There are quite a few half-height ISA or PCI SBCs on eBay with a Pentium cpu, 32+ mb ram and 16+ mb flash Disk-on-Chip. They'll fit nicely into a small empty radio case, or something similar made manually from Home Depot parts.
Ive won bids on one card with a PCI connector on it, and will plug in a Soundblaster Live, and run Linux on it. It takes standard ATX power and guess what, the car battery is 12V too. My only worry now is adjusting the card output current to what the amplifier takes, and if the PCI slot can take the vibrations of drag races.
I think they can just release the sources for people to try out, under a license that protects their interest and enough people will tweak, tune and compile it to make the whole thing feasable.
Good thing the building blocks of "Linux on Desktop" are being put in place gradually.
A lotta slashdot types love photography. Look for digital camera articles and count the comments...
Many others like me also have radio-controlled devices like airplanes to fly. Beside these, I enjoy travel in general, camping, visiting nearby cities and large scientific installations like the Brookhaven National Labs, although I have to visit the Sudbury Neutrino obs. up here. Aircraft museums arent too bad either.
Beside these, I also happen to work. I cant quite debug a crashed firewall from home. I still have to install a dialup line for debug.
Lanparties too are a reason to sortof, LEAVE the house.
I compiled and ran the 2.6.4 on an eSeries xServer 235 with 6 10k speed disks on RAID5, 2x HT Xeons (3.02GHz), 3 GB ram... and it crashed. The symbols didnt make much sense either.
Ive been using 2.6.3 and 2.6.4 on two other machines with great results, and running oracle on them now. I've been impressed with newer results, I thought the 2.4 ran the system close to wire speed. I've seen most of the performance difference on my SMP machine (2x Pentium3 550MHz) and filesystem (9GB SCSI 80mbps using XFS), but almost no difference on networking, video and the likes.
I'll still keep using 2.4 for full-production systems, well, partly because UML is not mature (or even available) on 2.6 yet.
I'm administering the IT of a small company that uses MS O, Access in some places, Lotus Suite and Lotus Notes. The articles points about Outlook therefore does not apply to us.
We're still having trouble translating the old Lotus application documents to MS O. There are too many of them. For now, keeping Lotus Suite is cheaper than converting to MS O, while all new docs are Word-based. Trying to goto OO is therefore worsening the situation unless compatibility with MS O 2000 is guaranteed (minus Active X and Macros which we dont use).
Hardware is also not an issue since all machines are Pentium3 with 256mb ram and win2k pro minimum.
I tried OO a while ago, a few Word documents did not translate well, and it seemed too slow. At one point during testing it crashed on me. Since it was a while ago, I intend to try it again. However it will have to be very stable. It should also be noted that like PDF, MS Word documents are a bit of an industrial standard with everyone sending them in email attachments expecting you to be able to deal with them. This is another sticking point... can OO's compatibility be guaranteed with MS Word? I doubt the UI training will be an issue.
So we cannot dare switch to OO, even to lower the TCO. If a company stepped forward to support OO and guarantee compatibility, we will pay them the licensing fees. For now we'll remain stuck with MS O and MS Windows. Some points in that document against OO are valid, and I must say that, although I'd prefer OO anyday.
Only one other student in my class knew anything about Linux/BSD/UNIX or anything outside of Windows. You know whats worse? Most of those other students are now in their MBA classes after their BCS. They will be leading IT technicians, the likes of us.
I remember in the second year, the blabbing away of Von Newman architectures, inputs and outputs etc, without any real examples at all. Next class, learning ADA and the students copying structures from each other or googling around to find a piece of code that does the job. Genuine interest in technology was unheard of, except for a small (3) group of Quake enthusiasts. I was so bored.
Tough luck that I couldnt do more than 2 years of college for personal reasons, and am now in the workforce, while theyre in their MBA classes, once in a while emailing me to ask how to get rid of Gator, and help them with their assignment to describe what FreeBSD is.
I sure as hell wouldnt put much value on college grads if I were hiring. I'd test them myself with complex and multiple interviews. Its the only way.
I dont know quite what went wrong, but Mozilla's development just spiralled upwards into features and bloat year ago. That is bad considering its the only really free standalone browser. If youre running say NetBSD on some exotic hardware, or Solaris on x86, or something not mainstream, youre really stuck with Mozilla unless you can get around the overhead of KDE/GNOME and use their browsers.
Mozilla firebird/thunderbird has caught most peoples attention and can be far more popular than mozilla if it didnt crash so much. For now, people with exotic setups will have to use lynx, keep trying mozilla and firebird intermittently and turn back to Windows or Linux on x86 when they get frustrated. I do wonder whose interests is Mozilla serving anyway with such extreme bloat.
This feature is really cool, Ive been to sites where one question was VERY quickly answered. Call them and you have to navigate through touch-tone menus and wait till youre forwarded to 'engineers' who actually know what theyre selling. Email them and youll only get a reply bot saying expect another email shortly and hold your breath.
In fact Ive never had technical questions like how much would a certain microcontrller sample cost, so fast. Its also much lighter on the salesrep than getting calls; any 14 year old can switch between 6 MSN chat windows faster than she can say huh
In college when they were trying to teach me Java, I wiggled my way out by proving I knew both C++ and pascal really well. I'm also allergic to C++, and will use it happily only if the API is QT (not MFC).
I played with QBASIC for many years, made many little pascal apps, did quite a bit of Visual Basic, but was always a little allergic to C++. There were too many things I couldnt even conceptualize. C is so clean and easy, you can make tiny C programs, then read the assembly language and you understand everything. C++ seperates you from the hardware.
Now Java takes that to another limit. Everything is in nicely packed boxes, you program and end up with something thats relatively slow. I know portability is a bid deal, which is why I'm a big fan of making sure my code is ANSI C 89 or 99 with no warnings, and I test it with gcc, borland c, visualc, forte, and intel compilers. Heck gcc compatibility alone will guarantee portability to Java's extent.
Java does allow larger projects, but with too many developers who dont have a clear larger picture in their heads, the project will have the quality of Windows95 and changing the whole model becomes increasing difficult (think of how easily a new linux kernel version is released with everything rewritten, now think of the same in windows). I'm not bashing OO programming, I just think it has its place and that place is not EVERYWHERE.
Java has really become a way to put the half-a-techies colleges are spewing like theres no tommorw to work. You put 20 of them in cubicles and give them parts of the project and they'll deliver. But is it the same as a good C/C++ developer who will understand everything in the project?
Since when does the country of the developer matter so much? The Linux kernel was written by a Fin, so even in 1991 at Linux kernel version 0.1, it was being outsourced. It also means every time youre booting into Linux youre supporting outsourced software (from US) and costing real Americans real jobs.
Heck ATI is a Canadian company, and you'd better start buying nVidia since you dont like Indian software developers. Is the free software movement just a US movement? Since when does nationality of free software developers matter? Why was that story posted at all?
I'm descended from a certain nationality, my grandparents had a different nationality, my parents lived in yet another country, and I'm in yet another country now, none of which is USA or India. Is it really all that horrible for me to contribute GPL software and therefore cost Americans jobs because cheaper software is available? Noone is really openly prejudiced, but doomsday scenarios and the use of fear is common among those who divide us between politically-drawn borders.
Why cant they just build rockets to send people to Mars? Do they have a free reign at Bush's budget till the elections?
If I were O Keefe, I'd move the techies from speech technologies to making sure the next rovers will have Linux/BSD and XFS/JFS/ReiserFS as filesystems... and goddamn COLOR cameras.
Because the whole Monkey Island/ Treasure Island / Peter Pan themeset has been very attractive and marketable. You make a pirate game, movie, cartoon and follow the basic template even if the story is crappy and it'll sell.
I've many caribbean friends, with caribbean accents, and they dont seem they lived such interesting lives back home...
And I wanted go for a $600 vacation to the caribbean, and take a sword with me.
Geeks come in all shapes and sizes. Dont apply the stereotype of a medium-height thick-rimmed glasses, monotonic, sad-sense-of-fashion geek who listens to the MP3 player, constantly taps at his PDA and pulls out his laptop to show off 3d games and knoppix to people around.
I hate small appliances. I hate cellphones and dont have one. The only thing in my wallet is a (paper) diary and a swiss army knife. I dont have a USB-key and hate wireless keyboards and mice. Heck I hate wireless in general.
So whats my connection with technology? I love playing with the innards of Linux and BSD. I fool around with solaris, aix, openvms and os/400 too, right here at my home computer pile. I'm trying to get into ham radio and enjoy soldering SOC chips on self-etched PCBs for prototyping and booting Linux/QNX. Oh yeah, I tune my 93 dodge shadow alot.
Therefore you see, I pity this guy and would try not to be seen around him.
The world is bigger than a 'few' slashdot posters think.
I have used Activestate's perl with windows ADSI Active Directory stuff on our Win2k network with things like one-shot startup scripts, background MSI installs, and gathering hardware and software inventory by batch querying everyones registry.
Start out with VBscript to learn the very wacky internals of Windows scripting, the move on to using perl for some serious power. God willing one day we could just install Linux/BSD and be done with it.
We're killing the support contract of our company with IBM, and spending the money on another identical server instead. Shit happens, we swap the new with the broke server, surely much faster than waiting for their next-day service.
Same with Microsoft. We were paying support for copies of Windows 2000 server, when I realized we've never placed one call to Microsoft. Things go wrong, we format and reinstall Windows; much faster than arguing with a MS technician isnt it?
So just purchasing duplicated hardware and software gets the job done better and cheaper in most cases, except say for ERP systems in which case a bug will have to be fixed and the system cant be just reinstalled for a fix.
I know support contracts are different from software subscription licenses but thought I'd mention it here for brevity. Now on that topic, I wouldnt quite understand why anyone would need subscription licenses from Microsoft anyway. Its 2004 and we still insist on running Windows2000SP4 instead of XP or 2003. We'll wait till 2005 and SP3 before considering 2003. IT departments crave stability in their servers, so going cutting edge with Micrsoft is like shooting yourself in the foot. I wouldnt even go cutting edge on Redhat if the server hosts important stuff.
So ladies and gentlemen of IT, please stop the frenzy of latest, more, bigger, faster, cutting-edge and focus more on better, smarter. We're all in the business of making money.
Someone with a lot of brainpower would always be itching to put it to use. Neither Linus nor Alan Cox would worry about how to kill time. Richard Feynman probably had to find ways to get his head off Physics to get it some rest, same with Einstein.
If youre wondering how to improve brain power or kill time, somethings wrong. Find a cause, like making so much GPL software, Microsoft gets broke, or start some world domination plans.
OK 5 million of lines of code were written ONCE. How many people paid MS? Lets start with 200 million including all legal copies of Windows around the world including China etc.
So each line was sold to 40 users. Theres an average of 40 characters in the line considering so much of the code is { or } or// or int main(void) in the line, meaning each character was sold for $60 on average. Or if you prefer going by lines, $2400 per line of C++ source code! Mind you this price is really against the choice of the consumer because MS is a monopoly and is relatively low quality.
They can charge what it costs them, and healthy competition will keep the pressure to lower costs as RnD will pressure to increase costs. Thats how capitalism works and thats why we bombed Vietnam. Here, capitalism breaks, one of the pressure goes away and people standing in Circuit City just cant for the life of them find an IBM laptop with linux loaded.
I'm using Windows now, to the max, but I put in a lot of work to see if something else can serve my needs, if I can play that music in linux, and look for linux version of the games. When you dont WANT to pay and have to because the vendor blocks other vendors, it sucks.
Hear hear. I remember just wondering why other kids in class never joined my world domination plans and always laughed. I drew many sophisticated diagrams of vehicles, rockets etc that worked, and took great interest in Chemistry, Trignometry etc which related directly to my plans. I drew a helicopters gear system in great detail including materials used, and later saw a real heli used the exact same structures, gears and materials. Thats a whole lot of motivation to go on.
What did kids talk about in class? Laughing at teachers, cynicism, I like this car, that girls great in bed, I had cheerios this morning, I havent done my homework etc. I did come across other geeks and had great conversations with them. With some, I argued over some philosophical things for years (specifically that God doesnt exist), and others gave some good advice, and lent books they never got back.
Put gifted kids together. I understand they can be seriously egoistic, considering the time they spent with uninteresting kids. But that will only challenge them further. If you want your kid to be 'normal', your post on slashdot will earn you many, many, many enemies.
How would you build social skills in someone more concerned with math, science and computers?
You dont! Whats the matter with you. Youre smart enough to know Slashdot exists, yet you post offensive questions like that. Whats wrong with him? And why would you hook him up with inferior hobbies like meeting people.
That said, theres value in being able to say hi to girls. Alternatively you can get them to say hi to you by being a Lotus consultant in a porsche, but there are easier ways while youre making GPL software, and thats training.
Ive seen geeks that ARE social depend alot on humor. That scrawny geeky guy in the group is usually the funniest and certainly doesnt mind being poked fun at. The mathematically inclined are usually a bit on the sensitive side, and it really helps to show them how to deal with people with humor. He should be able to see the funny side of his character, and the funny side of other people, and build from there.
...or the Village of the damned. What adds to the fun of being in that town is the lack of an implemented speed limit.
If I were in Russia, I would try to get a hold of a radiaition suit, test it well, and try to get into the Chernobyl compound and take pictures there (digital camera, not film). The town is eerie, the nuclear compound would be totally alien.
I agree with the travelling part. I'm hoping to get somewhere that will allow me 1-2 months of off-time, possibly unpaid, per year to get out and enjoy life itself. I've always loved travel, and have overhauled my car, and am itching to go for a weeklong camping.
In the long term, I'll probably get back to my original passion: Physics. College has always been more fun than anywhere else and I'll try to stay there as a researcher. Anyones got a job for a physics student + CCNP for 10 months a year???
Slashdot Mirror
There are quite a few half-height ISA or PCI SBCs on eBay with a Pentium cpu, 32+ mb ram and 16+ mb flash Disk-on-Chip. They'll fit nicely into a small empty radio case, or something similar made manually from Home Depot parts.
Ive won bids on one card with a PCI connector on it, and will plug in a Soundblaster Live, and run Linux on it. It takes standard ATX power and guess what, the car battery is 12V too. My only worry now is adjusting the card output current to what the amplifier takes, and if the PCI slot can take the vibrations of drag races.
That wont work. Telling Steve something will not convinvce him.
Just implement it in FreeBSD and Linux, watch the world flock to it, and watch Steve and Gates try it on their OSes.
We should teach them by example. They only know the language of success.
I think they can just release the sources for people to try out, under a license that protects their interest and enough people will tweak, tune and compile it to make the whole thing feasable.
Good thing the building blocks of "Linux on Desktop" are being put in place gradually.
A lotta slashdot types love photography. Look for digital camera articles and count the comments...
Many others like me also have radio-controlled devices like airplanes to fly. Beside these, I enjoy travel in general, camping, visiting nearby cities and large scientific installations like the Brookhaven National Labs, although I have to visit the Sudbury Neutrino obs. up here. Aircraft museums arent too bad either.
Beside these, I also happen to work. I cant quite debug a crashed firewall from home. I still have to install a dialup line for debug.
Lanparties too are a reason to sortof, LEAVE the house.
I compiled and ran the 2.6.4 on an eSeries xServer 235 with 6 10k speed disks on RAID5, 2x HT Xeons (3.02GHz), 3 GB ram... and it crashed. The symbols didnt make much sense either.
Ive been using 2.6.3 and 2.6.4 on two other machines with great results, and running oracle on them now. I've been impressed with newer results, I thought the 2.4 ran the system close to wire speed. I've seen most of the performance difference on my SMP machine (2x Pentium3 550MHz) and filesystem (9GB SCSI 80mbps using XFS), but almost no difference on networking, video and the likes.
I'll still keep using 2.4 for full-production systems, well, partly because UML is not mature (or even available) on 2.6 yet.
If the so called 'free' hardware didnt require you to fork out a fortune for some Redmond software, you can run Free software on it and be all happy.
I'd like some free DOOM4 with a free Geforce 6 in the free machine please. I wonder if AOL's 3 months free connection will be up to all that?
I'm administering the IT of a small company that uses MS O, Access in some places, Lotus Suite and Lotus Notes. The articles points about Outlook therefore does not apply to us.
We're still having trouble translating the old Lotus application documents to MS O. There are too many of them. For now, keeping Lotus Suite is cheaper than converting to MS O, while all new docs are Word-based. Trying to goto OO is therefore worsening the situation unless compatibility with MS O 2000 is guaranteed (minus Active X and Macros which we dont use).
Hardware is also not an issue since all machines are Pentium3 with 256mb ram and win2k pro minimum.
I tried OO a while ago, a few Word documents did not translate well, and it seemed too slow. At one point during testing it crashed on me. Since it was a while ago, I intend to try it again. However it will have to be very stable. It should also be noted that like PDF, MS Word documents are a bit of an industrial standard with everyone sending them in email attachments expecting you to be able to deal with them. This is another sticking point... can OO's compatibility be guaranteed with MS Word? I doubt the UI training will be an issue.
So we cannot dare switch to OO, even to lower the TCO. If a company stepped forward to support OO and guarantee compatibility, we will pay them the licensing fees. For now we'll remain stuck with MS O and MS Windows. Some points in that document against OO are valid, and I must say that, although I'd prefer OO anyday.
I take offence from her words. We never slashdotted anyone, we warned before we tcpblasted ourselves...
Of course you realize I'm kidding. I'm a big fan of her site, and its good to know we're not the only ones to do harm to those good Russian people.
Only one other student in my class knew anything about Linux/BSD/UNIX or anything outside of Windows. You know whats worse? Most of those other students are now in their MBA classes after their BCS. They will be leading IT technicians, the likes of us.
I remember in the second year, the blabbing away of Von Newman architectures, inputs and outputs etc, without any real examples at all. Next class, learning ADA and the students copying structures from each other or googling around to find a piece of code that does the job. Genuine interest in technology was unheard of, except for a small (3) group of Quake enthusiasts. I was so bored.
Tough luck that I couldnt do more than 2 years of college for personal reasons, and am now in the workforce, while theyre in their MBA classes, once in a while emailing me to ask how to get rid of Gator, and help them with their assignment to describe what FreeBSD is.
I sure as hell wouldnt put much value on college grads if I were hiring. I'd test them myself with complex and multiple interviews. Its the only way.
I dont know quite what went wrong, but Mozilla's development just spiralled upwards into features and bloat year ago. That is bad considering its the only really free standalone browser. If youre running say NetBSD on some exotic hardware, or Solaris on x86, or something not mainstream, youre really stuck with Mozilla unless you can get around the overhead of KDE/GNOME and use their browsers.
Mozilla firebird/thunderbird has caught most peoples attention and can be far more popular than mozilla if it didnt crash so much. For now, people with exotic setups will have to use lynx, keep trying mozilla and firebird intermittently and turn back to Windows or Linux on x86 when they get frustrated. I do wonder whose interests is Mozilla serving anyway with such extreme bloat.
This feature is really cool, Ive been to sites where one question was VERY quickly answered. Call them and you have to navigate through touch-tone menus and wait till youre forwarded to 'engineers' who actually know what theyre selling. Email them and youll only get a reply bot saying expect another email shortly and hold your breath.
In fact Ive never had technical questions like how much would a certain microcontrller sample cost, so fast. Its also much lighter on the salesrep than getting calls; any 14 year old can switch between 6 MSN chat windows faster than she can say huh
In college when they were trying to teach me Java, I wiggled my way out by proving I knew both C++ and pascal really well. I'm also allergic to C++, and will use it happily only if the API is QT (not MFC).
I played with QBASIC for many years, made many little pascal apps, did quite a bit of Visual Basic, but was always a little allergic to C++. There were too many things I couldnt even conceptualize. C is so clean and easy, you can make tiny C programs, then read the assembly language and you understand everything. C++ seperates you from the hardware.
Now Java takes that to another limit. Everything is in nicely packed boxes, you program and end up with something thats relatively slow. I know portability is a bid deal, which is why I'm a big fan of making sure my code is ANSI C 89 or 99 with no warnings, and I test it with gcc, borland c, visualc, forte, and intel compilers. Heck gcc compatibility alone will guarantee portability to Java's extent.
Java does allow larger projects, but with too many developers who dont have a clear larger picture in their heads, the project will have the quality of Windows95 and changing the whole model becomes increasing difficult (think of how easily a new linux kernel version is released with everything rewritten, now think of the same in windows). I'm not bashing OO programming, I just think it has its place and that place is not EVERYWHERE.
Java has really become a way to put the half-a-techies colleges are spewing like theres no tommorw to work. You put 20 of them in cubicles and give them parts of the project and they'll deliver. But is it the same as a good C/C++ developer who will understand everything in the project?
Since when does the country of the developer matter so much? The Linux kernel was written by a Fin, so even in 1991 at Linux kernel version 0.1, it was being outsourced. It also means every time youre booting into Linux youre supporting outsourced software (from US) and costing real Americans real jobs.
Heck ATI is a Canadian company, and you'd better start buying nVidia since you dont like Indian software developers. Is the free software movement just a US movement? Since when does nationality of free software developers matter? Why was that story posted at all?
I'm descended from a certain nationality, my grandparents had a different nationality, my parents lived in yet another country, and I'm in yet another country now, none of which is USA or India. Is it really all that horrible for me to contribute GPL software and therefore cost Americans jobs because cheaper software is available? Noone is really openly prejudiced, but doomsday scenarios and the use of fear is common among those who divide us between politically-drawn borders.
Why cant they just build rockets to send people to Mars? Do they have a free reign at Bush's budget till the elections?
If I were O Keefe, I'd move the techies from speech technologies to making sure the next rovers will have Linux/BSD and XFS/JFS/ReiserFS as filesystems... and goddamn COLOR cameras.
Because the whole Monkey Island/ Treasure Island / Peter Pan themeset has been very attractive and marketable. You make a pirate game, movie, cartoon and follow the basic template even if the story is crappy and it'll sell.
I've many caribbean friends, with caribbean accents, and they dont seem they lived such interesting lives back home...
And I wanted go for a $600 vacation to the caribbean, and take a sword with me.
Geeks come in all shapes and sizes. Dont apply the stereotype of a medium-height thick-rimmed glasses, monotonic, sad-sense-of-fashion geek who listens to the MP3 player, constantly taps at his PDA and pulls out his laptop to show off 3d games and knoppix to people around.
I hate small appliances. I hate cellphones and dont have one. The only thing in my wallet is a (paper) diary and a swiss army knife. I dont have a USB-key and hate wireless keyboards and mice. Heck I hate wireless in general.
So whats my connection with technology? I love playing with the innards of Linux and BSD. I fool around with solaris, aix, openvms and os/400 too, right here at my home computer pile. I'm trying to get into ham radio and enjoy soldering SOC chips on self-etched PCBs for prototyping and booting Linux/QNX. Oh yeah, I tune my 93 dodge shadow alot.
Therefore you see, I pity this guy and would try not to be seen around him.
The world is bigger than a 'few' slashdot posters think.
I have used Activestate's perl with windows ADSI Active Directory stuff on our Win2k network with things like one-shot startup scripts, background MSI installs, and gathering hardware and software inventory by batch querying everyones registry.
Start out with VBscript to learn the very wacky internals of Windows scripting, the move on to using perl for some serious power. God willing one day we could just install Linux/BSD and be done with it.
Tell em you need the Internet connection for some porn. The nice GIs will share what they value.
We're killing the support contract of our company with IBM, and spending the money on another identical server instead. Shit happens, we swap the new with the broke server, surely much faster than waiting for their next-day service.
Same with Microsoft. We were paying support for copies of Windows 2000 server, when I realized we've never placed one call to Microsoft. Things go wrong, we format and reinstall Windows; much faster than arguing with a MS technician isnt it?
So just purchasing duplicated hardware and software gets the job done better and cheaper in most cases, except say for ERP systems in which case a bug will have to be fixed and the system cant be just reinstalled for a fix.
I know support contracts are different from software subscription licenses but thought I'd mention it here for brevity. Now on that topic, I wouldnt quite understand why anyone would need subscription licenses from Microsoft anyway. Its 2004 and we still insist on running Windows2000SP4 instead of XP or 2003. We'll wait till 2005 and SP3 before considering 2003. IT departments crave stability in their servers, so going cutting edge with Micrsoft is like shooting yourself in the foot. I wouldnt even go cutting edge on Redhat if the server hosts important stuff.
So ladies and gentlemen of IT, please stop the frenzy of latest, more, bigger, faster, cutting-edge and focus more on better, smarter. We're all in the business of making money.
Someone with a lot of brainpower would always be itching to put it to use. Neither Linus nor Alan Cox would worry about how to kill time. Richard Feynman probably had to find ways to get his head off Physics to get it some rest, same with Einstein.
If youre wondering how to improve brain power or kill time, somethings wrong. Find a cause, like making so much GPL software, Microsoft gets broke, or start some world domination plans.
Thats all you have to do.
OK 5 million of lines of code were written ONCE. How many people paid MS? Lets start with 200 million including all legal copies of Windows around the world including China etc.
// or int main(void) in the line, meaning each character was sold for $60 on average. Or if you prefer going by lines, $2400 per line of C++ source code!
So each line was sold to 40 users. Theres an average of 40 characters in the line considering so much of the code is { or } or
Mind you this price is really against the choice of the consumer because MS is a monopoly and is relatively low quality.
They can charge what it costs them, and healthy competition will keep the pressure to lower costs as RnD will pressure to increase costs. Thats how capitalism works and thats why we bombed Vietnam. Here, capitalism breaks, one of the pressure goes away and people standing in Circuit City just cant for the life of them find an IBM laptop with linux loaded.
I'm using Windows now, to the max, but I put in a lot of work to see if something else can serve my needs, if I can play that music in linux, and look for linux version of the games. When you dont WANT to pay and have to because the vendor blocks other vendors, it sucks.
Hear hear. I remember just wondering why other kids in class never joined my world domination plans and always laughed. I drew many sophisticated diagrams of vehicles, rockets etc that worked, and took great interest in Chemistry, Trignometry etc which related directly to my plans. I drew a helicopters gear system in great detail including materials used, and later saw a real heli used the exact same structures, gears and materials. Thats a whole lot of motivation to go on.
What did kids talk about in class? Laughing at teachers, cynicism, I like this car, that girls great in bed, I had cheerios this morning, I havent done my homework etc. I did come across other geeks and had great conversations with them. With some, I argued over some philosophical things for years (specifically that God doesnt exist), and others gave some good advice, and lent books they never got back.
Put gifted kids together. I understand they can be seriously egoistic, considering the time they spent with uninteresting kids. But that will only challenge them further. If you want your kid to be 'normal', your post on slashdot will earn you many, many, many enemies.
How would you build social skills in someone more concerned with math, science and computers?
You dont! Whats the matter with you. Youre smart enough to know Slashdot exists, yet you post offensive questions like that. Whats wrong with him? And why would you hook him up with inferior hobbies like meeting people.
That said, theres value in being able to say hi to girls. Alternatively you can get them to say hi to you by being a Lotus consultant in a porsche, but there are easier ways while youre making GPL software, and thats training.
Ive seen geeks that ARE social depend alot on humor. That scrawny geeky guy in the group is usually the funniest and certainly doesnt mind being poked fun at. The mathematically inclined are usually a bit on the sensitive side, and it really helps to show them how to deal with people with humor. He should be able to see the funny side of his character, and the funny side of other people, and build from there.
...or the Village of the damned. What adds to the fun of being in that town is the lack of an implemented speed limit.
If I were in Russia, I would try to get a hold of a radiaition suit, test it well, and try to get into the Chernobyl compound and take pictures there (digital camera, not film). The town is eerie, the nuclear compound would be totally alien.
I agree with the travelling part. I'm hoping to get somewhere that will allow me 1-2 months of off-time, possibly unpaid, per year to get out and enjoy life itself. I've always loved travel, and have overhauled my car, and am itching to go for a weeklong camping.
In the long term, I'll probably get back to my original passion: Physics. College has always been more fun than anywhere else and I'll try to stay there as a researcher. Anyones got a job for a physics student + CCNP for 10 months a year???