I do all of the above and then some, and I rarely notice the performance hitches on a dual processor like I would on a single-just simple stuff like switching windows actually happens smoothly, unlike on a single where you usually end up sitting there waiting for the program to wake up and realize you want something done. Even so, most of the time your computer is sitting there waiting for you to do something-most of the tasks you mention are low impact on modern hardware. Audio/video playback? I almost never see a tick on the processor when I'm doing that, even with HD stuff, because in most systems there is hardware available to do the decoding/playback work. Checking network traffic? Only on a very high traffic connection will you see any kind of CPU load-look at your typical server; I do some pretty serious stress tests on the network software I write and I usually saturate the network bandwidth before I get even one processor near half load (100 Mbit, in case you care-we haven't started working on high bandwidth yet, since none of our customers care). Checking email is a really low impact operation and only happens every few minutes, unless you're in the habit of receiving multi-meg emails on a regular basis (and even that only causes a momentary sputter on current boxes). Unless you're doing something seriously compulationally intensive (and editing a very high resolution image certainly would count), most of the time computers are so fast now that they spend a lot of time waiting, even if it seems like they're doing a hell of a lot.
That really depends on what you mean by "using". For example, if you're just doing general work (web browsing, office, coding (compiling excepted), so on), your computer is spending most of the time idle waiting for you to do something. Take a look at your processor load sometime-you're only seeing peaks if a program is really having to work on something. Most of the time, the software that hits 1.0 load is compilers, video rendering tools, and games-there's other stuff, but that's what I do day to day that punches a 1.0 load. Other than that, you won't see your processors really pegged. I have a dual G5 at home, and I've really noticed a difference in performance-everything is much snappier, and you don't notice performance hitches as much if you have a program that is hammering one of the CPUs (video rendering and CD ripping being the big ones here-games will as well, but you don't notice that so much because when you're playing a game that's all you're doing on the box). I have friends who have dual intel boxes, and just for kicks we've pulled a processor to see what the performance difference is, and its almost night and day in windows. All of the normal pauses you are used to seeing when one program is busy thinking rarely show up with two processors.
Dual processors are worth it. If it weren't so damned expensive on the intel/amd side, I'd have a dual PC box as well. The thing is that games are about the only reason I still have a PC, and its a rare day when you find a game that makes use of multiple processors.
There's another, very serious, problem I've also seen more often than I care to remember-the parents who buy the 600k house, work long hours, and are never home for their kids. Then they have the temerity to tell those kids they should aspire to the same lifestyle. More often than not those kids want nothing to do with that kind of idiotic lifestyle (you have a great carear, a mansion of a house, and a family who don't even know you. Wee! That's a dream).
The entire anti smarts/education deal is pretty bad, and I still see it as an adult. These days its pretty endemic in the culture-especially amongst your management/business types who don't wnat to admit that without the engineers and scientists their company is going to have a tough time competing.
In my view, if you're continually beaten by someone doing the exact same thing, maybe you need to learn a new tactic to deal with it. Remember what doing the same thing and expecting different results is a sign of? Stupidity.
Wish I'd thought of that. Find out if being fired for not having the cell phone on is wrongful termination, and then "let" that happen. Of course, be careful doing that, and make certain you have legal recourse *first*, then get terminated.
As always, take any advice from/. with a honking grain of salt. I could be a drooling idiot for all you know.
This is outright abuse. I don't know what your local laws are like, but the company should be reimbursing you for this. If not, get your resume out and get a new job. You've already attempted, in good faith, to get compensation for the cost of their calls to you, and you have been rebuffed. If they gave a damn about keeping your experience, they wouldn't be acting like this. Find an employer who will act in a professional manner. Then, if you choose to, take the old employer to small claims court for the uncompensated cost of those cell phone bills. There is no sense in this world in taking a hit on your personal credit because your employer is too stingy to pay for the services they're using.
I was in very much the same boat as you in my first job. Four pretty miserable years working on financial software at a nasty company. I was bored, drained of energy, frustrated, and I had completely lost all love of programming. I actually dreaded coding-when I did get a chance to code, instead of dealing with all kinds of political crap. I changed jobs a short while ago, and its made a world of difference. Here I'm working almost 100% of my time on code, the work is challenging as hell, the coworkers are sharp, and I don't have to deal with all kinds of political crap. On top of that, I'm actually coding in my spare time again-something I stopped doing over two years ago.
What I'm saying is, there are jobs out there which are much better in this industry. Some suck, some are much better. The good jobs are always rare, in any industry, but they *are* out there. Don't lose hope.
I've met more than a few scientists/engineers over the years who were in Science Olympiad. I was in it every year of middle and high school, although the best years were in middle school. The students at Peirce were blessed to have one of the best coaches around (Charlotte Nighton), and my middle school team went to nationals all four years I was eligible to be a team member. The whole experience was a blast, and it helped make an otherwise miserable middle school experience livable. There need to be more programs like this, they're a significant help to introduce kids to the fun part of science and engineering where you're doing real, hands on, work, instead of rote memorization and tests.
The kids are going to have a blast at Nationals in Juniata-its a nice little campus.
I think we're muddling a few issues here, thanks to the lack of distinction in much of academia between computer science and software engineering. Just as I would not reasonably expect a Physicist to be a bridge designer (Mechanical/Civil Engineering), or circuit designer (Electrical Engineering), I would not expect a Computer Scientist to write software. A Computer Scientist is concerned with the theory and science of computation-algorithms, data structures, number theory, language research, and the like. They're the folks who are working out the theory on how something we may not see implemented in 30 years functions.
Really, we need to understand that there is software engineering (the folks who *design*, develop, and maintain software) and software science (what we call Computer Science). For software engineering, I believe it is fundamentally important to understand languages at as low a level as assembly, and as high a level as Prolog and the like. I have seen many poor design and implementation decisions made in professional code that would not have been made if the developer understood what was happening under the hood-or if they were aware of a higher level tool that would cut their development time dramatically and simplify their codebase. To be a good software engineer, you have to understand these things, and be able to judge the time to use a given tool. If you don't, you're doing a disservice to yourself, your employer, and your profession.
Now, I know there has long been an issue that (at least in the US, I don't know about other countries) there is no legal definition of what a software engineer does, or what qualifies a person to hold such a title. That's something we will need to change and address in this profession. The reality, though, is if you design and write software for a living, you really aren't a computer scientist-you're a software engineer.
This depends on the terms of the licensing agreement for the AGP code. nVidia may be barred from writing something to replace that code (I doubt that). Or they may have to do a "clean room" reverse engineering of it, without allowing anyone who has seen the old code base (any part of the driver, no matter how small) to work on the new code. That's a huge investment on their part for what is, in all fairness, a small market. That means that everyone who has worked on the video drivers from at least the TNT card could not be allowed to work on the new driver code at any time for fear of "contamination". That's a very real concern in the litigious world we live in.
I really get tired of hearing this same dispute come up every time nVidia and Linux are mentioned. nVidia can not release their drivers as open source due to the licensing for the AGP interface code in their drivers-pure plain and simple. There is not some huge conspiracy within nVidia to keep you from getting their source, they are not sitting here playing games with you, they are trying to support a market as best as they can within the restrictions imposed upon them by a business decision. If you don't believe me, the do a search here on slashdot into the history of this-even Carmack has chimed in on this one.
I sometimes wonder if there is a more thankless group out there than the Linux user market. Yes, it would be great if the nVidia drivers were open source. The truth of the matter is that unless someone wants to reverse engineer everything in these drivers, you're not going to have that anytime soon.
I was going to say "You must be new around here", but then I saw your user number. I'd love to see them evaluate articles based upon quality, but more often than not they seem to be evaluated based upon how well they speak for the "party line" around here.
This is getting a little rediculous. I'm seeing people confuse exploits with all other bugs. Buffer overruns and the like, which are a side effect of sloppy coding, make up a minority of the total bugs I see on a daily basis in production code. The only reason they are so well known is the consequences. Higher level languages, such as Java and Python, may protect the programmer against the effects of such sloppyness, but they do nothing to protect you against algorithmic bugs, which make up an overwhelming percentage of the bugs I see. Coding in a higher level language may protect you from easily writing exploits, but they do not guarantee you bug free, stable code. Only paying attention to every line you write, and making it as bullet proof and stable as possible, will help safeguard you from all of the many bugs we see. C and C++ are entirely appropriate languages to work in, if they fit the needs of your project.
Or he's very good at qualifying his statements. Note the article claims he says that recent versions have default settings to prevent automatic loading. In the MS security bulliten, they note that the default configuration of IE running under Windows Server 2003 is not affected due to its higher security settings. I can attest to that one, if you want to browse the web at all without seeing half the content locked off (like css headers, for example), you have to turn off all of the security lockdowns. I wouldn't know for certain about the latest Outlook releases, as I'm not about to test that!
So, he wasn't a lying scuzzball, he just was very careful with how he couched what he said.
This may be naive, but couldn't you just cut and paste your previously used linked list.
Well, you can cut and paste code, and that happens quite often in this world (one project here has 400 controls that perform various functions, and most of them are based off of a cut and pasted code template. Talk about a maintenance nightmare!). However, there is one huge problem with cutting and pasting code: if there is a bug, you will have to fix it everywhere you have copied that code. That's the big benefit of implementing a generic container class in a dynamic library-if you find a bug in your code, you fix it one place and the fix propagates to all applications using that library.
More than likely, if you're reading this site, you've lived in such a world your entire life. This has been possible with both conventional and nuclear weapons on bombers and ICBMs for years. This technology makes it possible for them to react a little faster, and a lot more accurately.
One of my coworkers came from a small town near Chernobyl. He died last year from complications brought about by radiation exposure from the meltdown. Nuclear power requires that the people using it be responsible and treat it with proper respect and fear. That didn't happen in Chernobyl, and a lot of good people died because of it.
Interesting, thanks for the info. For the first time ever I'm going to vote on the trustee ballot. The joys of being an alumnus.
I'll pass this one on to the other alumni I know. No need to have creeps like that influencing the school so directly, we already have Pepsi and Nike for that!:)
People have told me before how Objective-C was nice. But looking again now, it looks like it's only Mac OS-X, which is probably why I never looked into it before. I don't want to get locked into coding for a specific platform.
Objective C is fully available for Unix and windows systems, and I'm using it in my latest spare time project. If you're looking to code in Cocoa, GNUStep already provides a very good implementation of the Foundation, and they're working to get the Application classes fully supported under Unix and Windows.
In the Windows world you would probably best use the MinGW toolkit. If you don't plan to use GNUStep/Cocoa, but just the standard Objective C runtime, you'll still want to download the GNUStep runtime. The language runtime packaged with the latest MinGW does not support building DLLs, which can be rather frustrating if you don't know about it before you start. Once you get that built and installed, you're good to go.
I've been very happy thus far working in Objective C. I typically find my code is much smaller than when I work in C++, and its much easier to read and maintain when I'm done. There is something very pleasant and freeing about being able to work in a nicely dynamic language.
Of course if the Republicans announce that they're suddenly all in favor of gun control, I'm moving to Canada immediately.
Great idea. Run to a country where the gun control folks already have more control than the worst US states.
The day I see a republican administration embrace the gun control lobby, I will get very scared. I think we all will, because that means things are rapidly falling on a slippery slope, Hollywood anti-gun proselytizing notwithstanding.
And it was bombed by the US in the first Gulf War when it reported the killing of civilians in a supposedly military target.
Well done. You've shot your credibility in one sentence. It was Al Jazeera's offices in Kabul that were bombed last year, not their offices in Iraq. Al Jazeera was founded in 1996, 5 years after the first Gulf War.
They've also been threatened by every single Arab country in the region - closed down, ambassadors recalled, physical attacks.
Wow, this has to be the first time I've ever heard of a news organization with ambassadors. This must be a very powerful organisation.
Regardless of what the article said, the post on slashdot implied that it was.05% per decade, period. Thats what I'm responding to.
I'm glad to see someone here openly admit they aren't commenting on the article, but on the Slashdot post that is either politically spun or written by someone who didn't bother to read the article in the first place. If only more people would open up and admit they only read the postings, we could get the editors to stop linking the sites, and end the scourge of slashdotting.
Slashdot Mirror
I do all of the above and then some, and I rarely notice the performance hitches on a dual processor like I would on a single-just simple stuff like switching windows actually happens smoothly, unlike on a single where you usually end up sitting there waiting for the program to wake up and realize you want something done. Even so, most of the time your computer is sitting there waiting for you to do something-most of the tasks you mention are low impact on modern hardware. Audio/video playback? I almost never see a tick on the processor when I'm doing that, even with HD stuff, because in most systems there is hardware available to do the decoding/playback work. Checking network traffic? Only on a very high traffic connection will you see any kind of CPU load-look at your typical server; I do some pretty serious stress tests on the network software I write and I usually saturate the network bandwidth before I get even one processor near half load (100 Mbit, in case you care-we haven't started working on high bandwidth yet, since none of our customers care). Checking email is a really low impact operation and only happens every few minutes, unless you're in the habit of receiving multi-meg emails on a regular basis (and even that only causes a momentary sputter on current boxes). Unless you're doing something seriously compulationally intensive (and editing a very high resolution image certainly would count), most of the time computers are so fast now that they spend a lot of time waiting, even if it seems like they're doing a hell of a lot.
That really depends on what you mean by "using". For example, if you're just doing general work (web browsing, office, coding (compiling excepted), so on), your computer is spending most of the time idle waiting for you to do something. Take a look at your processor load sometime-you're only seeing peaks if a program is really having to work on something. Most of the time, the software that hits 1.0 load is compilers, video rendering tools, and games-there's other stuff, but that's what I do day to day that punches a 1.0 load. Other than that, you won't see your processors really pegged. I have a dual G5 at home, and I've really noticed a difference in performance-everything is much snappier, and you don't notice performance hitches as much if you have a program that is hammering one of the CPUs (video rendering and CD ripping being the big ones here-games will as well, but you don't notice that so much because when you're playing a game that's all you're doing on the box). I have friends who have dual intel boxes, and just for kicks we've pulled a processor to see what the performance difference is, and its almost night and day in windows. All of the normal pauses you are used to seeing when one program is busy thinking rarely show up with two processors.
Dual processors are worth it. If it weren't so damned expensive on the intel/amd side, I'd have a dual PC box as well. The thing is that games are about the only reason I still have a PC, and its a rare day when you find a game that makes use of multiple processors.
No wonder so many people are opposed to using them-they're afraid that the stem cells would be used to grow them a brain.
There's another, very serious, problem I've also seen more often than I care to remember-the parents who buy the 600k house, work long hours, and are never home for their kids. Then they have the temerity to tell those kids they should aspire to the same lifestyle. More often than not those kids want nothing to do with that kind of idiotic lifestyle (you have a great carear, a mansion of a house, and a family who don't even know you. Wee! That's a dream).
The entire anti smarts/education deal is pretty bad, and I still see it as an adult. These days its pretty endemic in the culture-especially amongst your management/business types who don't wnat to admit that without the engineers and scientists their company is going to have a tough time competing.
In my view, if you're continually beaten by someone doing the exact same thing, maybe you need to learn a new tactic to deal with it. Remember what doing the same thing and expecting different results is a sign of? Stupidity.
So, how long until the google personals service starts up? That's one of Yahoo's biggest money makers.
Wish I'd thought of that. Find out if being fired for not having the cell phone on is wrongful termination, and then "let" that happen. Of course, be careful doing that, and make certain you have legal recourse *first*, then get terminated.
As always, take any advice from /. with a honking grain of salt. I could be a drooling idiot for all you know.
This is outright abuse. I don't know what your local laws are like, but the company should be reimbursing you for this. If not, get your resume out and get a new job. You've already attempted, in good faith, to get compensation for the cost of their calls to you, and you have been rebuffed. If they gave a damn about keeping your experience, they wouldn't be acting like this. Find an employer who will act in a professional manner. Then, if you choose to, take the old employer to small claims court for the uncompensated cost of those cell phone bills. There is no sense in this world in taking a hit on your personal credit because your employer is too stingy to pay for the services they're using.
I was in very much the same boat as you in my first job. Four pretty miserable years working on financial software at a nasty company. I was bored, drained of energy, frustrated, and I had completely lost all love of programming. I actually dreaded coding-when I did get a chance to code, instead of dealing with all kinds of political crap. I changed jobs a short while ago, and its made a world of difference. Here I'm working almost 100% of my time on code, the work is challenging as hell, the coworkers are sharp, and I don't have to deal with all kinds of political crap. On top of that, I'm actually coding in my spare time again-something I stopped doing over two years ago.
What I'm saying is, there are jobs out there which are much better in this industry. Some suck, some are much better. The good jobs are always rare, in any industry, but they *are* out there. Don't lose hope.
I've met more than a few scientists/engineers over the years who were in Science Olympiad. I was in it every year of middle and high school, although the best years were in middle school. The students at Peirce were blessed to have one of the best coaches around (Charlotte Nighton), and my middle school team went to nationals all four years I was eligible to be a team member. The whole experience was a blast, and it helped make an otherwise miserable middle school experience livable. There need to be more programs like this, they're a significant help to introduce kids to the fun part of science and engineering where you're doing real, hands on, work, instead of rote memorization and tests.
The kids are going to have a blast at Nationals in Juniata-its a nice little campus.
- Matt
I think we're muddling a few issues here, thanks to the lack of distinction in much of academia between computer science and software engineering. Just as I would not reasonably expect a Physicist to be a bridge designer (Mechanical/Civil Engineering), or circuit designer (Electrical Engineering), I would not expect a Computer Scientist to write software. A Computer Scientist is concerned with the theory and science of computation-algorithms, data structures, number theory, language research, and the like. They're the folks who are working out the theory on how something we may not see implemented in 30 years functions.
Really, we need to understand that there is software engineering (the folks who *design*, develop, and maintain software) and software science (what we call Computer Science). For software engineering, I believe it is fundamentally important to understand languages at as low a level as assembly, and as high a level as Prolog and the like. I have seen many poor design and implementation decisions made in professional code that would not have been made if the developer understood what was happening under the hood-or if they were aware of a higher level tool that would cut their development time dramatically and simplify their codebase. To be a good software engineer, you have to understand these things, and be able to judge the time to use a given tool. If you don't, you're doing a disservice to yourself, your employer, and your profession.
Now, I know there has long been an issue that (at least in the US, I don't know about other countries) there is no legal definition of what a software engineer does, or what qualifies a person to hold such a title. That's something we will need to change and address in this profession. The reality, though, is if you design and write software for a living, you really aren't a computer scientist-you're a software engineer.
This depends on the terms of the licensing agreement for the AGP code. nVidia may be barred from writing something to replace that code (I doubt that). Or they may have to do a "clean room" reverse engineering of it, without allowing anyone who has seen the old code base (any part of the driver, no matter how small) to work on the new code. That's a huge investment on their part for what is, in all fairness, a small market. That means that everyone who has worked on the video drivers from at least the TNT card could not be allowed to work on the new driver code at any time for fear of "contamination". That's a very real concern in the litigious world we live in.
I really get tired of hearing this same dispute come up every time nVidia and Linux are mentioned. nVidia can not release their drivers as open source due to the licensing for the AGP interface code in their drivers-pure plain and simple. There is not some huge conspiracy within nVidia to keep you from getting their source, they are not sitting here playing games with you, they are trying to support a market as best as they can within the restrictions imposed upon them by a business decision. If you don't believe me, the do a search here on slashdot into the history of this-even Carmack has chimed in on this one.
I sometimes wonder if there is a more thankless group out there than the Linux user market. Yes, it would be great if the nVidia drivers were open source. The truth of the matter is that unless someone wants to reverse engineer everything in these drivers, you're not going to have that anytime soon.
I was going to say "You must be new around here", but then I saw your user number. I'd love to see them evaluate articles based upon quality, but more often than not they seem to be evaluated based upon how well they speak for the "party line" around here.
This is getting a little rediculous. I'm seeing people confuse exploits with all other bugs. Buffer overruns and the like, which are a side effect of sloppy coding, make up a minority of the total bugs I see on a daily basis in production code. The only reason they are so well known is the consequences. Higher level languages, such as Java and Python, may protect the programmer against the effects of such sloppyness, but they do nothing to protect you against algorithmic bugs, which make up an overwhelming percentage of the bugs I see. Coding in a higher level language may protect you from easily writing exploits, but they do not guarantee you bug free, stable code. Only paying attention to every line you write, and making it as bullet proof and stable as possible, will help safeguard you from all of the many bugs we see. C and C++ are entirely appropriate languages to work in, if they fit the needs of your project.
Or he's very good at qualifying his statements. Note the article claims he says that recent versions have default settings to prevent automatic loading. In the MS security bulliten, they note that the default configuration of IE running under Windows Server 2003 is not affected due to its higher security settings. I can attest to that one, if you want to browse the web at all without seeing half the content locked off (like css headers, for example), you have to turn off all of the security lockdowns. I wouldn't know for certain about the latest Outlook releases, as I'm not about to test that!
So, he wasn't a lying scuzzball, he just was very careful with how he couched what he said.
This may be naive, but couldn't you just cut and paste your previously used linked list.
Well, you can cut and paste code, and that happens quite often in this world (one project here has 400 controls that perform various functions, and most of them are based off of a cut and pasted code template. Talk about a maintenance nightmare!). However, there is one huge problem with cutting and pasting code: if there is a bug, you will have to fix it everywhere you have copied that code. That's the big benefit of implementing a generic container class in a dynamic library-if you find a bug in your code, you fix it one place and the fix propagates to all applications using that library.
This may be a logical answer: its much easier for them to update the code running the fans from the OS than in firmware.
More than likely, if you're reading this site, you've lived in such a world your entire life. This has been possible with both conventional and nuclear weapons on bombers and ICBMs for years. This technology makes it possible for them to react a little faster, and a lot more accurately.
One of my coworkers came from a small town near Chernobyl. He died last year from complications brought about by radiation exposure from the meltdown. Nuclear power requires that the people using it be responsible and treat it with proper respect and fear. That didn't happen in Chernobyl, and a lot of good people died because of it.
Interesting, thanks for the info. For the first time ever I'm going to vote on the trustee ballot. The joys of being an alumnus.
I'll pass this one on to the other alumni I know. No need to have creeps like that influencing the school so directly, we already have Pepsi and Nike for that! :)
People have told me before how Objective-C was nice. But looking again now, it looks like it's only Mac OS-X, which is probably why I never looked into it before. I don't want to get locked into coding for a specific platform.
Objective C is fully available for Unix and windows systems, and I'm using it in my latest spare time project. If you're looking to code in Cocoa, GNUStep already provides a very good implementation of the Foundation, and they're working to get the Application classes fully supported under Unix and Windows.
In the Windows world you would probably best use the MinGW toolkit. If you don't plan to use GNUStep/Cocoa, but just the standard Objective C runtime, you'll still want to download the GNUStep runtime. The language runtime packaged with the latest MinGW does not support building DLLs, which can be rather frustrating if you don't know about it before you start. Once you get that built and installed, you're good to go.
I've been very happy thus far working in Objective C. I typically find my code is much smaller than when I work in C++, and its much easier to read and maintain when I'm done. There is something very pleasant and freeing about being able to work in a nicely dynamic language.
Of course if the Republicans announce that they're suddenly all in favor of gun control, I'm moving to Canada immediately.
Great idea. Run to a country where the gun control folks already have more control than the worst US states.
The day I see a republican administration embrace the gun control lobby, I will get very scared. I think we all will, because that means things are rapidly falling on a slippery slope, Hollywood anti-gun proselytizing notwithstanding.
And it was bombed by the US in the first Gulf War when it reported the killing of civilians in a supposedly military target.
Well done. You've shot your credibility in one sentence. It was Al Jazeera's offices in Kabul that were bombed last year, not their offices in Iraq. Al Jazeera was founded in 1996, 5 years after the first Gulf War.
They've also been threatened by every single Arab country in the region - closed down, ambassadors recalled, physical attacks.
Wow, this has to be the first time I've ever heard of a news organization with ambassadors. This must be a very powerful organisation.
They're called reporters.
Regardless of what the article said, the post on slashdot implied that it was .05% per decade, period. Thats what I'm responding to.
I'm glad to see someone here openly admit they aren't commenting on the article, but on the Slashdot post that is either politically spun or written by someone who didn't bother to read the article in the first place. If only more people would open up and admit they only read the postings, we could get the editors to stop linking the sites, and end the scourge of slashdotting.