iTunes supports playback of AAC formats. I recently converted some of mp3's to AAC and found the converted files took roughly 40% less space than the mp3's. Cool. I can do more with less.!
I am booting my system using boot floppy. My BIOS boot loader cannot boot from the hard-disk after I installed a second hard-disk. I did an upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1. Mandrake installation of 9.1 did not create a valid boot floppy for me when I installed. So I was basically screwed by the upgrade. So I had to revert back to 9.0 installation which faithfully creates a bootable floppy everytime.
All of a sudden Slashdot seems to revel in sensational and populist political news items. For example the recent news items titled "No Americans Need Apply", etc... I'm sorry to see the Slashdot editorial standard declining... Recently there have been many news items which are not at all worth posting but got posted anyway. Is this a cheap way to get more Slashdot posters..? If Slashdot does not change its course sooner or later, I think it will lose real the contributers.
Tell me how NASA or moon-landing contributed to the bottom-line of the USA. People need to look at the history to do things differently.
Government and the elite needs to think about coming up with innovative ways along the lines of what H-P is doing with its iCommunity project in the Indian village called Kuppam.
I think the history repeats itself. Back in 1970s, IBM wanted to gain market for its mainframes in India. But as we all know the Mainframe hardware, software and services costs lots of $$$. So instead placing bets on a proprietory vendor with lots of money, the government officials decided to go without it. This presented an opportunity for others. Indian companies like HCL licensed inexpensive Unix from AT&T, built their own hardware and modified the source code to run on their hardware. All the universities and banks had modest computing power running on a version of Unix. Students learnt Unix not OS 390 and it turned out that Unix is the future and mainframes were obsolete. We all now know why this is good for India. The same thing happening now, instead of IBM substitute M$. So lack of money can sometimes be advantageous.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, too little and too much wealth are not good for well-being of the society.
Man you can never accuse anybody wholeheartedly. You got to put yourself in his shoes to see what he is going through. Do you know how much politics goes on in Corporate America that prevents engineers from doing their best? Okay let me correct my narrow view, 75% of corporate world fits into my description.
I agree, but surely you must concede that some people just like to play the victim just a little to often
Wow! what a condescending remark. Not everybody is self-satisfied as you and there is no reason why they should be, given the stinking nature of corporate atmosphere.
India had lots of brain power but no money. If proprietary software was allowed to take root in India would still be poor in computer knowledge. India booted out IBM and mainframes in favor of Unix some 30 years ago. It was kinda boon to fledgling Indian software engineers because Unix made it possible to hook up a dirt cheap terminal to a low cost server. This made computing available to lots of students in universities that had no money for proprietary software. And everybody learnt the computers on the Unix platform.
I hope Linux other would do they same to poor countries. Many developing countries need something that they can use as a stepping stone to develop themeselves without being exploited by developed countries.
I think this kinda geeky attitude is preventing lot of good technology ventures becoming a business success.
Believe me, I've been Linux user since RedHat 5.x. IMHO, these are the reasons why I settled with Mandrake. Please beware that I'm the kinda guy who would switch to Mac OS-X if it is as affordable as Mandrake. But Mandrake is the reason why I still haven't switched over to Mac-OS-X.
The greatest hurdle for entry into Linux has been the installation nightmare. Mandrake removed that obstacle and made it available for masses. When I first installed Mandrake 8.0, I felt like this is what I've been looking for all along. C'mon, the damn thing configured and installed all the drivers for the hardware I've got in one installation step. Normally, I used to spend days and weeks just to get my Sound, network, display, CD-RW, etc working after I installed Linux.
For people like me, who want run their home network server in the cheapest possible way without getting distracted by installation nightmare, Mandrake rocks.
Being easy to install doesn't make it a dumbed down Linux. It just makes the chores of installation and configuration easy. So I don't have to remember minutia of configuring sound, display etc.
Now if you download Mandrake, please consider making a donation, as there are many people like me who want it stay in the business as it provides an optimal solution.
He sees the UI of the system which is designed by non-techies atleast in all the projects that I worked on. And those designers tend to be those kinda people with brain function impaired by too much partying. Yet the people of similar nature (end users with brain function impaired by too much partying) find it so convenient to blame the techies who work hard and long hours.
I strive to build a well balanced and optimized backend system but does that author of the article give a shit about that?
Can somebody tell him real techies do not design UIs? Give him a clue.
First of all, let me make it clear that I would rather not pay for something if I can get it for free. Having said that the reasons I paid for Opera are: 1.Tabs Say what you may about Knoq, phoenix having tabbed browsing. But Opera what the first and does now has even more tabbed features with ability to save tab sessions. 2. Gestures: This is first to market and most elegant and intuitive gestures than the Moz plugin which caused me unpredicatable or inintentional behaviors with the gestures. 3. Kickass Download manager The best download integration with browser. Stop start resume, etc,, With the new version you can download all the links in a page in just one operation. 4. Memory and Speed: My normal usage takes only 20MB(I have 12 tabs open usually mostly java documentation that I can easily access) on minimizing it takes only 7MB.
5. Search integration Believe it the searching google, amazon or ebay or your custom configuration is far superior to any browser out there.
Only negative I have is the rendering of pages. For example Yahoo! Mail had pull down menu. But I can't get it to work in Opera given that Yahoo! is a megaplex on the web.
So give it a try and you'll never turn back just I did. If it makes your life better thank Opera team and you'll be better for it.
Is intuitive design necessarily good in programming.? Recursion is intuitive but not necessarily efficient in terms of performance. At what point do we decide which is better intuitive design or efficient design.
No amount of testing can salvage a sloppy design and coding. You need a team of skilled and trained engineers who are dedicated rather than people who just look forward to Friday and who should really been in someother field. Not someone who is in for making money. I guess the problem lies on the so called project managers imbeciles most of whom should be really doing some telemarketing stuff. The silver bullet to highly successful projects is - dynamic leadership, environment and dedicated, highly trained and skilled engineers. All other talk about testing is just rambling... My 2 cents
I am using Eclipse 2.0 Beta for about a month now. I am increasingly becoming comfortable with it. I like the user interface better than NetBeans. You can run each Java class file. But the Ant integration is not as good as NetBeans. But the source editing and object browsing is far superior to NetBeans. Eclipse offers on-the-fly compiling which compiles code as you save/type it and gives you compilation errors on the lines you just typed. This I think is a great productivity enhancer which saves your time by not having you go through each and every compilation error and fixing them. The refactoring support is great. I changed a package name and the import statements were automatically changed. It is fairly robust and has not crashed on me given that it is a beta version. I find this to be very promising tool platform. Give it a shot and you'll be happy for it. Trust me.
Many OO books contain an example of how to model the car in OO. The "Car" object is a container of Engine, Transmission, etc. The engine can be of different types like V6, V8, Turbo-charged etc..
How use inheritance to model that. OO is comes in obvious when you have to do lot of simulation work in your engineering field. I find your question ironical because I frequently read the analogy of the software components and engineering components (like IC, nut, bold) and having standard interfaces between the components so the COTS software components can be assembled together just like the hardware components. To model, algorithms use the "Template" pattern from GoF pattern book. In fact OO would be very ideal. Only field where I don't see OO to be very helpful as you mention in your question is in the field of Mathematics. Well, I guess even there is a standard example like Complex numbers and operator overloading. OO is good. I like it. I see no reason why anyone want to program in procedural paradigm.
>It brought taxation and simple democracy to >India. It breathed the first light of the west's >wisdom on those dark and primitive lands.
Your knowledge of indian heritage and culture and for that matter your worldly views wouldn't sell for one cent. Go read about Indus Valley civilization (www.harappa.com, www.brittanica.com), the invention of decimal system etc.
This news post and the title seems biased towards AMD. By the time the Clawhammer is widely available, both Intel P4 and AMD will be of more or less same size. The size of of P4 will be 116 millimeters square to that Clawhammer's 105 millimeters square. I don't see anything unique to what is being done by AMD (well may be the cost is unique, but Intel is also cutting down now thanks to AMD).
I used opera for three full trial periods (not on the same system) without purchasing it. I think I saved some 40 bugs because of that. Now that I am up and running on Opera 5, I do n't think I will spend money on the license. The reason is there is
* I am not bothereed with ads appearing as long as I do not lose much of real estate. Just don't look at them. I have better things to do than looking at the ads and clicking on them. Have some self control without it you're an animal.
Also, the ad banner now only takes up 10-20% extra of my screen real estate than the opera 4.0 browser without it. I can live that.
Also another cool feature that I found in new version is the search text box. Way cool. I've always opened many windows just to do search on google and AV.
With IE hanging my Win2000 and nutscrape out otf the question, I think Opera is my only choice. I don't see myself changing browsers in near future. Way to go Opera!!!
I had the bigATT charge me exorbitant amount for my long distance charges. I was their customer and I relocated to another area. I called them before and after I moved and informed them promptly what I am doing. But it was not until 3 or 4 months, I realized that they charged me high rates. I called them and they said I did not have a plan on my line. What the heck? I had a calling plan before relocating and I told them I wanted to retain the same account status with a different phone number.
I called them and explained the problem. One customer representative gave me credit but it was rejected later telling some vague reason ignoring my explanation. I again called and another customer representative re-issued the credit because that person felt I had a valid reason.
But that credit never came to me and I spent hours every week calling them and enquiring about the status. Finally when I called they flatly told me my case was closed long back even though I was constantly being told it is still in processing.
Their aim was to wear me down but I persisted and wrote BBB. Their whole billing system is messed up that I got different everytime. The whole experience was so disgusting that I would not even think of siging up with them again for any service.
Anything is possible. Haven't you heard of that thing or did people forget about that. If at all something is not possible it is more to do with ugly human tendencies like politics, greed, etc than innovation.
Think different. Just because other countries developed with means of power etc., does not mean that is the only way to achieve standard of living. I personally consider IT as one of the far reaching invention by human kind which is paralles the invention wheel and farming. Infact, it was of Gandhi from India who taught the world to think differently when fighting for one's cause. See those Apple ads with Gandhi picture.
Why there is so much negative/pessimistic thoughts belaboring about the lack of power, health care, etc. Internet is a powerful which can bring definitive social changes if utilized properly. I do not see why Internet cannot be the enabler of basic needs. If internet can educate people and make them realize their condition, there starts the progress. Is not the famous revolutions fuelled by media like print etc. Infact one of the major facilitator of revolutions has been the invention of printing press. So why not can internet pull the same thing off. Think positive (TM)
Slashdot Mirror
iTunes supports playback of AAC formats. I recently converted some of mp3's to AAC and found the converted files took roughly 40% less space than the mp3's. Cool. I can do more with less.!
I am booting my system using boot floppy. My BIOS boot loader cannot boot from the hard-disk after I installed a second hard-disk.
I did an upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1. Mandrake installation of 9.1 did not create a valid boot floppy for me when I installed. So I was basically screwed by the upgrade. So I had to revert back to 9.0 installation which faithfully creates a bootable floppy everytime.
Now you tell me there is a 9.2 version?
All of a sudden Slashdot seems to revel in sensational and populist political news items.
For example the recent news items titled "No Americans Need Apply", etc...
I'm sorry to see the Slashdot editorial standard declining...
Recently there have been many news items which are not at all worth posting but got posted anyway.
Is this a cheap way to get more Slashdot posters..?
If Slashdot does not change its course sooner or later, I think it will lose real the contributers.
like the idea that posting to Slashdot could actually speed up a download. It seems so wrong.
Actually, it speeds up the download counter in the hosting site.
Tell me how NASA or moon-landing contributed to the bottom-line of the USA. People need to look at the history to do things differently.
Government and the elite needs to think about coming up with innovative ways along the lines of what H-P is doing with its iCommunity project in the Indian village called Kuppam.
I think the history repeats itself. Back in 1970s, IBM wanted to gain market for its mainframes in India.
But as we all know the Mainframe hardware, software and services costs lots of $$$.
So instead placing bets on a proprietory vendor with lots of money, the government officials decided to go without it.
This presented an opportunity for others. Indian companies like HCL licensed inexpensive Unix from AT&T, built their own hardware and modified the source code to run on their hardware.
All the universities and banks had modest computing power running on a version of Unix.
Students learnt Unix not OS 390 and it turned out that Unix is the future and mainframes were obsolete. We all now know why this is good for India.
The same thing happening now, instead of IBM substitute M$.
So lack of money can sometimes be advantageous.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, too little and too much wealth are not good for well-being of the society.
Man you can never accuse anybody wholeheartedly. You got to put yourself in his shoes to see what he is going through.
Do you know how much politics goes on in Corporate America that prevents engineers from doing their best?
Okay let me correct my narrow view, 75% of corporate world fits into my description.
I agree, but surely you must concede that some people just like to play the victim just a little to often
Wow! what a condescending remark. Not everybody is self-satisfied as you and there is no reason why they should be, given the stinking nature of corporate atmosphere.
India had lots of brain power but no money. If proprietary software was allowed to take root in India would still be poor in computer knowledge.
India booted out IBM and mainframes in favor of Unix some 30 years ago. It was kinda boon to fledgling Indian software engineers because Unix made it possible to hook up a dirt cheap terminal to a low cost server. This made computing available to lots of students in universities that had no money for proprietary software. And everybody learnt the computers on the Unix platform.
I hope Linux other would do they same to poor countries. Many developing countries need something that they can use as a stepping stone to develop themeselves without being exploited by developed countries.
Long live, open source and free software.
I think this kinda geeky attitude is preventing lot of good technology ventures becoming a business success.
Believe me, I've been Linux user since RedHat 5.x.
IMHO, these are the reasons why I settled with Mandrake. Please beware that I'm the kinda guy who would switch to Mac OS-X if it is as affordable as Mandrake. But Mandrake is the reason why I still haven't switched over to Mac-OS-X.
The greatest hurdle for entry into Linux has been the installation nightmare. Mandrake removed that obstacle and made it available for masses.
When I first installed Mandrake 8.0, I felt like this is what I've been looking for all along.
C'mon, the damn thing configured and installed all the drivers for the hardware I've got in one installation step. Normally, I used to spend days and weeks just to get my Sound, network, display, CD-RW, etc working after I installed Linux.
For people like me, who want run their home network server in the cheapest possible way without getting distracted by installation nightmare, Mandrake rocks.
Being easy to install doesn't make it a dumbed down Linux. It just makes the chores of installation and configuration easy. So I don't have to remember minutia of configuring sound, display etc.
Now if you download Mandrake, please consider making a donation, as there are many people like me who want it stay in the business as it provides an optimal solution.
He sees the UI of the system which is designed by non-techies atleast in all the projects that I worked on.
And those designers tend to be those kinda people with brain function impaired by too much partying.
Yet the people of similar nature (end users with brain function impaired by too much partying) find it so convenient to blame the techies who work hard and long hours.
I strive to build a well balanced and optimized backend system but does that author of the article give a shit about that?
Can somebody tell him real techies do not design UIs?
Give him a clue.
First of all, let me make it clear that I would rather not pay for something if I can get it for free. Having said that the reasons I paid for Opera are:
1.Tabs
Say what you may about Knoq, phoenix having tabbed browsing. But Opera what the first and does now has even more tabbed features with ability to save tab sessions.
2. Gestures:
This is first to market and most elegant and intuitive gestures than the Moz plugin which caused me unpredicatable or inintentional behaviors with the gestures.
3. Kickass Download manager
The best download integration with browser. Stop start resume, etc,, With the new version you can download all the links in a page in just one operation.
4. Memory and Speed:
My normal usage takes only 20MB(I have 12 tabs open usually mostly java documentation that I can easily access) on minimizing it takes only 7MB.
5. Search integration
Believe it the searching google, amazon or ebay or your custom configuration is far superior to any browser out there.
Only negative I have is the rendering of pages. For example Yahoo! Mail had pull down menu. But I can't get it to work in Opera given that Yahoo! is a megaplex on the web.
So give it a try and you'll never turn back just I did.
If it makes your life better thank Opera team and you'll be better for it.
Is intuitive design necessarily good in programming.?
Recursion is intuitive but not necessarily efficient in terms of performance.
At what point do we decide which is better intuitive design or efficient design.
No amount of testing can salvage a sloppy design and coding. You need a team of skilled and trained engineers who are dedicated rather than people who just look forward to Friday and who should really been in someother field. Not someone who is in for making money. I guess the problem lies on the so called project managers imbeciles most of whom should be really doing some telemarketing stuff. The silver bullet to highly successful projects is - dynamic leadership, environment and dedicated, highly trained and skilled engineers. All other talk about testing is just rambling...
My 2 cents
Take a look at company called called Pramati . Theya are the first J2EE 1.3 certified server and a real good application server.
I am using Eclipse 2.0 Beta for about a month now. I am increasingly becoming comfortable with it. I like the user interface better than NetBeans. You can run each Java class file. But the Ant integration is not as good as NetBeans. But the source editing and object browsing is far superior to NetBeans. Eclipse offers on-the-fly compiling which compiles code as you save/type it and gives you compilation errors on the lines you just typed. This I think is a great productivity enhancer which saves your time by not having you go through each and every compilation error and fixing them. The refactoring support is great. I changed a package name and the import statements were automatically changed. It is fairly robust and has not crashed on me given that it is a beta version. I find this to be very promising tool platform. Give it a shot and you'll be happy for it. Trust me.
Many OO books contain an example of how to model the car in OO. The "Car" object is a container of Engine, Transmission, etc. The engine can be of different types like V6, V8, Turbo-charged etc..
How use inheritance to model that. OO is comes in obvious when you have to do lot of simulation work in your engineering field. I find your question ironical because I frequently read the analogy of the software components and engineering components (like IC, nut, bold) and having standard interfaces between the components so the COTS software components can be assembled together just like the hardware components. To model, algorithms use the "Template" pattern from GoF pattern book. In fact OO would be very ideal. Only field where I don't see OO to be very helpful as you mention in your question is in the field of Mathematics. Well, I guess even there is a standard example like Complex numbers and operator overloading. OO is good. I like it. I see no reason why anyone want to program in procedural paradigm.
>It brought taxation and simple democracy to >India. It breathed the first light of the west's >wisdom on those dark and primitive lands. Your knowledge of indian heritage and culture and for that matter your worldly views wouldn't sell for one cent. Go read about Indus Valley civilization (www.harappa.com, www.brittanica.com), the invention of decimal system etc.
This news post and the title seems biased towards AMD. By the time the Clawhammer is widely available, both Intel P4 and AMD will be of more or less same size. The size of of P4 will be 116 millimeters square to that Clawhammer's 105 millimeters square. I don't see anything unique to what is being done by AMD (well may be the cost is unique, but Intel is also cutting down now thanks to AMD).
I used opera for three full trial periods (not on the same system) without purchasing it. I think I saved some 40 bugs because of that. Now that I am up and running on Opera 5, I do n't think I will spend money on the license. The reason is there is * I am not bothereed with ads appearing as long as I do not lose much of real estate. Just don't look at them. I have better things to do than looking at the ads and clicking on them. Have some self control without it you're an animal. Also, the ad banner now only takes up 10-20% extra of my screen real estate than the opera 4.0 browser without it. I can live that. Also another cool feature that I found in new version is the search text box. Way cool. I've always opened many windows just to do search on google and AV. With IE hanging my Win2000 and nutscrape out otf the question, I think Opera is my only choice. I don't see myself changing browsers in near future. Way to go Opera!!!
I had the bigATT charge me exorbitant amount for my long distance charges. I was their customer and I relocated to another area. I called them before and after I moved and informed them promptly what I am doing. But it was not until 3 or 4 months, I realized that they charged me high rates. I called them and they said I did not have a plan on my line. What the heck? I had a calling plan before relocating and I told them I wanted to retain the same account status with a different phone number. I called them and explained the problem. One customer representative gave me credit but it was rejected later telling some vague reason ignoring my explanation. I again called and another customer representative re-issued the credit because that person felt I had a valid reason. But that credit never came to me and I spent hours every week calling them and enquiring about the status. Finally when I called they flatly told me my case was closed long back even though I was constantly being told it is still in processing. Their aim was to wear me down but I persisted and wrote BBB. Their whole billing system is messed up that I got different everytime. The whole experience was so disgusting that I would not even think of siging up with them again for any service.
Anything is possible. Haven't you heard of that thing or did people forget about that. If at all something is not possible it is more to do with ugly human tendencies like politics, greed, etc than innovation.
If you know about the news and can find it out without reading slashdot, then you shouldnn't be reading slashdot.
Think different. Just because other countries developed with means of power etc., does not mean that is the only way to achieve standard of living. I personally consider IT as one of the far reaching invention by human kind which is paralles the invention wheel and farming. Infact, it was of Gandhi from India who taught the world to think differently when fighting for one's cause. See those Apple ads with Gandhi picture.
Why there is so much negative/pessimistic thoughts belaboring about the lack of power, health care, etc. Internet is a powerful which can bring definitive social changes if utilized properly. I do not see why Internet cannot be the enabler of basic needs. If internet can educate people and make them realize their condition, there starts the progress. Is not the famous revolutions fuelled by media like print etc. Infact one of the major facilitator of revolutions has been the invention of printing press. So why not can internet pull the same thing off. Think positive (TM)