Wow, and I thought eating nothing but MRE rations for a weeks at a time in the Army was brutal. The ones you're describing sound even worse! What branch were you in?
Who said anything about malice? If I challenge and evaluate a job candidate's personality by asking a "trick" question, I'm not doing it because I hate the guy. I'm doing it because I want to know how he responds, because that's (believe it or not) important to how someone will perform their job.
Agreed. A lot of (probably most) real-world situations involve vague and contradictory or just plain impossible requirements. Dealing with them is just as important as coding ability - developers need to have the human skills to understand needs and successfully pitch solutions. In fact, most coding jobs break down roughly as follows: (in my experience)
1.) 1/3 The human skills to understand the problem, which often involves weeding through a tangled mess of requirements written by people who don't understand their own problem in the first place
2.) 1/3 The technical chops to envision and implement the solution
3.) 1/3 The human skills to successfully explain all of the above to those that will be using the solution and successfully pitch a solution
#1 and #3 are the parts they never told me about in college. I quickly learned that people skills were a huge, huge, huge part of the job. Sure, that's not always true -- you sometimes have coding positions where a lone John Carmack type gets to spend 98% of his time coding in a dark room somewhere -- but those are by far the exception. Furthermore, programmers with the brains and chops to perform that kind of role are extraordinarily rare. Don't count on that kind of job unless you're literally one in a thousand (if not more) when it comes to your coding skills.
("One in a thousand" compared to other programmers, that is. Not compared to random people on the street. Hell, being able to write "Hello World" is nearly enough to be one in a thousand compared to J. Average Worker...)
Try looking at the NintendoDS. Lots of innovative games there, especially ones that use the stylus/touch screen.
It's a fairly low-cost platform to develop for; much lower than one of the SUPER 3D OMG consoles. As result you do see more wacky games and risks taken, especially if you don't mind importing some of the wackier DS games from Japan.
(DS carts aren't region-locked; you can pop any DS game into any DS regardless of country of origin...)
Give yourself some time each week to play with new "stuff". Download some new development environments and play with them.
As for choosing what "stuff" to download and explore? Just surf around, subscribe to some development-oriented RSS feeds in a decent newsreader, see what the buzz is about. Some of the buzz is justified, some isn't, but following the buzz with a healthy dose of skepticism and a big grain of salt is tons more effective than just flailing around in the dark.
The big challenge, of course, is blocking out time to do this on a regular basis. I've only been semi-successful (and that's putting it nicely) at that part of things myself. But when I do block out time, it's pretty rewarding.
Sometimes buying a book on a topic is a good motivator, too. Get a nice book stand that you can sit next to your monitor (or a second monitor and a subscription to O'Reilly Safari so you can read online!) and work your way through the first few chapters. That will give you a good feel for if it's something you want to continue with. Sure, books are expensive but consider it a small cost in the larger game of working in a field that generally pays nicely.
Sounds like you need a content management system, not just a database. Your users basically seem to wish for a way to share project-related materials. I see you've already considered that...
We have tried Sharepoint with some success but that is pretty limited too
...so I'd definitely be interested to hear what limitations you ran into there. It's highly possible that some of the open CMS systems (Drupal, etc) could offer you what Sharepoint doesn't, but it's hard to say without knowing exactly what parts of Sharepoint you found limiting for your needs.
You might also consider a hosted collaboration tool such as Basecamp. I haven't used it myself but it has quite a few fans. It's probably more limited (and certainly less extensible) than software like Drupal but the ease of administration (since it's hosted) and easy accessibility (since it's not on your LAN, it's on the 'net) could compensate. Then again, if you're the IT guy... perhaps you don't want a zero-administation solution for job security's sake.:)
It takes some serious marketing balls (and/or or a lack of marketing brains) to release a product branded "2003" when we're already halfway through 2006.
I actually have to applaud the naming move; it accurately lets everybody know that this product is based on Windows Server 2003. It would have been quite misleading if they'd passed it off as " Windows Compute Cluster Server 2006".
Wonder what the meetings between the marketing team and the engineering team were like for this one.:)
Now, what if you could nearly double your salary working a second job and that meant you could semi-retire at age 40.
Double your salary? This isn't possible for any sort of professional career that I know of. Most careers that provide any sort of decent income take more than 40 hours a week.
The only "get another job, double your income" kind of positions I can think of would be menial jobs. If you're making $6/hour putting in 20-30 hours/week at Burger King then yeah, I'm sure you could do another 20-30 hours a week at another burger joint. But that's not the kind of money you can retire on. I mean, you can barely live on that.
The teacher in the article isn't retiring early either, by the sound of it. And she's sure not doubling her money. Sounds like she's supplementing her teaching income by working other jobs just to make ends meet and provide for her kid.
Even if this was possible, that's no way to live. Wasting the prime years of your life working sunup to sundown is not a ticket to happiness.
First of all, that is extremely impressive. Looks great and kudos to the team that produced it.
However there's a huge question.
Is that actual gameplay footage? I realize that it was rendered in real-time on the Nokia. However, that's a different thing from actual gameplay. To me, that appeared to be non-interactive motion-captured animation and not actual gameplay.
It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to mo-cap a bunch of moves, map the animations to 3D models, and play them back in real time.
However, that's a totally different thing from creating actual gameplay utilizing those mo-capped moves. Fighting games, at least the good ones, are fairly complex beasts in terms of the gameplay systems. Hit detection, combo systems, character balancing, parries, and so forth. Simply replaying a bunch of non-interactive motion-captured animations means you're about 1% of the way there; crafting the gameplay is the other 99%.
I agree that the problems are anecdotal. My experiences are just one more data point and should of course be taken with the appropriately grain of salt.
PayPal does, at least, have some semblence of an appeals process. Although it's said to be quite lacking to say the least, at least it exists. They also tend to give some kind of reason as to what the problem was when payments are canceled and/or accounts are frozen.
Google seems shadier. Now, as you say, this is anecdotal. But Adsense account freezes almost always seem to take place right before the first check is due to be cut. In my case I had AdSense ads up for 2-3 months and generated quite a chunk of change for Google before they conveniently pulled the plug right before cutting me a check. I wound up with nothing. I'm not sure if they detected "suspicious" clicks on my Adsense ads or what, but they nullified all my earnings. Surely the vast majority of those earnings weren't suspicious.
I love Google for the most part, and use a great deal of their free products - search (duh), Google Desktop Search, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Notebook, etc.
However, I do not trust them with my money. I had the same experience with Google Adsense that many people have had - account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal right before my first check was due. I never saw a penny.
Realistically, I'm sure that Checkout will be handled by a different internal group within Google. I don't know if they'll have the same "we'll take your money with no explanation" attitude as the Adsense group. But you can count me right the heck out.
Also, for the record... while PayPal horror stories also abound, I've had no problem with them even after several thousand transactions. I'm quite happy with them. If Google Checkout is a PayPal competitor, I know which side I'm on. Until convinced otherwise.
It seems rather shortsighted to single out Lenovo. It would make a lot more sense for government computers to pass some sort of actual security audit, rather than simply singling out a single manufacturer. Most IBMs were probably manufactured in China anyway, even before the sale to Lenovo.
A large percentage of consumer eletronics are produced in China - if we're truly worried about the Chinese government spying on us through consumer electronics, why only care about a single brand?
That was a rhetorical question, of course. Obviously the answer is: "political grandstanding in an election year"
Still, this thing isn't totally without merit. After all, do we really want our government using computers manufactured by a company owned in part by the Chinese government? The American government has sabotaged other countries with software Trojan horses before. While I certainly don't believe that Lenovo Thinkpads have anything malicious lurking in the firmware, it's not totally impossible or anything.
Let's take a quick sampling of low endcomputers on sale at Best Buy this week. Roughly speaking these models are averaging around 150GB of drive space, 3GHZ of CPU power, 512MB of RAM, and the ability to display several megapixels of graphical data at once.
Divide those stats by ten and yeah, you've basically got yourself a high-endphone/PDA combo like the Treo700. Obviously the difference is even greater if you make your comparison with high-end PCs and not bargain basement models like we've done here.
Even the Treo700 is pushing the boundaries of "mobile" for a lot of people. If we restrict the definition of "mobile" to "something the average person can comfortably fit in their pocket" the difference grows even greater.
So. Do you know what an "order of magnitude" is?
Processing power is less than an order of magnitude difference, between handhelds and desktops. Slightly larger handhelds can have standard notebook hard drives, making them less than an order of magnitude of difference.
Except those larger handhelds aren't supplanting PCs, which is what TFA was about: devices that are (or could one day) supplant PCs. PDAs aren't supplanting anything at all, because PDA sales have been declining since the late 1990s. Google "PDA sales decline" for more results than you could read in a lifetime. The only things gobbling up market share and sales are mobile phones, not Palm-esque PDAs and certainly not total market failures like your Psion.
(Which isn't to disrespect your Psion. Those things are awesome and I want one! But they're certainly not grabbing marketshare.)
If you're working in a hotel room, I assumed it will be paid for by the company and most likely comes with internet connection. So is it not possible to use VNC/RDP to access your servers?
In my experience, a lot of hotels have very flaky wireless connections.
Also, if something goes wrong, it can be a while until the connection is restored. The $6/hr clerk at the front desk doesn't always know how to reset the DSL modem much less diagnose and fix a more serious problem.
Those connections sure are useful for websurfing and email but I'd hate to depend on them for Real Work(tm). I sure wouldn't want to have to tell a client that their work is delayed because the WLAN at my Howard Johnson shit the bed.
I see the PC being only partially supplanted by cellphones and other mobile devices. Did tiny portable televisions supplant the living room television? No, because they're just not as nice.
Mobile phones have largely replaced landline phones for a lot of people because they're able to do almost everything better than landline phones (portability, easy address book address) at a comparable price (an extra $20 a month or so).
However, mobile phones and PDAs do not do everything better than traditional PCs. Their advantages are price, portability, and simplicity - all extremely important traits that will allow them to carve out more and more market share over time.
However, for the forseeable future (10-20 years?) PCs will be several orders of magnitudes more powerful than mobile devices when it comes to storage capacity, power, display, and input devices.
Other aspects will take even longer (25+ years?) to be bested by mobile devices due to the sheer physical limits of mobile devices - big screens and comfortable input devices. Over time, I'm sure creators mobile devices will overcome these challenges. We've all seen scifi movies where users have portable 10-megapixel displays that are the size of dimes and can be worn as an eyepiece and I'm sure bright MIT grads are working to make that a reality in some lab somewhere.
Plus, as an added bonus, I like to think the day will come, sometime down the road, when some snobby slashbot sees a used black MacBook on sale at a sensational price, and he will be in agony over it, because even though it fits his needs perfectly, he will utterly detest the idea of ever being seen with it. Something about that image makes me smile.
This kind of describes me. The shame of people knowing I paid an extra $150 just for the black finish is equal to the pain of suffering that $150 hit in the first place.
Usually my view with "big ticket" purchases (cars, big appliances, computers) is that it's worth it to pay a little more for something you'll be truly happy with over the years. But I'd go with the white model here just on principle, even though it's the black one that makes me drool.
So 25% of doctors are AOL users. Now I'm really afraid to go in for my next checkup.
Hahaha. That was definitely my first reaction, too. But these people were prominent doctors in their field, so their average age was even higher than the average doctor's. I'd say the average age of these doctors was 50+ as far as I know.:)
I used to work for a company that sent emails to medical professionals regarding ongoing clinical drug studies.
These emails absolutely took "opt-in" to the next level.
Not only did the doctors opt-in to receive these emails, they had to go through a fairly rigorous screening process to be eligible to receive them. On top of that, it actually would have been highly illegal for us to send these emails to others!
So, needless to say, the emails weren't spam and were going to modestly-sized email lists of 100-1,000 total recipients, approx 25% of which were AOL users.
And still, we had countless problems with AOL blocking them. AOL never listened nor responded.
The iCal calendar format (.ics) has been the de facto open calendaring standard for a few years now. The Mozilla Calendar Project (aka "Lightning") supports it as well.
This isn't really a "Google cooperating with Apple" thing as much as it is a "Google using the most popular open calendaring format in the world today, for which there are already thousands of publically-accessible calendars, because it is in Google's own best interests".
Still, it's a great example of the good that comes from open standards. I love the fact that I can add all the existing.ics calendars out there to Google Calendar, such as sports schedules for the local teams.
In the above quote, you placed the burden of efficiency on the compiler, and on this quote, you placed the burden of efficiency on the programmer. Which is responsible for the optimization of the resulting binary, the compiler or the language?
You certainly made a great point here, though. To be honest, I'm not sure of the answer. I was banking on it being "both".
I'm going on various (admittedly secondhand) things I've heard about Xbox360/PS3 development along with several whitepapers I've read. Creating code that fully utilizes the 360's three multithreaded cores or the PS3's multiple execution units seems to be quite the challenge.
I'm thinking that instruction scheduling for a single-threaded in-order core could be handled by the compiler. Whereas vectorization and/or multithreading are still largely the domain of hand-tuned low-level code, despite compilers' slight inroads into this area.
But I guess I really muddied the issue since this was a thread about in-order vs. out-of-order CPUs, not vectorization and multithreading.
To some extent the concepts are intertwined (since the trend seems to be dropping out-of-order execution in favor of vector units and/or multithreading support) but not necessarily so.
Not really. The best case for any in-order processor is to have dependent instructions as far apart from each other as possible....no in-order pipeline will be particularly disadvantaged by this.
You're assuming that the definition of "dependent instructions" is the same for every in-order processor sharing the same instruction set. I think that's a highly suspect assumption!
Different theoretical in-order x86 CPUs would surely differ in terms of execution units and other factors.
That may have mattered in previous iterations of CPU hardware, but haven't the last few generations of AMD & Intel CPUs used the same instruction sets?
You can have two processors that implement the exact same instruction set, yet have entirely different performance characteristics.
Of course, this happens even with complex out-of-order cores. With simpler, in-order cores, the difference really grows. You need to tightly couple your code (typically via compiler optimizations, unless you're hand-coding assembly) to a specific implementation of the x86 instruction set instead of merely writing good clean efficient code and letting your friendly out-of-order core figure out an efficient way to run it.
There's no right or wrong answer. The simple, in-order approach definitely has some real strengths. You can achieve some stunning performance this way (at a large cost in man-hours) assuming the coders and compilers are up to the task.
In-order cores are probably the right approach for markets without a diverse selection of CPUs. Game consoles come to mind.
But with all the different CPUs floating around in the PC world, I think out-of-order cores are definitely the right approach. How many different processor architectures have we seen in the past 10 years? At least 20 or 30 if you count everything from AMD/Intel/Transmeta/VIA/whoever.
It's a philosophical difference. Should we optimize code at run-time (like an OOOE processor) or rely on the compiler to optimize code at compile time (the IOE approach)?
The good thing about in-order execution is that it keeps the actual silicon simple and uses less transistors. This keeps costs down and engineers have more die space to "spend" on other features, such as more cores or more cache.
The bad thing about in-order execution is that your compiled, highly-optimized-for-a-specific-CPU code will only really perform its best on one particular CPU. And that's assuming the compiler does its job well. Imagine in a world where AthlonXPs, P4s, P-Ms, and Athlon64s were all highly in-order CPUs. Each piece of software out there in the wild would run on all of them but would only reach peak performance on one of them.
(Unless developers released multiple binaries or the source code itself. While we'd HAVE source code for everything in an ideal world, that just isn't the case for a lot of performance-critical software out there such as games and commerical multimedia software.)
As a programmer, I like the idea of out-of-order execution and the concept of runtime optimization. Programmers are typically the limiting factor in any software development project. You want those guys (and girls) worrying about efficient, maintainable, and correct code... not CPU specifics.
I'd love to hear some facts on the relative performance benefits of runtime/compiletime optimization. I know that some optimizations can only be achieved at runtime and some can only be achieved at compiletime because they require analysis too complex to tackle in realtime.
Now that I'm getting PHP under my belt, do I have any reason to learn C? Isn't it Ruby time? Shouldn't everyone go LAMP beginner programmer or otherwise?
LAMP is certainly a great tool. It's very practical and useful.
As for a beginner language? Hmm. I always kind of wince when people get their programming feet wet with web-based development. There are so many issues involved with web development (browser issues, the interplay between database/server-side scripting/client-side scripting/etc) and several different languages involved (SQL,PHP,HTML at a minimum) that a beginner's head is often swimming.
It's certainly not rocket science, and if you can hack it - good for you! But I'm kind of skeptical that the best way to learn good programming practices by starting off with web development.
On the other hand, web development is fun and you can see some immediate results. Throwing an application up on the web is a lot more satisfying than writing Yet Another Linked List Implementation in C/C++ or something - something that would surely turn a lot of potential programmers off. While I'd rather see new programmers go the traditional CS route and do some learning of "the basics" in non-GUI non-web programming environments*... whatever works. Have fun!
* These environments could certainly be modern OO languages like Ruby
Slashdot Mirror
some sort of 100:0 kill ration
Wow, and I thought eating nothing but MRE rations for a weeks at a time in the Army was brutal. The ones you're describing sound even worse! What branch were you in?
Agreed. A lot of (probably most) real-world situations involve vague and contradictory or just plain impossible requirements. Dealing with them is just as important as coding ability - developers need to have the human skills to understand needs and successfully pitch solutions. In fact, most coding jobs break down roughly as follows: (in my experience)
1.) 1/3 The human skills to understand the problem, which often involves weeding through a tangled mess of requirements written by people who don't understand their own problem in the first place
2.) 1/3 The technical chops to envision and implement the solution
3.) 1/3 The human skills to successfully explain all of the above to those that will be using the solution and successfully pitch a solution
#1 and #3 are the parts they never told me about in college. I quickly learned that people skills were a huge, huge, huge part of the job. Sure, that's not always true -- you sometimes have coding positions where a lone John Carmack type gets to spend 98% of his time coding in a dark room somewhere -- but those are by far the exception. Furthermore, programmers with the brains and chops to perform that kind of role are extraordinarily rare. Don't count on that kind of job unless you're literally one in a thousand (if not more) when it comes to your coding skills.
("One in a thousand" compared to other programmers, that is. Not compared to random people on the street. Hell, being able to write "Hello World" is nearly enough to be one in a thousand compared to J. Average Worker...)
Try looking at the NintendoDS. Lots of innovative games there, especially ones that use the stylus/touch screen.
It's a fairly low-cost platform to develop for; much lower than one of the SUPER 3D OMG consoles. As result you do see more wacky games and risks taken, especially if you don't mind importing some of the wackier DS games from Japan.
(DS carts aren't region-locked; you can pop any DS game into any DS regardless of country of origin...)
Give yourself some time each week to play with new "stuff". Download some new development environments and play with them.
As for choosing what "stuff" to download and explore? Just surf around, subscribe to some development-oriented RSS feeds in a decent newsreader, see what the buzz is about. Some of the buzz is justified, some isn't, but following the buzz with a healthy dose of skepticism and a big grain of salt is tons more effective than just flailing around in the dark.
The big challenge, of course, is blocking out time to do this on a regular basis. I've only been semi-successful (and that's putting it nicely) at that part of things myself. But when I do block out time, it's pretty rewarding.
Sometimes buying a book on a topic is a good motivator, too. Get a nice book stand that you can sit next to your monitor (or a second monitor and a subscription to O'Reilly Safari so you can read online!) and work your way through the first few chapters. That will give you a good feel for if it's something you want to continue with. Sure, books are expensive but consider it a small cost in the larger game of working in a field that generally pays nicely.
Sounds like you need a content management system, not just a database. Your users basically seem to wish for a way to share project-related materials. I see you've already considered that...
...so I'd definitely be interested to hear what limitations you ran into there. It's highly possible that some of the open CMS systems (Drupal, etc) could offer you what Sharepoint doesn't, but it's hard to say without knowing exactly what parts of Sharepoint you found limiting for your needs.
You might also consider a hosted collaboration tool such as Basecamp. I haven't used it myself but it has quite a few fans. It's probably more limited (and certainly less extensible) than software like Drupal but the ease of administration (since it's hosted) and easy accessibility (since it's not on your LAN, it's on the 'net) could compensate. Then again, if you're the IT guy... perhaps you don't want a zero-administation solution for job security's sake. :)
It takes some serious marketing balls (and/or or a lack of marketing brains) to release a product branded "2003" when we're already halfway through 2006.
:)
I actually have to applaud the naming move; it accurately lets everybody know that this product is based on Windows Server 2003. It would have been quite misleading if they'd passed it off as " Windows Compute Cluster Server 2006".
Wonder what the meetings between the marketing team and the engineering team were like for this one.
Now, what if you could nearly double your salary working a second job and that meant you could semi-retire at age 40.
Double your salary? This isn't possible for any sort of professional career that I know of. Most careers that provide any sort of decent income take more than 40 hours a week.
The only "get another job, double your income" kind of positions I can think of would be menial jobs. If you're making $6/hour putting in 20-30 hours/week at Burger King then yeah, I'm sure you could do another 20-30 hours a week at another burger joint. But that's not the kind of money you can retire on. I mean, you can barely live on that.
The teacher in the article isn't retiring early either, by the sound of it. And she's sure not doubling her money. Sounds like she's supplementing her teaching income by working other jobs just to make ends meet and provide for her kid.
Even if this was possible, that's no way to live. Wasting the prime years of your life working sunup to sundown is not a ticket to happiness.
However there's a huge question.
Is that actual gameplay footage? I realize that it was rendered in real-time on the Nokia. However, that's a different thing from actual gameplay. To me, that appeared to be non-interactive motion-captured animation and not actual gameplay.
It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to mo-cap a bunch of moves, map the animations to 3D models, and play them back in real time.
However, that's a totally different thing from creating actual gameplay utilizing those mo-capped moves. Fighting games, at least the good ones, are fairly complex beasts in terms of the gameplay systems. Hit detection, combo systems, character balancing, parries, and so forth. Simply replaying a bunch of non-interactive motion-captured animations means you're about 1% of the way there; crafting the gameplay is the other 99%.
I agree that the problems are anecdotal. My experiences are just one more data point and should of course be taken with the appropriately grain of salt.
PayPal does, at least, have some semblence of an appeals process. Although it's said to be quite lacking to say the least, at least it exists. They also tend to give some kind of reason as to what the problem was when payments are canceled and/or accounts are frozen.
Google seems shadier. Now, as you say, this is anecdotal. But Adsense account freezes almost always seem to take place right before the first check is due to be cut. In my case I had AdSense ads up for 2-3 months and generated quite a chunk of change for Google before they conveniently pulled the plug right before cutting me a check. I wound up with nothing. I'm not sure if they detected "suspicious" clicks on my Adsense ads or what, but they nullified all my earnings. Surely the vast majority of those earnings weren't suspicious.
I love Google for the most part, and use a great deal of their free products - search (duh), Google Desktop Search, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Notebook, etc.
However, I do not trust them with my money. I had the same experience with Google Adsense that many people have had - account frozen and terminated with no explanation and no possibility for appeal right before my first check was due. I never saw a penny.
Realistically, I'm sure that Checkout will be handled by a different internal group within Google. I don't know if they'll have the same "we'll take your money with no explanation" attitude as the Adsense group. But you can count me right the heck out.
Also, for the record... while PayPal horror stories also abound, I've had no problem with them even after several thousand transactions. I'm quite happy with them. If Google Checkout is a PayPal competitor, I know which side I'm on. Until convinced otherwise.
Were you kidding about the "nice" part or the "people" part?
It seems rather shortsighted to single out Lenovo. It would make a lot more sense for government computers to pass some sort of actual security audit, rather than simply singling out a single manufacturer. Most IBMs were probably manufactured in China anyway, even before the sale to Lenovo.
A large percentage of consumer eletronics are produced in China - if we're truly worried about the Chinese government spying on us through consumer electronics, why only care about a single brand?
That was a rhetorical question, of course. Obviously the answer is: "political grandstanding in an election year"
Still, this thing isn't totally without merit. After all, do we really want our government using computers manufactured by a company owned in part by the Chinese government? The American government has sabotaged other countries with software Trojan horses before. While I certainly don't believe that Lenovo Thinkpads have anything malicious lurking in the firmware, it's not totally impossible or anything.
Let's take a quick sampling of low end computers on sale at Best Buy this week. Roughly speaking these models are averaging around 150GB of drive space, 3GHZ of CPU power, 512MB of RAM, and the ability to display several megapixels of graphical data at once.
Divide those stats by ten and yeah, you've basically got yourself a high-end phone/PDA combo like the Treo700. Obviously the difference is even greater if you make your comparison with high-end PCs and not bargain basement models like we've done here.
Even the Treo700 is pushing the boundaries of "mobile" for a lot of people. If we restrict the definition of "mobile" to "something the average person can comfortably fit in their pocket" the difference grows even greater.
So. Do you know what an "order of magnitude" is?
Except those larger handhelds aren't supplanting PCs, which is what TFA was about: devices that are (or could one day) supplant PCs. PDAs aren't supplanting anything at all, because PDA sales have been declining since the late 1990s. Google "PDA sales decline" for more results than you could read in a lifetime. The only things gobbling up market share and sales are mobile phones, not Palm-esque PDAs and certainly not total market failures like your Psion.
(Which isn't to disrespect your Psion. Those things are awesome and I want one! But they're certainly not grabbing marketshare.)
Also, if something goes wrong, it can be a while until the connection is restored. The $6/hr clerk at the front desk doesn't always know how to reset the DSL modem much less diagnose and fix a more serious problem.
Those connections sure are useful for websurfing and email but I'd hate to depend on them for Real Work(tm). I sure wouldn't want to have to tell a client that their work is delayed because the WLAN at my Howard Johnson shit the bed.
I see the PC being only partially supplanted by cellphones and other mobile devices. Did tiny portable televisions supplant the living room television? No, because they're just not as nice.
Mobile phones have largely replaced landline phones for a lot of people because they're able to do almost everything better than landline phones (portability, easy address book address) at a comparable price (an extra $20 a month or so).
However, mobile phones and PDAs do not do everything better than traditional PCs. Their advantages are price, portability, and simplicity - all extremely important traits that will allow them to carve out more and more market share over time.
However, for the forseeable future (10-20 years?) PCs will be several orders of magnitudes more powerful than mobile devices when it comes to storage capacity, power, display, and input devices.
Other aspects will take even longer (25+ years?) to be bested by mobile devices due to the sheer physical limits of mobile devices - big screens and comfortable input devices. Over time, I'm sure creators mobile devices will overcome these challenges. We've all seen scifi movies where users have portable 10-megapixel displays that are the size of dimes and can be worn as an eyepiece and I'm sure bright MIT grads are working to make that a reality in some lab somewhere.
Plus, as an added bonus, I like to think the day will come, sometime down the road, when some snobby slashbot sees a used black MacBook on sale at a sensational price, and he will be in agony over it, because even though it fits his needs perfectly, he will utterly detest the idea of ever being seen with it. Something about that image makes me smile.
This kind of describes me. The shame of people knowing I paid an extra $150 just for the black finish is equal to the pain of suffering that $150 hit in the first place.
Usually my view with "big ticket" purchases (cars, big appliances, computers) is that it's worth it to pay a little more for something you'll be truly happy with over the years. But I'd go with the white model here just on principle, even though it's the black one that makes me drool.
So 25% of doctors are AOL users. Now I'm really afraid to go in for my next checkup.
:)
Hahaha. That was definitely my first reaction, too. But these people were prominent doctors in their field, so their average age was even higher than the average doctor's. I'd say the average age of these doctors was 50+ as far as I know.
I used to work for a company that sent emails to medical professionals regarding ongoing clinical drug studies.
These emails absolutely took "opt-in" to the next level.
Not only did the doctors opt-in to receive these emails, they had to go through a fairly rigorous screening process to be eligible to receive them. On top of that, it actually would have been highly illegal for us to send these emails to others!
So, needless to say, the emails weren't spam and were going to modestly-sized email lists of 100-1,000 total recipients, approx 25% of which were AOL users.
And still, we had countless problems with AOL blocking them. AOL never listened nor responded.
The iCal calendar format (.ics) has been the de facto open calendaring standard for a few years now. The Mozilla Calendar Project (aka "Lightning") supports it as well.
.ics calendars out there to Google Calendar, such as sports schedules for the local teams.
This isn't really a "Google cooperating with Apple" thing as much as it is a "Google using the most popular open calendaring format in the world today, for which there are already thousands of publically-accessible calendars, because it is in Google's own best interests".
Still, it's a great example of the good that comes from open standards. I love the fact that I can add all the existing
In the above quote, you placed the burden of efficiency on the compiler, and on this quote, you placed the burden of efficiency on the programmer. Which is responsible for the optimization of the resulting binary, the compiler or the language?
You certainly made a great point here, though. To be honest, I'm not sure of the answer. I was banking on it being "both".
I'm going on various (admittedly secondhand) things I've heard about Xbox360/PS3 development along with several whitepapers I've read. Creating code that fully utilizes the 360's three multithreaded cores or the PS3's multiple execution units seems to be quite the challenge.
I'm thinking that instruction scheduling for a single-threaded in-order core could be handled by the compiler. Whereas vectorization and/or multithreading are still largely the domain of hand-tuned low-level code, despite compilers' slight inroads into this area.
But I guess I really muddied the issue since this was a thread about in-order vs. out-of-order CPUs, not vectorization and multithreading.
To some extent the concepts are intertwined (since the trend seems to be dropping out-of-order execution in favor of vector units and/or multithreading support) but not necessarily so.
Not really. The best case for any in-order processor is to have dependent instructions as far apart from each other as possible. ...no in-order pipeline will be particularly disadvantaged by this.
You're assuming that the definition of "dependent instructions" is the same for every in-order processor sharing the same instruction set. I think that's a highly suspect assumption!
Different theoretical in-order x86 CPUs would surely differ in terms of execution units and other factors.
Wow, that sounds fascinating. Sounds like that achieves the best of all worlds with minimal drawbacks.
I'd seen the odd reference to LLVM in the past, but I'd never seen a succinct description of its benefits until now. Thanks for the informative reply.
You can have two processors that implement the exact same instruction set, yet have entirely different performance characteristics.
Of course, this happens even with complex out-of-order cores. With simpler, in-order cores, the difference really grows. You need to tightly couple your code (typically via compiler optimizations, unless you're hand-coding assembly) to a specific implementation of the x86 instruction set instead of merely writing good clean efficient code and letting your friendly out-of-order core figure out an efficient way to run it.
There's no right or wrong answer. The simple, in-order approach definitely has some real strengths. You can achieve some stunning performance this way (at a large cost in man-hours) assuming the coders and compilers are up to the task.
In-order cores are probably the right approach for markets without a diverse selection of CPUs. Game consoles come to mind.
But with all the different CPUs floating around in the PC world, I think out-of-order cores are definitely the right approach. How many different processor architectures have we seen in the past 10 years? At least 20 or 30 if you count everything from AMD/Intel/Transmeta/VIA/whoever.
It's a philosophical difference. Should we optimize code at run-time (like an OOOE processor) or rely on the compiler to optimize code at compile time (the IOE approach)?
The good thing about in-order execution is that it keeps the actual silicon simple and uses less transistors. This keeps costs down and engineers have more die space to "spend" on other features, such as more cores or more cache.
The bad thing about in-order execution is that your compiled, highly-optimized-for-a-specific-CPU code will only really perform its best on one particular CPU. And that's assuming the compiler does its job well. Imagine in a world where AthlonXPs, P4s, P-Ms, and Athlon64s were all highly in-order CPUs. Each piece of software out there in the wild would run on all of them but would only reach peak performance on one of them.
(Unless developers released multiple binaries or the source code itself. While we'd HAVE source code for everything in an ideal world, that just isn't the case for a lot of performance-critical software out there such as games and commerical multimedia software.)
As a programmer, I like the idea of out-of-order execution and the concept of runtime optimization. Programmers are typically the limiting factor in any software development project. You want those guys (and girls) worrying about efficient, maintainable, and correct code... not CPU specifics.
I'd love to hear some facts on the relative performance benefits of runtime/compiletime optimization. I know that some optimizations can only be achieved at runtime and some can only be achieved at compiletime because they require analysis too complex to tackle in realtime.
Now that I'm getting PHP under my belt, do I have any reason to learn C? Isn't it Ruby time? Shouldn't everyone go LAMP beginner programmer or otherwise?
LAMP is certainly a great tool. It's very practical and useful.
As for a beginner language? Hmm. I always kind of wince when people get their programming feet wet with web-based development. There are so many issues involved with web development (browser issues, the interplay between database/server-side scripting/client-side scripting/etc) and several different languages involved (SQL,PHP,HTML at a minimum) that a beginner's head is often swimming.
It's certainly not rocket science, and if you can hack it - good for you! But I'm kind of skeptical that the best way to learn good programming practices by starting off with web development.
On the other hand, web development is fun and you can see some immediate results. Throwing an application up on the web is a lot more satisfying than writing Yet Another Linked List Implementation in C/C++ or something - something that would surely turn a lot of potential programmers off. While I'd rather see new programmers go the traditional CS route and do some learning of "the basics" in non-GUI non-web programming environments*... whatever works. Have fun!
* These environments could certainly be modern OO languages like Ruby