The devil is in the details. To say that C++ and Objective C, and Java are the same indicates to me you don't know those very well. Yes they are all 'OO', yes they all support objects and methods, etc, but there are many other details. For example, compare and contrast the method dispatching technology in those languages. Also while you're at it, compare the memory allocation and management techniques. I would be expecting the word 'dynamic binding' in your answers.
I could tell you the differences, more or less, most importantly though, when coding the solution in C++, if you walk by me, you would hear constant muttersing of "I could do this so much faster in Java...."
Yes dynamic binding would be in my answer somewhere, C++ has to be specifically told when to do it, Java likes to do it automatically (when doing an OO theory versus performance trade-off, Java tends to go the OO theory route).
Memory allocation and management is something that anybody who has completed the freshman sequence in programming SHOULD be able to answer, come on, pointers are introduced in the second course, memory management in depth in the third.
Maybe you just are interviewing a lot of canidates with brain rot? I honestly cannot think of a SINGLE one of my fellow students who could not answer that. Now maybe some of them have such bad communications skills that it would take them awhile to understand what you were asking (heh), but they all would answer the question sooner or later. All of them would CODE properly from the get go. I do understand though that being able to communicate with other developers is just as essential of a skill, if not more so, than coding itself.
Honor roll, CS Merit Scholar, Presidents + Deans List, on and on.
Didn't even return her a message saying she had been denied.
Websites that resumes are submitted to tend to be black holes.
Oh and if high tech companies are so busy looking for good candidates, why aren't more high tech companies showing up to career fairs? Going out and recruiting students in CS programs? If we aren't learning the skills you want us to in our college life, go to University ACM meetings and tell us what we SHOULD be learning! You have the local ACM chapter announce "high tech firms coming next Thursday do tell you what you have to learn to get a job" and you will be speaking to a packed auditorium!
My friend and I are both desperately looking for CS internships this summer, but you know what? Most companies do not even bother responding, so far only Weyerhaeuser and Microsoft. (Oh, and NASA, NASA rocks)
How much more do you WANT from your recruits?
List of projects completed so far (note I am a JUNIOR, before I graduate I will have to make a fully networked 3D game, likely a raytracer, and work on a large scale distributed computing project, just to name a few bits and pieces of Western Washington University's CS curriculum):
Fully OO vector based Java Painting Program (trivial I know, Java is fun!)
Same painting program, this time in about 50 lines of Scheme code. (Scheme is even more fun!)
2D tile based dungeon hack game written in C++. (Pain in the rear end, really makes one utilize all the data structures learned so far!)
A full three-four tree implementation from scratch.
and currently I am writing my own *nix shell for one of my classes this quarter. This is a three month long project where we have to live by (and die by) the design decisions we make from the very beginning. Utilizing CVS, our own Makefiles, and every other resource we can get our grubby little hands around, and yes, we ARE being graded on how well we utilize the revision control system at our disposal.
Now I admit all of this is still "toy" work, but by all means, we have to know what we are doing to survive this curriculum. Heck just the shell alone has required more pointer juggling (When a pointer to a pointer to an array of pointers not only makes sense, but seems like the natural way to solve a problem, how can you say that we as candidates do not at least have potential?) than I thought was ever possible (before I took this course that is!).
Oh, and if you are hiring Interns, I know of two very qualified and motivated ones looking for some work.:)
100% agree with this. Last time I was looking to hire people -- a couple years ago around the worst of the bust -- the available candidates were almost universally horrible. And it's not even something as "complicated" as subclassing -- most of the people I saw couldn't write code, period. More than once, we had people who struggled just figuring out hexadecimal conversions and bit masks.
A lot of the problem is, the candidates may very well have excelled in what their college curriculum had taught them, but hey, bit masks are not exactly something most curriculums cover more than one or twice in passing.
If you want candidates who know what they are doing, use an internship program. Hire some young coders in who have had the "basics" down (4 or 5 programming classes, OO, and so forth) and bring them in for three months or so to show them what they are going to need to focus on learning to get a job outside of college. When they go back to their classes they will focus and pay attention on the details that you want them to learn. Wait a year or two, and out pops a nicely trained Computer Scientist.:)
So a logical response is for faculty to go easy on students, rightly assuming that this will return higher evaluations.
As a student let me tell you, I have given very low ratings to professors who have given me very high grades.
Heck I have given low ratings in classes I have gotten a 4.0 in! ("Professor did not adequately explain material, necessitated high curving of exam as class was not able to comprehend material"...)
I think I am going to stick with Yoper though, soon as I get my sound working, and my scroll wheel, I'll be set.
Well un-trashing my Windows partition would be nice. Their stupid non-destructive partioner during the install crashes, so I had to reboot, try again, crashed, reboot, use the old text mode one which naturally assumes you know what you are doing. ^_^
Have you ever tried to change a setting like the size of the pagefile or similar nontrivial things?
Good point, setting stuff up is non-trivial. Then again compared to Linux where configuration is best performed with a command line utility, of which the only way to find the name of is to:
A. Dig though numeroux README files
B. Have someone tell it to you
C. Google for it
D. Search around your HD typing in random command names until something does what you want it to
I'd think that Windows has it pretty good. Though I will grant that a lot of bits and pieces of Windows are hidden behind even the GUI. (and a ton of the exe files in the Windows and Windows\System32 directory are undocumented! Or at least minimally documented, without Google you'd have no way of finding out what they did.) A user can completely manage a Windows NT5+ box without ever dropping to the CLI, although the situation is naturally differnt for a network admin.
Could've been done without adding two keys to the keyboard, though. I also prefer user-adjustale shortcuts, but you can't have everything...
From a historic point of view, they really only added one key, the Windows key was just a relabled Meta key.
The document thingy key I used to think was useless, untill I read that it actually brings up the right click context sensitive menu of whatever is currently in focus.
6 months, 2.70Ghz. I just changed Distros, KDE is faster now, but still takes its time booting up. As soon as I get around to it I'll switch over to xfce.
Debian is a good distro, stable stuff, not latest releases. Oddly enough, running apps that are slightly out of date makes one's computer seem much faster.:)
Dude, I have 256 megs of RAM and I am working on a laptop. Swap is slower than crud (laptop HD), and KDE eats over 50% of my system resources.
The Konqueror preloaded is stuck in swap. Or at least so I am guessing based on the massive HD thrashing that I hear going on.
Either one of two things needs to (or at least should) happen:
Someone somewhere gets bashed on the head for allowing a preloaded to get stuck in Swap.
Someone at Toshiba gets bashed on the head for releasing this DOG SLOW Laptop.
And my alt-f2 has been reprogrammed to windowkey-r. More mnemonic that way (start menu->run)
Actually KDE comes with a default Windows Shortcuts w/WinKey shortcut binding list, that is really convenient, and most of the time Linux even detects my keyboard correctly so I get to use the Windowskey! (ok ok only one distro was too stupid to do this, 99.999% of them have managed it OK)
The computer runs a lot faster if KDE is not forcing everything else out onto disk.
And a $250 portable gaming unit is going to be playing games that are a few years old anyways, your point is? Drop an $80 video card in the PC and your good to go for the current generation of games, all previous Windows games, and the next generation of games, albeit at 800x600.
And besides, modern game suck.:-D A $250 PC can emulate:
NES SNES PSX N64 crudloadofotherplatforms
just fine.
Ok ok not what little Bobby is going to want, but whatever. Its an entrance drug man, just wait, in 5 years he'll be pushing out the $500 for a new video card to play Doom4.:)
Take a valid indie video stream, encode pirated data stream inside of it, hey, instant government sponsered w@rez trading!
granted the large file sizes would make this somewhat problamatic, but hey, the servers are paid for, and I assume the server's bandwidth is too, and over modern broadband (500KB/s to 1MB/s), downloading even a 1gb release for 500 or so MB of data isn't too bad if you save time by not having to crawl all over the internet trying to find the file in the first place!
You can get a decent PC for that price, add in the $100 or so you need for additional accessories, and you can get a PC that you might not have to upgrade for awhile.
Sure it isn't portable, but come on, your a parent trying to choose what to buy your son for his birthday;
"Well on this PC he can do his homework, surf the internet, access a wide range of academic material, and gain entrance into the digital era"
"On this PSP he can bl0w l04ds of sh!t up"
Compare and contrast.:)
(granted in the end both are going to be used to blow stuff up, but hey, don't tell momma that.:) )
Did it ever cross your mind that an average user is not a programmer and has no idea what you're talking about?
*G*
And why do you care about monospaced typefaces when you could just as well use Arial for coding?
Umm, what the fuck?
Do you know how hard it is to read code in a variable width font?
It Looks Like Ass.
Crap doesn't line up, things don't indent properly, understanding the code's layout from a vertical scan eye scan is now a more involved task, and, oh yah, my professors would downgrade the living SHIT out of me for not having proper 80 column code.
Not to mention no one else in the world would want to help me out if I had any problems. Doh.
I have tried to write sample code for people in word, it doesn't work out well for anything but trival examples.
I also have an old Mandrake CD around here someplace that was blazing fast on my 266mhz PII box.
Unfortunately it doesn't support AGP video cards. *G*
Seriously though, I have (unfortunately!) actual work to do with Linux, and I needed a minimal upkeep distro, SuSE is, umm, well. Yah. Annnyways. I am seriously thinking of installing a different distro, as I definitely am NOT satisfied with SuSE. (out of date packages in YaST2, out of date packages in YaST2, out of date packages in YaST2,...)
On the flip side, I know that there HAS to be some switches I can set some place to get SuSE out of "Slow Arsed Mode".
(I recompiled the kernel and ditched tons of stuff, I am on a laptop so future expandability is not really going to happen, but my laptop decided to turn itself off in the midst of the compilation!)
Yeesh people, stop bitching. Or at least grow a set and reply rather than mod troll. Firefox loads up like a piece of rotten molasses. I love the browser, but loading it is dog slow.
Konqueror is also slow, all of KDE is slow, this is not flamebait, but rather an often noted complaint in/. threads.
It is well known that Microsoft takes steps to make Windows appear faster than it really is. These steps are appreciated.
The fact that the Konqueror preloaded sucks up more of my memory than Explorer or Firefox.. (ignoring massive difficulties with comparing memory usage across platforms)
The early Phoenix builds are so much faster it is not funny. WTF happened? (no plugins installed on Phoenix or Firefox).
Screw web page browsing, I have arrow keys on my keyboard for that.
3D modeling! Yaaah!
(More buttons the merrier!)
You know how IRRITATING it is when apps have a separate "zoom tool"?
Alternatively you can try and remember which confounded combination of left/right clicking and cntrl/alt/shift keys your particular 3D modeling program uses to zoom in and out with.
As for slowness, yah, there is that. But A4Tech sells this REALLY nice mouse that has two scrolls wheels offset vertically a bit and next to each other. One is set to 2x or 3x the scroll rate of the other one, and IIRC they are cumulative.:) Hey look ma, 4x scrolling!:-D
Of course if you are selecting a large segment of text and you need to scroll, the wheel can be a big advantage for when you need precise control.
The border thing IS stupid, but I can KIND OF understand why they did it, it is more regular to draw a "maximized" window as just a normal window that is, well, the size of the full screen.
This would make more sense if it weren't for the fact that Windows treats maximized windows in a special fashion anyways, so adding in another bit of code to chop off the right border shouldn't have been too hard for them. (Well then again this depends on how their underlying code works, hmm.) Anyways, software engineering issues aside, it would be a nice UI fix.
I do find myself using the scroll bar a bit more under Linux. Of course many KDE themes have issues of their own, heh. (Hey look, the close button is CIRCULAR, and requires PRECISE aiming to hit! Yah freaking genius there folks, I used a circular window bar theme for a VERY short period of time, looks good, works like arse)
Yah, I understand that it is a typographer specialty thing, same way I get irritated at stupid code or stupid UI design (hey look, we'll make the buttons just a FEW pixel below the screen edge, so they are extra easy to miss!... )
As for Comic Sans, I am so used to seeing it all over the place, when I Googled for it and went to a ban Comic Sans site, I was rather surprised at what font they were talking about. ^_^
Minor correction, KDE takes 1-2 minutes to boot, one other reason I am not using my Linux partition is that Linux itself takes 2-3, and up to 5, minutes to boot.
(Ironically enough, I switched over to Linux because XP is too danged slow with only 256 megs of memory, well, Linux is slower, and XP seems like it is downright speedy now!)
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, yes they do. I know the guy who runs the bus service. I have been down there and seen it.
I could tell you the differences, more or less, most importantly though, when coding the solution in C++, if you walk by me, you would hear constant muttersing of "I could do this so much faster in Java...."
Yes dynamic binding would be in my answer somewhere, C++ has to be specifically told when to do it, Java likes to do it automatically (when doing an OO theory versus performance trade-off, Java tends to go the OO theory route).
Memory allocation and management is something that anybody who has completed the freshman sequence in programming SHOULD be able to answer, come on, pointers are introduced in the second course, memory management in depth in the third.
Maybe you just are interviewing a lot of canidates with brain rot? I honestly cannot think of a SINGLE one of my fellow students who could not answer that. Now maybe some of them have such bad communications skills that it would take them awhile to understand what you were asking (heh), but they all would answer the question sooner or later. All of them would CODE properly from the get go. I do understand though that being able to communicate with other developers is just as essential of a skill, if not more so, than coding itself.
My friend applied for an internship at Amazon,
:)
Honor roll, CS Merit Scholar, Presidents + Deans List, on and on.
Didn't even return her a message saying she had been denied.
Websites that resumes are submitted to tend to be black holes.
Oh and if high tech companies are so busy looking for good candidates, why aren't more high tech companies showing up to career fairs? Going out and recruiting students in CS programs? If we aren't learning the skills you want us to in our college life, go to University ACM meetings and tell us what we SHOULD be learning! You have the local ACM chapter announce "high tech firms coming next Thursday do tell you what you have to learn to get a job" and you will be speaking to a packed auditorium!
My friend and I are both desperately looking for CS internships this summer, but you know what? Most companies do not even bother responding, so far only Weyerhaeuser and Microsoft. (Oh, and NASA, NASA rocks)
How much more do you WANT from your recruits?
List of projects completed so far (note I am a JUNIOR, before I graduate I will have to make a fully networked 3D game, likely a raytracer, and work on a large scale distributed computing project, just to name a few bits and pieces of Western Washington University's CS curriculum):
Fully OO vector based Java Painting Program (trivial I know, Java is fun!)
Same painting program, this time in about 50 lines of Scheme code. (Scheme is even more fun!)
2D tile based dungeon hack game written in C++. (Pain in the rear end, really makes one utilize all the data structures learned so far!)
A full three-four tree implementation from scratch.
and currently I am writing my own *nix shell for one of my classes this quarter. This is a three month long project where we have to live by (and die by) the design decisions we make from the very beginning. Utilizing CVS, our own Makefiles, and every other resource we can get our grubby little hands around, and yes, we ARE being graded on how well we utilize the revision control system at our disposal.
Now I admit all of this is still "toy" work, but by all means, we have to know what we are doing to survive this curriculum. Heck just the shell alone has required more pointer juggling (When a pointer to a pointer to an array of pointers not only makes sense, but seems like the natural way to solve a problem, how can you say that we as candidates do not at least have potential?) than I thought was ever possible (before I took this course that is!).
Oh, and if you are hiring Interns, I know of two very qualified and motivated ones looking for some work.
A lot of the problem is, the candidates may very well have excelled in what their college curriculum had taught them, but hey, bit masks are not exactly something most curriculums cover more than one or twice in passing.
If you want candidates who know what they are doing, use an internship program. Hire some young coders in who have had the "basics" down (4 or 5 programming classes, OO, and so forth) and bring them in for three months or so to show them what they are going to need to focus on learning to get a job outside of college. When they go back to their classes they will focus and pay attention on the details that you want them to learn. Wait a year or two, and out pops a nicely trained Computer Scientist.
Acctually,
Microsoft does do this, sort of.
Microsoft already has a HUGE housing complex for their Indian workers, complete with Bus rides to and from work every day.
As a student let me tell you, I have given very low ratings to professors who have given me very high grades.
Heck I have given low ratings in classes I have gotten a 4.0 in! ("Professor did not adequately explain material, necessitated high curving of exam as class was not able to comprehend material"...)
I think I am going to stick with Yoper though, soon as I get my sound working, and my scroll wheel, I'll be set.
Well un-trashing my Windows partition would be nice. Their stupid non-destructive partioner during the install crashes, so I had to reboot, try again, crashed, reboot, use the old text mode one which naturally assumes you know what you are doing. ^_^
Nice except when an application is either already running, or truly "opening' the file with the application would cause Bad Stuff to happen.
The common (ok, only) example of this is in Winamp when you want to add an object to the playlist and you have disabled "Always On Top" mode.
I may have used that feature once or twice aside from that, but adding a file to my Winamp queue is the most common usage for me.
Good point, setting stuff up is non-trivial. Then again compared to Linux where configuration is best performed with a command line utility, of which the only way to find the name of is to:
A. Dig though numeroux README files
B. Have someone tell it to you
C. Google for it
D. Search around your HD typing in random command names until something does what you want it to
I'd think that Windows has it pretty good. Though I will grant that a lot of bits and pieces of Windows are hidden behind even the GUI. (and a ton of the exe files in the Windows and Windows\System32 directory are undocumented! Or at least minimally documented, without Google you'd have no way of finding out what they did.) A user can completely manage a Windows NT5+ box without ever dropping to the CLI, although the situation is naturally differnt for a network admin.
From a historic point of view, they really only added one key, the Windows key was just a relabled Meta key.
The document thingy key I used to think was useless, untill I read that it actually brings up the right click context sensitive menu of whatever is currently in focus.
Now I love it.
6 months, 2.70Ghz. I just changed Distros, KDE is faster now, but still takes its time booting up. As soon as I get around to it I'll switch over to xfce.
*One yoper install later*
:)
:(
Hey, this IS faster! Konqueror now opens in about 1.5 seconds, not bad, not bad at all!
Now if I can just get my sound and my scroll wheel to work!
I am going to miss the SuSE 3D graphics card driver though, SuSE supports the weird ATI integrated card I have, not in the OSS drivers.
2.70 Ghz big enough for yah?
:)
Debian is a good distro, stable stuff, not latest releases. Oddly enough, running apps that are slightly out of date makes one's computer seem much faster.
What is so bad about 2.6.11 anyways? SuSE freaks out if I use it, wants me to downgrade to 2.6.10.
(Mind you, SuSE installed 2.6.11...)
Dude, I have 256 megs of RAM and I am working on a laptop. Swap is slower than crud (laptop HD), and KDE eats over 50% of my system resources.
The Konqueror preloaded is stuck in swap. Or at least so I am guessing based on the massive HD thrashing that I hear going on.
Either one of two things needs to (or at least should) happen:
Someone somewhere gets bashed on the head for allowing a preloaded to get stuck in Swap.
Someone at Toshiba gets bashed on the head for releasing this DOG SLOW Laptop.
And my alt-f2 has been reprogrammed to windowkey-r. More mnemonic that way (start menu->run)
Actually KDE comes with a default Windows Shortcuts w/WinKey shortcut binding list, that is really convenient, and most of the time Linux even detects my keyboard correctly so I get to use the Windowskey! (ok ok only one distro was too stupid to do this, 99.999% of them have managed it OK)
The computer runs a lot faster if KDE is not forcing everything else out onto disk.
And a $250 portable gaming unit is going to be playing games that are a few years old anyways, your point is? Drop an $80 video card in the PC and your good to go for the current generation of games, all previous Windows games, and the next generation of games, albeit at 800x600.
:-D A $250 PC can emulate:
:)
And besides, modern game suck.
NES
SNES
PSX
N64
crudloadofotherplatforms
just fine.
Ok ok not what little Bobby is going to want, but whatever. Its an entrance drug man, just wait, in 5 years he'll be pushing out the $500 for a new video card to play Doom4.
No, those speeds suck ass.
500KB/s is better, but still a bit slow for downloading an entire CD. (AAARG! Thirty whole minutes! NOOOO!)
1MB/s is rather nice, but that is mostly the domain of college campuses.
Take a valid indie video stream, encode pirated data stream inside of it, hey, instant government sponsered w@rez trading!
granted the large file sizes would make this somewhat problamatic, but hey, the servers are paid for, and I assume the server's bandwidth is too, and over modern broadband (500KB/s to 1MB/s), downloading even a 1gb release for 500 or so MB of data isn't too bad if you save time by not having to crawl all over the internet trying to find the file in the first place!
You can get a decent PC for that price, add in the $100 or so you need for additional accessories, and you can get a PC that you might not have to upgrade for awhile.
:)
:) )
Sure it isn't portable, but come on, your a parent trying to choose what to buy your son for his birthday;
"Well on this PC he can do his homework, surf the internet, access a wide range of academic material, and gain entrance into the digital era"
"On this PSP he can bl0w l04ds of sh!t up"
Compare and contrast.
(granted in the end both are going to be used to blow stuff up, but hey, don't tell momma that.
*G*
Umm, what the fuck?
Do you know how hard it is to read code in a variable width font?
It Looks Like Ass.
Crap doesn't line up, things don't indent properly, understanding the code's layout from a vertical scan eye scan is now a more involved task, and, oh yah, my professors would downgrade the living SHIT out of me for not having proper 80 column code.
Not to mention no one else in the world would want to help me out if I had any problems. Doh.
I have tried to write sample code for people in word, it doesn't work out well for anything but trival examples.
I also have an old Mandrake CD around here someplace that was blazing fast on my 266mhz PII box.
...)
Unfortunately it doesn't support AGP video cards. *G*
Seriously though, I have (unfortunately!) actual work to do with Linux, and I needed a minimal upkeep distro, SuSE is, umm, well. Yah. Annnyways. I am seriously thinking of installing a different distro, as I definitely am NOT satisfied with SuSE. (out of date packages in YaST2, out of date packages in YaST2, out of date packages in YaST2,
On the flip side, I know that there HAS to be some switches I can set some place to get SuSE out of "Slow Arsed Mode".
(I recompiled the kernel and ditched tons of stuff, I am on a laptop so future expandability is not really going to happen, but my laptop decided to turn itself off in the midst of the compilation!)
Yeesh people, stop bitching. Or at least grow a set and reply rather than mod troll. Firefox loads up like a piece of rotten molasses. I love the browser, but loading it is dog slow.
/. threads.
Konqueror is also slow, all of KDE is slow, this is not flamebait, but rather an often noted complaint in
It is well known that Microsoft takes steps to make Windows appear faster than it really is. These steps are appreciated.
The fact that the Konqueror preloaded sucks up more of my memory than Explorer or Firefox.. (ignoring massive difficulties with comparing memory usage across platforms)
The early Phoenix builds are so much faster it is not funny. WTF happened? (no plugins installed on Phoenix or Firefox).
Screw web page browsing, I have arrow keys on my keyboard for that.
:) Hey look ma, 4x scrolling! :-D
3D modeling! Yaaah!
(More buttons the merrier!)
You know how IRRITATING it is when apps have a separate "zoom tool"?
Alternatively you can try and remember which confounded combination of left/right clicking and cntrl/alt/shift keys your particular 3D modeling program uses to zoom in and out with.
As for slowness, yah, there is that. But A4Tech sells this REALLY nice mouse that has two scrolls wheels offset vertically a bit and next to each other. One is set to 2x or 3x the scroll rate of the other one, and IIRC they are cumulative.
Of course if you are selecting a large segment of text and you need to scroll, the wheel can be a big advantage for when you need precise control.
The border thing IS stupid, but I can KIND OF understand why they did it, it is more regular to draw a "maximized" window as just a normal window that is, well, the size of the full screen.
This would make more sense if it weren't for the fact that Windows treats maximized windows in a special fashion anyways, so adding in another bit of code to chop off the right border shouldn't have been too hard for them. (Well then again this depends on how their underlying code works, hmm.) Anyways, software engineering issues aside, it would be a nice UI fix.
I do find myself using the scroll bar a bit more under Linux. Of course many KDE themes have issues of their own, heh. (Hey look, the close button is CIRCULAR, and requires PRECISE aiming to hit! Yah freaking genius there folks, I used a circular window bar theme for a VERY short period of time, looks good, works like arse)
Actually you know what, I just hit a website that completely uses comic sans, never mind, it does suck when used for 100% of text on a site.
(I also think the site was a parody so...)
Yah, I understand that it is a typographer specialty thing, same way I get irritated at stupid code or stupid UI design (hey look, we'll make the buttons just a FEW pixel below the screen edge, so they are extra easy to miss! ... )
As for Comic Sans, I am so used to seeing it all over the place, when I Googled for it and went to a ban Comic Sans site, I was rather surprised at what font they were talking about. ^_^
Minor correction, KDE takes 1-2 minutes to boot, one other reason I am not using my Linux partition is that Linux itself takes 2-3, and up to 5, minutes to boot.
(Ironically enough, I switched over to Linux because XP is too danged slow with only 256 megs of memory, well, Linux is slower, and XP seems like it is downright speedy now!)