An easier road to market acceptance probably lies in the evolution of the mouse itself. Mouse Systems (Fremont, CA) first released a commercial mouse with an embedded roller for scrolling. The ProAgio included a rolling "barrel" for scrolling. However, wide market acceptance did not occur until Microsoft (Redmond, WA) introduced the IntelliMouse in 1996. In 1996, researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) explored various implementations of scrolling and pointing. In particular, they prototyped a mouse with an isometric, miniature joystick for 2D scrolling, located between the two mouse buttons, dubbed the JoyMouse (or JSMouse, for the combination of the joystick and mouse).
The article is a pretty good read - especially since one of the researchers taught at the university I go to until recently.
So it looks like Microsoft did copy the idea but deserves some credit in making it popular. Maybe they just put their name on Mouse Systems design, maybe they made it better. All I know is my Logitech Optical Wireless wheel hadn't existed 6 years and I can't wait to see what we're using in 2010.
Strangely enough, I *just* had a talk with a good friend about my plans on buying a Mac after I graduate and have a little extra money to play with - for the reasons you mentioned above.
No OS I've used is near perfect - I'm going to kill my new karma by saying this, but I'm have a great time with XP. It'll probably end up that Linux is my development OS, Mac is my "office"/other work OS and XP is my game/toy OS.
It's a good time to be playing with computers right now.
bias: I'm not a linux guru, but I've had other CS students ask me a thing or two about linux.
Back in my early teens, I thought I was *the* power user. I wrote help files telling people how they could put "C:\BATCH" in their path and start up wordperfect, games, anything at all by just typing "wp" or "wolf3d".
Thinking about starting my own ISP, I had heard about this thing called Unix and BSD being really, really good for running servers. Having lots of time on my hands, I got a copy of FreeBSD and threw myself at it, sans manuals or knowledge of "man" (at first) for 48 hours. I made SOME progress and can still remember how weird it was to have a hard drive as a file! (mount/dev/whatever seemed so stupid when I could just do C: before...) Eventually I got my system accepting modem calls from two modems, but it was painful.
My ego smashed, I didn't touch anything resembling Unix for a while.
I started playing around with Linux a few months before I started my CS program - not knowing that it'd end up being my developement OS for a few years - and I picked up SuSe, RedHat and Mandrake.
Suse had hardware issues and I just didn't get like their config utilities. Redhat was a step up, but I tried Mandrake and found my distro of choice. Things weren't easy at first but with a minimum of effort, I got things going.
After finding out "Mandrake = stupid user linux" and "Debian = if you are smart enough, THEN you can use this one", I started feeling I need to prove myself. Which put me back to my teen years and reminded me *way* too much of high school. This time, I didn't bend and I stuck with Mandrake - I could get things done, the company seemed to be going in a direction I liked and the software seemed to be fairly new and easily updatable (when MandrakeUpdate worked).
Mandrake might not be the best linux for everyone. But I wanted to get something done, without learning EVERYTHING. I had time for that when I was younger.
The $60US I just sent (direct credit card payment, SSL and took less than 30 seconds) might not save the company, but for the effort they saved me, it's not nearly enough.
I hope Mandrake has a long and successful future, and if you are using Mandrake now - how much time has it saved you? Can you afford to eat if you give them $60 per year? Likely, yes.
I ran into the same problem last year - I wanted something that I could take around with me, I didn't even care if it had a battery, AC power is fine as long as it had a NIC and large screen.
I got lucky and found a off-name brand laptop (Eurocom, a Canadian company who sells high-end laptops to education/government types).
Being a low-income student, I had two choices - a $300-400 pentium (P200ish) laptop with tiny screen or start up another loan and go for an off-lease $1000 machine that was far more than I needed. I feel your pain!
I got lucky on eBay - found a Eurocom (14" TFT / 350MHz AMD / 128MB) and paid relatively little for it (similar laptops at the time were over $1000). Off-name laptops have been good to me - do a few searches before hand though, as there may be some problems with embedded sound/video cards and linux support. No problems for me though.
The shameless plug: I lost my job recently and I had to choose between rent and selling the laptop. The upside is in a few months, I hope to have a better paying job (graduating in a month!) and will probably buy an off-name again. Maybe even new.
Other tips: Buy a mini keyboard, optical mouse and a few other trinkets for it too - I tried for a while to use the original keyboard, but when surfaces are too high, it gets uncomfortable REAL quick. It's a little more hassle, but bending your wrists in awkward angles for a few hours at a time is *not* a good idea.
A laptop would never replace my home machine but like my Palm VX, it complements wonderfully.
Last time I looked at IDE in any technical depth, I only saw four addresses "reserved" for IDE controller use. I guess you can have any address, but the BIOS couldn't boot off any address, it has to know where to look for the controller. Predetermined list of 4 seems to ring a bell.
Secondly, IDE seems to REALLY hit the breaks when you do two independant operations on two drives on the same channel (say, a read on drive 1 and writer on drive 2). If my 4 controller addresses educated guess is right, and performance does crawl, you'd probably want to have 4 drives on 4 controllers, one each.
If all the above is correct, this guy is plain wrong. He's published, I'm not, I'm willing to admit defeat - where am I wrong? Do the raid controllers emulate being scsi hosts, run off OS drivers (=likely windows ones), etc?
I must have gone to the most enlightened university in North America going by the responses by most of the crowd here.
First of all, go look at MOSS before you call all cheat-detection tools copies of diff. For my university's more rigourous classes, they've set scores VERY low (I've been told about 20-30% of a perfect match) and only 5-10% of the class meet that. The majority of that group were dumb as a rock - cut and pasting ALL code, INCLUDING comments, etc. There was even a case where twins were in the same program, same class, and they used the SAME code in a major assignment. Didn't even change the documentation to reflect the "new" author. There have been false positives, but they are rare and the department errs on the side of the student if there is reasonable doubt.
Like a few have said - these are tools and should be used accordlingly. No one who wields a scapel is qualified to perform surgery, nor should one tool be used to perform cheating tests. A school of any size gets lawsuits for everything. Students can appeal just about anything. Why would they suddenly trust one source of error when students can be ejected from school?
Consider the alternative argument: many students ARE cheating. Hmmm - a course forced on most students, CS degree or not. Many prior students take the course, probably got away with quite a bit.
Collaboration is one thing. Cheating because you think you can get away with it - oops, not anymore - is another thing. Flag the code matches, look at it with your eyes and ASK THE STUDENT. If they can't answer a single question about a 200 line program they wrote, the odds are slim that they wrote it. (maybe we can finally use drinking as a defense though!)
Make sure punishment is swift, certain and (relatively) severe and in a few years, students will either a) do their own work or b) the manditory course's workload will be reduced.
I'm 99% sure anything other than the credit card number itself is 'voluntarily' checked. All the equipment I've seen in Canada only requires a CC number - this can be typed manually, swiped, etc.
But there IS incentive for a business to do some checking - CC companies recommend it, and if someone uses a fake card, CC companies have some options in getting the money back. Or never dispursing it to retail company X in the first place.
I'll borrow the spirit of my 1st year Psychology prof for a moment for one important message:
95% of people who died from cancer ate bread.
The *only* way to be sure that bread causes cancer is to EXPERIMENT. 1 large group eats bread, 1 large group doesn't, compare the numbers. Anyone who reads this study and spreads the word that games make you smarter:
Please don't be a doctor! Last thing I need to hear now is computers are gonna kill me.
(After all, 100% of computer users die)
I saw this a while ago and thought the same thing - 'cept I was wrong.
"equivalent" PC100 memory with DDR is called PC1600. I believe PC133 is 2100, and MUCH more expensive.
I've been quoted $150 for an Asus A7V133 board and about the same (a little higher) for a 128MB PC2100 DIMM. On top of that, the CPUs with the 133FSBs are still around $250 and it's the slowest 133FSB Athlon CPU I have access to (Southern Ontario).
Tom's has a pretty good set of articles on the whole DDR situation. I've read around 5-10% overall speed increases with DDR memory.
Influenza is seasonal, but with a twist. School resumes in fall. *Millions* of people are in close contact after a break. A few get sick, many catch it, and so on - by winter, everyone is sick. They see their parents, their grandparents, etc.
Winter is great for causing symptoms similar to catching a cold. I think the closest link you could find to temperature and illness is when people stay outside long enough to lower their body temperature, severely enough to allow virii/bacteria that die at 36C to live at say, 34C. (read: not likely)
For the record, some DVD players handle CDRs easily. I've tried a Sanyo model (can't remember model, green box, retails $175ish) that read CDRs fine, but a slightly more expensive Toshiba and Sharp didn't. So it IS possible, and not too cost-prohibitive.
I've kept an eye on this for a little while now, being in electronics retail, and I've heard two good POSSIBLE ideas:
1. CDRs return less light than commerically pressed CDs. This hasn't been a problem for newer CD players (in general). If DVD players aren't made sensitive enough, this explains plays-CDs-DVDs-but-not-CDRs. Possible test: put a CD-R in, listen to it spin.. if it spins, stops, spins, stops, spins... I'd assume a reading problem. No guarantees though.
2. This one is complete rumour - but it was a good source and makes SOME sense. I've been informed that all CD media has some info on disc already (chemical, manufacturer, type, etc). Pull up cd-record in linux and you'll get a page of it. Supposedly, a DVD player looks up the codes and if a certain test fails (CD_Type != CDR maybe), it doesn't read. VERY easy to do.
Since this is as much an opinion forum as anything else, I'll toss in my two bits: Sony profits on burners and CDRs. Sony profits more money through Sony Music (90% sure of this). Sony thinks, "Hey, I might lose a *little* in one small revenue stream, but what else is as EASY as this to kill off some piracy? After all, CDRs are only for pirates..." and tries it out on the lower- and middle-end DVD players.
If it backfires... wow, look, all newer models that read CDRs. Or, only high-end models get this feature. Better yet, "Sony offers upgrade for xxx-model owners!" Sony gets minor points in the public's eye for listening to them, while a few people are peeved enough not to buy Sony stuff again.
Seeing as I have the moral spine of Gumby, even after seeing this article and re-reading eBay's privacy policy, I will probably still use the service.
BUT, for people like me, there is a nice way to get this info out and make other eBay users (with greater spines) to send a LOT of comments/complaints to eBay staff.
This should get quite a response. After say, 500 emails, the company *may* just have to look into the legality of its position before some of the more affluent eBay users decide to class action eBay before they can "neutralize" that.
Slashdot Mirror
Relevant quote:
An easier road to market acceptance probably lies in the evolution of the mouse itself. Mouse Systems (Fremont, CA) first released a commercial mouse with an embedded roller for scrolling. The ProAgio included a rolling "barrel" for scrolling. However, wide market acceptance did not occur until Microsoft (Redmond, WA) introduced the IntelliMouse in 1996. In 1996, researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) explored various implementations of scrolling and pointing. In particular, they prototyped a mouse with an isometric, miniature joystick for 2D scrolling, located between the two mouse buttons, dubbed the JoyMouse (or JSMouse, for the combination of the joystick and mouse).
The article is a pretty good read - especially since one of the researchers taught at the university I go to until recently.
So it looks like Microsoft did copy the idea but deserves some credit in making it popular. Maybe they just put their name on Mouse Systems design, maybe they made it better. All I know is my Logitech Optical Wireless wheel hadn't existed 6 years and I can't wait to see what we're using in 2010.
Strangely enough, I *just* had a talk with a good friend about my plans on buying a Mac after I graduate and have a little extra money to play with - for the reasons you mentioned above.
No OS I've used is near perfect - I'm going to kill my new karma by saying this, but I'm have a great time with XP. It'll probably end up that Linux is my development OS, Mac is my "office"/other work OS and XP is my game/toy OS.
It's a good time to be playing with computers right now.
bias: I'm not a linux guru, but I've had other CS students ask me a thing or two about linux.
/dev/whatever seemed so stupid when I could just do C: before...) Eventually I got my system accepting modem calls from two modems, but it was painful.
Back in my early teens, I thought I was *the* power user. I wrote help files telling people how they could put "C:\BATCH" in their path and start up wordperfect, games, anything at all by just typing "wp" or "wolf3d".
Thinking about starting my own ISP, I had heard about this thing called Unix and BSD being really, really good for running servers. Having lots of time on my hands, I got a copy of FreeBSD and threw myself at it, sans manuals or knowledge of "man" (at first) for 48 hours. I made SOME progress and can still remember how weird it was to have a hard drive as a file! (mount
My ego smashed, I didn't touch anything resembling Unix for a while.
I started playing around with Linux a few months before I started my CS program - not knowing that it'd end up being my developement OS for a few years - and I picked up SuSe, RedHat and Mandrake.
Suse had hardware issues and I just didn't get like their config utilities. Redhat was a step up, but I tried Mandrake and found my distro of choice. Things weren't easy at first but with a minimum of effort, I got things going.
After finding out "Mandrake = stupid user linux" and "Debian = if you are smart enough, THEN you can use this one", I started feeling I need to prove myself. Which put me back to my teen years and reminded me *way* too much of high school. This time, I didn't bend and I stuck with Mandrake - I could get things done, the company seemed to be going in a direction I liked and the software seemed to be fairly new and easily updatable (when MandrakeUpdate worked).
Mandrake might not be the best linux for everyone. But I wanted to get something done, without learning EVERYTHING. I had time for that when I was younger.
The $60US I just sent (direct credit card payment, SSL and took less than 30 seconds) might not save the company, but for the effort they saved me, it's not nearly enough.
I hope Mandrake has a long and successful future, and if you are using Mandrake now - how much time has it saved you? Can you afford to eat if you give them $60 per year? Likely, yes.
I ran into the same problem last year - I wanted something that I could take around with me, I didn't even care if it had a battery, AC power is fine as long as it had a NIC and large screen.
I got lucky and found a off-name brand laptop (Eurocom, a Canadian company who sells high-end laptops to education/government types).
Being a low-income student, I had two choices - a $300-400 pentium (P200ish) laptop with tiny screen or start up another loan and go for an off-lease $1000 machine that was far more than I needed. I feel your pain!
I got lucky on eBay - found a Eurocom (14" TFT / 350MHz AMD / 128MB) and paid relatively little for it (similar laptops at the time were over $1000). Off-name laptops have been good to me - do a few searches before hand though, as there may be some problems with embedded sound/video cards and linux support. No problems for me though.
The shameless plug: I lost my job recently and I had to choose between rent and selling the laptop. The upside is in a few months, I hope to have a better paying job (graduating in a month!) and will probably buy an off-name again. Maybe even new.
The auction is up here.
Other tips: Buy a mini keyboard, optical mouse and a few other trinkets for it too - I tried for a while to use the original keyboard, but when surfaces are too high, it gets uncomfortable REAL quick. It's a little more hassle, but bending your wrists in awkward angles for a few hours at a time is *not* a good idea.
A laptop would never replace my home machine but like my Palm VX, it complements wonderfully.
Good luck!
Hi all, quick question for the brighter bunch.
Last time I looked at IDE in any technical depth, I only saw four addresses "reserved" for IDE controller use. I guess you can have any address, but the BIOS couldn't boot off any address, it has to know where to look for the controller. Predetermined list of 4 seems to ring a bell.
Secondly, IDE seems to REALLY hit the breaks when you do two independant operations on two drives on the same channel (say, a read on drive 1 and writer on drive 2). If my 4 controller addresses educated guess is right, and performance does crawl, you'd probably want to have 4 drives on 4 controllers, one each.
If all the above is correct, this guy is plain wrong. He's published, I'm not, I'm willing to admit defeat - where am I wrong? Do the raid controllers emulate being scsi hosts, run off OS drivers (=likely windows ones), etc?
Thanks - inquiring minds.. yadda yadda.
When you saw this article, who else thought:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
- Arabian proverb
I must have gone to the most enlightened university in North America going by the responses by most of the crowd here.
First of all, go look at MOSS before you call all cheat-detection tools copies of diff. For my university's more rigourous classes, they've set scores VERY low (I've been told about 20-30% of a perfect match) and only 5-10% of the class meet that. The majority of that group were dumb as a rock - cut and pasting ALL code, INCLUDING comments, etc. There was even a case where twins were in the same program, same class, and they used the SAME code in a major assignment. Didn't even change the documentation to reflect the "new" author. There have been false positives, but they are rare and the department errs on the side of the student if there is reasonable doubt.
Like a few have said - these are tools and should be used accordlingly. No one who wields a scapel is qualified to perform surgery, nor should one tool be used to perform cheating tests. A school of any size gets lawsuits for everything. Students can appeal just about anything. Why would they suddenly trust one source of error when students can be ejected from school?
Consider the alternative argument: many students ARE cheating. Hmmm - a course forced on most students, CS degree or not. Many prior students take the course, probably got away with quite a bit.
Collaboration is one thing. Cheating because you think you can get away with it - oops, not anymore - is another thing. Flag the code matches, look at it with your eyes and ASK THE STUDENT. If they can't answer a single question about a 200 line program they wrote, the odds are slim that they wrote it. (maybe we can finally use drinking as a defense though!)
Make sure punishment is swift, certain and (relatively) severe and in a few years, students will either a) do their own work or b) the manditory course's workload will be reduced.
I'm 99% sure anything other than the credit card number itself is 'voluntarily' checked. All the equipment I've seen in Canada only requires a CC number - this can be typed manually, swiped, etc.
But there IS incentive for a business to do some checking - CC companies recommend it, and if someone uses a fake card, CC companies have some options in getting the money back. Or never dispursing it to retail company X in the first place.
I'll borrow the spirit of my 1st year Psychology prof for a moment for one important message:
95% of people who died from cancer ate bread.
The *only* way to be sure that bread causes cancer is to EXPERIMENT. 1 large group eats bread, 1 large group doesn't, compare the numbers. Anyone who reads this study and spreads the word that games make you smarter:
Please don't be a doctor! Last thing I need to hear now is computers are gonna kill me.
(After all, 100% of computer users die)
I saw this a while ago and thought the same thing - 'cept I was wrong.
"equivalent" PC100 memory with DDR is called PC1600. I believe PC133 is 2100, and MUCH more expensive.
I've been quoted $150 for an Asus A7V133 board and about the same (a little higher) for a 128MB PC2100 DIMM. On top of that, the CPUs with the 133FSBs are still around $250 and it's the slowest 133FSB Athlon CPU I have access to (Southern Ontario).
Tom's has a pretty good set of articles on the whole DDR situation. I've read around 5-10% overall speed increases with DDR memory.
Minor, irrelevant point:
Influenza is seasonal, but with a twist. School resumes in fall. *Millions* of people are in close contact after a break. A few get sick, many catch it, and so on - by winter, everyone is sick. They see their parents, their grandparents, etc.
Winter is great for causing symptoms similar to catching a cold. I think the closest link you could find to temperature and illness is when people stay outside long enough to lower their body temperature, severely enough to allow virii/bacteria that die at 36C to live at say, 34C. (read: not likely)
Just my two bits.
For the record, some DVD players handle CDRs easily. I've tried a Sanyo model (can't remember model, green box, retails $175ish) that read CDRs fine, but a slightly more expensive Toshiba and Sharp didn't. So it IS possible, and not too cost-prohibitive.
I've kept an eye on this for a little while now, being in electronics retail, and I've heard two good POSSIBLE ideas:
1. CDRs return less light than commerically pressed CDs. This hasn't been a problem for newer CD players (in general). If DVD players aren't made sensitive enough, this explains plays-CDs-DVDs-but-not-CDRs. Possible test: put a CD-R in, listen to it spin.. if it spins, stops, spins, stops, spins... I'd assume a reading problem. No guarantees though.
2. This one is complete rumour - but it was a good source and makes SOME sense. I've been informed that all CD media has some info on disc already (chemical, manufacturer, type, etc). Pull up cd-record in linux and you'll get a page of it. Supposedly, a DVD player looks up the codes and if a certain test fails (CD_Type != CDR maybe), it doesn't read. VERY easy to do.
Since this is as much an opinion forum as anything else, I'll toss in my two bits: Sony profits on burners and CDRs. Sony profits more money through Sony Music (90% sure of this). Sony thinks, "Hey, I might lose a *little* in one small revenue stream, but what else is as EASY as this to kill off some piracy? After all, CDRs are only for pirates..." and tries it out on the lower- and middle-end DVD players.
If it backfires... wow, look, all newer models that read CDRs. Or, only high-end models get this feature. Better yet, "Sony offers upgrade for xxx-model owners!" Sony gets minor points in the public's eye for listening to them, while a few people are peeved enough not to buy Sony stuff again.
Seeing as I have the moral spine of Gumby, even after seeing this article and re-reading eBay's privacy policy, I will probably still use the service.
BUT, for people like me, there is a nice way to get this info out and make other eBay users (with greater spines) to send a LOT of comments/complaints to eBay staff.
Create an auction. Tag a little "Oh, by the way, check out what eBay has been doing to Microsoft software auctions at http://slashdot.org/ar ticle.pl?sid=00/05/29/1542223&mode=nocomment to the top/bottom of your auction.
This should get quite a response. After say, 500 emails, the company *may* just have to look into the legality of its position before some of the more affluent eBay users decide to class action eBay before they can "neutralize" that.