At one point, I decided to watch some videos of Dawkins and found him to be obscene and utterly rude. While I am personally an atheist, I truly disagree with people suggesting that this man is representative of me. It's reached a point where religious people use him as an example of the raving lunatics atheists are. So far as I can tell, while he's also an atheist, he takes atheism to a degree of being a religion. Between him and organized non-religion groups, I'm thoroughly disappointed.
The point is atheists shouldn't ever be organizing as being atheists. It should not be a defining characteristic. A person who is an atheist should be something else. Maybe an artist, a musician, a scientist, an engineer, a good will worker. In short, an atheist should have a great deal of time to spend on things that are just more important and more meaningful than religion. Instead, these groups (including the Dawkins lackies) spend all their time being atheists and they even get into the "I'm better than the people who define themselves as believing in nonsense since I'm a person who defines myself as opposing believing in nonsense." It's like the morons who stand outside of meat plants protesting slaughtering cows while wearing a leather jacket to stay warm.
If Romney gets in, cash strapped states can siphon off the health care budget and then ask for more. Best thing about leaving it up to the states to manage their own budgets is that they generally have so much extra cash laying around that they shouldn't have a problem with it.
Kinda lame that Obama thinks it's a better idea to have central control over it. How the hell are states going to properly misappropriate funds if we don't give it to them in the first place? I know I sure as hell don't want to pay taxes to carry the burden of the poor... like Mississippi.
Gotta say, Windows 8 Tablets are just anything but a "Me Too" tablet. The fact is, if you wanted to call it a me too tablet, Apple would have to put the full OS X on iPad and let you run everything on it before it was a me-too.
The regular Surface tablet might be me-tooish. It's just a lame ass tablet. The Surface Pro... which will be more expensive is going to be a whole different beast. The Surface will run the same old apps as iPad. In my house, we have four iPads. One for each of us. I use my iPad for reading books because of the high resolution display, everything else I do with my Slate. Everything is just harder and takes longer on an iPad. Even watching videos is just not a positive experience on the iPad. The App Store and Music store has REALLY sucked since iOS 6 too. These days, when I want to buy a new film, song or app on the Apple store, I break out my slate, use iTunes and buy it there and download it to the iPad.
I have used iPhone 4 for the past few years (got it the week it came out) and now that it's pretty much end of life and it's time for a new phone, I'm looking elsewhere than Apple since I can't see paying for a CPU upgrade which is basically all the iPhone 5 is. And since I'll have to buy all new accessories for my phone anyway (thanks to the dock connector ordeal, I'm probably going to look at the Samsung Ativ S.
Microsoft Surface Pro on the other hand (I really just don't even consider Surface worth buying) will be a huge upgrade for my Samsung Series 7 Slate and it will be accessorizable. I don't usually get that excited about new tech coming out, but if the Surface Pro at least has a full HD screen, I'll replace my tablet and one of my laptops (probably my MacBook Air) as well as my iPad 3 with this one device.
I think people really need to stop comparing iPad to Windows 8. It's like comparing a bicycle to a race car. There are some similarities between the two technologies, but iPad is for FaceBook, eBooks and Angry Birds type games. Windows 8 systems are for getting things done. A machine you can actually accomplish things on should definitely cost more than a machine you read books on and play goofy games on.
I am 37 years old... spent 31 years programming as a hobby or for a living. I got tired of coding for a living and became a Cisco instructor. In 6 months I've gotten 3 CCNPs, 5 CCNA, a CCENT, multiple specialist certs, juniper certs etc... I'll take my CCIE R&S lab exam in January.
I've studied 3-11 hours a day minimum every single day since I quit my job in February. I've also been a father of two young kids full time and taught classes most of the time.
Back when I was 18 I could stay awake and alert for nearly 48 hour at a time... now I make use of Red Bull, chain smoke and drink coffee by the liter. But I'll be damned if anyone will tell me I can't keep up with the 22 year olds or learn as quickly as them.
So... what the hell are you whining about... you recognized the problem... get off your ass and fix it.
Consoles choose RISC vs. CISC for a much simpler reason. The performance isn't really that important. It's typically an issue of endianess.
It has become quite simple in modern times to make a CPU emulating JIT (meaning treating the binary instruction set of one CPU as source code and recompiling it for the host platform.) what is extremely expensive execution-wise is data model conversion on loads and stores. Unless Intel starts making load and store instructions that can function in big endian mode (we can only dream), data loading in an emulator/JIT will always be a huge execution burden.
The result being that while an x86 can run rings around any of the console processors, a perfect one to one JIT can't be developed to make big-endian code run on a little endian CPU with a 1 to 1 mapping.
As an example of this, if you look at emulators for systems that make use of little endian ARM, performance of the JIT is perfect. In fact, the JIT can sometimes even make performance better. But if you look at a modern 3.4Ghz Quad-Core Core-i7, it still struggles with emulating the Wii which is insanely low performance.
So, don't read into RISC vs. CISC here. It's really an issue of blocking emulators in most cases.
Nokia has sold feature phones with Symbian Series 60 on them for ages and called the smart phones. The point was that they were theoretically running a smart phone operating system. Of course, the target market for the phones were generally markets such as elderly women (granny phones). In addition, they were generally phones which were given away for free with cheap contracts. So they weren't really selling them to consumers.
In fact, if you were to tell the people receiving those telephones that they were so "fancy" and had all these "smart phone features", they would in fact choose another telephone which was "simpler".
Those phones will continue to sell quite a lot so long as Nokia continues selling them with big numbers and screens which can be read when you hold them close to your face.
I have never met anyone who is even kinda cool that has a Nokia smart phone when you consider a smart phone to be something actually useful for more than using as a telephone and maybe listening to the radio or music files. The only people I've ever seen with the are people who wear ties as a status thing.
I for example us a great deal of differential equations when I'm developing audio and video filters (FIRs, IIRs etc...). I don't even have a math education past trig, the rest is from books and websites.
There are cases where I'd chose to perform real-time filter calculation for adaptive filters (things like calculating the points of an FIR without knowing my desired frequency response before hand), it's not terribly common outside of for example echo cancellation where I'd want to design the shortest possible filter with the desired effect for the current environment instead of just using a long filter with good response in all frequency ranges.
I generally do most of my math work in a tool like Matlab (sometimes Mathematica if it's more mathy and less computery) and then when I have the coefficients I desire for a formula, then I'll code it in C or C++... oddly sometimes in DSP assembler.
That said, another example of where I'm using calculus, though not terribly advanced calculus is that my 8 1/2 year daughter, 10 year old son and I are writing a platform scroller for their phones. The girl is doing pretty well with coding the object structure, my son is doing much of the artwork. I'm working mostly on things like motion. In the case of motion, I make use of rate of change calculations and apply them using simple physics. For example, if the user holds the right arrow for X amount of time, I increase the positive moment energy. If they press the left arrow it applies negative momentum energy, if they simply let go of the arrows, then at a given rate, the horizontal momentum energy reduces towards zero. For jumping, when the user presses space, depending on the duration, upward energy is applied until a peak is reached which will fight gravity. Gravity however works as expected 32feet *...
I also have used math a bit in producing a TDR for cable length detection.
Math is VERY useful in programming so long as you choose to work on projects where math is interesting:) Even when I was working for a web browser company, I'd find myself writing a JPEG decoder which isn't really hard math, but it's at least somewhat advanced.
Acer specializes in making the cheapest crap you can buy without getting eMachines. If there's a company which can almost be blamed for pushing Microsoft to this point, it's actually Acer.
Asus makes pretty good stuff, but go to their website to download drivers. They don't really stay up to date on that do they? Sure, they show a product love for a few weeks after you buy it, but it's just too much work to have a script file which says "All laptops using NVidia chips should get the new NVidia driver when we add it to the server".
Dell, they will continue selling servers and infrastructure to companies. For users who don't get tablets or laptops, they'll sell those too. For users who will now get a Microsoft Surface, they'd have gotten a iPad or a cheap assed laptop otherwise.
HP is kinda like Dell except they don't depend as heavily on PC (unless you're a shareholder whinging about how PC sales are down, when the real sales on are the big stuff).
I can go on and on, but let's be honest, this isn't going to bother the vendors selling :
a) Budget crap "Timmy needs a computer honey... this one on the shelf looks pretty, and it's cheap too. Let's get it"
b) Corporate budget crap "We have to get PCs for 50 telephone sales people, does XX have anything?" (dell's market)
c) Server sales.
Asus will be the worst hit by this I think. But they'll differentiate by offering 900 models of Windows 8 machines each year to choose from, including ones with quad hex-core i7s and GTX900 in threeway SLI that can cook an egg from across the room.
Surface product is not going to be the fastest. It won't be the sexiest. It won't be the most amazing. But it will be the one which Microsoft ships one or two models of each year and for people like myself who are sick of buying cool gadgets and not being able to find cases or accessories for them, this will be perfect.
Acer should quit bitching and learn from this. Make less shit machines and start focusing on how they can make a smaller number of machines which people don't feel screwed for buying afterwards.
I recently bought my two kids Windows Phones, the HTC Titan. It really has come a long way. There are still some issues, but frankly, Windows 8 Phone (which I intend to finally trade my iPhone in for when I can get a Windows 8 x86 phone) looks really nice. There isn't enough app support yet, but I see Metro solving that.
Windows 8 Phone is just very nice to use... it's much snappier than iOS (on slower CPUs) and it feels more like my desktop Windows 8 systems. Oh, I can write software for Windows desktop and it runs almost unchanged on Windows phone.... and don't forget Visual Studio.
Dutch are taught Dutch, French, German and English before graduating school. Norwegians learn Bokmaal, NyNorsk, English and an elective language, then they generally also understand Swedish and Danish nearly fluently. Swedes learn Swedish, English and usually a third as Danish learn Danish, English and a third. Both Swedes and Danes normally understand Bokmaal Norwegian. Fins learn Suomi, Swedish, English and often a fourth. I only mentioned a small percentage of the world, they're only about 50 million people altogether, but that's about 1% of the world's population.
That sounds pretty common. I'm am American and I can speak 2 languages fluently, a third not-so-fluently, can communicate in 5 other languages (order food, ask directions, etc...) and can read a total of 14 languages without much effort. I suck at language too... my hearing problems make it impossible for me to learn new sounds, but once you learn a few, the others aren't so hard (within the same families).
My kids... they learn new languages like it's just natural. That's because on a daily basis, they can be watching cartoons or playing video games in 4 different languages and then we watch educational videos on learning new languages together. I am really hoping I can get one of them to learn Mandarin at some point.
I'll reiterate what other's have said... LibreOffice is shit. Ok, maybe not shit... but about as good as its name. "What's Lyber Office?" Fact is, LibreOffice is ok s a tinker toy, but when the apps can't even handle cut and paste between themselves very well, how can anyone expect an end user to like it?
Some might say that Google Docs doesn't suck... well they'd be pretty far off. There are in fact dozens of Office like packages out there and all of them are fairly bad. Google Docs is 5-10 years behing MS Office and Microsoft's Office 365 should be pretty impressive when it finally launches (the new version), but it's still and online office package and frankly, if it can run local, it's crap.
As far as how many consumers buy it... there ARE A LOT!!! Everyone I know who doesn't know how to pirate it simply spend the $99 for the convenience. In fact, through the Microsoft HUP (home user program) people who work for companies who license MS products can buy Microsoft Office for $10.
Seriously... SQL and DBA guys grow on trees... I don't see why Microsoft doesn't just raid the high schools and make them instead o hiring them with years of experience.
It's expensive... often 4-10 times as expensive as the common MLC media, but flash media is the most promising at this time for long term storage... 25-50 years I think. If you look at it, even today, it is possible to read 8" floppies with a little effort. With a bit of work, I was able to help someone read an old IBM370 disk pack on a PC a little while back. Whether it is convenient to read or not is a different story. But the fact is that reading ancient media isn't impossible. Flash is promising since it should experience almost no bit rot if you use single level media which tends to have fairly gigantic cells. Making use of 45nm or larger tech is an even better idea. So, in reality, a USB thumb drive that was a bit price a while ago might be your best option. I regularly buy industrial grade flash which is single level based, in an age where a 256gig flash drive can cost $300 or less, these still cost about $300 for 8gigs. They will however last a great deal longer than the alternative varieties.
I am not a big believer in disc based media since purchasing a 8" floppy drive and connecting it to a PC can easily end up costing $1000 or more these days. I feel strongly that it will be much harder in the future. I would even recommend finding a really cheap single board computer with a USB port on it and putting it into the box. With some exposed pins and access to the Internet, a high school kid in an electronics course should be able to use that to rig up a reader for the Flash drive if USB happens to go the way of the dodo. Remember though, this is 2012 and I still use RS-232 every single day I'm at work.
If you are the type of person that would find this type of thing uncomfortable to begin with, you are exactly the type of person who wouldn't function well in a kernel development environment. I know quite a few female programmers and the best of them are generally busting out as many dumb assed wise cracks as the guys... often more.
This is an excellent example of why there are a ton of women out there who have superior rights (better than equal) including pay checks to match and there are even more which sit around bitching about why men have everything. Some women think men are saying "Their tiny little brains" where in reality, if you're actually a good programmer, it doesn't matter if you're white, black, guy, gal, gay, straight, in a wheelchair or hunchbacked... on the first few days, you might be seen by some idiots as "oh... a girl...", but I wouldn't work with those people, I don't know why you would. But if you actually are a good programmer and are willing to smack people around (the way we do each other), then you'll be fine.
Personally, when I was at my last job and I found out that there was going to be an attractive woman sitting next to me, I saw her and then heard "This is... she has a Ph.D. in digital signal processing" at which point in time I got REALLY excited. I think I spent the next year leeching her brain dry about everything she knew about digital signal processing... we still eat lunch together sometimes even though we both left that company. We have a lot to teach each other. And I can promise you, if we drew a naked girl using ASCII art in the comments of the code, she'd probably put a tattoo on the picture or add a comment like "Closest thing any of these guys will get to seeing a naked woman".
I have to give the guy who added that credit since I was growing tired of 0xdeadbeef, I think 0xb16b00b5 was pretty creative.. though he probably stole it from someone else.
I like the morning meetings, but I have found the concept of a sprint to have killed off most of the design and planning phase, especially as a group when needed. Most of the projects I work on should have all the developers/engineers/scientists locked in a room together for two months before a single line of code is written. We should have a project manager with better than entry level knowledge in all fields and as a bonus based on recent methods should have tests for every component written before and/or after implementation.
I think extreme programming combined with project management and morning scrums would be much more suitable than Agile which tends to make me see most projects get to the 90% mark muh faster, but fails drastically at the end since the lack of proper planning made integration of components extremely impractical. I still like it best when 1-2 guys spend some time to build the base product and then a team is assembled to evolve it... It avoids too many cooks.
I've programmed all of them professionally with multi-million line code bases and frankly... in recent years the extensions to C have made it a far more sophisticated language than ever. With extensions like variable length arrays in structs to allow for easier construction of classes (yes, they don't call them that, but they might as well) and things that just feel like hacked in RTTI, C has grown VERY sophisticated and even in some cases object-orientedish.
C++ has become a bit of a disaster. They have added ridiculous features like Lambas which may my rear end itch. They're a kinda neat feature in many ways, but I feel they will almost certainly be abused as opposed to used. It will attract JavaScript style programming which is painful to look at. I had hoped they would have added constructs for things like functional programming, but instead they made classes for that. The real problem with C++ in recent times is that the standard C++ library is a cludge of template on template on template. Also, with many companies I've encountered, we don't know how to treat the licensing for the templates when using GPL/LGPL implementations. It seems that since you're not linking to them so much as basing your code on them, even LGPL would require you to open source your code. It's a bit of a mess. So, we use Qt in most cases since it does everything the Standard C++ libraries do but without the licensing questions.
Objective-C is the least understood by the author of the article. There are certainly thousands of open source iPhone and Mac apps coming along, but it's VERY rare that a program is written in that language as opposed to wrapped in it. You have to code Objective-C to simply create an app, after that, you can use C, C++ or just about anything else (thank to SWIG) to write the rest of your app. If you look at the Mono.NET stuff which is REALLY popular as it's as easy as it gets, it compiles C# or CIL into Objective-C which is then compiled natively to the device. So, this can easily be considered writing in Objective-C, but in most circumstances, it would account for 1% or less of the actual program. The rest in C++, C# or C.
Now, I would be willing to believe that C# is quickly taking a high position in the open source since any C++ programmer can code it with almost no experience and it works on every platform known to man. Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone... I don't know but maybe even Symbian. I even heard there's a Java back-end for it somewhere which could be used to make an app for BlackBerry... who the hell knows why... but there you have it. Oh.. and thanks to Unity3D, there's GOBS of C# apps.
So we spent obscene amounts of money funding companies who time and time again have proven they can't seem to build anything for under several billion dollars and then end up cutting corners left and right leaving us with over-priced, under-specced crap? Don't get me wrong, there's a romantic spot in my heart for the space shuttle which was just too damn cool. But Orion just seems like a square peg for a round hole or vise verse.
At the moment, there are only two real players in the commercial space game, a tourism business (which is pretty damn cool) and SpaceX who is just getting off the ground now. But in the limited time and with limited budgets they've worked with, they have accomplished substantially more in the past 10 years than the contractors involved with Orion had in the previous 30. These guys will think smarter and move things into space and then they or someone else will build long range transport craft from LEO to elsewhere as opposed to this ridiculous model where we feel we have to create a single craft which has to fly directly from earth's surface with everything it needs in one step. We already have a space station and it seems to me that we need to have another or extend the one we currently have to start storing what we need for deep space travel.Then we can work on for example a space station orbiting the moon and/or mars where we can transport what we need to build surface launch facilities for getting to and from the surface. For what Orion cost, NASA could have bough 10 Falcon 9 Heavy rockets and launched them probably 100 times.
Lockheed, Boeing and all those guys are slow, overpriced, sleazy and generally just obsolete. If they can't compete with companies like SpaceX, they should simply get out of that business altogether. If you don't want to hop on the private space wagon, well there's always hitchhiking with the Chinese.
I was going to say it if no one else does... come on... Apple store employee? If you want to have fun... bring a MacBook running Windows into the Apple Store and claim to have a problem. It'll take about 5 seconds at the genius bar to start getting a guy spewing one made up line of shit after the next. I do that sometimes just to have some fun:) Here's a sales rep at the store who clearly doesn't understand how those laws work and wants to seem self important by pretending he does.
Now... for a little fun... I'm an American who lives in Norway. I speak Norwegian.... very badly... but I'm fluent in bad Norwegian, so that's ok. When I travel to the states with my family to visit the grandparents, when we go out to eat, it's common for us to speak Norwegian at the dinner table. One two separate occasions, I have heard these comments :
- (Two middle aged ladies in an American whisper... meaning whisper sound, but loud enough to be heard in the next county) "I can't believe these Germans... they come to this country and don't even have the decency to learn the language.. and they speak it with their children! It's disgusting" at which point I respond "Excuse me madam, it's Norwegian, not German. I was born at the hospital down the road and currently live in Norway and my children speak English just fine. Unlike you however who prefer to share your conversations with everyone, we prefer to be civilized".
- (Two rednecks in the south) Damn Mexicans don't even know how ta' speak English.
Funny thing is... most Norwegians don't consider me able to speak their language haha
A whole ago, I watched a program on the huge teen prostitution problem in Vacouver. High school girls apparently found out that a little lip service was enough to fill their wardrobes with name brands. I have a daughter that will soon be a teen... So I'm not moving there!!!
Shit... I can't remember the name of that movie where some politician tried to gain points while running for office by trying to declare war on Canada... That was too good... Not joking when I say that I met someone who actually only caught a few minutes of the film back then and actually thought Canadians were dangerous. I told him "Only the French speaking ones. Their communists and hide behind their language.". Not sure what happened to him... But if he's still alive, he probably still believes it.
Another mobile company learns that there's more to the modern mobile business than the technology itself.
I really never liked RIM, their products always made me feel like they were crappy plastic things which salespeople would have. Oh... Don't forget that high school kids loved them because of how fast you could text. But these days, messaging is considered to be "Of course it's there". A good web browser and a good selection of time wasting apps is far more important. And I haven't once seen RIM even try to make developing for their platform easier. Java is ok for new apps, but it's shit for porting. No one wants to gamble their whole business coding for one platform... Well except the iPhone guys... Even then, do you think EA is rewriting all their code in Objective-C? Hell no. They write as little as possible in Objective-C and leave the rest in C++.
If RIM wants to make a big difference... They should port the Mono.Net platform to work on their devices and get Unity3D running on there. They can even do it so that the C# compiler generates code compatible with their APIs like Monotouch and Mono for Android do. Then port Unreal Engine as well. Who gives a rats ass less about QNX (which is ok stuff, but not really anything amazing)... QNX just means "Nothing compatible with any other platform runs on this... Try again".
This is slashdot. We all know better than everyone else, therefore without senseless disagreement in the forums, the site would fail to exist.
The reasonI disagree is because I feel the lack of demand for Windows Phone is more because the only companies who make them have long histories of lack of commitment to their phones. Nokia made a fortune for decades by selling new phones when a feature could have been adde through an update, but because software updates are free to the consumer, they sold new phones instead. Having been a developer on Nokia phones for years, I can say even the developers often couldn't update the phones without a JTAG cable and sometimes soldering on wires to connect it.
Samsung and LG have dipped their toes in te water, but their commitment is half assed. HTC... Don't make me laugh. They toss the OS on the phone, load it up with crapware, ship it and say screw it.
Apple changed the way we perceive phones. If Nokia had adopted Android as opposed to Windows Phone, they'd have released 10 new Android phones back to back and screwed all their users from version to version and Android would have sucked instead.
Apple's success wasn't entirely because of iOS. It was very much about the commitment to the actual platform. They provided an operating system, tools, PC and Mac software which was good (unlike Android sync crap and Zune) and then gave content distributors a reason to hype their product for them too.
Android would have been screwed if Samsung didn't try to duplicate the iPhone experience by committing to a small number of variations of the device which were each maintained for long periods. People like to know their phones will have all the cool features for a year or two after they buy them.
Also, Apple and Samsung focused less on tech (let's face it, you can getter better tech elsewhere) and instead focused on style. Nokia makes a crap phone that only people in poor parts of Asia and the Eastern Block would think looks cool. LG and Samsung's Windows Phones look like utility bricks. And HTC... Well... Looks like HTC. Dell tried and ended up making something which looks like "The Budget Windows Phone".
If Microsoft wants Windows Phone to succeed (and Windows 8 tablets), try have to try and make one device a year with NO focus on the underlying tech and a huge focus on the overall experience. It has to be snappy, easy and sexy. Sell the features and style, not the tech.
I hope they polish Metro or made it djinn able enough so others can. Metro is amazing, but it needs some more sex appear to work. The start screen is either too busy or busy in a non-astheticly pleasing way. But it works so damn well it's forgivable. Additionally, when using Metro split-screen, the splitter bar is too wide or maybe chunky. It gives it a kindergarten or preschoolish feel. App design using existing controls is troublesome since drill down entry is hard to work out in the screen format the way they did it. Classic Windows desktop doesn't integrate as well in split screen as it should.
I think the fatal flaw of Surface is that they didn't make one or the other. They should have made x86 only (Windows RT is lame... No classic desktop apps and no visual studio on device... So development sucks for it) and they should have made a ultra and a lite version of it. Core i3 ULV with 8" screen and Core i5 with 10" or 11".
I will buy one of each of the surface tablets anyway, but I don't like that it seems too PCish. Specs don't really matter. Functionality and price are all that matters
Though, I don't recall there being any rules which state that products not designed for Windows or iOS having to be locks down.
I figure that the UEFI BIOS for ARM is open source, Linux is open source... Shouldn't be so hard to produce a non-Windows or Apple tablet. I just don't see any problem with Microsoft and even other vendors locking the devices they make. Why not just buy something else?
Oops... Forgot.. Slashdot... People here intentionally buy locked down devices do they can bitch about their lack of freedom
I have both a Samsung Series 7 Slate (running Windows 8) and a Mac Book Air (running Windows 7) which together take up almost no space. I use the slate for the slide show part of presentations where having a pen to mark up the slides is just awesome. I use the air for running Visual Studio, putty and GNS3 for typing C++ and teaching Cisco.
I also have owned pico projectors.... they suck... 300 lumens is the absolute bare minimum useful level of light for a projector and eventually I ended up with a Casio XJ-240 which is a 2000 Lumen projector which is thin and is LED and Laser based so no changing of light bulbs. In one backpack, I can pack clothes for a week (thin t-shirts, underwear, socks, one extra pair of pants... slacks not jeans), toiletries (toothbrush and razor.. use the hotel shampoo and soap), carry a presentation system and a Cisco lab.
The only thing I really need to make this work is to get a VGA or HDMI switch that is small enough to manage.
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At one point, I decided to watch some videos of Dawkins and found him to be obscene and utterly rude. While I am personally an atheist, I truly disagree with people suggesting that this man is representative of me. It's reached a point where religious people use him as an example of the raving lunatics atheists are. So far as I can tell, while he's also an atheist, he takes atheism to a degree of being a religion. Between him and organized non-religion groups, I'm thoroughly disappointed.
The point is atheists shouldn't ever be organizing as being atheists. It should not be a defining characteristic. A person who is an atheist should be something else. Maybe an artist, a musician, a scientist, an engineer, a good will worker. In short, an atheist should have a great deal of time to spend on things that are just more important and more meaningful than religion. Instead, these groups (including the Dawkins lackies) spend all their time being atheists and they even get into the "I'm better than the people who define themselves as believing in nonsense since I'm a person who defines myself as opposing believing in nonsense." It's like the morons who stand outside of meat plants protesting slaughtering cows while wearing a leather jacket to stay warm.
People... please just be more.
If Romney gets in, cash strapped states can siphon off the health care budget and then ask for more. Best thing about leaving it up to the states to manage their own budgets is that they generally have so much extra cash laying around that they shouldn't have a problem with it.
Kinda lame that Obama thinks it's a better idea to have central control over it. How the hell are states going to properly misappropriate funds if we don't give it to them in the first place? I know I sure as hell don't want to pay taxes to carry the burden of the poor... like Mississippi.
I was going to write something similar, but you did a far better job than I would have :)
Gotta say, Windows 8 Tablets are just anything but a "Me Too" tablet. The fact is, if you wanted to call it a me too tablet, Apple would have to put the full OS X on iPad and let you run everything on it before it was a me-too.
The regular Surface tablet might be me-tooish. It's just a lame ass tablet. The Surface Pro... which will be more expensive is going to be a whole different beast. The Surface will run the same old apps as iPad. In my house, we have four iPads. One for each of us. I use my iPad for reading books because of the high resolution display, everything else I do with my Slate. Everything is just harder and takes longer on an iPad. Even watching videos is just not a positive experience on the iPad. The App Store and Music store has REALLY sucked since iOS 6 too. These days, when I want to buy a new film, song or app on the Apple store, I break out my slate, use iTunes and buy it there and download it to the iPad.
I have used iPhone 4 for the past few years (got it the week it came out) and now that it's pretty much end of life and it's time for a new phone, I'm looking elsewhere than Apple since I can't see paying for a CPU upgrade which is basically all the iPhone 5 is. And since I'll have to buy all new accessories for my phone anyway (thanks to the dock connector ordeal, I'm probably going to look at the Samsung Ativ S.
Microsoft Surface Pro on the other hand (I really just don't even consider Surface worth buying) will be a huge upgrade for my Samsung Series 7 Slate and it will be accessorizable. I don't usually get that excited about new tech coming out, but if the Surface Pro at least has a full HD screen, I'll replace my tablet and one of my laptops (probably my MacBook Air) as well as my iPad 3 with this one device.
I think people really need to stop comparing iPad to Windows 8. It's like comparing a bicycle to a race car. There are some similarities between the two technologies, but iPad is for FaceBook, eBooks and Angry Birds type games. Windows 8 systems are for getting things done. A machine you can actually accomplish things on should definitely cost more than a machine you read books on and play goofy games on.
I am 37 years old... spent 31 years programming as a hobby or for a living. I got tired of coding for a living and became a Cisco instructor. In 6 months I've gotten 3 CCNPs, 5 CCNA, a CCENT, multiple specialist certs, juniper certs etc... I'll take my CCIE R&S lab exam in January.
I've studied 3-11 hours a day minimum every single day since I quit my job in February. I've also been a father of two young kids full time and taught classes most of the time.
Back when I was 18 I could stay awake and alert for nearly 48 hour at a time... now I make use of Red Bull, chain smoke and drink coffee by the liter. But I'll be damned if anyone will tell me I can't keep up with the 22 year olds or learn as quickly as them.
So... what the hell are you whining about... you recognized the problem... get off your ass and fix it.
Consoles choose RISC vs. CISC for a much simpler reason. The performance isn't really that important. It's typically an issue of endianess.
It has become quite simple in modern times to make a CPU emulating JIT (meaning treating the binary instruction set of one CPU as source code and recompiling it for the host platform.) what is extremely expensive execution-wise is data model conversion on loads and stores. Unless Intel starts making load and store instructions that can function in big endian mode (we can only dream), data loading in an emulator/JIT will always be a huge execution burden.
The result being that while an x86 can run rings around any of the console processors, a perfect one to one JIT can't be developed to make big-endian code run on a little endian CPU with a 1 to 1 mapping.
As an example of this, if you look at emulators for systems that make use of little endian ARM, performance of the JIT is perfect. In fact, the JIT can sometimes even make performance better. But if you look at a modern 3.4Ghz Quad-Core Core-i7, it still struggles with emulating the Wii which is insanely low performance.
So, don't read into RISC vs. CISC here. It's really an issue of blocking emulators in most cases.
Nokia has sold feature phones with Symbian Series 60 on them for ages and called the smart phones. The point was that they were theoretically running a smart phone operating system. Of course, the target market for the phones were generally markets such as elderly women (granny phones). In addition, they were generally phones which were given away for free with cheap contracts. So they weren't really selling them to consumers.
In fact, if you were to tell the people receiving those telephones that they were so "fancy" and had all these "smart phone features", they would in fact choose another telephone which was "simpler".
Those phones will continue to sell quite a lot so long as Nokia continues selling them with big numbers and screens which can be read when you hold them close to your face.
I have never met anyone who is even kinda cool that has a Nokia smart phone when you consider a smart phone to be something actually useful for more than using as a telephone and maybe listening to the radio or music files. The only people I've ever seen with the are people who wear ties as a status thing.
I for example us a great deal of differential equations when I'm developing audio and video filters (FIRs, IIRs etc...). I don't even have a math education past trig, the rest is from books and websites.
:) Even when I was working for a web browser company, I'd find myself writing a JPEG decoder which isn't really hard math, but it's at least somewhat advanced.
There are cases where I'd chose to perform real-time filter calculation for adaptive filters (things like calculating the points of an FIR without knowing my desired frequency response before hand), it's not terribly common outside of for example echo cancellation where I'd want to design the shortest possible filter with the desired effect for the current environment instead of just using a long filter with good response in all frequency ranges.
I generally do most of my math work in a tool like Matlab (sometimes Mathematica if it's more mathy and less computery) and then when I have the coefficients I desire for a formula, then I'll code it in C or C++... oddly sometimes in DSP assembler.
That said, another example of where I'm using calculus, though not terribly advanced calculus is that my 8 1/2 year daughter, 10 year old son and I are writing a platform scroller for their phones. The girl is doing pretty well with coding the object structure, my son is doing much of the artwork. I'm working mostly on things like motion. In the case of motion, I make use of rate of change calculations and apply them using simple physics. For example, if the user holds the right arrow for X amount of time, I increase the positive moment energy. If they press the left arrow it applies negative momentum energy, if they simply let go of the arrows, then at a given rate, the horizontal momentum energy reduces towards zero. For jumping, when the user presses space, depending on the duration, upward energy is applied until a peak is reached which will fight gravity. Gravity however works as expected 32feet *...
I also have used math a bit in producing a TDR for cable length detection.
Math is VERY useful in programming so long as you choose to work on projects where math is interesting
Acer specializes in making the cheapest crap you can buy without getting eMachines. If there's a company which can almost be blamed for pushing Microsoft to this point, it's actually Acer.
Asus makes pretty good stuff, but go to their website to download drivers. They don't really stay up to date on that do they? Sure, they show a product love for a few weeks after you buy it, but it's just too much work to have a script file which says "All laptops using NVidia chips should get the new NVidia driver when we add it to the server".
Dell, they will continue selling servers and infrastructure to companies. For users who don't get tablets or laptops, they'll sell those too. For users who will now get a Microsoft Surface, they'd have gotten a iPad or a cheap assed laptop otherwise.
HP is kinda like Dell except they don't depend as heavily on PC (unless you're a shareholder whinging about how PC sales are down, when the real sales on are the big stuff).
I can go on and on, but let's be honest, this isn't going to bother the vendors selling :
a) Budget crap "Timmy needs a computer honey... this one on the shelf looks pretty, and it's cheap too. Let's get it"
b) Corporate budget crap "We have to get PCs for 50 telephone sales people, does XX have anything?" (dell's market)
c) Server sales.
Asus will be the worst hit by this I think. But they'll differentiate by offering 900 models of Windows 8 machines each year to choose from, including ones with quad hex-core i7s and GTX900 in threeway SLI that can cook an egg from across the room.
Surface product is not going to be the fastest. It won't be the sexiest. It won't be the most amazing. But it will be the one which Microsoft ships one or two models of each year and for people like myself who are sick of buying cool gadgets and not being able to find cases or accessories for them, this will be perfect.
Acer should quit bitching and learn from this. Make less shit machines and start focusing on how they can make a smaller number of machines which people don't feel screwed for buying afterwards.
I recently bought my two kids Windows Phones, the HTC Titan. It really has come a long way. There are still some issues, but frankly, Windows 8 Phone (which I intend to finally trade my iPhone in for when I can get a Windows 8 x86 phone) looks really nice. There isn't enough app support yet, but I see Metro solving that.
Windows 8 Phone is just very nice to use... it's much snappier than iOS (on slower CPUs) and it feels more like my desktop Windows 8 systems. Oh, I can write software for Windows desktop and it runs almost unchanged on Windows phone.... and don't forget Visual Studio.
Dutch are taught Dutch, French, German and English before graduating school. Norwegians learn Bokmaal, NyNorsk, English and an elective language, then they generally also understand Swedish and Danish nearly fluently. Swedes learn Swedish, English and usually a third as Danish learn Danish, English and a third. Both Swedes and Danes normally understand Bokmaal Norwegian. Fins learn Suomi, Swedish, English and often a fourth. I only mentioned a small percentage of the world, they're only about 50 million people altogether, but that's about 1% of the world's population.
That sounds pretty common. I'm am American and I can speak 2 languages fluently, a third not-so-fluently, can communicate in 5 other languages (order food, ask directions, etc...) and can read a total of 14 languages without much effort. I suck at language too... my hearing problems make it impossible for me to learn new sounds, but once you learn a few, the others aren't so hard (within the same families).
My kids... they learn new languages like it's just natural. That's because on a daily basis, they can be watching cartoons or playing video games in 4 different languages and then we watch educational videos on learning new languages together. I am really hoping I can get one of them to learn Mandarin at some point.
I'll reiterate what other's have said... LibreOffice is shit. Ok, maybe not shit... but about as good as its name. "What's Lyber Office?" Fact is, LibreOffice is ok s a tinker toy, but when the apps can't even handle cut and paste between themselves very well, how can anyone expect an end user to like it?
Some might say that Google Docs doesn't suck... well they'd be pretty far off. There are in fact dozens of Office like packages out there and all of them are fairly bad. Google Docs is 5-10 years behing MS Office and Microsoft's Office 365 should be pretty impressive when it finally launches (the new version), but it's still and online office package and frankly, if it can run local, it's crap.
As far as how many consumers buy it... there ARE A LOT!!! Everyone I know who doesn't know how to pirate it simply spend the $99 for the convenience. In fact, through the Microsoft HUP (home user program) people who work for companies who license MS products can buy Microsoft Office for $10.
Seriously... SQL and DBA guys grow on trees... I don't see why Microsoft doesn't just raid the high schools and make them instead o hiring them with years of experience.
It's expensive... often 4-10 times as expensive as the common MLC media, but flash media is the most promising at this time for long term storage... 25-50 years I think. If you look at it, even today, it is possible to read 8" floppies with a little effort. With a bit of work, I was able to help someone read an old IBM370 disk pack on a PC a little while back. Whether it is convenient to read or not is a different story. But the fact is that reading ancient media isn't impossible. Flash is promising since it should experience almost no bit rot if you use single level media which tends to have fairly gigantic cells. Making use of 45nm or larger tech is an even better idea. So, in reality, a USB thumb drive that was a bit price a while ago might be your best option. I regularly buy industrial grade flash which is single level based, in an age where a 256gig flash drive can cost $300 or less, these still cost about $300 for 8gigs. They will however last a great deal longer than the alternative varieties.
I am not a big believer in disc based media since purchasing a 8" floppy drive and connecting it to a PC can easily end up costing $1000 or more these days. I feel strongly that it will be much harder in the future. I would even recommend finding a really cheap single board computer with a USB port on it and putting it into the box. With some exposed pins and access to the Internet, a high school kid in an electronics course should be able to use that to rig up a reader for the Flash drive if USB happens to go the way of the dodo. Remember though, this is 2012 and I still use RS-232 every single day I'm at work.
If you are the type of person that would find this type of thing uncomfortable to begin with, you are exactly the type of person who wouldn't function well in a kernel development environment. I know quite a few female programmers and the best of them are generally busting out as many dumb assed wise cracks as the guys... often more.
This is an excellent example of why there are a ton of women out there who have superior rights (better than equal) including pay checks to match and there are even more which sit around bitching about why men have everything. Some women think men are saying "Their tiny little brains" where in reality, if you're actually a good programmer, it doesn't matter if you're white, black, guy, gal, gay, straight, in a wheelchair or hunchbacked... on the first few days, you might be seen by some idiots as "oh... a girl...", but I wouldn't work with those people, I don't know why you would. But if you actually are a good programmer and are willing to smack people around (the way we do each other), then you'll be fine.
Personally, when I was at my last job and I found out that there was going to be an attractive woman sitting next to me, I saw her and then heard "This is... she has a Ph.D. in digital signal processing" at which point in time I got REALLY excited. I think I spent the next year leeching her brain dry about everything she knew about digital signal processing... we still eat lunch together sometimes even though we both left that company. We have a lot to teach each other. And I can promise you, if we drew a naked girl using ASCII art in the comments of the code, she'd probably put a tattoo on the picture or add a comment like "Closest thing any of these guys will get to seeing a naked woman".
I have to give the guy who added that credit since I was growing tired of 0xdeadbeef, I think 0xb16b00b5 was pretty creative.. though he probably stole it from someone else.
Pretty sure his boobs are quite huge... don't want to look though.
I like the morning meetings, but I have found the concept of a sprint to have killed off most of the design and planning phase, especially as a group when needed. Most of the projects I work on should have all the developers/engineers/scientists locked in a room together for two months before a single line of code is written. We should have a project manager with better than entry level knowledge in all fields and as a bonus based on recent methods should have tests for every component written before and/or after implementation.
I think extreme programming combined with project management and morning scrums would be much more suitable than Agile which tends to make me see most projects get to the 90% mark muh faster, but fails drastically at the end since the lack of proper planning made integration of components extremely impractical. I still like it best when 1-2 guys spend some time to build the base product and then a team is assembled to evolve it... It avoids too many cooks.
haha I love the but... do you?
I've programmed all of them professionally with multi-million line code bases and frankly... in recent years the extensions to C have made it a far more sophisticated language than ever. With extensions like variable length arrays in structs to allow for easier construction of classes (yes, they don't call them that, but they might as well) and things that just feel like hacked in RTTI, C has grown VERY sophisticated and even in some cases object-orientedish.
C++ has become a bit of a disaster. They have added ridiculous features like Lambas which may my rear end itch. They're a kinda neat feature in many ways, but I feel they will almost certainly be abused as opposed to used. It will attract JavaScript style programming which is painful to look at. I had hoped they would have added constructs for things like functional programming, but instead they made classes for that. The real problem with C++ in recent times is that the standard C++ library is a cludge of template on template on template. Also, with many companies I've encountered, we don't know how to treat the licensing for the templates when using GPL/LGPL implementations. It seems that since you're not linking to them so much as basing your code on them, even LGPL would require you to open source your code. It's a bit of a mess. So, we use Qt in most cases since it does everything the Standard C++ libraries do but without the licensing questions.
Objective-C is the least understood by the author of the article. There are certainly thousands of open source iPhone and Mac apps coming along, but it's VERY rare that a program is written in that language as opposed to wrapped in it. You have to code Objective-C to simply create an app, after that, you can use C, C++ or just about anything else (thank to SWIG) to write the rest of your app. If you look at the Mono.NET stuff which is REALLY popular as it's as easy as it gets, it compiles C# or CIL into Objective-C which is then compiled natively to the device. So, this can easily be considered writing in Objective-C, but in most circumstances, it would account for 1% or less of the actual program. The rest in C++, C# or C.
Now, I would be willing to believe that C# is quickly taking a high position in the open source since any C++ programmer can code it with almost no experience and it works on every platform known to man. Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone... I don't know but maybe even Symbian. I even heard there's a Java back-end for it somewhere which could be used to make an app for BlackBerry... who the hell knows why... but there you have it. Oh.. and thanks to Unity3D, there's GOBS of C# apps.
So we spent obscene amounts of money funding companies who time and time again have proven they can't seem to build anything for under several billion dollars and then end up cutting corners left and right leaving us with over-priced, under-specced crap? Don't get me wrong, there's a romantic spot in my heart for the space shuttle which was just too damn cool. But Orion just seems like a square peg for a round hole or vise verse.
At the moment, there are only two real players in the commercial space game, a tourism business (which is pretty damn cool) and SpaceX who is just getting off the ground now. But in the limited time and with limited budgets they've worked with, they have accomplished substantially more in the past 10 years than the contractors involved with Orion had in the previous 30. These guys will think smarter and move things into space and then they or someone else will build long range transport craft from LEO to elsewhere as opposed to this ridiculous model where we feel we have to create a single craft which has to fly directly from earth's surface with everything it needs in one step. We already have a space station and it seems to me that we need to have another or extend the one we currently have to start storing what we need for deep space travel.Then we can work on for example a space station orbiting the moon and/or mars where we can transport what we need to build surface launch facilities for getting to and from the surface. For what Orion cost, NASA could have bough 10 Falcon 9 Heavy rockets and launched them probably 100 times.
Lockheed, Boeing and all those guys are slow, overpriced, sleazy and generally just obsolete. If they can't compete with companies like SpaceX, they should simply get out of that business altogether. If you don't want to hop on the private space wagon, well there's always hitchhiking with the Chinese.
I was going to say it if no one else does... come on... Apple store employee? If you want to have fun... bring a MacBook running Windows into the Apple Store and claim to have a problem. It'll take about 5 seconds at the genius bar to start getting a guy spewing one made up line of shit after the next. I do that sometimes just to have some fun :) Here's a sales rep at the store who clearly doesn't understand how those laws work and wants to seem self important by pretending he does.
Now... for a little fun... I'm an American who lives in Norway. I speak Norwegian.... very badly... but I'm fluent in bad Norwegian, so that's ok. When I travel to the states with my family to visit the grandparents, when we go out to eat, it's common for us to speak Norwegian at the dinner table. One two separate occasions, I have heard these comments :
- (Two middle aged ladies in an American whisper... meaning whisper sound, but loud enough to be heard in the next county) "I can't believe these Germans... they come to this country and don't even have the decency to learn the language.. and they speak it with their children! It's disgusting" at which point I respond "Excuse me madam, it's Norwegian, not German. I was born at the hospital down the road and currently live in Norway and my children speak English just fine. Unlike you however who prefer to share your conversations with everyone, we prefer to be civilized".
- (Two rednecks in the south) Damn Mexicans don't even know how ta' speak English.
Funny thing is... most Norwegians don't consider me able to speak their language haha
A whole ago, I watched a program on the huge teen prostitution problem in Vacouver. High school girls apparently found out that a little lip service was enough to fill their wardrobes with name brands. I have a daughter that will soon be a teen... So I'm not moving there!!!
Shit... I can't remember the name of that movie where some politician tried to gain points while running for office by trying to declare war on Canada... That was too good... Not joking when I say that I met someone who actually only caught a few minutes of the film back then and actually thought Canadians were dangerous. I told him "Only the French speaking ones. Their communists and hide behind their language.". Not sure what happened to him... But if he's still alive, he probably still believes it.
Another mobile company learns that there's more to the modern mobile business than the technology itself.
I really never liked RIM, their products always made me feel like they were crappy plastic things which salespeople would have. Oh... Don't forget that high school kids loved them because of how fast you could text. But these days, messaging is considered to be "Of course it's there". A good web browser and a good selection of time wasting apps is far more important. And I haven't once seen RIM even try to make developing for their platform easier. Java is ok for new apps, but it's shit for porting. No one wants to gamble their whole business coding for one platform... Well except the iPhone guys... Even then, do you think EA is rewriting all their code in Objective-C? Hell no. They write as little as possible in Objective-C and leave the rest in C++.
If RIM wants to make a big difference... They should port the Mono.Net platform to work on their devices and get Unity3D running on there. They can even do it so that the C# compiler generates code compatible with their APIs like Monotouch and Mono for Android do. Then port Unreal Engine as well. Who gives a rats ass less about QNX (which is ok stuff, but not really anything amazing)... QNX just means "Nothing compatible with any other platform runs on this... Try again".
This is slashdot. We all know better than everyone else, therefore without senseless disagreement in the forums, the site would fail to exist.
The reasonI disagree is because I feel the lack of demand for Windows Phone is more because the only companies who make them have long histories of lack of commitment to their phones. Nokia made a fortune for decades by selling new phones when a feature could have been adde through an update, but because software updates are free to the consumer, they sold new phones instead. Having been a developer on Nokia phones for years, I can say even the developers often couldn't update the phones without a JTAG cable and sometimes soldering on wires to connect it.
Samsung and LG have dipped their toes in te water, but their commitment is half assed. HTC... Don't make me laugh. They toss the OS on the phone, load it up with crapware, ship it and say screw it.
Apple changed the way we perceive phones. If Nokia had adopted Android as opposed to Windows Phone, they'd have released 10 new Android phones back to back and screwed all their users from version to version and Android would have sucked instead.
Apple's success wasn't entirely because of iOS. It was very much about the commitment to the actual platform. They provided an operating system, tools, PC and Mac software which was good (unlike Android sync crap and Zune) and then gave content distributors a reason to hype their product for them too.
Android would have been screwed if Samsung didn't try to duplicate the iPhone experience by committing to a small number of variations of the device which were each maintained for long periods. People like to know their phones will have all the cool features for a year or two after they buy them.
Also, Apple and Samsung focused less on tech (let's face it, you can getter better tech elsewhere) and instead focused on style. Nokia makes a crap phone that only people in poor parts of Asia and the Eastern Block would think looks cool. LG and Samsung's Windows Phones look like utility bricks. And HTC... Well... Looks like HTC. Dell tried and ended up making something which looks like "The Budget Windows Phone".
If Microsoft wants Windows Phone to succeed (and Windows 8 tablets), try have to try and make one device a year with NO focus on the underlying tech and a huge focus on the overall experience. It has to be snappy, easy and sexy. Sell the features and style, not the tech.
I hope they polish Metro or made it djinn able enough so others can. Metro is amazing, but it needs some more sex appear to work. The start screen is either too busy or busy in a non-astheticly pleasing way. But it works so damn well it's forgivable. Additionally, when using Metro split-screen, the splitter bar is too wide or maybe chunky. It gives it a kindergarten or preschoolish feel. App design using existing controls is troublesome since drill down entry is hard to work out in the screen format the way they did it. Classic Windows desktop doesn't integrate as well in split screen as it should.
I think the fatal flaw of Surface is that they didn't make one or the other. They should have made x86 only (Windows RT is lame... No classic desktop apps and no visual studio on device... So development sucks for it) and they should have made a ultra and a lite version of it. Core i3 ULV with 8" screen and Core i5 with 10" or 11".
I will buy one of each of the surface tablets anyway, but I don't like that it seems too PCish. Specs don't really matter. Functionality and price are all that matters
Though, I don't recall there being any rules which state that products not designed for Windows or iOS having to be locks down.
I figure that the UEFI BIOS for ARM is open source, Linux is open source... Shouldn't be so hard to produce a non-Windows or Apple tablet. I just don't see any problem with Microsoft and even other vendors locking the devices they make. Why not just buy something else?
Oops... Forgot.. Slashdot... People here intentionally buy locked down devices do they can bitch about their lack of freedom
I have both a Samsung Series 7 Slate (running Windows 8) and a Mac Book Air (running Windows 7) which together take up almost no space. I use the slate for the slide show part of presentations where having a pen to mark up the slides is just awesome. I use the air for running Visual Studio, putty and GNS3 for typing C++ and teaching Cisco.
I also have owned pico projectors.... they suck... 300 lumens is the absolute bare minimum useful level of light for a projector and eventually I ended up with a Casio XJ-240 which is a 2000 Lumen projector which is thin and is LED and Laser based so no changing of light bulbs. In one backpack, I can pack clothes for a week (thin t-shirts, underwear, socks, one extra pair of pants... slacks not jeans), toiletries (toothbrush and razor.. use the hotel shampoo and soap), carry a presentation system and a Cisco lab.
The only thing I really need to make this work is to get a VGA or HDMI switch that is small enough to manage.