason high school math students need graphing calculators. In fact, with the possible exception of Trig functions, they shouldn't need calculators at all. As a college level math tutor I think it's unfortunate that high school math teachers encourage the use of calculators. I've watched too many freshman flounder in Calculus because they never really understood Algebra. That's certainly not entirely because their high school teachers let them use calculators, but it's certainly a contributing factor. It's really sad to see someone who claimed to get A's in math all through high school who can't even multiply by 10's without picking up their calculator.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time? They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation.
That would explain their popularity, or lack thereof. Personally I despise RPN, for the same reasons I despise Newtons notations for Calculus. Oh well, I guess if your going to be wrong you might as well be wrong about everything...
That is true from the point of view of profit margins, but 3% is insignificant in relation to the price differential between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, which was what I was trying to explain.
Yes, I realize that the price difference is not as extreme as it once was, I was mostly speaking from historical perspective.
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
I've tried a few telephony packages, and they have all sucked. The first was whatever came with my dad's computer (Acer Pentium 100, should give you an idea of the time frame) which was real crap. All it had to offer was a bunch of "wacky" prerecorded greetings, basically the same stuff being sold on late-night TV commercials at the time (the 30 second spots, not the spiffy paid programs). Then we tried WinFax Pro (7.0 I think) and it sucked too. It was difficult to configure and not very reliable. It was always confusing voice and fax calls. As an added bonus, it sent the fax handshake before the voice greeting. I'm sure you can imagine how much my Grandmother liked that!
Probably the biggest problem, though, was that with only 1GB HDDs there wasn't that much room for the messages, especially since they were all being recorded at stereo CD quality (roughly 10MB/minute)! Not really an issue these days, especially if the software compressed the messages to MP3 or something.
Anyway, I tried a few of the internet telephony packages when that started up. My conclusion is that there's a pretty good reason you don't hear much about that anymore. I couldn't actually get any of them to work.
The PC entertainment system has interested me for a while, but the remote control problem is definately a barrier, as well as boot time (although since the local power company killed our TV and we've inherited my in-laws old one, I'm not sure it would be that noticable). Of course, as I got older the realization that my life doesn't really require a 24/7 soundtrack crept in and my MP3 collection has seen a lot less use, so the appeal is somewhat diminished. I still like the home theater aspect, though, particularly with a high-res projector. It never occured to me to care about TV res until I got a job testing professional digital video equipment. Full res HDTV is really jaw-dropping.
Hmm... kinda strayed from my point, but I guess that just means I only have to post once on this topic :)
Yet another reason why I wish this had been available when I was a kid...