You all should feel lucky, it's not every generation that gets to witness the crash of a major empire.
Umm, actually, it pretty much is. Major empires fall rather reguarly.
Just within the 20th century, we had the English, Germans, and the Soviets, so pretty much every generation got to see a major empire fall. Albiet the English fall was rather anti-climatic.
If you want to deal with an overpriced piece of software whose only difference from The Gimp is MDI vs. a few floating windows
A more efficient user interface makes for more efficient work. This is especially true for professionals who are often times getting paid a good chunk of change by the hour to get something done.
Even aside from the MDI vs floating windows thing, GIMP has other UI issues, some of which will hopefully be fixed in the next release, but then again isn't that always what is said?:)
For one thing, hotkeys == borked! Or I just do not understand how GIMP is interpreting the idea of a hotkey, I expect E to go to the erase tool no matter what window I am in!
Thank you, that makes a lot more sense than "because we want to and it is easier for us", the excuse I hear so often from so many programmers.
If I am understanding correctly (realize that Universities don't even seem to go into JUnit and such, there seems to be some sorta of stigma attached to practical learning.;) ), this mostly applies for cases when you do not have the original source code correct?
Did you seriously miss the irony of what you just said?
How dare programmers make me.. umm.. what's the word? "Upgrade" my hardware?
So memory is a religious point of conservation, but you're probably pissed that you can't afford that new 4000+ AMD-64x2????????? w.t.f?
I'm more pissed that programmers can't figure out how to display a few widgets on my screen without needing 700mhz+ of CPU power to render them!
Look at program features vs code size, it is NOT an even balance at all. Heck MS had that problem with Office XP, minimal new feature set, HUGE performance drop. Oops. Thankfully they cleaned their code up and released Office 2003.
As for bugs, maybe if programmers didn't suck so much arse now days... you know, if they were made to actually think about their code rather than using the compiler as a debugger...
When trying to squeeze every last byte (or bit!) of efficiency out of a code segment, that chunk of code is going to be looked over far more carefully than some OO class that is written once than just instantiated by people ever-after. More time is going to be spent thinking about the algorithms in use, how do they work, how reliable are they.
There is a reason why the old mainframes were trusted to run so many facets of our lives, but so few (technical or non-technical types) are willing to trust modern OSs to run things like, say, airplanes.
There was also a reason that Ada was used for a lot of aircraft programming, it is HORRIBLE for the programmer to use it, very very painful. Declaring a pointer to a variable takes 3 lines of code! (well you can squeeze it into two IIRC), compare this to the C derived languages, where, excepting Java, you have pointers sometimes with just one character.
Implementing polymorphic objects in it is a pain, it made you think about exactly what you were doing VERY carefully, heck everything about Ada was like that.
So of course the programming community killed it, after all, who wants to program in a language that is just "safe"?
Then again I don't have much room to stand here, my favorite language is C, specifically because the compiler lets me pass darn nearly anything in as valid code (so long as the braces match up and I got the semicolons in place...:) )
Programmers have lost sight of eloquence; tell me, why are you programming something in 100 megs when it could take, umm, A FEW HUNDRED KILOBYTES.
Are modern programmers (myself included....) so bad that we need literally hundreds of megabytes of overhead to protect our dumb ass's from ourselves? Are we so out of touch with the machines we proclaim dominance over (or at least a good working relationship with) that we need to abstract ourselves 838,860,800 Bits away from our machines?
As far as guzzling RAM goes, all programs these days guzzle RAM, and they're right to do so, because RAM is cheap.
Hey screw you! What makes YOU think that YOU have the right to eat at my system's memory so I have to go out and buy more? You're a programmer? So what, your job is to write applications for the END USER, not to write applications As It Is Convenient To You.
Besides, if EVERYONE takes up 100 Megs of Memory (about what the JavaVM with Eclipse running takes up, and my Explorer.exe process is sucking down another 100MB, and Acrobat is taking 32MB just with a single file loaded) pretty soon 1GB will not be enough, so users will upgrade, so programmers will think "hey we have more room to work with now" and they will get lazier and eventually 2GB will not be enough...
It is stupid, REALLY stupid. Why should a text editor take up 100MB of RAM? Why can EMACS have a boatload of features (CD-Burning...) and take up less memory than a freaking.NET IRC client?
Let me tell you why, it was because even with the GNU's non-conservative programming tactics (Stallman says in his Manifesto than the GNU during its founding years did not work to conserve memory, in the belief that computer power was expanding so fast that to do so was meaningless), they did not have such an ego about them as to abandon effort all together and just throw their apps willy nilly.
Oh, and for the record, Dell's low end Dimension systems STILL ship with 256MB of RAM standard. At least now MOST of Dell's Business workstation's come with at least 512 MB of ram.
VS2005, with a decently sized project open, 300MB of RAM or so. I had a 512 system, I could MAYBE browse the web while running it, had to deal with a lot of disk thrashing though.
So tell me, with half a gigabyte of memory, why should my disk be thrashing like mad because I dare to have both an IDE and a web browser open at the same time? Don't tell me it is MS's fault, they are just following in the trend that Sun created: Please the programmer, forget about the end user.
Of course with all of this running, Developers need a good 2GB+ of memory on their computers, which means they loose site even more of what kind of system's their end users are working on.
I like it because I can then have 'a' as "move up" and 'z' as "crouch" or "move down". with wasd those keys are hard to reach! I get to use all five fingers at once with a esdf layout.:)
Then again maybe now that I am older than 9 or 10, I could solve some of them.:)/me never got anyways playing Myst, ran around in circles, no clue what was going on.
have an entertainment budget then you should be on public transportation
Yah except public transportation costs more than gas!
For me to go back and forth to work each day, it would cost $4, and my city does not give discounts for buying large numbers of bus tickets at once!
That is $20 a week, ouch. Driving a small econo-car is less than that, thankfuly.
Of course this does not count in insurance fees, and other misc. auto fees that come in to play.
Then again, if I wanted to go anywhere during work, or after work, etc, even more money would have to be coughed up.
Seattle has great air, but one horrible public transportation system. Bless'ed be the local government who has decided to do NOTHING about it aside from spend a few billion on an already outdated and useless system. (Hint: It does NOTHING to relieve one of the largest conjestion points in the city, getting across Lake Washington to Bellevue!)
Different context of embedded device. All computers have something embedded into them (USB controllers, etc), but they are talking about in this case a computer that is embedded into ANOTHER device.
So installing Flash onto your toaster is not allowed.
A laptop is a fully integrated PC, nothing too special.
Actually a lot of laptops DO have swappable component, even CPUs on many models can be upgraded, although some OEMs are real pricks about it and put the CPU into the socket and then sodder the thing down for no good reason (aside from forcing you to buy a new laptop if you want an upgrade!)
Now actually getting a hold of a laptop CPU at a decent price is a whole seperate issue.:)
This is of course averaged out, I mean I can very well study my arse off until 2am in the morning 4 days of the week and sleep like a log the remaining 3.
I think you are exaggerating, or maybe you just needed to study a whole lot to keep up with the others.
I'd get a lot more sleep but people keep asking me questions....
Go awwaaay, I am trying to sleeeeeeep
The strangest thing I ever got asked was if I knew COBOL.
No.
(thankfully, or I would have people asking me questions on that too!)
Most of the CS degree holders I meet describe long hours of tedious study of useless (in the vast majority of computer related jobs) COBOL on ancient and limited systems. Some describe hours of Novell training (and not the cool new SUSE-based stuff, I mean bindery context and the like) or, even worse, a lot of M$ crap that's not relevent to enterprise level computing. People who look at me like I've grown another head when I tell them to shift something right two bits or similar low-level concept.
Personally, I'm prejudiced against people with college degrees too... the way I see it, if you're spending years in college, you're not a self-motivated go-getter who can learn independantly, you're just another drone who paid a fortune to be spoonfed and can't be trusted to do anything more than go through the motions like he's been taught.
First off, a college degree in CS is not about learning "how to program", it is learning about learning how to think in the mind set of computers.
You can spend five or six years studying on your own (and good luck funding five years of sixteen hours a day of studying!), with no guidance at all, but there are many things you may miss. Tell me, how much have you studied formal logic? Advanced mathematics? Music? Color theory? What is the weirdest data structure you ever implemented? (sure some people implement odd data structure for fun, but when you are getting a CS degree you will be forced to implement a wide variety of weird data structure, again and again and again! Until you have them, and their relative performance characteristics, not just memorized, but understood completely)
Secondly, computer science IS mostly a self-motivated discipline, much more so than other majors.
Heck, at my University, the second quarter there, you get thrown a 3D ray tracing assignment. The professor doesn't actually LECTURE about 3D ray tracing, he just tells you to write one.
The first portion of it (a simple line based renderer) is due in 2 weeks. Now it can take far less time than that, or a bit more, depending on how good you are at learning on your own, but you know what? Students who are not good self-motivated learners FAIL that course. And if they fail any one of the introductory courses 3 times, they are denied entrance into the major, permanently. Now giving students three chances to fail may seem like a lot, until you realize that during the THIRD quarter there you are writing a networked battle tank game. Network sockets, streams, and so forth, are not explained to you. You just get to, well, you know, "pick them up" along the way.
You live, breath, and sleep, computer science, mathematics, and logic. Your mind begins to easily wrap itself around the most abstract and obtuse of problems, you learn how to push your abilities of comprehension to limits that you never knew you had.
IT is not the profession for those who need a teacher, it is a profession for those who prefer to teach themselves, because that's what you'll spend the rest of your career doing if you're successful.
This is an obvious statement.
Go to one of my classes, see what it is like when the professor writes the name of the programming language you will be using up on the board, and tells you that your first assignment is due in 2 weeks.
Someone asks "are we missing a book for this class?" The professor replies "No, use Google."
I have not even began to go in to depth about all the other benefits that a college education gives someone. From a greater understanding of both one's own nation's history, and world history as a whole, to insight into various cultures and groups world wide. From having math taught by professors from all corners of the globe (and trust me, math may be a global language, but how it is interpreted, and understood, in different cultures varies a lot!), to organizing a study group with no two students from the same continent, because you have learned that the different perspectives will enable solving of problems much faster.
See, Office XP is a load of garbage. Unusable, horrible UI, and the load time is horrible.
Office 2003 is a nice speed up from XP (although still not as fast as Office 2000), has features that actually work, and can do some downright amazing things.
Are the differences earth shattering? Taken alone, no, but on the other hand, XP is almost unusable, where as 2003 is rather nice to use.
Speaking of load times, that is the one BIG thing that is keeping Open Office from being widely accepted. Until the load times get under 3 seconds (Pentium 4 3.0GHz+ systems with 1GB+ of RAM should NOT be talking over 3 seconds to load a word processor!), OOo is going to go the same way as Winamp3, sure it may be superior, but does it feel good to use?
This was on the world news (well nightly network news) almost 3 weeks ago, bleck.
Also, they mentioned that this system was the first one run by PCs! Wikipedia has had this up for quite some time as well.
Reading up on it, it appears more that the lack of PLANNING was more at fault. The system was designed AND implemented with only 2 years left before opening, and with the majority of construction on the airport already completed, meaning the physical aspects of it had to be squeezed in where ever spae was available, given that, the results are not to surprising.
If anything this represents a massive failure on the part of management to allocate enough time for a project, implementations of far smaller systems than the one at Denver spent two years alone in just the research phase!
In response, if you read one of the articles linked to from the main article:
Sun Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz submitted a project to the Sun Grid--graphically rendering data from a protein folding experiment. It took only a few seconds, but cost $12. The 12 hours of CPU time for which Schwartz was billed was consumed by hundreds of machines simultaneously clicking away at the rendering problem for a few seconds each.
Results n seconds.
Doing a quick read through I did not see exactly how large the cluster was, but there is no reason that Sun could not scale it to a few thousand nodes, providing results in a time frame that would be cost prohibitive for most companies to setup clusters to compute.
Come on, if you are running a huge simulation a few tmes a year, maintaining a 1000+ node cluster year round is just not cost efficient.
Problem with a CS degree is it's a dead end job. The days of a geek making it into upper management are over. Sr. Programmer is as high as most will be able to get.
You don't get it do you? If I wanted to be in management, I would GO into management, get an MIS degree or something. It has been said that entering management is the death of a programmer.
The technology evolves over time. In 20 years C++, Java, and.NET likely won't be cutting edge anymore (we hope now). So those skills don't work to well... you need to retrain anyway.
I went into CS knowing very well that I would be spending my entire life "learning". Heck that is what I want. Yet, in 20 years time, I shall not only have studied the latest and greatest in technology trends, but also had the experience that I gained through creation and management of systems throughout those 20 years of time.
You can teach almost anyone to program, but an actual understanding of the computer is something different altogether.
The business degree will still be good in 20 years.
There will be changes in management styles and trends over 20 years, business laws will change as well, so will accepted ethical practices. Do you honestly think that you will not have to go for any "retraining" in any of those 20 years?
uhh, so recompile the older driver for your new kernel
Unable to, the newer kernels do not support something specific in the last version of the Nvidia drivers that worked with my card.
Oh, not to mention:
why the heck should I have to recompile my video card drivers?
Do you HONESTLY think that having users recompile drivers is a user friendly experience? Yah I know Nvidia is to blame this time, (dropping support for my video card was a sleezy thing to do, especially since on Windows their drivers support my card still!) but it doesn't change all the OTHER times you need to compile drivers just to get something working.
and "Guess Which Driver Is Causing A Problem Today."
Instead, under Linux, you get to play:
"Guess which driver is not supported today."
For instance, when I did a kernel upgrade, I lost video driver support, my vid driver was too old, OK, go get another one, hey look, my video card was NO LONGER SUPPORTED by the newest video card driver.
Gee thanks Nvidia! Because we all know that Linux is primarily about gaming and that no one would dare use an OLDER video card on a Linux box? Right?...
Granted this particular problem is Nvidia's fault, but then there are the sound drivers. . . .
Oh and why does something as simple as getting a frame buffered console require me to recieve conflicting advice on exactly which packages to emerge, and then editing of a script file?...
Installing Java on Linux, hey, just as much fun! Only 3 or so files to edit in order to get the paths setup right. Don't count on advice from any ONE site since every distro is different! Fuuuun....
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, Seattle, Hick Town!
I had a cable modem nearly the month it was available in my area. Blame TCI.
Stop it stop it stop it! You are making me feel old! I am only 21, it was NOT that long ago damnit!
Ok so I did spend two entire days downloading GTA from a Warez site over dialup 2MB zip file by 2MB zip file.....
Ouch that was awhile back wasn't it...
Umm, actually, it pretty much is. Major empires fall rather reguarly.
Just within the 20th century, we had the English, Germans, and the Soviets, so pretty much every generation got to see a major empire fall. Albiet the English fall was rather anti-climatic.
A more efficient user interface makes for more efficient work. This is especially true for professionals who are often times getting paid a good chunk of change by the hour to get something done.
Even aside from the MDI vs floating windows thing, GIMP has other UI issues, some of which will hopefully be fixed in the next release, but then again isn't that always what is said?
For one thing, hotkeys == borked! Or I just do not understand how GIMP is interpreting the idea of a hotkey, I expect E to go to the erase tool no matter what window I am in!
Thank you, that makes a lot more sense than "because we want to and it is easier for us", the excuse I hear so often from so many programmers.
;) ), this mostly applies for cases when you do not have the original source code correct?
If I am understanding correctly (realize that Universities don't even seem to go into JUnit and such, there seems to be some sorta of stigma attached to practical learning.
I'm more pissed that programmers can't figure out how to display a few widgets on my screen without needing 700mhz+ of CPU power to render them!
Look at program features vs code size, it is NOT an even balance at all. Heck MS had that problem with Office XP, minimal new feature set, HUGE performance drop. Oops. Thankfully they cleaned their code up and released Office 2003.
As for bugs, maybe if programmers didn't suck so much arse now days... you know, if they were made to actually think about their code rather than using the compiler as a debugger...
When trying to squeeze every last byte (or bit!) of efficiency out of a code segment, that chunk of code is going to be looked over far more carefully than some OO class that is written once than just instantiated by people ever-after. More time is going to be spent thinking about the algorithms in use, how do they work, how reliable are they.
There is a reason why the old mainframes were trusted to run so many facets of our lives, but so few (technical or non-technical types) are willing to trust modern OSs to run things like, say, airplanes.
There was also a reason that Ada was used for a lot of aircraft programming, it is HORRIBLE for the programmer to use it, very very painful. Declaring a pointer to a variable takes 3 lines of code! (well you can squeeze it into two IIRC), compare this to the C derived languages, where, excepting Java, you have pointers sometimes with just one character.
Implementing polymorphic objects in it is a pain, it made you think about exactly what you were doing VERY carefully, heck everything about Ada was like that.
So of course the programming community killed it, after all, who wants to program in a language that is just "safe"?
Then again I don't have much room to stand here, my favorite language is C, specifically because the compiler lets me pass darn nearly anything in as valid code (so long as the braces match up and I got the semicolons in place...
Programmers have lost sight of eloquence; tell me, why are you programming something in 100 megs when it could take, umm, A FEW HUNDRED KILOBYTES.
Are modern programmers (myself included....) so bad that we need literally hundreds of megabytes of overhead to protect our dumb ass's from ourselves? Are we so out of touch with the machines we proclaim dominance over (or at least a good working relationship with) that we need to abstract ourselves 838,860,800 Bits away from our machines?
Hey screw you! What makes YOU think that YOU have the right to eat at my system's memory so I have to go out and buy more? You're a programmer? So what, your job is to write applications for the END USER, not to write applications As It Is Convenient To You.
Besides, if EVERYONE takes up 100 Megs of Memory (about what the JavaVM with Eclipse running takes up, and my Explorer.exe process is sucking down another 100MB, and Acrobat is taking 32MB just with a single file loaded) pretty soon 1GB will not be enough, so users will upgrade, so programmers will think "hey we have more room to work with now" and they will get lazier and eventually 2GB will not be enough...
It is stupid, REALLY stupid. Why should a text editor take up 100MB of RAM? Why can EMACS have a boatload of features (CD-Burning...) and take up less memory than a freaking
Let me tell you why, it was because even with the GNU's non-conservative programming tactics (Stallman says in his Manifesto than the GNU during its founding years did not work to conserve memory, in the belief that computer power was expanding so fast that to do so was meaningless), they did not have such an ego about them as to abandon effort all together and just throw their apps willy nilly.
Oh, and for the record, Dell's low end Dimension systems STILL ship with 256MB of RAM standard. At least now MOST of Dell's Business workstation's come with at least 512 MB of ram.
VS2005, with a decently sized project open, 300MB of RAM or so. I had a 512 system, I could MAYBE browse the web while running it, had to deal with a lot of disk thrashing though.
So tell me, with half a gigabyte of memory, why should my disk be thrashing like mad because I dare to have both an IDE and a web browser open at the same time? Don't tell me it is MS's fault, they are just following in the trend that Sun created: Please the programmer, forget about the end user.
Of course with all of this running, Developers need a good 2GB+ of memory on their computers, which means they loose site even more of what kind of system's their end users are working on.
The return of Ada95! (Seriously, in the C# language manual they even mention Ada!)
Alright! Another esdf player! woohoo!
:)
I like it because I can then have 'a' as "move up" and 'z' as "crouch" or "move down". with wasd those keys are hard to reach! I get to use all five fingers at once with a esdf layout.
Supply and demand.
Well mostly just that you can sell suckers (most buyers) a low rez 17" LCD screen and they don't know the difference.
Heck look at what prices 15" LCD TVs go for! You can get a 15" LCD Monitor for less.
And a computer with a TV tuner!
Illegal, dogs must be on leashes (a very FEW off-leash parks are the exception)
Beer in public parks, illegal, smoking, some states, getting to be illegal!
No, it is not. BBQ r0x0rs.
American offices do not have showers, unless they also have a gym.
Also, neccessary to carry so much junk in order to shower, major pain. Shaving cream, soap, etc.
Oh shutup. I always sucked at puzzles.
Then again maybe now that I am older than 9 or 10, I could solve some of them.
Yah except public transportation costs more than gas!
For me to go back and forth to work each day, it would cost $4, and my city does not give discounts for buying large numbers of bus tickets at once!
That is $20 a week, ouch. Driving a small econo-car is less than that, thankfuly.
Of course this does not count in insurance fees, and other misc. auto fees that come in to play.
Then again, if I wanted to go anywhere during work, or after work, etc, even more money would have to be coughed up.
Seattle has great air, but one horrible public transportation system. Bless'ed be the local government who has decided to do NOTHING about it aside from spend a few billion on an already outdated and useless system. (Hint: It does NOTHING to relieve one of the largest conjestion points in the city, getting across Lake Washington to Bellevue!)
Different context of embedded device. All computers have something embedded into them (USB controllers, etc), but they are talking about in this case a computer that is embedded into ANOTHER device.
:)
So installing Flash onto your toaster is not allowed.
A laptop is a fully integrated PC, nothing too special.
Actually a lot of laptops DO have swappable component, even CPUs on many models can be upgraded, although some OEMs are real pricks about it and put the CPU into the socket and then sodder the thing down for no good reason (aside from forcing you to buy a new laptop if you want an upgrade!)
Now actually getting a hold of a laptop CPU at a decent price is a whole seperate issue.
Well I am aiming for a dual major....
I was including classes in the 16 hours.
This is of course averaged out, I mean I can very well study my arse off until 2am in the morning 4 days of the week and sleep like a log the remaining 3.
I'd get a lot more sleep but people keep asking me questions.
Go awwaaay, I am trying to sleeeeeeep
The strangest thing I ever got asked was if I knew COBOL.
No.
(thankfully, or I would have people asking me questions on that too!)
Come hire from Western Washington University's CS Department then.
Seriously, the above was a description of my first year.
FIRST year.
I don't know what the heck they are going to do to me next. o_O
Laptops are not "non-PC" nor are they embedded or device versions of yada yada yada.
First off, a college degree in CS is not about learning "how to program", it is learning about learning how to think in the mind set of computers.
You can spend five or six years studying on your own (and good luck funding five years of sixteen hours a day of studying!), with no guidance at all, but there are many things you may miss. Tell me, how much have you studied formal logic? Advanced mathematics? Music? Color theory? What is the weirdest data structure you ever implemented? (sure some people implement odd data structure for fun, but when you are getting a CS degree you will be forced to implement a wide variety of weird data structure, again and again and again! Until you have them, and their relative performance characteristics, not just memorized, but understood completely)
Secondly, computer science IS mostly a self-motivated discipline, much more so than other majors.
Heck, at my University, the second quarter there, you get thrown a 3D ray tracing assignment. The professor doesn't actually LECTURE about 3D ray tracing, he just tells you to write one.
The first portion of it (a simple line based renderer) is due in 2 weeks. Now it can take far less time than that, or a bit more, depending on how good you are at learning on your own, but you know what? Students who are not good self-motivated learners FAIL that course. And if they fail any one of the introductory courses 3 times, they are denied entrance into the major, permanently. Now giving students three chances to fail may seem like a lot, until you realize that during the THIRD quarter there you are writing a networked battle tank game. Network sockets, streams, and so forth, are not explained to you. You just get to, well, you know, "pick them up" along the way.
You live, breath, and sleep, computer science, mathematics, and logic. Your mind begins to easily wrap itself around the most abstract and obtuse of problems, you learn how to push your abilities of comprehension to limits that you never knew you had.
This is an obvious statement.
Go to one of my classes, see what it is like when the professor writes the name of the programming language you will be using up on the board, and tells you that your first assignment is due in 2 weeks.
Someone asks "are we missing a book for this class?" The professor replies "No, use Google."
I have not even began to go in to depth about all the other benefits that a college education gives someone. From a greater understanding of both one's own nation's history, and world history as a whole, to insight into various cultures and groups world wide. From having math taught by professors from all corners of the globe (and trust me, math may be a global language, but how it is interpreted, and understood, in different cultures varies a lot!), to organizing a study group with no two students from the same continent, because you have learned that the different perspectives will enable solving of problems much faster.
Well, you are definently uninformed.
See, Office XP is a load of garbage. Unusable, horrible UI, and the load time is horrible.
Office 2003 is a nice speed up from XP (although still not as fast as Office 2000), has features that actually work, and can do some downright amazing things.
Are the differences earth shattering? Taken alone, no, but on the other hand, XP is almost unusable, where as 2003 is rather nice to use.
Speaking of load times, that is the one BIG thing that is keeping Open Office from being widely accepted. Until the load times get under 3 seconds (Pentium 4 3.0GHz+ systems with 1GB+ of RAM should NOT be talking over 3 seconds to load a word processor!), OOo is going to go the same way as Winamp3, sure it may be superior, but does it feel good to use?
This was on the world news (well nightly network news) almost 3 weeks ago, bleck.
Also, they mentioned that this system was the first one run by PCs! Wikipedia has had this up for quite some time as well.
Reading up on it, it appears more that the lack of PLANNING was more at fault. The system was designed AND implemented with only 2 years left before opening, and with the majority of construction on the airport already completed, meaning the physical aspects of it had to be squeezed in where ever spae was available, given that, the results are not to surprising.
If anything this represents a massive failure on the part of management to allocate enough time for a project, implementations of far smaller systems than the one at Denver spent two years alone in just the research phase!
Results n seconds.
Doing a quick read through I did not see exactly how large the cluster was, but there is no reason that Sun could not scale it to a few thousand nodes, providing results in a time frame that would be cost prohibitive for most companies to setup clusters to compute.
Come on, if you are running a huge simulation a few tmes a year, maintaining a 1000+ node cluster year round is just not cost efficient.
You don't get it do you? If I wanted to be in management, I would GO into management, get an MIS degree or something. It has been said that entering management is the death of a programmer.
I went into CS knowing very well that I would be spending my entire life "learning". Heck that is what I want. Yet, in 20 years time, I shall not only have studied the latest and greatest in technology trends, but also had the experience that I gained through creation and management of systems throughout those 20 years of time.
You can teach almost anyone to program, but an actual understanding of the computer is something different altogether.
There will be changes in management styles and trends over 20 years, business laws will change as well, so will accepted ethical practices. Do you honestly think that you will not have to go for any "retraining" in any of those 20 years?
Unable to, the newer kernels do not support something specific in the last version of the Nvidia drivers that worked with my card.
Oh, not to mention:
why the heck should I have to recompile my video card drivers?
Do you HONESTLY think that having users recompile drivers is a user friendly experience? Yah I know Nvidia is to blame this time, (dropping support for my video card was a sleezy thing to do, especially since on Windows their drivers support my card still!) but it doesn't change all the OTHER times you need to compile drivers just to get something working.
Instead, under Linux, you get to play:
"Guess which driver is not supported today."
For instance, when I did a kernel upgrade, I lost video driver support, my vid driver was too old, OK, go get another one, hey look, my video card was NO LONGER SUPPORTED by the newest video card driver.
Gee thanks Nvidia! Because we all know that Linux is primarily about gaming and that no one would dare use an OLDER video card on a Linux box? Right?
Granted this particular problem is Nvidia's fault, but then there are the sound drivers. . . .
Oh and why does something as simple as getting a frame buffered console require me to recieve conflicting advice on exactly which packages to emerge, and then editing of a script file?
Installing Java on Linux, hey, just as much fun! Only 3 or so files to edit in order to get the paths setup right. Don't count on advice from any ONE site since every distro is different! Fuuuun....