Tools get better and cheaper, no matter what business you're in, but you still have to have that talent.
So how's that different from programming? (It was you who made that comparison, not me).
That doesn't mean that you need an expensive engineer and producer in a rented studio to produce music. It would be like saying all free software projects need to rent their own office with their own programmer. They don't. Free software programmers do it as a hobby. So do musicians.
With regard to the gear, a decent sound card is not enough if you do not have quality microphones and proper acoustics.
Of course. If you intend to record something, you need a decent microphone (not several). Proper acoustics can be made with wool blankets, egg-cartons, whatever... This is still not putting the price above what the average person with a job can afford.
Even the folks who create entirely electronic music largely do not rely on the free or the cheap software -- BT told me once that he prototypes stuff on Acid Express, but his full set of tools goes way beyond that.
So what? Even the cheapest (or entirely free) studio software today, is something producers 20 years ago wouldn't even have dreamed to lay their hands on. It is more than capable of producing a decent-quality CD-release. Of course, in the proper hands, the more expensive stuff might produce even better results, although compared with some extra talent, it means zilch. Try to ask BT which of his tools are essential next time, not just which of them are the most fun (and realize that his answer may be far above what most musicians/producers need, if they are not into electronic music)
But mostly it's a question of scale and features. The cheap stuff is cut-down version of the expensive stuff, with the same quality, but less tracks, etc... And the cheap stuff may lack some "professional" features such as surround mixing, hardware faders, etc... Apart from that, it's just not that much you can do to increase or decrease quality with digital mixing. Floating point sums are still floating point sums.
It's like "hey, my brakes squeal, how do I solve this?" And instead of really solving the squealing brakes by replacing them you just buy a new car. Do the brakes still squeal? Yes, but since you're not driving it anymore you no longer care.
Yes. It is like that. But it is still a solution!
Just because you find it a bit silly to replace a whole computer because of spyware, or replace a whole car because of squeaky brakes, doesn't disqualify it as a solution. No matter how silly you find it, it's still a solution to the problem of the user experiencing spyware on his computer, or squeaky brakes on his car.
In the case of the computer, as a techie, I would actually recommend this to non-techies. A new dell costs about the same as you could expect to pay if you would pay someone to fix the problem. In addition you get a new and better computer. If you were to pay someone to fix it, you would still solve the problem, and still part with your money, but you would not have a new and spiffy computer. If you invested the time into learning enough about computers to fix it yourself, by the time you were finished fixing the probem, if you'd been working overtime instead, you could have bought at least 50 dells.
As for the car, the same logic applies. If it's an old car, which you know sooner or later will need a major (costly) overhaul, you can just as well ditch it when a problem shows up, such as squeaky brakes. You don't need to fix it yourself, or pay someone to do it, when you are going to need a new car soon enough anyway.
I've contributed to open source projects just by using my $500 Mac Mini and a few hours of my time. By comparison, a decent studio and engineer might cost you $500 a day.
Uh, not any more. A decent studio consists of a home computer, a good soundcard, and some software (often included with the computer or sound card). A decent studio engineer can be yourself or a friend.
If you think otherwise, either you haven't followed what's been happening in the last years in music software, or you have different concepts of what's "decent" when it comes to music studios and to programming labs. (Personally, I wouldn't even consider a programming lab decent unless I had 3 widescreen monitors on my desk connected to my workstation, a network of at least 1 other workstation and a server, and software for at least $50,000. And I also need to pay a programmer to sit there:-).
Somebody actually use tiny firewall? Wow, I tried it once, and after having clicked yes about 2579 times the last 5 minutes... it didn't get used any more!
buy a new computer? It really irks me when people cite this as a solution.
It is a solution!
Just because it's not the techiest, or generally lowest-cost, or whatever, doesn't disqualify it from being a solution. It solved his problem. Therefore, by definition it is a solution.
Maybe google.com was down when the barely literate author of the article tried to look up "incidences" to check the spelling.
You use google as a spell checker? Wouldn't it be better to use something like a, uhm..., spell checker? Or at least a dictionary?
If the author can't be bothered to spell check his article why does he think we should bother to read it?
Maybe because we think he has something interesting to say? (Ok, he didn't, his article was a collection of lies, half-truths, and wishful thinking. But we wouldn't know that before we tried reading it).
Incidentally, what do you think of microthreads, ie. found in Stackless Python
As far as I'm aware, stackless python "threads" aren't threads, but is really what the rest of us calls coroutines. I like coroutines, as they are predictable and easy to understand, and gives a lot of (useful) power to the programmer. Now, it might be true that later versions (such as the current) has added some scheduling beyond manual yield(), in which case you would call them userspace threads. Personally, I prefer system threads, coroutines, or both, and think of userspace threads as a bastardization of the concept. But if people find user threads useful, I'm not going to argue with them. To each his own...
and possibly concurrent languages like Erlang?
I have no experience with Erlang. From what I understand, erlang threads are userspace threads and are not used for efficiency, they are used for ease of modelling. And message-passing is the way these threads communicate. This is completely unfamiliar territory for me, but intelligent people I respect like Erlang, and projects in Erlang has a good track record. As a result Erlang exists somewhere on my got-to-learn-that-sometime-in-the-future list. Unfortunately nobody has time for every interesting thing out there.
As I understand it, microthreads are more lightweight than threads and far more manageable.
As I understand it, "micro"-threads are really user-space threads. This will not give any benefits for parallel processing on machines with more than one execution unit. Even though you have structured your program for multithreading, it will still execute on just one of your CPUs or cores (Erlang might be an exception to that, as I believe Erlang is also good for distributed programs, meaning objects/threads/whatever can live in different address spaces.) On the other hand, since the majorithy of computers used to have just one execution unit (cpu core), this also used to mean that threads would be more lightweight and there could be less overhead.
Dude, have you written any multi-threaded code? It really isn't that hard, regardless of how smart I may or may not be.
Dude, have you ever written some multi-threaded code that
Wasn't slower on a single-processor than properly optimized single-threaded code would be?
Wasn't more complicated to understand than when implemented straight-forward as a single-threaded program?
Wasn't obviously parallelizable, at a level that fits present-days multithreaded processors?
The JIT compilers in Java and.Net/Mono take care of many future hardware problems, since the JIT can optimize your code for processors that didn't even exist when you wrote it.
So can any other compiler or interpreter. They are a way of abstracting the details of actual computer hardware into more abstract concepts such as if-statements or member functions. In that respect, it isn't anything fundamentally different between a JIT and any of the other common ways of implenting computer languages, they all "take care of future hardware problems".
The reason this works, however, is that while computing hardware varies, these variations has always been minor variations of more or less the same architecture. This architecture is called a von Neumann architecture. Now, a parallel architecture is by definition not a von Neumann architecture. So, once you decide to write parallel computer programs, you must also decide on a parallel architecture to run your programs on!
And while you may think that should be multicore cpus, other people think differently, and want to programs SIMD computers, transputers, scientific clusters, database clusters, cell processors, programmable chips, etc... No matter how great you think java is, it won't help make programs efficient across these different architectures, unless you can abstract it all away into one common architecture, like the von Neumann architecture has done for normal computers.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard,
Let me put it this way. If all the developers in the world were as smart as you think you are, it would not be that hard. As it is, however, coming up with scalable, manageable, efficient ways of writing multi-threaded code, in a way that is future-proof, as opposed to simply optimized for todays generation of hardware, is hard. Very hard. Not as in research-subject hard, but as in continuing-research-for decades-has-still-not-brought-us-much-closer-to-a- solution hard!
, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
Let me rephrase part of the above sentence: "using threads properly can...". Did you notice which word I emphasized? Can you guess why?
Any idiot can use threads. The difficulty is to find the right granularity of threads (which is related to what kind of hardware you've got), which tasks are parallelizable, which parallelizable tasks should (or should not) get parallelized because of communication overhead and other factors (which is also related to what kind of hardware you've got), and so on.
It is also important to note, that few existing programs are designed from scratch today. In fact, almost all existing programs were designed in the past! In the past they didn't have affordable multicore (or multi-CPU) computers. And thus, those old designs didn't take that into account.
Processor makers need to really work on energy efficiency of all their desktops, these speeds were achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption, and its really flatly unacceptable
Didn't you pay attention in class? All the processor makers have started doing this. For the last one or two years, the mantra has been "computing per watt", pretty universally, no matter which company you were from. And by the way, if you compare your 386 and a modern computer, I'll bet the modern computer gives more "computing per watt", no matter how you decide to calculate, so all improvements can't have been "achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption".
Maybe if every 3-5 years there was a responsible and substantial leap in computing power people would upgrade in regular phases [SNIP] Of course gaming is to blame for this constant demand
Ha ha ha. Hi hi hi. Ho ho ho. Hilarious! So you think if it wasn't for the gaming industry, we would somehow magically have every manufacturer on the planet agreeing to wait releasing their improved products untill someone (who?) said it was time for a new "generation"?
Apart from the fact that such a thing has never happened in other industries (or would you care to give a counterexample?), that it is uncompatible with the idea of a free market, and that it is bad for consumers as well as producers, please explain why you think that would happen AND why you think that would be a good thing.
So I figure nothing will ever change until we hit that mythical peak in which everyone says "Good enough" and the race to real time photorealism is over.
Yeah, because when graphics are suddenly "good enough", nobody needs computers for other purposes. People don't need plain old office computers, workstations, databases, web-servers, B2B-applications, industrial control software, or anything else. Because the only thing driving the computing industry forward is gaming. And when photorealism in gaming has been achieved, all computing innovation will stop. Right!
And besides, there will never be a "good enough" for graphics. In my view, audio has been "good enough" since long before the invention of the CD. That doesn't mean that there aren't people still working on creating better and/or cheaper audio components.
A format war occurs when there are two or more incompatible interfaces for accessing data on media. Since these chips would be the guts inside a thumb drive or other medium using a standard interface, there would be no format war, just a new choice of implementation technology that could be adopted as slowly or quickly as desired.
Yeah, exactly like you can use both RAMBUS and SDRAM in most computers. And they aren't even that different.
And nobody considers the differenses between IDE, SATA, or SCSI (and all of the slightly different SCSI connectors), fibre channel, USB, firewire, or whatever the fuck it is important. Because nobody is interested in just attaching a disk, they want to understand the politics of interface standards.
Wow, by your logic nobody would have bought digital cameras, mp3-players, or USB flash ram. And the major harddrive vendors wouldn't be thinking about combining traditional HD technology with flash ram.
Does that tell you that you might be a bit out of tune with reality?
This is (hopefully) not going to damage the majority of slashdotters. This is going to damage the minimum wage workers!
Here are my very simple reasons for that:
Minimum-wage workers have less money, thus are more likely to use money they don't have (which is what causes you credit rating to dwindle)
Minimum-wage workers usually have longer periods of unvoluntary unemployment than non-minimum-wage workers. See point #1.
Minimum-wage workers are easily replaceable. If McDonalds want to hire someone, they know that anyone can flip a burger. 10 years experience with burger flipping isn't important to them. What they want is someone who never calls in sick, and someone that can be ordered to work whenever (and whereever) the employer feels like (instead of only wanting to work 0800-1600, or whatever). Bad credit leads to:
Psychological problems
People calling in sick
People loosing their car (can't drive to work)
People loosing their house (can't have bums working for McDonalds)
all reasons that make them a bad hire for McDonalds.
Hiring minimum-wage workers is a different process from hiring specialist workers. Minimum-wage hiring is mostly about filtering out bad candidates. Specialist-hiring is mostly about finding the best candidate.
Like I said, I completely agree that the iPod's form and function are superior, but that DEFINATELY was not the deciding factor in iPod's success.
So, uhm, if ipod was TEH SHITZ, would Apples marketing campaign have been as succesful?
There doesn't really have to be just ONE deciding factor, you know! This is the same as the old discussion of why Santa wears red and white. Is it marketers from the Coca-Cola company that invented it, or is it traditional? You can argue all you want, but untill you conclude that both factors have been important in establishing todays status quo, both parties are having a one-sided discussion.
Well, it's not Microsofts fault. I'll tell you that. Under linux, using alsa, my audigy 2 has 45 different sliders, knobs, or switches (well, probably more, as the majority of them are stereo sliders).
I've tried using this soundcard for recording music (i.e. with a HD recording program) earlier. It's incredibly difficult to get the settings right for actually recording anything. Whether it's the official windows drivers, kx drivers, or alsa under linux, is not of importance. It's the soundcard that makes it difficult.
Bacteria don't have a space program. Therefore, they're fucked when the Sun expands. We're not.
And what makes you think that it wasn't the bacteria that created us specifically in order to bring them into space when the sun expands. It's not like we're going to go anywhere without bringing lots of bacteria with us...
Hey, if your DNA wanted you could not have sex, or you would die one of thousands of terrible deaths. You could be crippled, or successful. All depends on your DNA overlords.
I'm already not having sex. I'm a cripple, and I'm succesful. I haven't died a terrible death yet, but now I know what my DNA wants me to...
* Customer X has problems with a new bug. Please fix.
Reply: Please add the bug to the bug-database with appropriate priority, and I'll look at it later.
* I added a bug, please check bugtracker
This is spam, delete it
* FEAUTURE REQUEST! I'd like gizmo special ultra -requires massive redesign- by tomorrow. I saw it somewhere and want it too -Boss
Do not reply, delete it, and walk over to your boss and explain what consequences it would have, then let him decide
* Meeting at xx/xx/xx about new planned software. Prepare visualizations and analys.
This is presumably sent to everybody in a group or working on one or more projects, ignore, unless you are a core person for the "new planned software".
* Manual needed for program in alpha fase. Can you write it? I don't have time for it, too busy on support.
Reply: No, I'm busy too. It's your job!
* We wont buy and implement the Novell meta-database. You were on the meeting with Novell, can you make something with the same functionality? Make an analys asap, so we can discuss it.
Reply: No, I can't make "something with the same functionality", we'd have to buy it from Novell or some competitor. A product like that requires about 50 man-years of work!
* I'm still waiting for the update. Customer is growing impatient, CANT YOU JUST QUICKLY UPDATE THE INSTALLER?
Reply: Please go to the bugtracker and increase priority. Yelling only wastes my time.
* Can you put down a description of the issues we adressed in last meeting? So we can approve the core idea's before you start coding.
Reply: Didn't you take notes yourself? Wasn't that why we had a meeting? Anyway, feel free to drop by my office, and I'll lend you my paper notes. There's a photocopier down the hall.
* BUG FOUND!! (bug proves to be user configuration-error, described in manual)
Reply: Thank you, please inform the relevant customer(s) for me.
* I know product X-version 4 seems to be near completion. But I we might migrate to Linux. I know at first we wanted to use ASP.NET v2.0 (did you use that?) But would it be much work to translate it into PHP? We could cut license-costs that way. These things shouldn't be too hard to translate.
Reply: You will have to take this decision with my boss. I estimate that a conversion will take about 2 months time before we have something running, and an additional month or two to sort out the extra bugs. Total: 3-4 months work. I doubt it will be worth the license-costs, but it's not my decision.
* What's the status on program xzy? The deadline is closing.
Reply: Please use the project tracker through the Intranet.
* In the meeting we discussed the use case where a new database could solve the problem. Can you design the database, so we can decide to go with it or to drop it? You can skip the specific columns to save time, just make sure you have all the 100 tables we brainstormed about and keep flexibility so we can expand if needed. Can this be done by next week? It would be clearer if you'd explain each table again as a reference.
Reply: I estimate this to be about 1-2 weeks worth of work. You'll have to talk to my boss if you want me to schedule the time for it.
Losing a job in the 90's was judged to be as stressful as the death of a parent or a divorce.
Hah! Who even cares about that anymore? I've lost hundreds of parents, and I didn't even care the first time! They were old, they were annoying, they smelled bad, couldn't remember a thing, and constantly demanded my help with the simplest thing. They're quite frankly better off dead.
If you are getting a divorce, good for you! Most of Hollywoods celebrities has at least three! Marriage is the celebration of a couple getting together. Divorce should be the celebration of two people getting on each others nerves finally not needing to have anything to do with eachother anymore. Go fuck somebody else!
I guess now that we (you) have accepted McJobs as a norm. Now this kind of corporate bullshit will only increase.
Good. There is only one thing I hate more than having to work for money. And that is responsibility. It doesn't pay more, and it takes away from my free time. Besides, if the employer is able to fire me with no warning, I can walk with no warning. I've done this at times, leaving a bombed out trail of chaos as every project involving me goes to hell, unless they decide to hire me as a consultant, which I won't do, since I'm off for vacation. It's not my fault the corporate bozos are bad at planning!
However using light bulbs as heaters isn't really very sensible - they typically don't put the heat where you want it - it all stays up on the ceiling
Now, that's another interesting debate. Where is the most efficient place in your house to put the heating elements? Traditionally (i.e. 100 years ago) the fireplace was usually in the middle of the house. This makes pretty much sense to me, if you're only having one fireplace, make sure it will heat as much of the house as possible, before the heat leaks out from the house.
Then with panel ovens and/or central heating, the heating elements were usually placed below the windows. This seems patently stupid to me. The windows are the places in the house that leaks the most heat. Warm air rises. Thus placing the heating elements below windows pretty much guarantees that there will be a huge heat-gradient through the window, and that the maximum amount of energy is therefore wasted.
Now, instead consider placing the heating elements in the middle of the room, near the ceiling. We all already know that warm air rises, so whether the heating element is close to the floor, or close to the ceiling matters little, as the warm air will end up near the ceiling anyway. What matters is that the heat from the light-bulb will remain in the room instead of being leaked through the window before it ever got a chance to heat the room up.
and they cost real money to replace.
As opposed to CFLs that are free? Look, I'm going to use the electricity to heat my home regardless of the type of light I use. Therefore, the only way I can save money by using CFLs is if they actually cost less per hour use when disregarding power-consumption.
If CFLs worked as well as advertized, they would actually be cheaper. However, in my experience, CFLs do not last as long as advertized. Instead of lasting 10 times longer than a normal bulb, they last 2-3 times longer. Instead of simply going out like a normal bulb, they often go out in puff of smoke and lightning, as well as a broken fuse. And instead of giving a warm pleasant light, they give a sharp unpleasant light. All of these limitations can be fixed by buying more expensive CFLs. But if they are more expensive, they do not save me money anymore.
Whether they use "the", "an", or "a" is totally irrelevant. The fact that they use "x-language" is.
If the wikipedia is an "african-language" one, it implies that it will be in the african language, regardless of whether "an" or "the" was used earlier, and regardless of whether such a language actually exist.
If somebody says "martian language" or "klingon language", the underlying assumption is that the speaker thinks that martians all speak the same language, or that klingons all speak the same language. And if somebody says "african language", the underlying assumption is that the speaker thinks such a language exists, not that it denotes an unspecified subset (or singleton) of language(s) spoken in Africa. By the way, if that was the intended meaning, we already have african-language wikipedias, they are written in English, French, etc... (all spoken in Africa).
And because there are not not two wikipedias in the same language(it said two wikipedias and not two wikis) it implies multiple languages in Africa.
You are not making any sense. Your writing abilities seems to be as bad as your reading abilities.
You seem to be the only one who needs to be beaten with a cluestick.
My daddy is bigger and stronger than your daddy! And besides, he's a policeman, so he can come and arrest you and your daddy!
Because, you know, other sources of heat (e.g. gas or oil furnaces, log stoves) are much cheaper to operate than lightbulbs.
This may be true where you live, and it may not be true in Finland. I've never been to Finland, but here in Norway, we've pretty much had to use electricity to heat our homes for the last 30 or 40 years. Using anything else would be too expensive! The reason for this is pretty obvious: lots of rivers give cheap water power! Finland also has lots of lakes and rivers, so I would guess they have the same reason for heating with electricity.
Of course, these days, norwegians are getting expensive electricity again. This is not because energy use has gone up, or because it's suddenly stopped raining. It's because the power-grid has been converted into a free market, which means all our cheap energy is exported to other countries, and what's left for us will be at similar prizes as they are willing to pay.
But even though the cost of electricity has increased dramatically, I still think light bulbs are pretty efficient at heating. A 60W light bulb will give about 55W heat, and lots of light, which we also need (winter is dark). It is cheaper than a CFL. It gives a more pleasant light (which is important, given that it's our *only* light except for 0-5 hours sunlight). And normal light bulbs don't tend to break down catastrophically like CFLs.
Anyway, if you want to conserve your money used for heating here up north, the way to go is to install heat-pumps. While oil, coal, pellets, whatever might be cheaper in some special circumstances, heat-pumps will always be more effective. More importantly, they are friendly to the local environment.
No it doesn't. Saying "a european-language wikipedia" does not imply that there is more than one language in Europe. Saying "a martian-language wikipedia" does not imply that martians use more than one language. The expression used in the submission clearly shows that the submitter and/. editor needs to be beaten over their head with a cluestick numerous times. End of argument.
Why just one wiki for Africa? [snip (rant about Africa being diversified)]
The author (Noam Cohen) of the original article know that. The wikipedians know that. You know that. I know that. Probably even most likely the majority of/.'s readers know that. The only people so far to conclusively prove that he/she has no clue at all, is the original submitter (Sharon Weinberger), and the slashdot editor Zonk. If you feel like blaming someone, blame them, not Noam Cohen or the wikipedians involved.
yeah I've heard of some extreme cases where they were able to swap out the control board with a fresh one to get the data out (if you were hardcore and had access to a clean room you might be able to swap out the platters too)
You consider this extreme? Given todays data densities on hard-drives, even a small piece of a platter can contain lots of data usable to "the enemy". They don't need the whole disk to be put into a standard disk controller to be able to read it. All they need is time, dedication, and the right equipment.
The best way to destroy data on a hard drive is to open it up and smash the platters, if your in a hurry a bulk tape eraser or other large magnetic device is also good.
No, see above. Of course grinding the platters to powder, or melting them, or dissolve them in acid is good enough. A bulk tape erase or other large magnetic device is no good. Sorry, but you just won't find powerful enough magnets in a common household (or anywhere else, outside special laboratories).
The easiest way is to simply overwrite the data with random data many times.
As for myself I keep all my downloads on an external USB 2.0 drive, simply unplug it and poof, it's as if the data was never on the machine in the first place. Of course this is just a happy consequence of my machine, being that it's liquid-cooled two hard drives are mounted to a cooler, I needed more space so rather then ripping one of the smaller ones out I just put it in an enclosure.
So what about cache files, log files, swap space, etc? Sorry, you may feel safer, but you really aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Tools get better and cheaper, no matter what business you're in, but you still have to have that talent.
So how's that different from programming? (It was you who made that comparison, not me).
That doesn't mean that you need an expensive engineer and producer in a rented studio to produce music. It would be like saying all free software projects need to rent their own office with their own programmer. They don't. Free software programmers do it as a hobby. So do musicians.
With regard to the gear, a decent sound card is not enough if you do not have quality microphones and proper acoustics.
Of course. If you intend to record something, you need a decent microphone (not several). Proper acoustics can be made with wool blankets, egg-cartons, whatever... This is still not putting the price above what the average person with a job can afford.
Even the folks who create entirely electronic music largely do not rely on the free or the cheap software -- BT told me once that he prototypes stuff on Acid Express, but his full set of tools goes way beyond that.
So what? Even the cheapest (or entirely free) studio software today, is something producers 20 years ago wouldn't even have dreamed to lay their hands on. It is more than capable of producing a decent-quality CD-release. Of course, in the proper hands, the more expensive stuff might produce even better results, although compared with some extra talent, it means zilch. Try to ask BT which of his tools are essential next time, not just which of them are the most fun (and realize that his answer may be far above what most musicians/producers need, if they are not into electronic music)
But mostly it's a question of scale and features. The cheap stuff is cut-down version of the expensive stuff, with the same quality, but less tracks, etc... And the cheap stuff may lack some "professional" features such as surround mixing, hardware faders, etc... Apart from that, it's just not that much you can do to increase or decrease quality with digital mixing. Floating point sums are still floating point sums.
It's like "hey, my brakes squeal, how do I solve this?" And instead of really solving the squealing brakes by replacing them you just buy a new car. Do the brakes still squeal? Yes, but since you're not driving it anymore you no longer care.
Yes. It is like that. But it is still a solution !
Just because you find it a bit silly to replace a whole computer because of spyware, or replace a whole car because of squeaky brakes, doesn't disqualify it as a solution. No matter how silly you find it, it's still a solution to the problem of the user experiencing spyware on his computer, or squeaky brakes on his car.
In the case of the computer, as a techie, I would actually recommend this to non-techies. A new dell costs about the same as you could expect to pay if you would pay someone to fix the problem. In addition you get a new and better computer. If you were to pay someone to fix it, you would still solve the problem, and still part with your money, but you would not have a new and spiffy computer. If you invested the time into learning enough about computers to fix it yourself, by the time you were finished fixing the probem, if you'd been working overtime instead, you could have bought at least 50 dells.
As for the car, the same logic applies. If it's an old car, which you know sooner or later will need a major (costly) overhaul, you can just as well ditch it when a problem shows up, such as squeaky brakes. You don't need to fix it yourself, or pay someone to do it, when you are going to need a new car soon enough anyway.
I've contributed to open source projects just by using my $500 Mac Mini and a few hours of my time. By comparison, a decent studio and engineer might cost you $500 a day.
Uh, not any more. A decent studio consists of a home computer, a good soundcard, and some software (often included with the computer or sound card). A decent studio engineer can be yourself or a friend.
If you think otherwise, either you haven't followed what's been happening in the last years in music software, or you have different concepts of what's "decent" when it comes to music studios and to programming labs. (Personally, I wouldn't even consider a programming lab decent unless I had 3 widescreen monitors on my desk connected to my workstation, a network of at least 1 other workstation and a server, and software for at least $50,000. And I also need to pay a programmer to sit there :-).
Somebody actually use tiny firewall? Wow, I tried it once, and after having clicked yes about 2579 times the last 5 minutes... it didn't get used any more!
buy a new computer? It really irks me when people cite this as a solution.
It is a solution!
Just because it's not the techiest, or generally lowest-cost, or whatever, doesn't disqualify it from being a solution. It solved his problem. Therefore, by definition it is a solution.
You use google as a spell checker? Wouldn't it be better to use something like a, uhm..., spell checker? Or at least a dictionary?
If the author can't be bothered to spell check his article why does he think we should bother to read it?
Maybe because we think he has something interesting to say? (Ok, he didn't, his article was a collection of lies, half-truths, and wishful thinking. But we wouldn't know that before we tried reading it).
Incidentally, what do you think of microthreads, ie. found in Stackless Python
As far as I'm aware, stackless python "threads" aren't threads, but is really what the rest of us calls coroutines. I like coroutines, as they are predictable and easy to understand, and gives a lot of (useful) power to the programmer. Now, it might be true that later versions (such as the current) has added some scheduling beyond manual yield(), in which case you would call them userspace threads. Personally, I prefer system threads, coroutines, or both, and think of userspace threads as a bastardization of the concept. But if people find user threads useful, I'm not going to argue with them. To each his own...
and possibly concurrent languages like Erlang?
I have no experience with Erlang. From what I understand, erlang threads are userspace threads and are not used for efficiency, they are used for ease of modelling. And message-passing is the way these threads communicate. This is completely unfamiliar territory for me, but intelligent people I respect like Erlang, and projects in Erlang has a good track record. As a result Erlang exists somewhere on my got-to-learn-that-sometime-in-the-future list. Unfortunately nobody has time for every interesting thing out there.
As I understand it, microthreads are more lightweight than threads and far more manageable.
As I understand it, "micro"-threads are really user-space threads. This will not give any benefits for parallel processing on machines with more than one execution unit. Even though you have structured your program for multithreading, it will still execute on just one of your CPUs or cores (Erlang might be an exception to that, as I believe Erlang is also good for distributed programs, meaning objects/threads/whatever can live in different address spaces.) On the other hand, since the majorithy of computers used to have just one execution unit (cpu core), this also used to mean that threads would be more lightweight and there could be less overhead.
Dude, have you written any multi-threaded code? It really isn't that hard, regardless of how smart I may or may not be.
Dude, have you ever written some multi-threaded code that
The JIT compilers in Java and .Net/Mono take care of many future hardware problems, since the JIT can optimize your code for processors that didn't even exist when you wrote it.
So can any other compiler or interpreter. They are a way of abstracting the details of actual computer hardware into more abstract concepts such as if-statements or member functions. In that respect, it isn't anything fundamentally different between a JIT and any of the other common ways of implenting computer languages, they all "take care of future hardware problems".
The reason this works, however, is that while computing hardware varies, these variations has always been minor variations of more or less the same architecture. This architecture is called a von Neumann architecture. Now, a parallel architecture is by definition not a von Neumann architecture. So, once you decide to write parallel computer programs, you must also decide on a parallel architecture to run your programs on!
And while you may think that should be multicore cpus, other people think differently, and want to programs SIMD computers, transputers, scientific clusters, database clusters, cell processors, programmable chips, etc... No matter how great you think java is, it won't help make programs efficient across these different architectures, unless you can abstract it all away into one common architecture, like the von Neumann architecture has done for normal computers.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard,
Let me put it this way. If all the developers in the world were as smart as you think you are, it would not be that hard. As it is, however, coming up with scalable, manageable, efficient ways of writing multi-threaded code, in a way that is future-proof, as opposed to simply optimized for todays generation of hardware, is hard. Very hard. Not as in research-subject hard, but as in continuing-research-for decades-has-still-not-brought-us-much-closer-to-a- solution hard!
, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
Let me rephrase part of the above sentence: "using threads properly can...". Did you notice which word I emphasized? Can you guess why?
Any idiot can use threads. The difficulty is to find the right granularity of threads (which is related to what kind of hardware you've got), which tasks are parallelizable, which parallelizable tasks should (or should not) get parallelized because of communication overhead and other factors (which is also related to what kind of hardware you've got), and so on.
It is also important to note, that few existing programs are designed from scratch today. In fact, almost all existing programs were designed in the past! In the past they didn't have affordable multicore (or multi-CPU) computers. And thus, those old designs didn't take that into account.
Processor makers need to really work on energy efficiency of all their desktops, these speeds were achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption, and its really flatly unacceptable
Didn't you pay attention in class? All the processor makers have started doing this. For the last one or two years, the mantra has been "computing per watt", pretty universally, no matter which company you were from. And by the way, if you compare your 386 and a modern computer, I'll bet the modern computer gives more "computing per watt", no matter how you decide to calculate, so all improvements can't have been "achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption".
Maybe if every 3-5 years there was a responsible and substantial leap in computing power people would upgrade in regular phases [SNIP] Of course gaming is to blame for this constant demand
Ha ha ha. Hi hi hi. Ho ho ho. Hilarious! So you think if it wasn't for the gaming industry, we would somehow magically have every manufacturer on the planet agreeing to wait releasing their improved products untill someone (who?) said it was time for a new "generation"?
Apart from the fact that such a thing has never happened in other industries (or would you care to give a counterexample?), that it is uncompatible with the idea of a free market, and that it is bad for consumers as well as producers, please explain why you think that would happen AND why you think that would be a good thing.
So I figure nothing will ever change until we hit that mythical peak in which everyone says "Good enough" and the race to real time photorealism is over.
Yeah, because when graphics are suddenly "good enough", nobody needs computers for other purposes. People don't need plain old office computers, workstations, databases, web-servers, B2B-applications, industrial control software, or anything else. Because the only thing driving the computing industry forward is gaming. And when photorealism in gaming has been achieved, all computing innovation will stop. Right!
And besides, there will never be a "good enough" for graphics. In my view, audio has been "good enough" since long before the invention of the CD. That doesn't mean that there aren't people still working on creating better and/or cheaper audio components.
A format war occurs when there are two or more incompatible interfaces for accessing data on media. Since these chips would be the guts inside a thumb drive or other medium using a standard interface, there would be no format war, just a new choice of implementation technology that could be adopted as slowly or quickly as desired.
Yeah, exactly like you can use both RAMBUS and SDRAM in most computers. And they aren't even that different.
And nobody considers the differenses between IDE, SATA, or SCSI (and all of the slightly different SCSI connectors), fibre channel, USB, firewire, or whatever the fuck it is important. Because nobody is interested in just attaching a disk, they want to understand the politics of interface standards.
Wow, by your logic nobody would have bought digital cameras, mp3-players, or USB flash ram. And the major harddrive vendors wouldn't be thinking about combining traditional HD technology with flash ram.
Does that tell you that you might be a bit out of tune with reality?
Here are my very simple reasons for that:
- Psychological problems
- People calling in sick
- People loosing their car (can't drive to work)
- People loosing their house (can't have bums working for McDonalds)
all reasons that make them a bad hire for McDonalds.Hiring minimum-wage workers is a different process from hiring specialist workers. Minimum-wage hiring is mostly about filtering out bad candidates. Specialist-hiring is mostly about finding the best candidate.
Like I said, I completely agree that the iPod's form and function are superior, but that DEFINATELY was not the deciding factor in iPod's success.
So, uhm, if ipod was TEH SHITZ, would Apples marketing campaign have been as succesful?
There doesn't really have to be just ONE deciding factor, you know! This is the same as the old discussion of why Santa wears red and white. Is it marketers from the Coca-Cola company that invented it, or is it traditional? You can argue all you want, but untill you conclude that both factors have been important in establishing todays status quo, both parties are having a one-sided discussion.
I've tried using this soundcard for recording music (i.e. with a HD recording program) earlier. It's incredibly difficult to get the settings right for actually recording anything. Whether it's the official windows drivers, kx drivers, or alsa under linux, is not of importance. It's the soundcard that makes it difficult.
Bacteria don't have a space program. Therefore, they're fucked when the Sun expands. We're not.
And what makes you think that it wasn't the bacteria that created us specifically in order to bring them into space when the sun expands. It's not like we're going to go anywhere without bringing lots of bacteria with us...
I'm already not having sex. I'm a cripple, and I'm succesful. I haven't died a terrible death yet, but now I know what my DNA wants me to...
Then learn to answer e-mail fast!
* Customer X has problems with a new bug. Please fix.
Reply: Please add the bug to the bug-database with appropriate priority, and I'll look at it later.
* I added a bug, please check bugtracker
This is spam, delete it
* FEAUTURE REQUEST! I'd like gizmo special ultra -requires massive redesign- by tomorrow. I saw it somewhere and want it too -Boss
Do not reply, delete it, and walk over to your boss and explain what consequences it would have, then let him decide
* Meeting at xx/xx/xx about new planned software. Prepare visualizations and analys.
This is presumably sent to everybody in a group or working on one or more projects, ignore, unless you are a core person for the "new planned software".
* Manual needed for program in alpha fase. Can you write it? I don't have time for it, too busy on support.
Reply: No, I'm busy too. It's your job!
* We wont buy and implement the Novell meta-database. You were on the meeting with Novell, can you make something with the same functionality? Make an analys asap, so we can discuss it.
Reply: No, I can't make "something with the same functionality", we'd have to buy it from Novell or some competitor. A product like that requires about 50 man-years of work!
* I'm still waiting for the update. Customer is growing impatient, CANT YOU JUST QUICKLY UPDATE THE INSTALLER?
Reply: Please go to the bugtracker and increase priority. Yelling only wastes my time.
* Can you put down a description of the issues we adressed in last meeting? So we can approve the core idea's before you start coding.
Reply: Didn't you take notes yourself? Wasn't that why we had a meeting? Anyway, feel free to drop by my office, and I'll lend you my paper notes. There's a photocopier down the hall.
* BUG FOUND!! (bug proves to be user configuration-error, described in manual)
Reply: Thank you, please inform the relevant customer(s) for me.
* I know product X-version 4 seems to be near completion. But I we might migrate to Linux. I know at first we wanted to use ASP.NET v2.0 (did you use that?) But would it be much work to translate it into PHP? We could cut license-costs that way. These things shouldn't be too hard to translate.
Reply: You will have to take this decision with my boss. I estimate that a conversion will take about 2 months time before we have something running, and an additional month or two to sort out the extra bugs. Total: 3-4 months work. I doubt it will be worth the license-costs, but it's not my decision.
* What's the status on program xzy? The deadline is closing.
Reply: Please use the project tracker through the Intranet.
* In the meeting we discussed the use case where a new database could solve the problem. Can you design the database, so we can decide to go with it or to drop it? You can skip the specific columns to save time, just make sure you have all the 100 tables we brainstormed about and keep flexibility so we can expand if needed. Can this be done by next week? It would be clearer if you'd explain each table again as a reference.
Reply: I estimate this to be about 1-2 weeks worth of work. You'll have to talk to my boss if you want me to schedule the time for it.
Losing a job in the 90's was judged to be as stressful as the death of a parent or a divorce.
Hah! Who even cares about that anymore? I've lost hundreds of parents, and I didn't even care the first time! They were old, they were annoying, they smelled bad, couldn't remember a thing, and constantly demanded my help with the simplest thing. They're quite frankly better off dead.
If you are getting a divorce, good for you! Most of Hollywoods celebrities has at least three! Marriage is the celebration of a couple getting together. Divorce should be the celebration of two people getting on each others nerves finally not needing to have anything to do with eachother anymore. Go fuck somebody else!
I guess now that we (you) have accepted McJobs as a norm. Now this kind of corporate bullshit will only increase.
Good. There is only one thing I hate more than having to work for money. And that is responsibility. It doesn't pay more, and it takes away from my free time. Besides, if the employer is able to fire me with no warning, I can walk with no warning. I've done this at times, leaving a bombed out trail of chaos as every project involving me goes to hell, unless they decide to hire me as a consultant, which I won't do, since I'm off for vacation. It's not my fault the corporate bozos are bad at planning!
However using light bulbs as heaters isn't really very sensible - they typically don't put the heat where you want it - it all stays up on the ceiling
Now, that's another interesting debate. Where is the most efficient place in your house to put the heating elements? Traditionally (i.e. 100 years ago) the fireplace was usually in the middle of the house. This makes pretty much sense to me, if you're only having one fireplace, make sure it will heat as much of the house as possible, before the heat leaks out from the house.
Then with panel ovens and/or central heating, the heating elements were usually placed below the windows. This seems patently stupid to me. The windows are the places in the house that leaks the most heat. Warm air rises. Thus placing the heating elements below windows pretty much guarantees that there will be a huge heat-gradient through the window, and that the maximum amount of energy is therefore wasted.
Now, instead consider placing the heating elements in the middle of the room, near the ceiling. We all already know that warm air rises, so whether the heating element is close to the floor, or close to the ceiling matters little, as the warm air will end up near the ceiling anyway. What matters is that the heat from the light-bulb will remain in the room instead of being leaked through the window before it ever got a chance to heat the room up.
and they cost real money to replace.
As opposed to CFLs that are free? Look, I'm going to use the electricity to heat my home regardless of the type of light I use. Therefore, the only way I can save money by using CFLs is if they actually cost less per hour use when disregarding power-consumption.
If CFLs worked as well as advertized, they would actually be cheaper. However, in my experience, CFLs do not last as long as advertized. Instead of lasting 10 times longer than a normal bulb, they last 2-3 times longer. Instead of simply going out like a normal bulb, they often go out in puff of smoke and lightning, as well as a broken fuse. And instead of giving a warm pleasant light, they give a sharp unpleasant light. All of these limitations can be fixed by buying more expensive CFLs. But if they are more expensive, they do not save me money anymore.
See my point?
Whether they use "the", "an", or "a" is totally irrelevant. The fact that they use "x-language" is.
If the wikipedia is an "african-language" one, it implies that it will be in the african language, regardless of whether "an" or "the" was used earlier, and regardless of whether such a language actually exist.
If somebody says "martian language" or "klingon language", the underlying assumption is that the speaker thinks that martians all speak the same language, or that klingons all speak the same language. And if somebody says "african language", the underlying assumption is that the speaker thinks such a language exists, not that it denotes an unspecified subset (or singleton) of language(s) spoken in Africa. By the way, if that was the intended meaning, we already have african-language wikipedias, they are written in English, French, etc... (all spoken in Africa).
And because there are not not two wikipedias in the same language(it said two wikipedias and not two wikis) it implies multiple languages in Africa.
You are not making any sense. Your writing abilities seems to be as bad as your reading abilities.
You seem to be the only one who needs to be beaten with a cluestick.
My daddy is bigger and stronger than your daddy! And besides, he's a policeman, so he can come and arrest you and your daddy!
Because, you know, other sources of heat (e.g. gas or oil furnaces, log stoves) are much cheaper to operate than lightbulbs.
This may be true where you live, and it may not be true in Finland. I've never been to Finland, but here in Norway, we've pretty much had to use electricity to heat our homes for the last 30 or 40 years. Using anything else would be too expensive! The reason for this is pretty obvious: lots of rivers give cheap water power! Finland also has lots of lakes and rivers, so I would guess they have the same reason for heating with electricity.
Of course, these days, norwegians are getting expensive electricity again. This is not because energy use has gone up, or because it's suddenly stopped raining. It's because the power-grid has been converted into a free market, which means all our cheap energy is exported to other countries, and what's left for us will be at similar prizes as they are willing to pay.
But even though the cost of electricity has increased dramatically, I still think light bulbs are pretty efficient at heating. A 60W light bulb will give about 55W heat, and lots of light, which we also need (winter is dark). It is cheaper than a CFL. It gives a more pleasant light (which is important, given that it's our *only* light except for 0-5 hours sunlight). And normal light bulbs don't tend to break down catastrophically like CFLs.
Anyway, if you want to conserve your money used for heating here up north, the way to go is to install heat-pumps. While oil, coal, pellets, whatever might be cheaper in some special circumstances, heat-pumps will always be more effective. More importantly, they are friendly to the local environment.
No it doesn't. Saying "a european-language wikipedia" does not imply that there is more than one language in Europe. Saying "a martian-language wikipedia" does not imply that martians use more than one language. The expression used in the submission clearly shows that the submitter and /. editor needs to be beaten over their head with a cluestick numerous times. End of argument.
Why just one wiki for Africa? [snip (rant about Africa being diversified)]
The author (Noam Cohen) of the original article know that. The wikipedians know that. You know that. I know that. Probably even most likely the majority of /.'s readers know that. The only people so far to conclusively prove that he/she has no clue at all, is the original submitter (Sharon Weinberger), and the slashdot editor Zonk. If you feel like blaming someone, blame them, not Noam Cohen or the wikipedians involved.
yeah I've heard of some extreme cases where they were able to swap out the control board with a fresh one to get the data out (if you were hardcore and had access to a clean room you might be able to swap out the platters too)
You consider this extreme? Given todays data densities on hard-drives, even a small piece of a platter can contain lots of data usable to "the enemy". They don't need the whole disk to be put into a standard disk controller to be able to read it. All they need is time, dedication, and the right equipment.
The best way to destroy data on a hard drive is to open it up and smash the platters, if your in a hurry a bulk tape eraser or other large magnetic device is also good.
No, see above. Of course grinding the platters to powder, or melting them, or dissolve them in acid is good enough. A bulk tape erase or other large magnetic device is no good. Sorry, but you just won't find powerful enough magnets in a common household (or anywhere else, outside special laboratories).
The easiest way is to simply overwrite the data with random data many times.
As for myself I keep all my downloads on an external USB 2.0 drive, simply unplug it and poof, it's as if the data was never on the machine in the first place. Of course this is just a happy consequence of my machine, being that it's liquid-cooled two hard drives are mounted to a cooler, I needed more space so rather then ripping one of the smaller ones out I just put it in an enclosure.
So what about cache files, log files, swap space, etc? Sorry, you may feel safer, but you really aren't.