Well the entire network is currently disassembled in my closet until I go back to college, so no feedback for awhile.:)
Sometimes network browsing can be fragile if you don't have a domain controller, even though the computers *can* actually talk to each other. Have you tried manually typing the computer's name (or IP address) into Explorer's address bar? ie: "\\WorkstationB\" or "\\10.0.0.2" (or whatever the IP address is, double-check by running "ipconfig" at the command line).
Oh, typing IP addresses in works.
Packets get routed out over the INTERNET first, but it works.
This is the fault of the ISP who apparently has the world's dumbest routers. The ISP also blocks Firefox automatic updates, EXEs inside of ZIP files, and users from downloading Thunderbird....
If anyone wants to direct flames somewhere, direct them at the stupid ISP for listing Thunderbird as a potential virus! Or as a threat or whatever. Actualy it just got caught by their stupid "download whitelist", if something isn't white listed, you can't download it. For a while Firefox 1.5 was not even allowed.... Once again, hilarious in some sad sad sense, since I am allowed to waltz all around the network looking at people's shared files. No, I won't give the ISPs name, as they are already nazis, I am afraid of what they would do to me if I showed any sign of overt resistence. I just SSH into a remote BSD machine and wget anything I need.
Actually the entire thing is dog slow since it is running 10baseT, I hope to get a Wireless G router up soon and fix the entire dang mess.
Do you know how slow VNC is over a 10baseT connection? It is just ridicules.
(Unfortunately for you, your router that's handing out DHCP addresses doesn't bother to do DNS resolving for you as well. So you've got the one half but not he other.)
If that was true, then none of my machines would be able to access any of the other machines, but some of my machines CAN access other machines.
And I do have DNS resolving set up, just fine.
Maybe I should explain the (overly retarded) network layout a bit better:
I am in an apartment complex. The entire apartment is on a stupid switch[1] (it doesn't perform packet filtering at all).
I can actually browse around all the different workgroups and shares of (almost?) EVERYBODY in my apartment.
Except for the machines that are on my own local workgroup.:-p
Somewhere there is a machine that assigns us internal IP addresses and internal use DNS names.
The entire thing is a giant security hole. It would be semi-useful, but now that Windows XP doesn't share entire HDs out of the box, things are less fun than they used to be on @Home.
[1] I HOPE it is a switch.... But they wired the thing with 10BaseT (last year!) so who knows... I do wonder where they found 10BaseT though, hehe. Maybe they crimped it all themselves?
All it takes is a single device spewing crap into the ether and weird shit happens. In our network we had three cards spewing crap. That was *really* hard to figure out which ones worked and which ones didn't. Ee gad. I hope I never have to go through that shit again.
Now I have had that type of thing happen. One time there was a power surge through my cable tv line that managed to blow my network gear. I had a cable modem, which is plugged into the cable line. Damned if that wasn't the ONLY wire that wasn't behind some sort of surge protector. Heck every other part of the network is behind a UPS. I would never have guessed at a surge coming through the coax[1]...
[1] Thus belying my youth, as I am sure many out there who worked with previous generation networking kit do indeed remember surges over coax.:)
But yah, I do need a new hub. Well what I need is a wireless switch, but I am cheap. I almost got one for free, but no power adapter.
I still would put a broken hub on my low list of likely causes though, as I can establish connections in various ways, the odds of the hub mangling frames in JUST the right way so that A can see B but B cannot see A (but can do anything else just fine) is realllly small.
Set up a DNS server/DHCP server, it takes all of two minutes... and POOF all your problems go away.
Now why the HELL would I go and setup a SECOND DHCP server and a SECOND DNS on top of the ones that already exists on the other end of my hub?
Also, maybe you didn't realize this, the software linked to in the article is for HOME NETWORKS. Why the hell should someone need a DNS/DHCP server to send a file from Computer A to Computer B when both computers are ALREADY on the same network?
This jerk probably left the firewall turned on and thus cannot "see" the machines.
Funny thing, in Windows, when you enable file sharing, Windows offers to disable those ports on the firewall for you. I clicked "yes". I even verified afterwards that the ports were disabled.
I have had troubles setting up file sharing in Windows before there even WAS a built in Windows firewall.
Once again, I reiterate, Microsoft would prefer that people buy a domain controller. In terms of network resource sharing, organizations that can afford to purchase/support a DC are the majority audience. Nobody really cares about the tiny home user.
Also, you can rule out Firewall issues if A can see B but B cannot see A. Both A and B obviously have a hole poked in their firewall for file sharing, but B is just acting STUPID.
This is not to mention that on SOME DAYS it is possible for B to see A, depending on what order computers are booted in, amongst other variables.
The other point is that this entire situation is STUPID. There is a big "ENABLE FILE SHARING" button in Windows. If I click it on each machine, and file sharing only halfway works, then obviously the big button is NOT doing its job.
Indeed, setting up a wireless network in your house using a Windows XP machine as a router is a similar situation. There is the official glossy MS pamphlet way of doing it, which doesn't work, and then if you dig a bit deeper you find out the REAL instructions. Once again, stupidity, if there is a button that SAYS it does something, it should darn well do that something, not secretly require that I do 5 other steps that are not officially documented.
If I want to mess around with undocumented configuration options I always have my Linux box!
Your tale of woe lacks too many specific details, and your failure to mention some of those details only servs to show that you need to spend a lot more time up to your elbows in NICs, Cables, and protocols, before you can make any sweeping claims as to how well Windows Networking works.
Microsoft likes to advertise how "simple" it is to setup a Windows XP network.
If I need to spend that much time learning, then it isn't simple.
Anyways, I have spent oodles of time setting up networks, in my experience, when dealing with Windows, domains are a more reliable solution. This is not TOO surprising, given that Microsoft sells domain systems for money, while workgroups are just a convinenence feature for users who are not willing to fork over the cash for a DC.
Windows Firewall is set to allow Windows Filesharing to pass through on all machines, naturally enough. The protocol is whatever the little checkbox for "Enable Windows File Sharing" uses. Not NetBEUI anymore thankfully.:)
You did not mention the make of your NICs
Every machine is a laptop, so whatever Intel felt like. Not really configurable!
if your "hub" is a simple switch or a router...
No, it is a 10mb/s HUB. When I said hub I meant HUB. The damn thing costs $40 new TODAY, and I have no clue why. (I bought it back in 1997 or so)
I want to get a nice router, wireless preferabbly. My Machine C is operating as a Wireless Router for the network right now, and THAT works perfectly. Go figure. Windows makes it PRETTY easy (but not inntuitive, since some amount of stupidity is required...) to turn a machine into a wireless router. (Linux, in comparison, loses out HORRIBLY here. Windows has a checkbox you select that makes a machine into a wireless router, linux has 2 or 3 packages you download, install, and edit text based configuration files for...)
And yes, all my machines are set to disable WiFi when their NIC is plugged in. (well except for machine C of course, which just doesn't connect to anything since all the other machines, when their NICs are plugged in, just do not connect to it!)
Did you know that using certain 3com NICs can cause some linksys switches to shut down?
Yah, I had to fix that once. Drove me freaking nuts trying to diagnoise it. Very weird issue.
This example is to show you that your networking issues could be simply HARDWARE issues that you are unaware of.
Except that, as stated above, I have a hub. Hubs barely above electrical repeaters in level of complexity.
I have the world's second most simple network layout. 3 machines, plugged into HUB.
Unless one of the machines is horribly mangling Ethernet frames, I have a software issue.
Windows XP has horrible networking. If you are on Domain, you get to offload the pain to a domain admin (unless you ARE the domain admin...) but for workgroups, the suffering is all yours.
Right now I have a network with the following characteristics:
Three machines
All machines have the same workgroup name and different IP addresses
All machines plugged in to the same hub.
All machines have a "shared items" folder that has been clicked on at listed as shared.
All machines have File Sharing enabled
The current situation is this:
Machine A can see Machine B, and can look at, upload to, and download from B's folders.
Machine B CANNOT see Machine A at all.
Machine B can see Machine C.
Machine A can see Machine C.
Machine C cannot see ANY machine.
Another form:
A-->B
B-->C
A-->C....
So to get a file from A to B or from B to A is easy, go to A, copy to or from B.
Getting a file to C is also easy, just go to A or B and put the file on or take the file off of C.
So technically I can "do" any possible transfer.
Damned if it isn't STUPID and MESSED UP though.
Oh and don't even go to printer sharing. The original idea was to have A act as a print server for B and C. Of course nobody can actually see A, so that didn't really go over that well.
Mind you I have NEVER seen a Windows network setup as eloquently as a *nix network. On *nix, I just go to any machine and lo and behold, I can see every other machine on the network, use any printer, and if I login to multiple machines at the same time (most often using SSH) any changes I make to a file in my home directory on machine A is almost instantly transferred to ALL other machines that I am logged on to. This is incredibly convenient for testing network client/server apps.
Windows, in comparison, has this entire synch on login/logoff thing going on, and the login process can take upwards of 2-3 minutes per machine! (Depending on the stupidity of how the domain was setup, some domains work better than others...)
Now when it comes to network printing, Windows domains have got *nix beat.
"Well what you do on *nix is you memorize the printers magic number, no, there is no searching GUI listing of printers setup, then you drop to the command line and pipe the file you want to print to the printer."
Okay....
Yes, I have seen *nix networks setup better than that, but I have encountered that level of stupidity too many times. Thankfully I have never needed to print a file with graphics in it (or any file that is not in plain text) on such a network!
In conclusion, we, Computer Scientists, are complete and utter idiots who cannot program a decent system for the life of us.
Something so simple, so very very simple....
What the heck is wrong with us? It should NOT be complicated. I have had times where, when on a LAN, it was faster to BURN A CDR than to try and get networking up and running. Some times networking works, some times it doesn't. When it does, great, when it doesn't, oh well.
Computers should not be non-deterministic.
I really love those situations when two identical machines in identical states have the same operations applied to them in the same order, and two different results end up happening. That is cute folks, really cute[1].
[1]By cute I mean "Somebody should be pounded in the head with a sledgehammer".
Dell has, for quite some time, had docking stations that supported an external PCI video card. Support for these video cards seems to run throughout their professional line of laptops. Indeed, check your BIOS. I know my GF's D600 BIOS has the option in there.:)
Although it's possible you have a point, I cannot believe you cite Eclipse as an example - that pos halts and leaves you looking at a blank menu bar more times than I care to count.
Never had that problem with Eclipse, though Netbeans leaves me staring at my monitor waiting for something to happen often enough.
See, this is the problem with Java's "cross-platform compatibility" spiel.
Even on the same platform, an application may or may not work properly.
And speaking of Sun's dedication to client side apps, lets look at the change log just for 1.5.0_06:
6257260 java classes_2d Memory leak on closing JFrame
6182812 java classes_io FileOutputStream constructor throws FileNotFoundException with long file names
5092063 java classes_net Extremely slow socket creation using new Socket("ip-address", port)
4263904 java classes_swing JTextPane: Paragraphs with Justified Attributes Appear Centered
6256473 java_plugin iexplorer To download an applet does not finish for 10 minutes with proxy server and IIS
And ad nauseum.
Don't get me wrong, I like Swing and Java in general. (Some of the bugs I listed above are not Swing specific, but they are still/stupid/). Swing is a wonderful API to create GUIs in. Very easy to use for the programmer.
Woe betide the poor user. Yet, is not the very purpose of client software to serve the end user?
I am sitting here on a machine with 1GB of RAM and Netbeans 5 is all but unusable. In fairness, previous versions were not nearly so bad. Of course previous versions did not have nearly as many features and niceties either.
Quite frankly, I love Eclipse. Amongst three of the largest IDEs (Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse) it was the first to have refactoring support (which everyone then went and copied from it!).
Ah, last week I used the final release version of VS 2005, and now I am stuck on Intellisense. (My reasoning is that Intellisense is needed since the MSDN search engine is so unusable!) Eclipse's auto-complete is a joke in comparison.
Oddly enough, KDevelop has a REALLY cool auto-complete that finishes off my variable names for me, and since I tend to use long self-descriptive variable names, this is very useful! Anybody know of an Eclipse plug-in that does the same?:)
any application using swing (using the current OS look and feel) behaves in a very similar speed as a delphi app.
Yah, like Netbeans for instance! That program is fast!
Oh wait, no its not. It is a slow POS that takes over 40 seconds just for the INSTALLER to pop up on a 1.6Ghz Pentium M.
WTF?
Eclipse is ALMOST as fast as a native app (they still could stand to improve start-up speed a bit) and ranges from just as fast to way faster than MS's recent.NET cruft.
That is a Windows thing most likely. (Unless you are using *nix, in which case it is a "magic line in some config file" thing)
Windows uses a magic color for its hardware accelerated overlay.
You can actually set this color on the fly, rather fun.:-D WinAmp takes advantage of this, if you ever want the background of a Word file you are working on to be a bit more interesting, set the overlay color to White.
Any ways.
Notice that I said "a magic color".
Singular.
DOH.
Some companies (Nvidia, ATI) have developed workarounds for this, but you may or may not have 100% compatibility with existing software. I cannot say for sure how their implementations work (though it only takes about half a brain cell to make a damn good guess).
I believe Microsoft is fixing this issue in Vista, and will support multiple hardware accelerated overlays, even on a single screen.
Microsoft said awhile back that Open Office is "10 years behind Microsoft Office".
They are right.
Open Office's interface is horrible. Inconsistent. 2.0 is an improvement, but what wouldn't be an improvement? I remember when Sun first released Star Office for free. It was a decent alternative to MS Office at the time.
Back in what, 1998?
It wasn't even a fully featured replacement then. OOo has gotten better, but it still needs a ton of work.
This is not even mentioning that MS just revolutionized the entire idea of an office app UI with their ribbon concept. Yes I said revolutionized, I use Office 12, and it freaking rocks. Ok it is beta code and is slower than heck and a huge resource hog, but it still opens about as fast as OOo does. That is sad. Very sad.
Gnome is one of the more polished UIs for Linux as well. Fairly consistent, well, within any one given version, they seem to like doing UI changes every version number. Whatever. It still is professional looking and reasonably usable.
Linux rocks for development. Multiple desktops, tabbed console windows. Those two alone are killer features for a programmer. (I have multiple desktop support up and running on Windows, but I do missed tabbed console windows!)
You compare how much energy the sun is putting out on its surface, to how much is getting to us.
What the inverse square law doesn't kill, our planets magnetic field and ozone deplete.
Actually a ton of energy is just out of our reach as it is direction away from us by the Earth, this is one reason that the satellite based power stations are a decent idea. Collect the energy, convert it over to a form that can be transmitted down to earth, and beam it down in a tightly controlled fashion.
It is not economically feasible yet because we have not depleted other sources of energy from the planet. Heartless, but that is the way it works I'm afraid.
That is the joke I make constantly with my friends.
Flying cars are not HARD actually. They had'em in the 30's or 40's (I cannot remember which at the moment, and I need to get back to work so no googling right now).
The problem is the IDIOTS doing the flying.
That and the lawsuits once one of them falls out of the sky, takes 2 other cars with it, and lands on some bloke's house.
Using the figures supplied above $900/yr thats about double to tripple the margin that a publisher has on regular books.
I buy books on half.com.
I take very good care of them, and sell them back for about the same price that I paid, plus or minus $5. Exceptions are any books that don't suck (most of them do), I tend to keep them. Those are O'Reilly and Deitel books, and I buy those are less than retail as it is.
My total yearly loss on books is likely around $50 to $90.
At that level of pricing you can afford a better desk to put all the monitors on.
It is not the desk, it is the room.:) On campus housing has stupid desks that come with the rooms and cannot be swapped out, they were made before computers become a common item, and thus have no space for a monitor really. Two is out of the question.
Off campus now, I still have a small-ish room, though rather nice and in a good apartment complex that is less than 10 years old, so I am doing pretty well compared to many of my compatriots.:) I will likely be investing in a good 19" LCD pretty soon, the 12.1" on my laptop is getting a wee bit annoying.
Take code examples. Reading through explanation of the code in a real book, I can keep a finger at the location where the code is and occasionally glance back at it.
Scroll wheels, while a wonderful invention, do not offer near the usability.
Oh and lets not mention that, unless I have a dual monitor setup (like I can afford that, not to mention find space for it, since square footage is always at a premium), working on code while looking at examples in a book is nearly impossible.
Oddly enough, Unix man pages have none of these problems.:-D
Oh, and ebooks suck for everything else academic in the world as well[1].
Math? I hardly need a monitor clogging up my workspace. When I do math, I push my screen back and pull out the pencil/paper.
Science? See notes about math. For higher level science classes that require working on a computer, see the notes about programming and e-books.
You want the ultimate evidence that e-books suck? I can pirate almost ANY required textbook for my courses in e-book format for free, but I still BUY the textbook. Ebooks suck that much.
Oh and lets not even mention accessibility. I have to be ON my computer? Or connected to the net and logged into a given website? Screw it. Give me a good ol' fashion bundle of dead paper.
Ah, being a CS senior, it is not like I use books anymore anyways. Google and Wikipedia have most of what I need, and most Unix things I can grab from man pages.
Given how textbook publishers (and school textbook stores) like screwing over the students, all of this DRM crud is not surprising though. Just this quarter, I found out that my university's book store is charging $80 for a book that Barnes and Noble has for $30.
Since we are talking about spherical radiation the energy is still there, it has just been radiated in, literally, every other direction.
Err, it makes a lot more sense when drawn on a board.:) The 1/x^2 thing is actually just due to the surface area of a sphere. (as I said, I dropped a ton of constants out!)
You can imagine in that you have "X watts" that are initially bundled up in a single point (the round little tip top of the radiating antenna, which in perfect physics land, is a single point.:).
Because EMF energy is radiated in a sphere when coming from a single point source, you have this ever increasing sphere. You basically have to "stretch" those "X watts" out over the surface area of the sphere.
(my humble apologizes to any actual physicists out there!)
Out of curiousity, why have we not yet figured out how to wirelessly power devices?
Short answer: We already have, it is just so inefficient that nobody uses it. (in fact it was invented over 100 years ago!)
Long answer: Electromagnetic waves radiate outwards. Either you have a simple non-directional antenna that radiates in all directions at the same time (in a sphere basically) and you lose power REALLY fast, or you have a directional antenna that radiates power in a cone at a target destination.
The omni-directional radiators suck so much that they are absolutely useless. Inverse square means 1/(x^2). Basically (and this is crappy math but gets the point across) if you have 10 watts at 1 feet, you would have 10*(1/(2^2)) = 2.5 watts at 2 feet. At 3 feet you would have 10*(1/9) = 1.11 watts. Please ignore that you would use meters instead of feet and that all my units are all messed up in various other ways as well. The point is that your power drops off REALLY fast.
So what about those directional antennas?
Well, you have to find some way to really accurately track someone's cell phone position, and have a world-wide array of directional antennas so that you can beam power to them no matter where they are at.
Oh and remember to keep those power levels low, else you will fry anything that gets in the way.
People worry about cell phones causing cancer as it is, directional power beamed at your head WOULD cause some serious issues!
Palm's have a far better interface. I have not used Symbian OS before (though I hear it is pretty good, I am looking at getting a Nokia phone pretty soon just to try it out), but all the cell phones that I have used required at least 3 or 4 button presses and menu navigations to even get to the calender. Entering data was far slower than with Graffiti, and storing information about a person has always been problematic (every cell phone company has different data it stores, and actually going to edit the phone book can be interesting on some phone models...)
Most cell phones are a UI nightmare. When someone does come out with a good UI for a phone, it is typically a 1.0 version so it is missing some obvious features any ways. For instance, NEC, wonderful UI for the most part, does some really awesome things.
Has caller groups.
You cannot DO ANYTHING with those groups. They just... exist. No custom group ringtones, just per-name ringtones, so you can assign the same ringtone to everything in a group manually, but what is the purpose of the group then?:|
Motorola has similar issues. Their UI is really good and consistent overall though.
Samsung has many different lines of cell phones, some of which have good UIs, others of which have horrible UIs (T309, I am looking at you! You are the official Samsung UI Abortion!)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, typing IP addresses in works.
Packets get routed out over the INTERNET first, but it works.
This is the fault of the ISP who apparently has the world's dumbest routers. The ISP also blocks Firefox automatic updates, EXEs inside of ZIP files, and users from downloading Thunderbird....
If anyone wants to direct flames somewhere, direct them at the stupid ISP for listing Thunderbird as a potential virus! Or as a threat or whatever. Actualy it just got caught by their stupid "download whitelist", if something isn't white listed, you can't download it. For a while Firefox 1.5 was not even allowed.... Once again, hilarious in some sad sad sense, since I am allowed to waltz all around the network looking at people's shared files. No, I won't give the ISPs name, as they are already nazis, I am afraid of what they would do to me if I showed any sign of overt resistence. I just SSH into a remote BSD machine and wget anything I need.
Actually the entire thing is dog slow since it is running 10baseT, I hope to get a Wireless G router up soon and fix the entire dang mess.
Do you know how slow VNC is over a 10baseT connection? It is just ridicules.
If that was true, then none of my machines would be able to access any of the other machines, but some of my machines CAN access other machines.
And I do have DNS resolving set up, just fine.
Maybe I should explain the (overly retarded) network layout a bit better:
I am in an apartment complex. The entire apartment is on a stupid switch[1] (it doesn't perform packet filtering at all).
I can actually browse around all the different workgroups and shares of (almost?) EVERYBODY in my apartment.
Except for the machines that are on my own local workgroup.
Somewhere there is a machine that assigns us internal IP addresses and internal use DNS names.
The entire thing is a giant security hole. It would be semi-useful, but now that Windows XP doesn't share entire HDs out of the box, things are less fun than they used to be on @Home.
[1] I HOPE it is a switch.... But they wired the thing with 10BaseT (last year!) so who knows... I do wonder where they found 10BaseT though, hehe. Maybe they crimped it all themselves?
Now I have had that type of thing happen. One time there was a power surge through my cable tv line that managed to blow my network gear. I had a cable modem, which is plugged into the cable line. Damned if that wasn't the ONLY wire that wasn't behind some sort of surge protector. Heck every other part of the network is behind a UPS. I would never have guessed at a surge coming through the coax[1]...
[1] Thus belying my youth, as I am sure many out there who worked with previous generation networking kit do indeed remember surges over coax.
But yah, I do need a new hub. Well what I need is a wireless switch, but I am cheap. I almost got one for free, but no power adapter.
I still would put a broken hub on my low list of likely causes though, as I can establish connections in various ways, the odds of the hub mangling frames in JUST the right way so that A can see B but B cannot see A (but can do anything else just fine) is realllly small.
Now why the HELL would I go and setup a SECOND DHCP server and a SECOND DNS on top of the ones that already exists on the other end of my hub?
Also, maybe you didn't realize this, the software linked to in the article is for HOME NETWORKS. Why the hell should someone need a DNS/DHCP server to send a file from Computer A to Computer B when both computers are ALREADY on the same network?
Funny thing, in Windows, when you enable file sharing, Windows offers to disable those ports on the firewall for you. I clicked "yes". I even verified afterwards that the ports were disabled.
I have had troubles setting up file sharing in Windows before there even WAS a built in Windows firewall.
Once again, I reiterate, Microsoft would prefer that people buy a domain controller. In terms of network resource sharing, organizations that can afford to purchase/support a DC are the majority audience. Nobody really cares about the tiny home user.
Also, you can rule out Firewall issues if A can see B but B cannot see A. Both A and B obviously have a hole poked in their firewall for file sharing, but B is just acting STUPID.
This is not to mention that on SOME DAYS it is possible for B to see A, depending on what order computers are booted in, amongst other variables.
The other point is that this entire situation is STUPID. There is a big "ENABLE FILE SHARING" button in Windows. If I click it on each machine, and file sharing only halfway works, then obviously the big button is NOT doing its job.
Indeed, setting up a wireless network in your house using a Windows XP machine as a router is a similar situation. There is the official glossy MS pamphlet way of doing it, which doesn't work, and then if you dig a bit deeper you find out the REAL instructions. Once again, stupidity, if there is a button that SAYS it does something, it should darn well do that something, not secretly require that I do 5 other steps that are not officially documented.
If I want to mess around with undocumented configuration options I always have my Linux box!
You do realize that hubs are simple electrical repeaters, and unless my old hub violates the laws of physics that it should work just fine?
Microsoft likes to advertise how "simple" it is to setup a Windows XP network.
If I need to spend that much time learning, then it isn't simple.
Anyways, I have spent oodles of time setting up networks, in my experience, when dealing with Windows, domains are a more reliable solution. This is not TOO surprising, given that Microsoft sells domain systems for money, while workgroups are just a convinenence feature for users who are not willing to fork over the cash for a DC.
Windows Firewall is set to allow Windows Filesharing to pass through on all machines, naturally enough. The protocol is whatever the little checkbox for "Enable Windows File Sharing" uses. Not NetBEUI anymore thankfully.
Every machine is a laptop, so whatever Intel felt like. Not really configurable!
No, it is a 10mb/s HUB. When I said hub I meant HUB. The damn thing costs $40 new TODAY, and I have no clue why. (I bought it back in 1997 or so)
I want to get a nice router, wireless preferabbly. My Machine C is operating as a Wireless Router for the network right now, and THAT works perfectly. Go figure. Windows makes it PRETTY easy (but not inntuitive, since some amount of stupidity is required...) to turn a machine into a wireless router. (Linux, in comparison, loses out HORRIBLY here. Windows has a checkbox you select that makes a machine into a wireless router, linux has 2 or 3 packages you download, install, and edit text based configuration files for...)
And yes, all my machines are set to disable WiFi when their NIC is plugged in. (well except for machine C of course, which just doesn't connect to anything since all the other machines, when their NICs are plugged in, just do not connect to it!)
Yah, I had to fix that once. Drove me freaking nuts trying to diagnoise it. Very weird issue.
Except that, as stated above, I have a hub. Hubs barely above electrical repeaters in level of complexity.
I have the world's second most simple network layout. 3 machines, plugged into HUB.
Unless one of the machines is horribly mangling Ethernet frames, I have a software issue.
Windows XP has horrible networking. If you are on Domain, you get to offload the pain to a domain admin (unless you ARE the domain admin...) but for workgroups, the suffering is all yours.
Right now I have a network with the following characteristics:
The current situation is this:
Machine A can see Machine B, and can look at, upload to, and download from B's folders.
Machine B CANNOT see Machine A at all.
Machine B can see Machine C.
Machine A can see Machine C.
Machine C cannot see ANY machine.
Another form:
A-->B
B-->C
A-->C
So to get a file from A to B or from B to A is easy, go to A, copy to or from B.
Getting a file to C is also easy, just go to A or B and put the file on or take the file off of C.
So technically I can "do" any possible transfer.
Damned if it isn't STUPID and MESSED UP though.
Oh and don't even go to printer sharing. The original idea was to have A act as a print server for B and C. Of course nobody can actually see A, so that didn't really go over that well.
Mind you I have NEVER seen a Windows network setup as eloquently as a *nix network. On *nix, I just go to any machine and lo and behold, I can see every other machine on the network, use any printer, and if I login to multiple machines at the same time (most often using SSH) any changes I make to a file in my home directory on machine A is almost instantly transferred to ALL other machines that I am logged on to. This is incredibly convenient for testing network client/server apps.
Windows, in comparison, has this entire synch on login/logoff thing going on, and the login process can take upwards of 2-3 minutes per machine! (Depending on the stupidity of how the domain was setup, some domains work better than others...)
Now when it comes to network printing, Windows domains have got *nix beat.
"Well what you do on *nix is you memorize the printers magic number, no, there is no searching GUI listing of printers setup, then you drop to the command line and pipe the file you want to print to the printer."
Okay....
Yes, I have seen *nix networks setup better than that, but I have encountered that level of stupidity too many times. Thankfully I have never needed to print a file with graphics in it (or any file that is not in plain text) on such a network!
In conclusion, we, Computer Scientists, are complete and utter idiots who cannot program a decent system for the life of us.
Something so simple, so very very simple....
What the heck is wrong with us? It should NOT be complicated. I have had times where, when on a LAN, it was faster to BURN A CDR than to try and get networking up and running. Some times networking works, some times it doesn't. When it does, great, when it doesn't, oh well.
Computers should not be non-deterministic.
I really love those situations when two identical machines in identical states have the same operations applied to them in the same order, and two different results end up happening. That is cute folks, really cute[1].
[1]By cute I mean "Somebody should be pounded in the head with a sledgehammer".
Dell has, for quite some time, had docking stations that supported an external PCI video card. Support for these video cards seems to run throughout their professional line of laptops. Indeed, check your BIOS. I know my GF's D600 BIOS has the option in there. :)
Their (very popular) D600 has the same option in the BIOS.
This is nothing new, please move along.
Umm, no.
Adderall is closely related to dexedrine, which is HIGHLY addictive.
I am on adderall, I miss a dose, I am down and out for the day. It takes me a week or so to completely withdrawl from it.
Mind you this is tons better than dexedrine, which has a spike so hard on it that I could feel the blood level drop in real time.
Never had that problem with Eclipse, though Netbeans leaves me staring at my monitor waiting for something to happen often enough.
See, this is the problem with Java's "cross-platform compatibility" spiel.
Even on the same platform, an application may or may not work properly.
And speaking of Sun's dedication to client side apps, lets look at the change log just for 1.5.0_06:
And ad nauseum.
Don't get me wrong, I like Swing and Java in general. (Some of the bugs I listed above are not Swing specific, but they are still
Woe betide the poor user. Yet, is not the very purpose of client software to serve the end user?
I am sitting here on a machine with 1GB of RAM and Netbeans 5 is all but unusable. In fairness, previous versions were not nearly so bad. Of course previous versions did not have nearly as many features and niceties either.
Quite frankly, I love Eclipse. Amongst three of the largest IDEs (Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse) it was the first to have refactoring support (which everyone then went and copied from it!).
Ah, last week I used the final release version of VS 2005, and now I am stuck on Intellisense. (My reasoning is that Intellisense is needed since the MSDN search engine is so unusable!) Eclipse's auto-complete is a joke in comparison.
Oddly enough, KDevelop has a REALLY cool auto-complete that finishes off my variable names for me, and since I tend to use long self-descriptive variable names, this is very useful! Anybody know of an Eclipse plug-in that does the same?
Yah, like Netbeans for instance! That program is fast!
Oh wait, no its not. It is a slow POS that takes over 40 seconds just for the INSTALLER to pop up on a 1.6Ghz Pentium M.
WTF?
Eclipse is ALMOST as fast as a native app (they still could stand to improve start-up speed a bit) and ranges from just as fast to way faster than MS's recent
That is a Windows thing most likely. (Unless you are using *nix, in which case it is a "magic line in some config file" thing)
:-D WinAmp takes advantage of this, if you ever want the background of a Word file you are working on to be a bit more interesting, set the overlay color to White.
Windows uses a magic color for its hardware accelerated overlay.
You can actually set this color on the fly, rather fun.
Any ways.
Notice that I said "a magic color".
Singular.
DOH.
Some companies (Nvidia, ATI) have developed workarounds for this, but you may or may not have 100% compatibility with existing software. I cannot say for sure how their implementations work (though it only takes about half a brain cell to make a damn good guess).
I believe Microsoft is fixing this issue in Vista, and will support multiple hardware accelerated overlays, even on a single screen.
I cannot scroll through "Presentor" (or whatever OOo's PP viewer is called) slides.
Sucks. Massivly.
Microsoft said awhile back that Open Office is "10 years behind Microsoft Office".
They are right.
Open Office's interface is horrible. Inconsistent. 2.0 is an improvement, but what wouldn't be an improvement? I remember when Sun first released Star Office for free. It was a decent alternative to MS Office at the time.
Back in what, 1998?
It wasn't even a fully featured replacement then. OOo has gotten better, but it still needs a ton of work.
This is not even mentioning that MS just revolutionized the entire idea of an office app UI with their ribbon concept. Yes I said revolutionized, I use Office 12, and it freaking rocks. Ok it is beta code and is slower than heck and a huge resource hog, but it still opens about as fast as OOo does. That is sad. Very sad.
Gnome is one of the more polished UIs for Linux as well. Fairly consistent, well, within any one given version, they seem to like doing UI changes every version number. Whatever. It still is professional looking and reasonably usable.
Linux rocks for development. Multiple desktops, tabbed console windows. Those two alone are killer features for a programmer. (I have multiple desktop support up and running on Windows, but I do missed tabbed console windows!)
It sucks for pretty much everything else
Not really.
You compare how much energy the sun is putting out on its surface, to how much is getting to us.
What the inverse square law doesn't kill, our planets magnetic field and ozone deplete.
Actually a ton of energy is just out of our reach as it is direction away from us by the Earth, this is one reason that the satellite based power stations are a decent idea. Collect the energy, convert it over to a form that can be transmitted down to earth, and beam it down in a tightly controlled fashion.
It is not economically feasible yet because we have not depleted other sources of energy from the planet. Heartless, but that is the way it works I'm afraid.
That is the joke I make constantly with my friends.
Flying cars are not HARD actually. They had'em in the 30's or 40's (I cannot remember which at the moment, and I need to get back to work so no googling right now).
The problem is the IDIOTS doing the flying.
That and the lawsuits once one of them falls out of the sky, takes 2 other cars with it, and lands on some bloke's house.
I buy books on half.com.
I take very good care of them, and sell them back for about the same price that I paid, plus or minus $5. Exceptions are any books that don't suck (most of them do), I tend to keep them. Those are O'Reilly and Deitel books, and I buy those are less than retail as it is.
My total yearly loss on books is likely around $50 to $90.
It is not the desk, it is the room.
Off campus now, I still have a small-ish room, though rather nice and in a good apartment complex that is less than 10 years old, so I am doing pretty well compared to many of my compatriots.
Try for high tech workers living in Seattle. The commute to Redmond or Bellevue is horrible.
Varies from 45 minutes to 2 hours. 15 minutes difference in start time makes a HUGE difference in how long it takes to get there.
What really sucks is that this summer I have an internship at Boeing lined up, for their Everett plant.
That is a 90 minute or so commute each way. 3 hours a day, bleck.
And this guy complains about his 20 some minute commute! Sounds lovely to me!
Suck suck suck.
:-D
Take code examples. Reading through explanation of the code in a real book, I can keep a finger at the location where the code is and occasionally glance back at it.
Scroll wheels, while a wonderful invention, do not offer near the usability.
Oh and lets not mention that, unless I have a dual monitor setup (like I can afford that, not to mention find space for it, since square footage is always at a premium), working on code while looking at examples in a book is nearly impossible.
Oddly enough, Unix man pages have none of these problems.
Oh, and ebooks suck for everything else academic in the world as well[1].
Math? I hardly need a monitor clogging up my workspace. When I do math, I push my screen back and pull out the pencil/paper.
Science? See notes about math. For higher level science classes that require working on a computer, see the notes about programming and e-books.
You want the ultimate evidence that e-books suck? I can pirate almost ANY required textbook for my courses in e-book format for free, but I still BUY the textbook. Ebooks suck that much.
Oh and lets not even mention accessibility. I have to be ON my computer? Or connected to the net and logged into a given website? Screw it. Give me a good ol' fashion bundle of dead paper.
Ah, being a CS senior, it is not like I use books anymore anyways. Google and Wikipedia have most of what I need, and most Unix things I can grab from man pages.
Given how textbook publishers (and school textbook stores) like screwing over the students, all of this DRM crud is not surprising though. Just this quarter, I found out that my university's book store is charging $80 for a book that Barnes and Noble has for $30.
[1]Giant unsubstantiated statement.
Since we are talking about spherical radiation the energy is still there, it has just been radiated in, literally, every other direction.
:) The 1/x^2 thing is actually just due to the surface area of a sphere. (as I said, I dropped a ton of constants out!)
:).
Err, it makes a lot more sense when drawn on a board.
You can imagine in that you have "X watts" that are initially bundled up in a single point (the round little tip top of the radiating antenna, which in perfect physics land, is a single point.
Because EMF energy is radiated in a sphere when coming from a single point source, you have this ever increasing sphere. You basically have to "stretch" those "X watts" out over the surface area of the sphere.
(my humble apologizes to any actual physicists out there!)
Out of curiousity, why have we not yet figured out how to wirelessly power devices?
Short answer: We already have, it is just so inefficient that nobody uses it. (in fact it was invented over 100 years ago!)
Long answer: Electromagnetic waves radiate outwards. Either you have a simple non-directional antenna that radiates in all directions at the same time (in a sphere basically) and you lose power REALLY fast, or you have a directional antenna that radiates power in a cone at a target destination.
The omni-directional radiators suck so much that they are absolutely useless. Inverse square means 1/(x^2). Basically (and this is crappy math but gets the point across) if you have 10 watts at 1 feet, you would have 10*(1/(2^2)) = 2.5 watts at 2 feet. At 3 feet you would have 10*(1/9) = 1.11 watts. Please ignore that you would use meters instead of feet and that all my units are all messed up in various other ways as well. The point is that your power drops off REALLY fast.
So what about those directional antennas?
Well, you have to find some way to really accurately track someone's cell phone position, and have a world-wide array of directional antennas so that you can beam power to them no matter where they are at.
Oh and remember to keep those power levels low, else you will fry anything that gets in the way.
People worry about cell phones causing cancer as it is, directional power beamed at your head WOULD cause some serious issues!
Wireless power is possible, just not feasible!
Well ok, on a large device you can have a hotkey for everything.
Palm was cool because it had 4 hotkeys on it, and they all did exactly what you needed them too.
Simple, eloquent, functional.
Palm's have a far better interface. I have not used Symbian OS before (though I hear it is pretty good, I am looking at getting a Nokia phone pretty soon just to try it out), but all the cell phones that I have used required at least 3 or 4 button presses and menu navigations to even get to the calender. Entering data was far slower than with Graffiti, and storing information about a person has always been problematic (every cell phone company has different data it stores, and actually going to edit the phone book can be interesting on some phone models...)
:|
Most cell phones are a UI nightmare. When someone does come out with a good UI for a phone, it is typically a 1.0 version so it is missing some obvious features any ways. For instance, NEC, wonderful UI for the most part, does some really awesome things.
Has caller groups.
You cannot DO ANYTHING with those groups. They just... exist. No custom group ringtones, just per-name ringtones, so you can assign the same ringtone to everything in a group manually, but what is the purpose of the group then?
Motorola has similar issues. Their UI is really good and consistent overall though.
Samsung has many different lines of cell phones, some of which have good UIs, others of which have horrible UIs (T309, I am looking at you! You are the official Samsung UI Abortion!)