3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures. 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling. Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon. I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.
There is a famous fable (by Aesop) about a tortoise and a hare racing. I don't think Open Source is better because of more eyeballs at any instant, I believe it is better because it is examined more often over a much longer period of time (in the same way the tortoise beats the hare in the fabled race). This is actually the same strategy Microsoft use against competitors. Even if their first releases are substandard compared to the competition they add features with each release (surviving because of their cash cows in other areas, when those products would have failed if they were any other company). The same goes for the GNU tools and Linux. Even if other O/Ss developed features faster they couldn't afford to keep adding them at the same incremental rate because they used traditional company economics to rapidly produce their product - but cannot continue to invest at that same rate. GCC has outlived what were initial better competitor compilers in the much same way that Microsoft's tools have. Although due to corporate necessities Microsoft must keep changing direction every few years in order to keep people buying new stuff. Open Source does not need to do this so leverages all its old 'products' which allows it to get further along the exponential decay curve of defects fixed/remaining. It is *more, integrated time* on the core Open Source products that make them superior - something Microsoft can't do as it must change it's direction every three to five years in tooling and technology to make customers pay again and again or else it's cash streams will stagnate (fatal for a company relying on growth-obsessed share investors).
To me the most appropriate word for Open Source compared to commercial software is *inexorable*. Open Source is the relentless glacier (ok, Borg for those of you who need to get out more) that grinds all in its path. Even worse than a static Borg, Open Source is snowballing through the network effect. Even the latest and greatest cellphones are Open Source and companies are scrambling to adopt it in devices and their corporate data centers. Microsoft can't defeat Open Source due to the different set of economics at work. It is simply a matter of time before Microsoft cannot offer enough new features to make paying for it more worthwhile than using a free equivalent.
Yes, but the 'gaming market' is not nearly as big as the 3D graphics market now is it, Mr Moms Basement Dweller? The 3D graphics market covers avionics, scientific visualization, handheld/portable/embedded devices, medical systems. Guess what? they're not using DirectX/Direct3D. Direct3D is oriented for shrinkwrapped games on Windows, which is a smaller part of the pie than you'd imagine. Perhaps once you get to the workplace you might get to see this.
One thing I notice (as a former physicist turned developer) is that computer science trained folk are very poor at documenting their *units*. For example, a time duration may be in days, years, milliseconds. Without either naming your variables with a unit name (eg. sleepDurationMillis) or putting in a comment stating the unit of measure at the point of declaration it becomes infuriating and risk-prone using other people's code. Comments are absolutely essential to document the units that variables use. It's also useful having light commentary describing the preconditions of a method and what will cause it to fail - that's one way to get more robust systems - yet few people do it. I only learnt these things after decades of maintaining and extending a lot of other people's code. Therefore I consider the "don't comment" brigade to be rather n00b in their outlook, despite thinking they're l33t.
I still see bad date formats specified in many projects I work on (not from me of course). People are still in love with entering two digit years and compressing things to shave off a bit here and there. This might make sense for high-volume data entry but for regular applications it is a vile practice. You then have to start guessing what century people mean and what the date offset is (is it 1970? 1979? 1990? 2000?). Things like date of births get very complicated since some people live past 100 and you don't know what century they belong to. All because they've broken the most fundamental rule of software systems, which is (wait for it....):
Don't lose information.
If you have information (a four digit year) then don't throw it away (store as a two digit, or one digit [hex] year). Don't ask the user for a two digit year since it doesn't have enough information to compose a four-digit year without some (risky) guessing.
Every time I see a two digit year specified for software I want to scream, "DIDN"T YOU LEARN *ANYTHING* FROM Y2K!".
Fortunately there is a solution. It is the ISO 8601 specification for representing dates in text format. It simply says use something like:
2010-01-08
You don't have to use this in the user interface, just use it everywhere else dates are represented as strings. This format also sorts properly using regular alphabetic string sorting and is internationalized (unlike dd-mm-yy or the crufty US system of mm-dd-yy). Hope this helps some of you developers, architects and analysts out there. Two digit dates are the plague and anyone using them should be stripped of their license to practice in IT (what? there's no license to practice IT? no wonder so many bad design decisions are made!). Use ISO 8601 for date strings and most of your date problems will disappear.
Java is actually fairly simple to start with. Certainly a lot simpler than C/C++ to start with. As long as you don't make it do JEE then he'll be fine, and he can even do some basic graphics which gives instant gratification. Once of the nice free IDEs (NetBeans ot BlueJ, NOT Eclipse for a beginner) can help to build something that will run (with a little bit of your help). And there are plenty of jobs if he continues Java. Many universities and polytechnics/technical schools start beginners with Java and with good reason. It scales from small simple problems up to big ones and you don't have to worry too much about string/memory management to begin with.
Here's a thought. I wonder if companies such as Microsoft that know if someone is using pirated versions of their software are required to report the copyright abuse. Surely if ISPs are liable then Microsoft ought to be too instead of tolerating breach of their own copyright (they don't waive the copyright, they still prosecute those they can be bothered to). Would be a colossal win for Free Software if Microsoft was compelled to report copyright infringement of their software or be liable. In fact, I think the Free Software movement should write an application to detect pirated closed-source software. That'd spur the movement to Free Software for those who say proprietary is better yet never actually pay for it. There are a few folks I know who prefer Windows to Linux yet run pirated versions of the former (and associated software) because they don't want to pay for it. Time they were made to obey the license terms, then the true economics of the situation would be revealed.
JoGL is a quite a nice (Java) wrapper for OpenGL. Lets you do the windowing stuff in Java (nice n easy) and then the OpenGL calls translate almost exactly to their documented C equivalents described at: http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/
DirectX is good for games on the PC and XBox360. OpenGL is good for games (eg. IL2) and engineering on the PC, PS3, iPhone/iTouch, cellphones, military avionics, professional movie rendering, scientific visualization, Solaris/Unix etc. The only platform you can't develop for using OpenGL is the Xbox (less than 1% of computable devices out there), with OpenGL you can use it almost everywhere else (including using software rendering with Mesa on headless platforms). Also, OpenGL changes more slowly than DirectX (which game developer's hate but the rest of us quite like stability and protection of our investment in our existing code - it is too expensive for larger pieces of software to keep getting re-written unlike games which are maintained for a couple of years at most). Your call which way you'd like your career to head.
Unlike an earlier poster I would not suggest learning graphics algorithms first (I guess that person was a computer scientist, this is the kind of thing they recommend). It is like saying you ought to learn assembly language rather than learning how to make shippable programs in something more widely (commerically) used like Java. I would suggest learning OpenGL using something free and easy to start with like the JoGL plugin for Netbeans (syntax highlights GLSL shader language). If you really do have a passion for graphics after you've learned OpenGL then I would say learning the underlying algorithms is an excellent idea and will make you a better graphics developer. But IMHO it is worth learning to be basically productive before trying to learn at an expert level.
> So Java is no "faster than C", it's only equally fast or better in scientific computations. Overall, Java remains slower than C.
For me, that's what matters. My point was that Java is not the "piece of slow shit" that the grandparent trolled about. C is faster sometimes and Java is faster sometimes - therefore speed is not a reason to choose C over Java at the start of a project (before profiling is possible).
I only use C these days for small specialized programs such as kernel modules. What I used to do for a decade with g++ I can now do with Java, and run it on more platforms with fewer 'linkage' errors - which are the bane of multi-platform C++ (you end up having to compile everything on each minor flavour of Linux or g++, which sucks).
Given the fact that Java is so much faster to develop (time-wise), has great multi-threading support (easier to use all the cores you have), and the Sun JVM is very fast (as you admit, faster than C for scientific computations/algorithmics) I was just pointing out that it speed of execution should not be a reason to choose C over Java. Use C where it makes sense (in embedded devices and kernel modules, but its not the greatest choice elsewhere). Obviously I was not clear on this in my quick post.
Revenues increased. Well done there. What about the costs? It is the rate of increase of profitability that seems to matter to the sharemarket, not raw revenue by itself.
According to the bechmarks made by INRIA (French scientific & supercomputing outfit) the Sun Java Hotspot VM has surpassed C for speed in many applications and is now approaching FORTRAN (which is considered the fastest in supercomputing circles). Please see:
http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/current_state_of_java_for
Yeah. Asus EEE Box. Much cheaper than Mac mini and uses 20 Watts. Runs Ubuntu well (we uses them as cheap boxes for when guests visit us at work). Not really upgradeable though (just disk and RAM).
Use the Google Web Toolkit, it will give you an asynchronous programming model where threads aren't really needed client-side (although they are certainly possible server-side, of course).
ps. Is your Slashdot ID really that low? and you're asking this question? lol
And it is actually quite simple to remove with regedit. For those that want to toss it just launch regedit and go to HKEY LOCAL MACHINE > Software> Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions. There you will find both it and the Java extension, just delete and voila! No more Dotnet or Java plugins.
Whoa, there partner! There hasn't been even a theoretical remote Java exploit for quite some time. The Java plugin is actually useful (especially on the corporate desktop where there are a lot of enterprise-internal Java apps not made available to the public) so might be worth leaving it on.
"Waaaah! I can't cope with difference and didn't wanna stick with it".
Fair enough that you personally don't like like Mac. Sorry, but this is what a lot of readers 'hear', even if you have been very reasonable about you being just one case. However, in the real world you have to work with software and systems you don't like (I'm a Linux and Java guy and am often forced to work with Windows and.NET, ugh!). Do yourself a favour and give it more time before you sell the Mac.
Actually, LockOn is written in C++ and Lua and IL-2 is written in Java (which is why it ports well to PS/3 etc). They're quite different beasts under the hood.
Well 64-bit has been as smooth as Teflon(tm) in Linux and Unix for quite some time longer.
Sorry, Windows 7 is ok, but not nearly as good as folk like yourself make out. I've been running the RC for a while and get quite a few problems with older programs that I cannot do without (I'm a gamer who flies a lot of LockOn: Modern Air Combat, so my Thrustmaster Cougar programming utility 'Foxy' is as essential to me as Photoshop is to others). These programs work on Vista but not on Win 7 (yes, I've tried compatibility mode and all that rigmarole), which is not exactly, "smooth as silk". In some aspects Wine is catching up for compatibility (although 3D is not very fast) so I'm tempted to ditch Win7 and spend the time moving to Wine (which is not pain-free either).
Yes, and much short-lived antimatter (and anti-neutrinos) is created all the time in natural processes. Antimatter is not really a big deal for physicists - even if it gets the Trekkies hot at the mere mention of it. Doing matter-antimatter collisions directly is useful though, as you don't have to wade through the other types of events to get the ones of interest.
Yes. The Allies had to re-estimate just how many men they would lose after the battle on Okinawa (higher casualties and fanatical resistance). It took *two* atom bombs and the threat of war to stop the Japanese.
No. The problem is if some faction within the Iran (and the government and military are heavily balkanized) was pursuaded to give a nuke to Hezbollah. Then you have a problem - especially if you are Israeli. A nuke can be used, or threatened to be used, and the Iranians can say, "it wasn't me, it was stolen !".
It's all abstract until you think what you would do if it was your own family under this threat.
HP nw8240 was awesome for its price in 2005. I'm still using mine (after repairs) although I learned that gaming should be done with a desktop not a laptop (I needed two motherboards replaced under warranty since the heat generated during Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and Battlefield 2 tended to fry motherboard components). Anyway, what is great about these is you can get a 1920x1200 display (great for developers like me who want lots of x-terms open) in a 15" body (a lot lighter than a 17", so easier if you are moving between customer sites). The price of the Elitebooks significantly cheaper than competitors for the features you get (and especially the limited displays on the 15" Macbook Pros). Yes, 1920x1200 res works well for me on a 15" screen, I'm obviously not getting enough self-abuse in:)
I eventually converted everyone in our small office (5 consultants/developers) to the "nw" series each time one of their Toshibas needed replacing. Initially they ignored me but I made sure they got a look at the nw series among all the other options they had. By looking at the features and the price they each came to the conclusion that the various evolutionary incarnations of that model stood out above other HP models and other brands (despite initially thinking I was full of bs).
The new equivalent of the Compaq nw series is the the "Elitebook" series (a dumb name if you ask me, but the units have great specs for the price). A new consultant in our office has an Elitebook and it looks pretty tempting (although it is wasted running Windows). I was thinking about getting a Macbook Pro to run Ubuntu on (OS X is cool but Apple put too many restrictions in for someone who has used Linux for a decade), but the low-resolution screen puts me off (c'mon that much money for 1440x900, that's pretty lousy value these days) despite the advantages Macbooks have in other areas.
Anyway, check out the Elitebook series and decide for yourself whether the price is right for the features you get - just put Ubuntu on instead of Win7
I second that. It's pleasing (and shocking, yes, since it's uncommon) to hear someone with authority actually understand that the long-term benefits of an open internet outweigh the commercial concerns of the carriers. Let's hope the FCC Chairman isn't replaced with a flunky as a result of this outstanding decision.
Yes, The purists in this case are all about users being in 'control' of their own systems. The pragmatists don't mind someone else having control as long as it is convenient. Unfortunately that means that someone else has the power to make it convenient or not (or even available) to the pragmatists. The purists are driven by the strategic picture while the pragmatists are mostly concerned with the tactical.
If it wasn't for the purists then Free Software would have been subsumed long ago. This is why a myriad of previous open development models (eg BSD) had fewer contributors. Only a few want to contribute when they know that their contribution can be taken away by an ungrateful company. The brilliance of Free Software (and its myriad of licenses to suite various situations) is that your contribution can never be taken away - which encourages people to participate in the community.
While pragmatism is usually a virtue for moderation it is actually a very impractical in the software world from a strategic point of view. Corporations and governments waste countless money upgrading software, whether they want to or not, because it suits the business interests of their suppliers to prevent the 'users' from being able to control and maintain their own systems. This money would be much better spent doing other things (see the 'Broken Window fallacy' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window on the significance of this wasted money).
Re:Does it matter, its all DirectX
on
Gaming On Windows 7
·
· Score: 2, Informative
DirectX versions don't perfect compatibility so it is not as simple as that. The reason versions of DirectX make incompatible changes due to different uses of the API and also different hardware (DirectX is closer to the hardware than OpenGL). For example, nearly all recent hardware have programmable pixel and vertex shaders and this is reflected in DirectX9, but DirectX 10 has support for geometry shaders. A program written to use these newer features cannot be used on systems running older versions of DirectX, even if the hardware supports it (no real surprise there). Even newer versions of DirectX eventually lose backwards-compatibility as support is dropped for outmoded ways of doing things.
Even OpenGL (which has vastly better forward and backwards compatibility than DirectX) suffers from this to some extent. For example, the ancient indexed colour mode is not supported on some newer implementations - although only many it can still be used but it is just slow (implemented in software). In general, OpenGL programming models have better longevity and stability than DirectX (and possibly the best of any widely used API). The downside to this increased stability/good compatibility between versions is that features are adopted at a slower pace than for DirectX (although OpenGL extensions are developed at a rapid rate).
IMHO, if you need graphics you should use OpenGL instead of DirectX these days (JoGL under Java is an easy way to use OpenGL). They have approximate feature parity and similar programming models (the types of shaders), but OpenGL has the advantage of working on Windows AND everything else (all those iPhones and Playstations and Macs and Linux and Solaris boxen).
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3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures. 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling. Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon. I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.
To me the most appropriate word for Open Source compared to commercial software is *inexorable*. Open Source is the relentless glacier (ok, Borg for those of you who need to get out more) that grinds all in its path. Even worse than a static Borg, Open Source is snowballing through the network effect. Even the latest and greatest cellphones are Open Source and companies are scrambling to adopt it in devices and their corporate data centers. Microsoft can't defeat Open Source due to the different set of economics at work. It is simply a matter of time before Microsoft cannot offer enough new features to make paying for it more worthwhile than using a free equivalent.
Yes, but the 'gaming market' is not nearly as big as the 3D graphics market now is it, Mr Moms Basement Dweller? The 3D graphics market covers avionics, scientific visualization, handheld/portable/embedded devices, medical systems. Guess what? they're not using DirectX/Direct3D. Direct3D is oriented for shrinkwrapped games on Windows, which is a smaller part of the pie than you'd imagine. Perhaps once you get to the workplace you might get to see this.
One thing I notice (as a former physicist turned developer) is that computer science trained folk are very poor at documenting their *units*. For example, a time duration may be in days, years, milliseconds. Without either naming your variables with a unit name (eg. sleepDurationMillis) or putting in a comment stating the unit of measure at the point of declaration it becomes infuriating and risk-prone using other people's code. Comments are absolutely essential to document the units that variables use. It's also useful having light commentary describing the preconditions of a method and what will cause it to fail - that's one way to get more robust systems - yet few people do it. I only learnt these things after decades of maintaining and extending a lot of other people's code. Therefore I consider the "don't comment" brigade to be rather n00b in their outlook, despite thinking they're l33t.
Don't lose information.
If you have information (a four digit year) then don't throw it away (store as a two digit, or one digit [hex] year). Don't ask the user for a two digit year since it doesn't have enough information to compose a four-digit year without some (risky) guessing.
Every time I see a two digit year specified for software I want to scream, "DIDN"T YOU LEARN *ANYTHING* FROM Y2K!".
Fortunately there is a solution. It is the ISO 8601 specification for representing dates in text format. It simply says use something like:
2010-01-08
You don't have to use this in the user interface, just use it everywhere else dates are represented as strings. This format also sorts properly using regular alphabetic string sorting and is internationalized (unlike dd-mm-yy or the crufty US system of mm-dd-yy). Hope this helps some of you developers, architects and analysts out there. Two digit dates are the plague and anyone using them should be stripped of their license to practice in IT (what? there's no license to practice IT? no wonder so many bad design decisions are made!). Use ISO 8601 for date strings and most of your date problems will disappear.
Java is actually fairly simple to start with. Certainly a lot simpler than C/C++ to start with. As long as you don't make it do JEE then he'll be fine, and he can even do some basic graphics which gives instant gratification. Once of the nice free IDEs (NetBeans ot BlueJ, NOT Eclipse for a beginner) can help to build something that will run (with a little bit of your help). And there are plenty of jobs if he continues Java. Many universities and polytechnics/technical schools start beginners with Java and with good reason. It scales from small simple problems up to big ones and you don't have to worry too much about string/memory management to begin with.
Here's a thought. I wonder if companies such as Microsoft that know if someone is using pirated versions of their software are required to report the copyright abuse. Surely if ISPs are liable then Microsoft ought to be too instead of tolerating breach of their own copyright (they don't waive the copyright, they still prosecute those they can be bothered to). Would be a colossal win for Free Software if Microsoft was compelled to report copyright infringement of their software or be liable. In fact, I think the Free Software movement should write an application to detect pirated closed-source software. That'd spur the movement to Free Software for those who say proprietary is better yet never actually pay for it. There are a few folks I know who prefer Windows to Linux yet run pirated versions of the former (and associated software) because they don't want to pay for it. Time they were made to obey the license terms, then the true economics of the situation would be revealed.
DirectX is good for games on the PC and XBox360. OpenGL is good for games (eg. IL2) and engineering on the PC, PS3, iPhone/iTouch, cellphones, military avionics, professional movie rendering, scientific visualization, Solaris/Unix etc. The only platform you can't develop for using OpenGL is the Xbox (less than 1% of computable devices out there), with OpenGL you can use it almost everywhere else (including using software rendering with Mesa on headless platforms). Also, OpenGL changes more slowly than DirectX (which game developer's hate but the rest of us quite like stability and protection of our investment in our existing code - it is too expensive for larger pieces of software to keep getting re-written unlike games which are maintained for a couple of years at most). Your call which way you'd like your career to head.
Unlike an earlier poster I would not suggest learning graphics algorithms first (I guess that person was a computer scientist, this is the kind of thing they recommend). It is like saying you ought to learn assembly language rather than learning how to make shippable programs in something more widely (commerically) used like Java. I would suggest learning OpenGL using something free and easy to start with like the JoGL plugin for Netbeans (syntax highlights GLSL shader language). If you really do have a passion for graphics after you've learned OpenGL then I would say learning the underlying algorithms is an excellent idea and will make you a better graphics developer. But IMHO it is worth learning to be basically productive before trying to learn at an expert level.
For me, that's what matters. My point was that Java is not the "piece of slow shit" that the grandparent trolled about. C is faster sometimes and Java is faster sometimes - therefore speed is not a reason to choose C over Java at the start of a project (before profiling is possible).
I only use C these days for small specialized programs such as kernel modules. What I used to do for a decade with g++ I can now do with Java, and run it on more platforms with fewer 'linkage' errors - which are the bane of multi-platform C++ (you end up having to compile everything on each minor flavour of Linux or g++, which sucks).
Given the fact that Java is so much faster to develop (time-wise), has great multi-threading support (easier to use all the cores you have), and the Sun JVM is very fast (as you admit, faster than C for scientific computations/algorithmics) I was just pointing out that it speed of execution should not be a reason to choose C over Java. Use C where it makes sense (in embedded devices and kernel modules, but its not the greatest choice elsewhere). Obviously I was not clear on this in my quick post.
Revenues increased. Well done there. What about the costs? It is the rate of increase of profitability that seems to matter to the sharemarket, not raw revenue by itself.
According to the bechmarks made by INRIA (French scientific & supercomputing outfit) the Sun Java Hotspot VM has surpassed C for speed in many applications and is now approaching FORTRAN (which is considered the fastest in supercomputing circles). Please see: http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/current_state_of_java_for
Yeah. Asus EEE Box. Much cheaper than Mac mini and uses 20 Watts. Runs Ubuntu well (we uses them as cheap boxes for when guests visit us at work). Not really upgradeable though (just disk and RAM).
ps. Is your Slashdot ID really that low? and you're asking this question? lol
And it is actually quite simple to remove with regedit. For those that want to toss it just launch regedit and go to HKEY LOCAL MACHINE > Software> Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions. There you will find both it and the Java extension, just delete and voila! No more Dotnet or Java plugins.
Whoa, there partner! There hasn't been even a theoretical remote Java exploit for quite some time. The Java plugin is actually useful (especially on the corporate desktop where there are a lot of enterprise-internal Java apps not made available to the public) so might be worth leaving it on.
"Waaaah! I can't cope with difference and didn't wanna stick with it".
Fair enough that you personally don't like like Mac. Sorry, but this is what a lot of readers 'hear', even if you have been very reasonable about you being just one case. However, in the real world you have to work with software and systems you don't like (I'm a Linux and Java guy and am often forced to work with Windows and .NET, ugh!). Do yourself a favour and give it more time before you sell the Mac.
Actually, LockOn is written in C++ and Lua and IL-2 is written in Java (which is why it ports well to PS/3 etc). They're quite different beasts under the hood.
Sorry, Windows 7 is ok, but not nearly as good as folk like yourself make out. I've been running the RC for a while and get quite a few problems with older programs that I cannot do without (I'm a gamer who flies a lot of LockOn: Modern Air Combat, so my Thrustmaster Cougar programming utility 'Foxy' is as essential to me as Photoshop is to others). These programs work on Vista but not on Win 7 (yes, I've tried compatibility mode and all that rigmarole), which is not exactly, "smooth as silk". In some aspects Wine is catching up for compatibility (although 3D is not very fast) so I'm tempted to ditch Win7 and spend the time moving to Wine (which is not pain-free either).
Yes, and much short-lived antimatter (and anti-neutrinos) is created all the time in natural processes. Antimatter is not really a big deal for physicists - even if it gets the Trekkies hot at the mere mention of it. Doing matter-antimatter collisions directly is useful though, as you don't have to wade through the other types of events to get the ones of interest.
Yes. The Allies had to re-estimate just how many men they would lose after the battle on Okinawa (higher casualties and fanatical resistance). It took *two* atom bombs and the threat of war to stop the Japanese.
No. The problem is if some faction within the Iran (and the government and military are heavily balkanized) was pursuaded to give a nuke to Hezbollah. Then you have a problem - especially if you are Israeli. A nuke can be used, or threatened to be used, and the Iranians can say, "it wasn't me, it was stolen !". It's all abstract until you think what you would do if it was your own family under this threat.
HP nw8240 was awesome for its price in 2005. I'm still using mine (after repairs) although I learned that gaming should be done with a desktop not a laptop (I needed two motherboards replaced under warranty since the heat generated during Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and Battlefield 2 tended to fry motherboard components). Anyway, what is great about these is you can get a 1920x1200 display (great for developers like me who want lots of x-terms open) in a 15" body (a lot lighter than a 17", so easier if you are moving between customer sites). The price of the Elitebooks significantly cheaper than competitors for the features you get (and especially the limited displays on the 15" Macbook Pros). Yes, 1920x1200 res works well for me on a 15" screen, I'm obviously not getting enough self-abuse in :)
I eventually converted everyone in our small office (5 consultants/developers) to the "nw" series each time one of their Toshibas needed replacing. Initially they ignored me but I made sure they got a look at the nw series among all the other options they had. By looking at the features and the price they each came to the conclusion that the various evolutionary incarnations of that model stood out above other HP models and other brands (despite initially thinking I was full of bs).
The new equivalent of the Compaq nw series is the the "Elitebook" series (a dumb name if you ask me, but the units have great specs for the price). A new consultant in our office has an Elitebook and it looks pretty tempting (although it is wasted running Windows). I was thinking about getting a Macbook Pro to run Ubuntu on (OS X is cool but Apple put too many restrictions in for someone who has used Linux for a decade), but the low-resolution screen puts me off (c'mon that much money for 1440x900, that's pretty lousy value these days) despite the advantages Macbooks have in other areas.
Anyway, check out the Elitebook series and decide for yourself whether the price is right for the features you get - just put Ubuntu on instead of Win7
I second that. It's pleasing (and shocking, yes, since it's uncommon) to hear someone with authority actually understand that the long-term benefits of an open internet outweigh the commercial concerns of the carriers. Let's hope the FCC Chairman isn't replaced with a flunky as a result of this outstanding decision.
If it wasn't for the purists then Free Software would have been subsumed long ago. This is why a myriad of previous open development models (eg BSD) had fewer contributors. Only a few want to contribute when they know that their contribution can be taken away by an ungrateful company. The brilliance of Free Software (and its myriad of licenses to suite various situations) is that your contribution can never be taken away - which encourages people to participate in the community.
While pragmatism is usually a virtue for moderation it is actually a very impractical in the software world from a strategic point of view. Corporations and governments waste countless money upgrading software, whether they want to or not, because it suits the business interests of their suppliers to prevent the 'users' from being able to control and maintain their own systems. This money would be much better spent doing other things (see the 'Broken Window fallacy' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window on the significance of this wasted money).
Even OpenGL (which has vastly better forward and backwards compatibility than DirectX) suffers from this to some extent. For example, the ancient indexed colour mode is not supported on some newer implementations - although only many it can still be used but it is just slow (implemented in software). In general, OpenGL programming models have better longevity and stability than DirectX (and possibly the best of any widely used API). The downside to this increased stability/good compatibility between versions is that features are adopted at a slower pace than for DirectX (although OpenGL extensions are developed at a rapid rate).
IMHO, if you need graphics you should use OpenGL instead of DirectX these days (JoGL under Java is an easy way to use OpenGL). They have approximate feature parity and similar programming models (the types of shaders), but OpenGL has the advantage of working on Windows AND everything else (all those iPhones and Playstations and Macs and Linux and Solaris boxen).
If it wasn't for you danged kids I would have gotten away with it too