All of my Logitech wireless kit has broken, I have gone through three Logitech wireless mice so far. They work GREAT out of the box, but after a year or so the range starts decreasing. For all the sarcastic people out there: Yes, this is with battery replacements, or in the case of the last one, it was Logitech's high end wireless mouse that had rechargeable batteries and a charging stand!
Eventually, after about 3 years, I have to hold the mouse next to the receiver to have any signal at all.
Then again, this has been my experience with EVERY wireless mouse. To be fair, Logitech mice tend to last a bit longer, most off brand wireless mice last a few months at most before they start exhibiting this behavior.
I haven't honestly ever had a wireless Microsoft product.
I do know that Microsoft makes some GREAT wired mice though. Their optical mice are top notch, I have only ever had one of them break, and I own plenty. I love the sheer number of buttons.
Microsoft also (used to?...) make the ONE true natural keyboard. Removes my wrist pains completely. Now days most new keyboards have that STUPID rearranged pageup/pagedown/etc vertical key layout. Who the hell thought up of that, and where do they live? I *hate* doing any sort of work on those keyboards, and since about 60%+ of all new keyboards out there are of that style, it really limits the number of keyboards I have to choose from when programming.
As for use with any operating system, get real. Their hardware is the only type out there that doesn't "just work". It requires funky drivers that ignore certain outputs, and generally just sucks. One's listed here. I've never experienced a problem like that with a Logitech.
A few of their REALLY funky keyboards, yah. But for the most part, they have a published standard for keymappings to features, the actual scancode that is generated by the "Mail" or "Homepage" button is documented, and any new keyboard out there that supports those keys uses the same standard. Of course the only MS OS that supports these features is XP, but any of the open source OSs allow users to set hotkeys to whatever they want, no drivers needed.:)
The "Windows" key is just another meta, and a really useful one at that.
What really irritates me is those keyboards that have a calculator built into them. The marketers put it there because everybody knows that the $2000 box in front of them is incapable of adding numbers. *G*
If you are talking about GSM phones, then just swapping sim cards in should work fine, just so long as the phone you are swapping into is not locked.
For CDMA, any provider should be willing to take the phone, unless they are complete jerks! It sounds like you might be in that situation. Interoperability is one of the few advantages of GSM over CDMA.
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 2GB. double the resolution, and you end up with at most a 8GB movie, ignoring any improvements in what compression techniques could offer, after all, a large splotch of black is still a large splotch of black, no matter what resolution you are recording it at.
8GB is a reasonable download size.
I really wonder WTF technology these companies are using to make their HD content look so crappy. Any DVD pirate who takes pride in his/her work does a far superior job on encoding than these "professionals" do on their commercial stuff.
Re:School can help, in more ways than the obvious.
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How Old is Too Old?
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Or maybe your knowledge is to esoteric to be useful
Yah like that esoteric time I had to write a *nix shell. You know how nobody EVER uses shells any more...
and to theoretical to be practical.
Or all that damned "theory" I had to learn about RMI.
Plus, you never learned anything about solid software construction
Something that takes year of work to learn. Yah, your right, some things CAN only be taught by experience. CS students had to spend some of their time coding, but nobody is promising perfection right out of the box.
your code is sloppy,
Only if I want to get down graded for turning in crap code. I have had profs who don't care about indenting style, so long as you use one, and you use it consistently. Indeed, this is taught right after the basic fundamentals of flow control (conditionals and loops).
you are overly concerned with Big O Notation before your code is even functional,
Only because we have learned that stupid code whose run time is off by a few orders of magnitude probably has some fundamental design flaw. Ex: If there is a bunch of objects being kept track of, and more objects are constantly adding more to this "group", and the objects are rarely rearranged within the group, and you typically access them in order, and you are using an array, somebody needs to be beaten with a clue by 4.
Many other (better!) examples exist of this. People who don't understand WHY a design sucks will refuse to fix it.
Actually the problem is that they came up with it in the FIRST damn place.
One time I needed to keep track of users who were connected to a chat server. Each user has a unique int ID. I needed to be able to send messages out to all users except for the one who originally had typed the message, since local echo was being used.[1]
Lots of people in my class used arrays.
Lots of people in my class spent time debugging their code. Oh and rewriting it when the next modification to the assignment came along.
I used a set that utilized bit strings for storage. (Yes, it was an API, this was all in C) People connect, I add them to the set. Someone sends out a message, I remove that person from the set (accomplished with binary logic by the underlying API), and send out a message to the remaining members of the set.
Now this code wasn't the most efficient in terms of run time (that last bit of iterating through the set really messed up my run time), but it was scalable, thread safe (I put POSIX thread locks[2] on important function calls in the set API), and it was damn QUICK to code. I got my entire application done in less time than it took most people to debug the code to manage their array.
The nicest part of the entire assignment was when the next two assignments came in.
I got them done in under 2 days. They were 2-3 week long assignments. One of them actually took less than a few hours to complete; I had a nice framework built up, it was very flexible and well commented.
The lesson from all this?
The obvious approach was "use an array!!". I thought for awhile about what the code would look like. Not clean, not simple, not eloquent. I think my entire code for handling user connects disconnects and message sending was something around 7 or 8 lines, 10 tops.
and your comments suck (or are non-extant).
All my comments are full sentences. With much better grammar and spelling than this post!:)
Once again, no comments, downgraded to hell. Any CS student who doesn't comment either has lazy profs, or didn't care about his/her grade. Actually they don't care about their profession either, since anyone who does would already have figured out that proper
But for the average/. nerd, even if they want to be completely 100% legal about it, with what HD sizes are now days, just copying DVDs straight over to the HD is a good option.
For the record, Microsoft actually has a TON of content deals that you are offered when you buy a MCPC, some of them are rather good too, I never got too far into it, because, you know, they cost money.:-D
With what a good entertainment system cost now days, I think that if movies were prices decently (say $4 to watch a new release), then for anybody who is a serious movie buff, it might become economical to buy a home theater system and pay for new release movies.
The current insane price of movie rentals online pretty much rules this out though. I am not really willing to pay around $20 for two people to see a movie in a theater (especially since many theaters now days have screens that are so small that I know I could do better at home!), and even more if I want to eat during said movie.
2 movies a month, at $30 per movie (food and such), $60 per month (not counting any other expenses associated with going to the movies, babysitter if couple has a child and such), that is 720 per year. Assuming a good theater system lasts at LEAST three years, that would give you around 2100 to make a home theater system. Hmm, not quite there yet, if TV prices drop a bit more or movie ticket prices go up, heh.
Any body who builds their own LCD projector and loud speakers need not apply, you already have a kick'in theater setup.:)
Many modern HDTVs can accept either RGB or DVI inputs. Some even support Firewire!
Don't look for your video card to connect to our TV, look for your TV to support your video card!
Recording sucks, but that has been covered on/. before.
Re:What will make KDE the perfect desktop...
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KDE 3.5.4 Released
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If you are running such a machine as your primary box, you can easily find machines much more powerful (Pentium III/Athlon 700-1GHz or early P4s) just being trashed as newer units replace them. Pick one of those up for little to no money and then you can buy a little RAM and run KDE.For example, my university is ditching a lot of PIII/866 machines with 256 or 512MB RAM for roughly $50-75.
Try to actually do something, and in my general experience, anything under 512MB of RAM is unacceptable[1].
And by "something", I include "Browse directory listing of files".
People like to make fun of Vista's resource usage, but while MS is in the habit of sudden dramatic increases in resource demands, KDE has been doing a fine job of maintaining a slow steady creep of increasing resource demands.
By the time Vista comes out, 1GB of RAM will be needed to browse directory listings for either system....
[1] Note, my definition of acceptable may differ from yours. If I have to WAIT for a folder to appear, it is not acceptable. By wait, I mean anything more than 500ms, and if I am in a hurry, that is noticeable! Having a 3Ghz processor is useless if it accomplishes the most basic of tasks at the same speed as my old 33mhz processor. (which reminds me of a story about Java...)
he reason you want folders is because searches generally start at some folder, and search through it's contents, including subfolders. This is a scalability/performance issue. Ideally, your mail client would categorize all mail by sender and by To/CC recipients transparently. (There's no need for you to have to do this manually, in my book, only if you want to exclude some group(s) from your inbox, e.g., the mailing list issue.:)
You figure that since mail clients use some sort of mini-db that they would already do this...
Quite frankly, I find it irritating that I cannot just store my files online in some transparent manner. Or that data is not automatically sorted away for me. We need a new paradigm for representing and storing data, bleck. Autorecipe identification!
Let me summarize that into one small example - you have 6+ years of email in this store, with a small group of friends comprising probably 25% of the messages. Now, you're looking for, say, a particular beer recipe that "Mike" sent you. Problem is, Mike sent you/the group over 500 recipes, and probably 10% of those had discussion among the group, with modifications, etc. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are now 750 messages with recipes in them.
Mike beer recipe
And how would organization help any? Most likely you would have placed the beer recipe from Mike in a folder with all his other recipes, so you end up with a folder that has 500 recipes in it, or, the same thing you have accomplished with the search terms Mike recipe.
Being able to specify sender and such helps of course. If you search beer recipe from:Mike (and assuming you only know one person named Mike:) Use of full name is advisable!) you will have accomplished nearly the exact same results as if you had presorted your mail.
Now the fun part comes in. If you DO presort your email, you STILL have to specify in your email client the above search limitations, it is just that you do so with the mouse (by clicking on a folder which has Mike's recipes in it) and you likely still have to fill in a "Only search through mail from this person" field, if you also copied the discussions over as well.
Indeed, the only advantage that a traditional mail client has is that it makes such UI elements more obvious. In all fairness though, I just guessed about Gmails "From" search, lo and behold, it worked as expected!
Of course the UI aspect of this is rather icky, but then again, when it comes to most mail programs, anything more than the simplest string matching search ends up being icky. At least GMail keeps it all in one UI, the search box.:) CLI power!
I also cannot understate the sheer convenience of NEVER having to worry about my email being deleted. I have my resume with me wherever there is an Internet connection. That document someone sent me two years ago? No problem. EVERYTHING is archived, and I can access it from anywhere. With Exchange, everything is archived, until I reach my mailbox limit, or until the mailbox file becomes corrupt, or until the Exchange server has a dead HD, or until I switch employers! The first batch of problems can be remedied by having a good infrastructure, but corporate infrastructure (at least at my present job) is not under my control. I know GMail has a good infrastructure; I have confidence that my data is safe. A lot safer than it would be on any consumer hard drive that I could purchase.
Oh, GMail does absolutely SUCK for mailing lists though. That is the one situation where I want folders.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Thunderbird, Outlook, and Eudora all allow searches, although Google's search is more straight forward (single line for all contents of an email). Additionally, the reason Outlook/Exchange's mail store is such a cluster is because it's a DB (I believe Outlook's PSTs also are deconstructed, just not as severely). Even Eudora, Elm, and Pine all offered search, with the search able to search all contents, as the mailbox was a single text file containing all messages.
But they do not promote searches as the end all of how to manage your data. Even worse, many companies (such as the one I am currently at!) place limits on how large your mailbox can be. This results in older messages being placed on a user's hard drive, and not being accessible over the int(ra)ernet anymore. Bam, with one corporate policy, search is neutered.
Traditional mail programs cause users to sort into folders, Gmail says heck with that, here is your data, which piece did you want? Sure, no problem, here it is.
I think this is the purpose of XML with XSLT currently. Except, in that case, it's self defining data (supposedly) with multiple possible transforms (XSLTs) that can convert that data into just about anything else.
Anything that requires my Grandmother to know what XML or XSLT means is not really that useful.:) Heck any system that involves manual tagging of data sucks.
XML data is not self defining, someone had to define it. An example would be offloading a few hundred pictures from a digital camera. No way am I going to go and type in who is in every picture and circle the general region of the picture that the person is in.
How about word documents? Many people have directories that are a mess, it would be nice if documents were auto sorted in at least a semi-intelligent fashion.
I'm not sure I'm following your point on this question either. Is it supposed to be rhetorical? If so, it falls flat, as we've had the capability for at least a decade, and it's been widely available for at least 6 years. Heck, in 1999, I had a GB DB on my personal dev box. Matter of fact, in 1997, I had a TB of production data. I'm sure others were way way way larger earlier than I.
Developers have access to gigabyte+ size databases, but what good does that do the users? We can shove a front end on it and give out a link to said front end, but if that is not done, what good does that do the guy down the hallway who can't see your DB but may need some piece of information that is in it? Even with a front end, what good does it do the new hire who does not even know that your database exists? Why should he have to run around for hours just trying to discover that the data he needs is in a database he has never heard of, and then have to hunt you down to get the data out of it? The computers are linked together, why are they not sharing information? Corporate search engines are not going to find the data, the only way to grab it is to go through meatspace, and that takes time, which is wasted money and wasted effort.
Somebody needs to put the resources into researching how to properly sort and catagorize the literally gigabytes of data that the human species is creating daily. I am glad that Google is at least putting effort somewhat in that direction.
While hopefully not coming across as being pedantic because I'm sure you meant to say Computer Science or something, I should say that Google Labs is most likely not doing any research in Information Theory. I seriously doubt they looking for mathematical limits on compression, encryption, or error control coding in communication systems. Their work is probably just industrial research into software run on distributed computing platforms, and of course research into linguistics and search algorithms with obvious implications on their core product. I would not be surprised if the only theoretical work they are doing is limited to the field of distributed computing, machine learning, and computer algorithms. Maybe someone can back (or refute) my claim with a search on Google Scholar for publications by Google employees?
I was trying to pick a term that sort of described what they do. Google is, from what I understand, concerned with anything that involves organizing data. I honestly do not know what field that truly belongs to, but their research seems much more highly specialized than just "Computer Science".
Excellent metaphor, but I still say that Google's results are more based on information theory, thus making it harder to see "drastic scientific advancements" in them, and that we will have to wait for quite awhile before we see the real fruits of their labor.
Give me a break. Threaded information has been in various clients since at least the late 80s in UNIX mail clients. Some of the best USENET readers were threaded as well, in the early 90s.
The point is that Google handles threads differently, as evidenced by the problems that occur when trying to import emails from Gmail into a traditional email client, Outlook or otherwise. Thunderbird does not handle GMail all that well either.
Then the entire idea of your inbox as a searchable repository is immensely useful.
Think of where this could go in 20 or so years. Self structuring data, you plop data into your computer, it organizes itself appropriately and adds the proper UI hooks in to make itself accessible.
Try to open your mind up a bit. One early application of LEDs was as red warning lights, red does not destroy night vision like other colors does, and LEDs are highly reliable, good for situations when you need a warning light! Now they are used to power multi-gigabit/sec fiber-optic connections across the world.
What use does research that gives users easy access to giga(tera)bytes of information have?
-PageRank -AJAX Mail Client -Contextual Advertising
You do not realize the significance of these?
PageRank is a method by which billions of related and interlinked pages of information can be searched across, that returns relevant results.
They managed to (nearly) tame the beast that the World Wide Web had become. The fact that they managed to do this using an almost sociological approach is all that much more amazing.
-AJAX Mail Client
Which also represents a new form of interaction with threaded information. Not the most revolutionary thing in the world, but hey, technically the LED is just another form of light.
-Contextual Advertising
Which represents just one application of research into machine learning.
I am on a subscription mailing list for intern employees. Two topics that come up often are car pools and drinking. Google's contextual advertising engine is so smart, it starting showing me ads for DUI lawyers next to emails from this distribution list! That freaked me out a bit, Google's computers had managed to learn that this distribution list consisted of people who drove around a lot of drank a lot of alcohol. Woh. The fact that Google is using that technology to show ads does not make it any less impressive. As it is also impressive that Gmail knows when my GF sends me a short message "go see superman next Saturday?" Gmail asks me if I want to add "Going to see Superman Movie" to my calendar.
Google's research is rather limited in that they primarily (solely?) deal with information theory, but within their research domain, their findings are quite amazing. Indeed, others have tried hard in the past to achieve the same results, and others still try today. Ask.com has managed to pull off some pretty amazing stuff (which is then replicated by Google is, oh, say, about 3 seconds.;) ) but their stuff still resembles complicated word matching more than it does new insights into, well, as Google puts it,
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Um, NVIDIA still supports the TNT on Linux, and that card was released in 1998.
They don't support the GeForce 256 though.
They removed support from their drivers for older GeForce chips. Maybe they added them back in and I didn't notice.:-p
Re:I guess a lot depends on the cell phone compani
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Unmaking Motorola's Q
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True, bandwidth allocation makes a big difference. GSM barely sounds digital though. I have no clue how they managed to get static noise over a digital signal, and I would be impressed by it if it wasn't so annoying!
The GSM carriers here in the states are either low cost providers (T-Mobile being the best of these) or just companies that enjoy screwing over their customers (Cingular). The CDMA providers by comparison compete based on the high quality of their calls (Sprint, Verizon).
Of course, I am in the North West part of the USA, so there are a fair number of carriers that I do not have experience with.
Cell phones still SUCK compared to land lines though. I hadn't used a line line for about 9 months when I was in college, and after I came back home, I was "wowed" by the quality.
Digital technology sucks!
Re:In practice, however, CDMA is poorer quality...
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Unmaking Motorola's Q
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In practice, however, CDMA is poorer quality, maybe because of the old CDMA systems.
I would disagree. Everybody I know who has used both CDMA and GSM thinks that CDMA sounds MUCH better. Indeed this is one reason why Verizon can get away with charging a premium for their service, even though their customer service stinks.
The quality of GSM generally sucks. Cingular REALLY sucks, lots of dropped calls, but they have a really brilliant advertising department. (The day their "Fewest dropped calls" ads came out, I had 3 dropped calls...)
Oh let us not forget the static, fading in out and, and overall low voice quality of GSM.
Verizon and Sprint use totally different, older, radio systems (CDMA),
Not quite true...
Throughout the evolution of cellular telecommunications, various systems were developed without the benefit of standardized specifications. This presented many problems directly related to compatibility, especially with the development of digital radio technology. In 1982, The GSM group ("Groupe Spécial Mobile" (French) 1, 2, 3 and 4) was formed to address these problems. ---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gsm
CDMA is actually a superior technology, GSM's ONLY real advantage is SIM chips, which the next generation of CDMA, , W-CDMA aka UMTS, uses.
GSM sounds horrid compared to CDMA. If the CDMA providers in the states had better customer service and if CDMA had better phones available for it, I would use a CDMA provider instead, the call quality is MUCH better.
Not the actual CS intro classes, but instead what amount to "feeder" classes that are designed to get students interested in CS who might not otherwise think about the field.
We have two such classes, Intro to Game Programming, and Intro to Robotics.
I know that the CS Department managed to get at least one of them designated as a GUR (General University Requirements) course for Mathematics and Logic, hoping that students will find Health = Health - ShotVelocity*ShotPower more interesting than y = x^2 - x.
Personally I find both interesting.:)
In what could be the second CS course you take in our program, the first Functional Programming course (there are 2 series of courses taken at the same time, one traditional Procedural/OO and the second is Functional), you end up programming a 3D Raytracer. This either inspires students, or causes them to change major. More of the latter I am afraid.
Most enterprises aren't using 1.5 yet. Business moves slow into tech until it's very well-tested.
The company I work for actually just recently moved to 1.4.
Please tell me that they were using 1.2 and NOT 1.3.
1.4 is so nice compared to previous versions, but 1.5 is SO nice. It gives the programmer the ability to bring the proper data structures to bear on a problem with such ease. Since 1.5 also encourages even stricter type-safe programming, errors are lessened as well. Any addition to the language that avoids a (Object) cast is a good thing.:)
I personally think it'd be great for a developer machine -- if you were a Java or Web developer, at least.
Yah, because we all know how up to date that Java 1.4.2 SDK is!
Seriously, why is everyone shipping such an old archaic Java still? Do whatever is necessary, pay whatever bribes, just give me a WORKING 1.5 SDK out of the box damnit!
I hope I didn't come across with any attitude in my reply, so I apologize if it came off that way. Having a degree in Computer Engineering, I am (unfortunately) very aware that even the simplest electronic/electric circuit can go bad - especially from age and use. Since most physics models choose to ignore it, wear-and-tear does not violate any law of physics that I know of.
Ah, now, I am in Computer Science, so my tendency is to think that one of my kind messed up somewhere.:)
I have actually had a hub go bad and seen the very same problems you're describing. The hub was about 5 years old and had been in near constant use since first plugged in. Logic tells me that if the software worked before the problem and the settings remained unchanged, then something must have changed outside of the software.
Yah, but this software never worked at all.:)
What I was trying to show in my orig post is that I have a system that is in some ways similar to yours (multi-XP),
I have had many XP based networks that did indeed, "just work".
They just never tend to be MY XP based networks.
I have the "car mechanic's car" problem. All the stuff I setup for others works grand, my own kit ain't pulling through though.
Did not detect my video card OR my monitor, set my monitor's refresh rate to 800x600@60hz.
OUCH.
Aside from that, I am fairly impressed, things work rather well. But, umm, for end user stuff?
Well I have my grandmother using it, after I set it up and locked it down. It doesn't seem to have the same sort of set it and forget it auto-update feature that SuSE does though, which is one feature I really like in software, the ability to shove it on someone's machine and not have to worry much about applying security updates.
Oh, also it is running Gnome. Now while I am fine with Gnome, I know 5 other linux users, 1 of whom uses Gnome, the other of whom find Gnome to be fugly. Gnome does have its bits of general retardation *COUGH*filechooser*COUGH* but then again, what Linux desktop environment doesn't...
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Yah for selling out to intellect destroying. Yah for establishing "friendly" relations with a country who sees us as an enemy!
All of my Logitech wireless kit has broken, I have gone through three Logitech wireless mice so far. They work GREAT out of the box, but after a year or so the range starts decreasing. For all the sarcastic people out there: Yes, this is with battery replacements, or in the case of the last one, it was Logitech's high end wireless mouse that had rechargeable batteries and a charging stand!
Eventually, after about 3 years, I have to hold the mouse next to the receiver to have any signal at all.
Then again, this has been my experience with EVERY wireless mouse. To be fair, Logitech mice tend to last a bit longer, most off brand wireless mice last a few months at most before they start exhibiting this behavior.
I haven't honestly ever had a wireless Microsoft product.
I do know that Microsoft makes some GREAT wired mice though. Their optical mice are top notch, I have only ever had one of them break, and I own plenty. I love the sheer number of buttons.
Microsoft also (used to?
A few of their REALLY funky keyboards, yah. But for the most part, they have a published standard for keymappings to features, the actual scancode that is generated by the "Mail" or "Homepage" button is documented, and any new keyboard out there that supports those keys uses the same standard. Of course the only MS OS that supports these features is XP, but any of the open source OSs allow users to set hotkeys to whatever they want, no drivers needed.
The "Windows" key is just another meta, and a really useful one at that.
What really irritates me is those keyboards that have a calculator built into them. The marketers put it there because everybody knows that the $2000 box in front of them is incapable of adding numbers. *G*
If you are talking about GSM phones, then just swapping sim cards in should work fine, just so long as the phone you are swapping into is not locked.
For CDMA, any provider should be willing to take the phone, unless they are complete jerks! It sounds like you might be in that situation. Interoperability is one of the few advantages of GSM over CDMA.
Why 35 GB?
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 2GB. double the resolution, and you end up with at most a 8GB movie, ignoring any improvements in what compression techniques could offer, after all, a large splotch of black is still a large splotch of black, no matter what resolution you are recording it at.
8GB is a reasonable download size.
I really wonder WTF technology these companies are using to make their HD content look so crappy. Any DVD pirate who takes pride in his/her work does a far superior job on encoding than these "professionals" do on their commercial stuff.
Yah like that esoteric time I had to write a *nix shell. You know how nobody EVER uses shells any more...
Or all that damned "theory" I had to learn about RMI.
Something that takes year of work to learn. Yah, your right, some things CAN only be taught by experience. CS students had to spend some of their time coding, but nobody is promising perfection right out of the box.
Only if I want to get down graded for turning in crap code. I have had profs who don't care about indenting style, so long as you use one, and you use it consistently. Indeed, this is taught right after the basic fundamentals of flow control (conditionals and loops).
Only because we have learned that stupid code whose run time is off by a few orders of magnitude probably has some fundamental design flaw. Ex: If there is a bunch of objects being kept track of, and more objects are constantly adding more to this "group", and the objects are rarely rearranged within the group, and you typically access them in order, and you are using an array, somebody needs to be beaten with a clue by 4.
Many other (better!) examples exist of this. People who don't understand WHY a design sucks will refuse to fix it.
Actually the problem is that they came up with it in the FIRST damn place.
One time I needed to keep track of users who were connected to a chat server. Each user has a unique int ID. I needed to be able to send messages out to all users except for the one who originally had typed the message, since local echo was being used.[1]
Lots of people in my class used arrays.
Lots of people in my class spent time debugging their code. Oh and rewriting it when the next modification to the assignment came along.
I used a set that utilized bit strings for storage. (Yes, it was an API, this was all in C) People connect, I add them to the set. Someone sends out a message, I remove that person from the set (accomplished with binary logic by the underlying API), and send out a message to the remaining members of the set.
Now this code wasn't the most efficient in terms of run time (that last bit of iterating through the set really messed up my run time), but it was scalable, thread safe (I put POSIX thread locks[2] on important function calls in the set API), and it was damn QUICK to code. I got my entire application done in less time than it took most people to debug the code to manage their array.
The nicest part of the entire assignment was when the next two assignments came in.
I got them done in under 2 days. They were 2-3 week long assignments. One of them actually took less than a few hours to complete; I had a nice framework built up, it was very flexible and well commented.
The lesson from all this?
The obvious approach was "use an array!!". I thought for awhile about what the code would look like. Not clean, not simple, not eloquent. I think my entire code for handling user connects disconnects and message sending was something around 7 or 8 lines, 10 tops.
All my comments are full sentences. With much better grammar and spelling than this post! :)
Once again, no comments, downgraded to hell. Any CS student who doesn't comment either has lazy profs, or didn't care about his/her grade. Actually they don't care about their profession either, since anyone who does would already have figured out that proper
For the average consumer, yah, pretty much.
/. nerd, even if they want to be completely 100% legal about it, with what HD sizes are now days, just copying DVDs straight over to the HD is a good option.
:-D
:)
But for the average
For the record, Microsoft actually has a TON of content deals that you are offered when you buy a MCPC, some of them are rather good too, I never got too far into it, because, you know, they cost money.
With what a good entertainment system cost now days, I think that if movies were prices decently (say $4 to watch a new release), then for anybody who is a serious movie buff, it might become economical to buy a home theater system and pay for new release movies.
The current insane price of movie rentals online pretty much rules this out though. I am not really willing to pay around $20 for two people to see a movie in a theater (especially since many theaters now days have screens that are so small that I know I could do better at home!), and even more if I want to eat during said movie.
2 movies a month, at $30 per movie (food and such), $60 per month (not counting any other expenses associated with going to the movies, babysitter if couple has a child and such), that is 720 per year. Assuming a good theater system lasts at LEAST three years, that would give you around 2100 to make a home theater system. Hmm, not quite there yet, if TV prices drop a bit more or movie ticket prices go up, heh.
Any body who builds their own LCD projector and loud speakers need not apply, you already have a kick'in theater setup.
Many modern HDTVs can accept either RGB or DVI inputs. Some even support Firewire!
/. before.
Don't look for your video card to connect to our TV, look for your TV to support your video card!
Recording sucks, but that has been covered on
Try to actually do something, and in my general experience, anything under 512MB of RAM is unacceptable[1].
And by "something", I include "Browse directory listing of files".
People like to make fun of Vista's resource usage, but while MS is in the habit of sudden dramatic increases in resource demands, KDE has been doing a fine job of maintaining a slow steady creep of increasing resource demands.
By the time Vista comes out, 1GB of RAM will be needed to browse directory listings for either system.
[1] Note, my definition of acceptable may differ from yours. If I have to WAIT for a folder to appear, it is not acceptable. By wait, I mean anything more than 500ms, and if I am in a hurry, that is noticeable! Having a 3Ghz processor is useless if it accomplishes the most basic of tasks at the same speed as my old 33mhz processor. (which reminds me of a story about Java...)
You figure that since mail clients use some sort of mini-db that they would already do this...
Quite frankly, I find it irritating that I cannot just store my files online in some transparent manner. Or that data is not automatically sorted away for me. We need a new paradigm for representing and storing data, bleck. Autorecipe identification!
Mike beer recipe
And how would organization help any? Most likely you would have placed the beer recipe from Mike in a folder with all his other recipes, so you end up with a folder that has 500 recipes in it, or, the same thing you have accomplished with the search terms Mike recipe.
Being able to specify sender and such helps of course. If you search beer recipe from:Mike (and assuming you only know one person named Mike
Now the fun part comes in. If you DO presort your email, you STILL have to specify in your email client the above search limitations, it is just that you do so with the mouse (by clicking on a folder which has Mike's recipes in it) and you likely still have to fill in a "Only search through mail from this person" field, if you also copied the discussions over as well.
Indeed, the only advantage that a traditional mail client has is that it makes such UI elements more obvious. In all fairness though, I just guessed about Gmails "From" search, lo and behold, it worked as expected!
Of course the UI aspect of this is rather icky, but then again, when it comes to most mail programs, anything more than the simplest string matching search ends up being icky. At least GMail keeps it all in one UI, the search box.
I also cannot understate the sheer convenience of NEVER having to worry about my email being deleted. I have my resume with me wherever there is an Internet connection. That document someone sent me two years ago? No problem. EVERYTHING is archived, and I can access it from anywhere. With Exchange, everything is archived, until I reach my mailbox limit, or until the mailbox file becomes corrupt, or until the Exchange server has a dead HD, or until I switch employers! The first batch of problems can be remedied by having a good infrastructure, but corporate infrastructure (at least at my present job) is not under my control. I know GMail has a good infrastructure; I have confidence that my data is safe. A lot safer than it would be on any consumer hard drive that I could purchase.
Oh, GMail does absolutely SUCK for mailing lists though. That is the one situation where I want folders.
But they do not promote searches as the end all of how to manage your data. Even worse, many companies (such as the one I am currently at!) place limits on how large your mailbox can be. This results in older messages being placed on a user's hard drive, and not being accessible over the int(ra)ernet anymore. Bam, with one corporate policy, search is neutered.
Traditional mail programs cause users to sort into folders, Gmail says heck with that, here is your data, which piece did you want? Sure, no problem, here it is.
Anything that requires my Grandmother to know what XML or XSLT means is not really that useful.
XML data is not self defining, someone had to define it. An example would be offloading a few hundred pictures from a digital camera. No way am I going to go and type in who is in every picture and circle the general region of the picture that the person is in.
How about word documents? Many people have directories that are a mess, it would be nice if documents were auto sorted in at least a semi-intelligent fashion.
Developers have access to gigabyte+ size databases, but what good does that do the users? We can shove a front end on it and give out a link to said front end, but if that is not done, what good does that do the guy down the hallway who can't see your DB but may need some piece of information that is in it? Even with a front end, what good does it do the new hire who does not even know that your database exists? Why should he have to run around for hours just trying to discover that the data he needs is in a database he has never heard of, and then have to hunt you down to get the data out of it? The computers are linked together, why are they not sharing information? Corporate search engines are not going to find the data, the only way to grab it is to go through meatspace, and that takes time, which is wasted money and wasted effort.
Somebody needs to put the resources into researching how to properly sort and catagorize the literally gigabytes of data that the human species is creating daily. I am glad that Google is at least putting effort somewhat in that direction.
I was trying to pick a term that sort of described what they do. Google is, from what I understand, concerned with anything that involves organizing data. I honestly do not know what field that truly belongs to, but their research seems much more highly specialized than just "Computer Science".
Excellent metaphor, but I still say that Google's results are more based on information theory, thus making it harder to see "drastic scientific advancements" in them, and that we will have to wait for quite awhile before we see the real fruits of their labor.
The point is that Google handles threads differently, as evidenced by the problems that occur when trying to import emails from Gmail into a traditional email client, Outlook or otherwise. Thunderbird does not handle GMail all that well either.
Then the entire idea of your inbox as a searchable repository is immensely useful.
Think of where this could go in 20 or so years. Self structuring data, you plop data into your computer, it organizes itself appropriately and adds the proper UI hooks in to make itself accessible.
Try to open your mind up a bit. One early application of LEDs was as red warning lights, red does not destroy night vision like other colors does, and LEDs are highly reliable, good for situations when you need a warning light! Now they are used to power multi-gigabit/sec fiber-optic connections across the world.
What use does research that gives users easy access to giga(tera)bytes of information have?
Well I can think of at least a few uses!
LEDs have a lot of uses aside from adding random bling to things.
We could have done without Unix and jumped straight to Plan9, and I could definently do without C++.
You know, we do not need ANY of those things. We do not NEED computers. Remember that.
You do not realize the significance of these?
PageRank is a method by which billions of related and interlinked pages of information can be searched across, that returns relevant results.
They managed to (nearly) tame the beast that the World Wide Web had become. The fact that they managed to do this using an almost sociological approach is all that much more amazing.
Which also represents a new form of interaction with threaded information. Not the most revolutionary thing in the world, but hey, technically the LED is just another form of light.
Which represents just one application of research into machine learning.
I am on a subscription mailing list for intern employees. Two topics that come up often are car pools and drinking. Google's contextual advertising engine is so smart, it starting showing me ads for DUI lawyers next to emails from this distribution list! That freaked me out a bit, Google's computers had managed to learn that this distribution list consisted of people who drove around a lot of drank a lot of alcohol. Woh. The fact that Google is using that technology to show ads does not make it any less impressive. As it is also impressive that Gmail knows when my GF sends me a short message "go see superman next Saturday?" Gmail asks me if I want to add "Going to see Superman Movie" to my calendar.
Google's research is rather limited in that they primarily (solely?) deal with information theory, but within their research domain, their findings are quite amazing. Indeed, others have tried hard in the past to achieve the same results, and others still try today. Ask.com has managed to pull off some pretty amazing stuff (which is then replicated by Google is, oh, say, about 3 seconds.
They don't support the GeForce 256 though.
They removed support from their drivers for older GeForce chips. Maybe they added them back in and I didn't notice.
True, bandwidth allocation makes a big difference. GSM barely sounds digital though. I have no clue how they managed to get static noise over a digital signal, and I would be impressed by it if it wasn't so annoying!
The GSM carriers here in the states are either low cost providers (T-Mobile being the best of these) or just companies that enjoy screwing over their customers (Cingular). The CDMA providers by comparison compete based on the high quality of their calls (Sprint, Verizon).
Of course, I am in the North West part of the USA, so there are a fair number of carriers that I do not have experience with.
Cell phones still SUCK compared to land lines though. I hadn't used a line line for about 9 months when I was in college, and after I came back home, I was "wowed" by the quality.
Digital technology sucks!
I would disagree. Everybody I know who has used both CDMA and GSM thinks that CDMA sounds MUCH better. Indeed this is one reason why Verizon can get away with charging a premium for their service, even though their customer service stinks.
The quality of GSM generally sucks. Cingular REALLY sucks, lots of dropped calls, but they have a really brilliant advertising department. (The day their "Fewest dropped calls" ads came out, I had 3 dropped calls...)
Oh let us not forget the static, fading in out and, and overall low voice quality of GSM.
Not quite true...
CDMA is actually a superior technology, GSM's ONLY real advantage is SIM chips, which the next generation of CDMA, , W-CDMA aka UMTS, uses.
GSM sounds horrid compared to CDMA. If the CDMA providers in the states had better customer service and if CDMA had better phones available for it, I would use a CDMA provider instead, the call quality is MUCH better.
Not the actual CS intro classes, but instead what amount to "feeder" classes that are designed to get students interested in CS who might not otherwise think about the field.
:)
We have two such classes, Intro to Game Programming, and Intro to Robotics.
I know that the CS Department managed to get at least one of them designated as a GUR (General University Requirements) course for Mathematics and Logic, hoping that students will find Health = Health - ShotVelocity*ShotPower more interesting than y = x^2 - x.
Personally I find both interesting.
In what could be the second CS course you take in our program, the first Functional Programming course (there are 2 series of courses taken at the same time, one traditional Procedural/OO and the second is Functional), you end up programming a 3D Raytracer. This either inspires students, or causes them to change major. More of the latter I am afraid.
Please tell me that they were using 1.2 and NOT 1.3.
1.4 is so nice compared to previous versions, but 1.5 is SO nice. It gives the programmer the ability to bring the proper data structures to bear on a problem with such ease. Since 1.5 also encourages even stricter type-safe programming, errors are lessened as well. Any addition to the language that avoids a (Object) cast is a good thing.
Yah, because we all know how up to date that Java 1.4.2 SDK is!
Seriously, why is everyone shipping such an old archaic Java still? Do whatever is necessary, pay whatever bribes, just give me a WORKING 1.5 SDK out of the box damnit!
Ah, now, I am in Computer Science, so my tendency is to think that one of my kind messed up somewhere.
Yah, but this software never worked at all.
I have had many XP based networks that did indeed, "just work".
They just never tend to be MY XP based networks.
I have the "car mechanic's car" problem. All the stuff I setup for others works grand, my own kit ain't pulling through though.
Did not detect my video card OR my monitor, set my monitor's refresh rate to 800x600@60hz.
OUCH.
Aside from that, I am fairly impressed, things work rather well. But, umm, for end user stuff?
Well I have my grandmother using it, after I set it up and locked it down. It doesn't seem to have the same sort of set it and forget it auto-update feature that SuSE does though, which is one feature I really like in software, the ability to shove it on someone's machine and not have to worry much about applying security updates.
Oh, also it is running Gnome. Now while I am fine with Gnome, I know 5 other linux users, 1 of whom uses Gnome, the other of whom find Gnome to be fugly. Gnome does have its bits of general retardation *COUGH*filechooser*COUGH* but then again, what Linux desktop environment doesn't...