1 data center gets built and they are calling themselves the data center capital of the country? Well, Salt Lake just opened EBAY last summer and has Oracle, Twitter, and a 1.3 Billion dollar data center for the NSA under construction and we don't feel qualified to make that statement. You don't see NC claiming that because of the apple one... with the tax rate of New York I hardly see that many businesses moving there!
It is up now... new battle.net website is the mysterious page... Just when I was going to decode that ascii on the image to see if it meant anything...
" The new wafer plant will be built in an existing facility at Chandler, Arizona, and will feature 45nm technology - 1/1,333th the width of a human hair"
Mounting samba directories from Linux w/ Finder under Tiger worked just fine for me. Used my stored password from my keychain and let me copy my pictures to my family website just like I'd never upgraded my os. Since it doesn't fail 100% for everyone, that makes it easier to miss... they likely have some certain configuration that causes the problem.
" Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if [Al Gore] had a/. account."
The above should be modded as a troll - you know somebody is going to register the user algore now and say "I do have a/. account and I did so invent the internet!"
Your problem is that during this time they were losing their shirts! Look it up, Hynix, Infineon, Micron were all losing billions of $$$ during this time period. So maybe they got together and said, look guys, we are all gonna be bankrupt if we don't cut production to try and slow this bleeding... And then dell complains cause the memory cost more per box and sicks the government at them. Their profits were in jeopardy. Anyhow, my point is that there would have been no third or fourth company as you postulated selling closer to cost - cause that would have meant their prices were higher! Everyone seems to be lynching the memory companies for wanting to at least break even on things... Ridiculous. Infineon lost billions and got fined for not losing trillions. I think they learned their lesson.
That 185 million dollar fine Hynix got doesn't come close to the multi billion dollar bailouts the Korean banks gave them right after the banks were bailed out my the IMF w/ your tax dollars.
But then world of warcraft came out and it has the os x version on the same cd as the windows one. Hooray. I've quit playing all other games cause it is so addictive, so, the lack of games problem is solved.
Even turbo tax had the os x and windows version together on the same cd. Hooray! (Now if they'd just make quicken files compatible between the mac and pc, that would solve my MAJOR gripe w/ switching... I switched, and I'm glad I did, but that was the worst thing for me!)
If this is such a hot news item, why does Apple already collect tax from me for every song I download (well, excluding the free pepsi ones at least)? They charged me for the audiobook I got as well. Maybe this is, lets make a law, that says we can officially do what we already do, just to be safe?
So, initially it is $499... apple for a while is gonna be production constrained at that price (took them quite some time to finally satisfy ipod mini demand). So take the extra $$$ while it is available and bring up your production. Then once sales begin to ebb... drop the price. Then you can really bring in the masses. Remember - it is always more $$$ to be on the cutting edge of technology!
He's right about making it up in software. I just got an iMac G5 for Christmas... and now I need to get me a new copy of iLife ($79) and upgrade my Final Cut Express ($99) let alone pick up Tiger when it comes out ($???)... just when I thought I could recover my finances from Christmas!:) And they have features I just can't say No to!!! (Hmmm... maybe that actually foils Cringely's plan - might be cheaper at $249 to just buy a MiniMac to upgrade all your software and throw the hardware away!)
The fact people view the programming as trivial is why there are so many crappy, bloated web pages out there. The graphics arts is the part that is trivial... you can make a great informative, usefull, and traffic'd site without any graphics at all. Just look at/. These sites that are all done w/ graphics and flash might be fun to look at but are for the most part very annoying to use... especially for those w/ lower bandwidth.
I would start w/ Jakob Nielsen's book Designing Web Interfaces. That will give you a basic foundation of thinking about a good user interface. Then you might want to read Zeldmans Designing with Web Standards and Cederholms Web Standard Solutions. That will give you a PROPER understanding of standards based html markup and a good intro to CSS. (Read Eric Meyer's books to further your CSS).
As to the programming for web driven apps - I like PHP the best - XML and SQL you would use within PHP. You want to have a good understanding of both of those... SQL especially to hook into database type stuff. Javascript, I'd just get a Cookbook or something - most of what you want to do with that you can quickly pick up from sample scripts.
I talked my parents into getting me an Atari 800 in the 4th grade - 48k of ram, no disk (tape cassette)... a few years later finally got me a 5 1/4" floppy drive and a 300 baud modem (screaming!).
The beauty of the early days was that if you wanted a game, you'd get a computer magazine and type it in. So you'd pick up a lot of code while you did so. I'd find myself changing colors or sound effects. My friend Joey and I started trying to make our own games hoping to get published.
Everybody back then had BASIC and many had other languages as well (LOGO, Assembly cartridge, etc.) Now things are different. The magazines come with cd's you just pop in and run. Most people have windoze with no programming language. Not even a really popular scripting language.
If I was gonna try and get a kid into computers today, I'd go with a mac... teach them how to use applescript to get some things done. Get them making some dashboard applets (coming out w/ tiger - done w/ simple html). Get them to make themselves a homepage as well. I'd say html and simple scripting would be the easiest way to get people into programming these days. Once they get html down, show them some emca script (java script) and maybe flash. Then on to php and perl. Next thing you know, they'll be working at Google (if they don't get consumed by somebody else).
I agree... Mr. Jobs has to worry about the MPAA if he were to offer video... you see, adding video might "induce" me to steal movies to fill up my nice generous disk space. And I'd have to say, it was apples fault - before a video ipod was in existence I would never do such a thing!!!
We found x11vnc to be the fastest server on our solaris setup... it works pretty well in linux as well. Also has the advantage some don't have of hooking into the active console nicely. Registering it into inetd to fire off automatically makes for a nice on demand system...
My order for my iMac G5 is in, ships next month. I think your fears about getting help are unfounded. As an experiment we got my wife an iBook... we'd never used a mac before (I admit I do know Unix quite well)... We were able to do most anything with no assistance (or even reading a manual) at all. Even setting up Xcode for Java for my wife's programming class at college. You try something, it just works. Don't have to worry about viruses, don't have to worry about active x controls installing spyware or taking over the browser - that is why people usually need "help" with their computer. So, now we are switching our main box to an apple... still have to keep a pc on hand for games, but for the most part, your fears are unfounded thanks to a very easy to use and elegant interface. It really does just work.
New features might take a while. Until your average car incorporates all the features which luxury cars already have, there is no impetus for the luxury car makers to develop that many more.
For example... on my BMW X5 I have some really nice features - Xenon lights, auto dimming mirrors (rear and side), rain sensing wipers, light sensing headlights, park distance control (radar that keeps you from banging into things when parking), hill descent control, etc. Adaptive Cruise control and actual cameras to see behind you (instead of a mirror) are also available now on other cars. Until those all come in your standard Honda Civic, it doesn't really profit them to develop that many more.
The ones that will get pushed forward quickly are safety related ones... driver alertness sensors, cop control devices (let them slow/stop your vehicle), passenger detection for airbag deployment (rate how large passengers are, etc.)... that kind of thing. You can see that in the recent past how things like anti-lock brakes and airbags are pretty much the only features that have trickled down lately (well, besides heated seats - that's a woman thing!)
I keep hoping that bluetooth integration for hands free phone systems becomes commonplace so you can use your cellphone... and something to hook in my ipod better than the lame ipod/bmw campaign... (make my nav system screen worth the $$$ I paid!)
That is so true... thought I had security pretty tight on my Cobalt Qube running Linux... then my ISP called me up telling me I'd already used 30G upload and download for the month after two weeks... I normally have like 400MB for a month on my little family server. The spammers were using the Squid vulnerability to make my box a zombie remailer. Had to slap on greatly increased security onto my firewall! They never logged in to my box at all - simply routed their filthy spam through my open port. From all the hits I got googling my issue, I'd say this is way to common... this is one case where Linux is easier to abuse than windows!
I would second the recommendation for the red octane pads... they are pretty durable and work great. I am well over 300 lbs and it has had no problem so if it can handle me it can likely handle anything else that is thrown at it. The best site for ddr info I have found is ddrfreak.com. Go to their forums and read up there and you'll get some actual good information instead of all these insensitive comments from fellow slashdotters about how you just have to burn more calories than you eat blah blah blah...
Check the DDR Simulators forum for your pc software type stuff. If you are willing to get a playstation 2, the current DDR title actually has a workout mode that lets you put your weight in and it will track your workouts for you including calorie counters, etc. Be prepared, it is pretty difficult at first, but after a while you can get into the higher difficulty ratings.
Oh yeah, red octane actually sells usb adapters for their pads as well so you can use those on your pc... or you can get them elsewhere.
Using "em" is not perfect - if people have a small standard font size, when you go to make small text in your web design it can fast become unreadable. And then there is the case of old browsers... not a big deal these days for most but depending on your audience you might have to take that into consideration. If IE would add (to windows, exists in Mac) the TextZoom feature pixels would work quite well, but alas they don't play well with others.
VoIP services are indeed the way to do this... you can transfer your cell phone number to your vonage account and then you can set that up to ring your internet phone first and then if that is not answered to forward to another number (your new cell phone #)... The virtual numbers are pretty cool - you can have local number for Chicago, New York, and LA all on your business card, all coming to your secret lab in Montana...
Well, since you say if you price your product below cost you can be accused of predatory pricing, the memory makers price fixing would be predatory price fixing since they were all still losing $$$ hand over fist even with this supposed price fixing. It might be against the law, but seems to me companies should be allowed to say, "hey, why don't we stop giving our product away with a dollar bill wrapped around each one..."
My EE teachers always said that 90% of us EE's would end up doing software. Well, in my case at least, they were right. It is just different software - more machine level or hardware oriented. So, I would think you could get your experience to help you land more than an entry level position if you got an EE degree.
The other comments about EE's being outsourced can be true as well. I know we have setup design centers in China, Japan, and Europe. However we are still hiring EE's at my company... but we are being very selective. (Better have a good gpa and some good experience to go along with it.) As the economy gets rolling again the big companies will all start hiring again - that should be a bigger worry than outsourcing.
We tried evolution for our solaris and linux users and found it fairly buggy and SLOW hooking into exchange. So we have switched our efforts to crossover office server (run on a server and export office clients to solaris/linux workstations) and that allows the solaris guys to actually use outlook itself. We are still in the evaluation stages, but it is looking pretty promising. You might want to give that an eval as well. Both codeweavers and ximian will give you evaluation licenses as needed so I'd say give them both a try.
Slashdot Mirror
1 data center gets built and they are calling themselves the data center capital of the country? Well, Salt Lake just opened EBAY last summer and has Oracle, Twitter, and a 1.3 Billion dollar data center for the NSA under construction and we don't feel qualified to make that statement. You don't see NC claiming that because of the apple one... with the tax rate of New York I hardly see that many businesses moving there!
Because X-rays are .01 - 10 nm light and EUV is 13.5nm light... so nothing to do with the word, as much as engineers like to label things correctly.
It is up now... new battle.net website is the mysterious page... Just when I was going to decode that ascii on the image to see if it meant anything...
" The new wafer plant will be built in an existing facility at Chandler, Arizona, and will feature 45nm technology - 1/1,333th the width of a human hair"
It's wafer thin!
Mounting samba directories from Linux w/ Finder under Tiger worked just fine for me. Used my stored password from my keychain and let me copy my pictures to my family website just like I'd never upgraded my os. Since it doesn't fail 100% for everyone, that makes it easier to miss... they likely have some certain configuration that causes the problem.
" /. account."
/. account and I did so invent the internet!"
Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if [Al Gore] had a
The above should be modded as a troll - you know somebody is going to register the user algore now and say "I do have a
Your problem is that during this time they were losing their shirts! Look it up, Hynix, Infineon, Micron were all losing billions of $$$ during this time period. So maybe they got together and said, look guys, we are all gonna be bankrupt if we don't cut production to try and slow this bleeding... And then dell complains cause the memory cost more per box and sicks the government at them. Their profits were in jeopardy. Anyhow, my point is that there would have been no third or fourth company as you postulated selling closer to cost - cause that would have meant their prices were higher! Everyone seems to be lynching the memory companies for wanting to at least break even on things... Ridiculous. Infineon lost billions and got fined for not losing trillions. I think they learned their lesson.
That 185 million dollar fine Hynix got doesn't come close to the multi billion dollar bailouts the Korean banks gave them right after the banks were bailed out my the IMF w/ your tax dollars.
But then world of warcraft came out and it has the os x version on the same cd as the windows one. Hooray. I've quit playing all other games cause it is so addictive, so, the lack of games problem is solved.
Even turbo tax had the os x and windows version together on the same cd. Hooray! (Now if they'd just make quicken files compatible between the mac and pc, that would solve my MAJOR gripe w/ switching... I switched, and I'm glad I did, but that was the worst thing for me!)
If this is such a hot news item, why does Apple already collect tax from me for every song I download (well, excluding the free pepsi ones at least)? They charged me for the audiobook I got as well. Maybe this is, lets make a law, that says we can officially do what we already do, just to be safe?
So, initially it is $499... apple for a while is gonna be production constrained at that price (took them quite some time to finally satisfy ipod mini demand). So take the extra $$$ while it is available and bring up your production. Then once sales begin to ebb... drop the price. Then you can really bring in the masses. Remember - it is always more $$$ to be on the cutting edge of technology!
:) And they have features I just can't say No to!!! (Hmmm... maybe that actually foils Cringely's plan - might be cheaper at $249 to just buy a MiniMac to upgrade all your software and throw the hardware away!)
He's right about making it up in software. I just got an iMac G5 for Christmas... and now I need to get me a new copy of iLife ($79) and upgrade my Final Cut Express ($99) let alone pick up Tiger when it comes out ($???)... just when I thought I could recover my finances from Christmas!
#1 has to be the little blue pill! Just ask Bob Dole!
The fact people view the programming as trivial is why there are so many crappy, bloated web pages out there. The graphics arts is the part that is trivial... you can make a great informative, usefull, and traffic'd site without any graphics at all. Just look at /. These sites that are all done w/ graphics and flash might be fun to look at but are for the most part very annoying to use... especially for those w/ lower bandwidth.
I would start w/ Jakob Nielsen's book Designing Web Interfaces. That will give you a basic foundation of thinking about a good user interface. Then you might want to read Zeldmans Designing with Web Standards and Cederholms Web Standard Solutions. That will give you a PROPER understanding of standards based html markup and a good intro to CSS. (Read Eric Meyer's books to further your CSS).
As to the programming for web driven apps - I like PHP the best - XML and SQL you would use within PHP. You want to have a good understanding of both of those... SQL especially to hook into database type stuff. Javascript, I'd just get a Cookbook or something - most of what you want to do with that you can quickly pick up from sample scripts.
Remember - HTML Editors are the devil!
I talked my parents into getting me an Atari 800 in the 4th grade - 48k of ram, no disk (tape cassette)... a few years later finally got me a 5 1/4" floppy drive and a 300 baud modem (screaming!).
The beauty of the early days was that if you wanted a game, you'd get a computer magazine and type it in. So you'd pick up a lot of code while you did so. I'd find myself changing colors or sound effects. My friend Joey and I started trying to make our own games hoping to get published.
Everybody back then had BASIC and many had other languages as well (LOGO, Assembly cartridge, etc.) Now things are different. The magazines come with cd's you just pop in and run. Most people have windoze with no programming language. Not even a really popular scripting language.
If I was gonna try and get a kid into computers today, I'd go with a mac... teach them how to use applescript to get some things done. Get them making some dashboard applets (coming out w/ tiger - done w/ simple html). Get them to make themselves a homepage as well. I'd say html and simple scripting would be the easiest way to get people into programming these days. Once they get html down, show them some emca script (java script) and maybe flash. Then on to php and perl. Next thing you know, they'll be working at Google (if they don't get consumed by somebody else).
I agree... Mr. Jobs has to worry about the MPAA if he were to offer video... you see, adding video might "induce" me to steal movies to fill up my nice generous disk space. And I'd have to say, it was apples fault - before a video ipod was in existence I would never do such a thing!!!
We found x11vnc to be the fastest server on our solaris setup... it works pretty well in linux as well. Also has the advantage some don't have of hooking into the active console nicely. Registering it into inetd to fire off automatically makes for a nice on demand system...
My order for my iMac G5 is in, ships next month. I think your fears about getting help are unfounded. As an experiment we got my wife an iBook... we'd never used a mac before (I admit I do know Unix quite well)... We were able to do most anything with no assistance (or even reading a manual) at all. Even setting up Xcode for Java for my wife's programming class at college. You try something, it just works. Don't have to worry about viruses, don't have to worry about active x controls installing spyware or taking over the browser - that is why people usually need "help" with their computer. So, now we are switching our main box to an apple... still have to keep a pc on hand for games, but for the most part, your fears are unfounded thanks to a very easy to use and elegant interface. It really does just work.
New features might take a while. Until your average car incorporates all the features which luxury cars already have, there is no impetus for the luxury car makers to develop that many more.
For example... on my BMW X5 I have some really nice features - Xenon lights, auto dimming mirrors (rear and side), rain sensing wipers, light sensing headlights, park distance control (radar that keeps you from banging into things when parking), hill descent control, etc. Adaptive Cruise control and actual cameras to see behind you (instead of a mirror) are also available now on other cars. Until those all come in your standard Honda Civic, it doesn't really profit them to develop that many more.
The ones that will get pushed forward quickly are safety related ones... driver alertness sensors, cop control devices (let them slow/stop your vehicle), passenger detection for airbag deployment (rate how large passengers are, etc.)... that kind of thing. You can see that in the recent past how things like anti-lock brakes and airbags are pretty much the only features that have trickled down lately (well, besides heated seats - that's a woman thing!)
I keep hoping that bluetooth integration for hands free phone systems becomes commonplace so you can use your cellphone... and something to hook in my ipod better than the lame ipod/bmw campaign... (make my nav system screen worth the $$$ I paid!)
You don't want early patches anyway... then you'd be paying extra $$$ to beta test the patch for the rest of the masses...
:)
I guess at least there would be less undoing of botched patches for the rest of the masses!
That is so true... thought I had security pretty tight on my Cobalt Qube running Linux... then my ISP called me up telling me I'd already used 30G upload and download for the month after two weeks... I normally have like 400MB for a month on my little family server. The spammers were using the Squid vulnerability to make my box a zombie remailer. Had to slap on greatly increased security onto my firewall! They never logged in to my box at all - simply routed their filthy spam through my open port. From all the hits I got googling my issue, I'd say this is way to common... this is one case where Linux is easier to abuse than windows!
I would second the recommendation for the red octane pads... they are pretty durable and work great. I am well over 300 lbs and it has had no problem so if it can handle me it can likely handle anything else that is thrown at it. The best site for ddr info I have found is ddrfreak.com. Go to their forums and read up there and you'll get some actual good information instead of all these insensitive comments from fellow slashdotters about how you just have to burn more calories than you eat blah blah blah...
Check the DDR Simulators forum for your pc software type stuff. If you are willing to get a playstation 2, the current DDR title actually has a workout mode that lets you put your weight in and it will track your workouts for you including calorie counters, etc. Be prepared, it is pretty difficult at first, but after a while you can get into the higher difficulty ratings.
Oh yeah, red octane actually sells usb adapters for their pads as well so you can use those on your pc... or you can get them elsewhere.
Using "em" is not perfect - if people have a small standard font size, when you go to make small text in your web design it can fast become unreadable. And then there is the case of old browsers... not a big deal these days for most but depending on your audience you might have to take that into consideration. If IE would add (to windows, exists in Mac) the TextZoom feature pixels would work quite well, but alas they don't play well with others.
VoIP services are indeed the way to do this... you can transfer your cell phone number to your vonage account and then you can set that up to ring your internet phone first and then if that is not answered to forward to another number (your new cell phone #)... The virtual numbers are pretty cool - you can have local number for Chicago, New York, and LA all on your business card, all coming to your secret lab in Montana...
Well, since you say if you price your product below cost you can be accused of predatory pricing, the memory makers price fixing would be predatory price fixing since they were all still losing $$$ hand over fist even with this supposed price fixing. It might be against the law, but seems to me companies should be allowed to say, "hey, why don't we stop giving our product away with a dollar bill wrapped around each one..."
My EE teachers always said that 90% of us EE's would end up doing software. Well, in my case at least, they were right. It is just different software - more machine level or hardware oriented. So, I would think you could get your experience to help you land more than an entry level position if you got an EE degree.
The other comments about EE's being outsourced can be true as well. I know we have setup design centers in China, Japan, and Europe. However we are still hiring EE's at my company... but we are being very selective. (Better have a good gpa and some good experience to go along with it.) As the economy gets rolling again the big companies will all start hiring again - that should be a bigger worry than outsourcing.
We tried evolution for our solaris and linux users and found it fairly buggy and SLOW hooking into exchange. So we have switched our efforts to crossover office server (run on a server and export office clients to solaris/linux workstations) and that allows the solaris guys to actually use outlook itself. We are still in the evaluation stages, but it is looking pretty promising. You might want to give that an eval as well. Both codeweavers and ximian will give you evaluation licenses as needed so I'd say give them both a try.