It took me at least a year to realize this to the point where I could verbalize it, but a really good C++ framework or class structure for Windows programming would, because of the design of C++, automatically be a really good system for writing Portable Programs!. Hence the evil that is MFC.
This is one reason why I was very ready to believe that C# would use a much better programming environment than Microsoft C++. The other reason was my familiarity with Microsoft Java.
If you want quality with MS software development products, you will have to put up with lack of platform-portability. Obvious now. See also ATL/WTL.
The challenges can be special. First, vision. Many seniors have bifocal reading glasses and/or varifocal near-far glasses. Neither is great for reading a computer screen. If they don't have good computer glasses, it is quite normal for them to
not even see a dialog box right in front of them
not read the screen
tilt their head upward whenever they need to read the screen
be unable to read the smaller print
A large (19 or 21 inch) screen with moderate resolution (less than 1024 X 768) helps a lot. Lowering resolution can improve readability tremendously.
Next, arthritis. Mousing and keyboard use can be quite challenging for some seniors. I've seen right-handed people use the mouse in the left hand and refuse to let me switch the buttons because it would be too confusing. Head and neck angle ergonomics matter more for arthritics.
Memory. It's tough for them to learn and use the keyboard shortcuts, since there is no visual prompt, so don't teach them. Rely on things with a visual prompt like menus. Even the edit menu. I've given up on teaching windows seniors the alt-tab switcher numerous times. Finger pain from arthritis plays a role here too.
New abstractions. It's tough to teach a tree control directory structure to someone whose life experience has been raising children. The difference between main memory and the disk escapes them.
Rigorous maintainance. Visiting a senior relative after an absence of a few years, I found that 19 Critical Updates from Windows Updates were pending and had not been installed. Likewise for backups, defrag, anti-virus... If a TV doesn't require it, they won't remember it.
The computer will often not get the priority that it would get in a work or student situation. The computer table will be used for other things, such as board games, eating, putting on makeup, writing checks, and so on. The computer books and the installation disks get lost. There may not be any organization to the place where the computer is. The chair so carefully selected may be in another room.
Opportunities
Seniors like games more than I thought they would. Card games, backgammon, and computerized versions of board and table-top games go over well. Shooter games are less interesting than to the younger crowd, but ymmv.
Human communication. Email, voice over ip, photos by mail, and all that are all very interesting to seniors. Especially women.
Persistance. They will keep at it for a decade or more, learning as they go.
Gizmophilia. Back-to-nature, home-cooking, earth mothers eventually succumb to a fascination with the latest gizmos and start exploring.
Finally, be warned that some seniors like porn and aren't sophisticated enough to hide it well. Don't go exploring in their hard drive unless you're ready to deal with the consequences. If the old man is having computer trouble but won't accept help, it might be pride, but it might be an attempt to prevent grossing out the youngsters!
The answer is too simple. If you have a postscript printer you can just use the command line "print" command to send the.ps file to the printer. Works great.
It's a regular industry. Check out this site for example. Note that they do full color.
Their specs page lists the preferred Macintosh file formats they accept.
I've been told that some of the large-format printing devices in use are essentially RGB raster graphic devices that have 3 paintball guns in a mount that scans across the surface in a grid pattern. The size of the paintballs is governed by the current pixel of the bitmap. Obviously, three nozzles each connect via hose to a separate reservoir of paint could be made to work as well.
I would expect the current report from Reasoning to be bogus also. The previous report (on TCP/IP stacks) was about code density. This means a code base that was 3 times as bloated (code size) but only had twice the number of bugs would come out as being better than its competitors. And that report did not give information on code size or total number of bugs or on the performance of the tcp/ip stack.
Built in, you have
Windows Scripting host. This has two different language front ends you can use to build stand-alone non-gui programs. VBScript and JScript. Yes, the same JScript you use for web pages. No, you don't need to use a web page or browser or HTML with it. I recommend downloading the
latest stuff if you're going to use it. If you have a Windows XP you're all set, but I'd recommend downloading the "JScript Documentation" or "VBScript Documentation" or both. If you have an older system, like windows 9x or even Me, you may as well download the "Microsoft Windows Script 5.6 Download" for your system. Otherwise you might be stuck with version 5.5, or whatever is on your system. 5.6 is just better.
This is the programming system that is so powerful that the virus writers all use it for those HTML and Outlook email viruses. And the documentation is very complete and thorough. And it's on every windows machine. These languages also have an object model that can be used to program every aspect of a windows client or server machine, including active directory. Look up WMI and ADSI
to learn how to use VBSCript and JScript to totally control your windows system or entire network. Also, you can look up those two keywords on Amazon if you want to spring for a book. Furthermore, there are web sites with lots of free scripts that run on Windows.
Plus, you can get free cygwin tools from cygwin.com that will enable you to program in all those GCC languages.
Plus, you can download a FREE Java environment from the Sun website. Mostly command line.
Plus, you can download for FREE, the entire suite of.NET Framework programming tools, at this web page, provided you are willing to live with Command Line tools! You are slashdot, are you willing to live with command line tools to use FREE C# and so on? It's a big download, though.
Plus, you can download FREE perl and Python, already compiled and adopted to Windows from
Active State.
Wait -- there's more! Batch files! The latest 32 bit OS's have a powerful batch system with real if-then-else structure! And, on XP, it's even documented !.
I really did leave Microsoft in the 1980's shortly before the stock options were issued. I figured that IBM had more software engineers than Microsoft had employees, and IBM would never be dumb enough to give the DOS market to pipsqueak Microsoft.
Almost all successful television series have some plot device to plausably permit a stream of new and odd characters to run through the premise-world inhabited by the series regulars.
This is why crime shows and police dramas are always standard. Plenty of odd and unusual behavior. Same with hospital shows. A stream of patients. Not too many prime time weekly series about life on farm in the middle of nowhere (Little House being the exception) or life in a senior citizens home. TV Series located in restaurants, bars, and diners are periodically tried, but it's hard to generate crisis after crisis in a diner.
Now one thing you don't get while programming is a stream of new and odd people coming through each week. There have been office comedies, (Yes Minister) but these are the exception. Sara Michelle Gellar had new demons to slay each week. But imaging trying to carry a series modeled on the movie "The Net" for a few years! Each week another abandoned secret agent types mysterious messages onto Sandra Bullocks computer screen. What's the variation, new fonts?
Programming isn't the center of TV series for the same reason that chess players, writers, philosophers, lexicographers, poets, and mathemeticians aren't --- the interesting things aren't dramatically visible.
I've got it! Each week the wacky cast tries to decode another 100 line error message about syntax errors in C++ templates. A laff riot! For sweeps week, the compiler crashes on a divide by zero error. I can't wait.
I've been coding, on and off, since the sixties. Maybe I'm in a rut. Anyway, the youth preference seems to be really new. In the 1970's through some of the 90's, programmers in their thirties and forties were valued. Perhaps because they were so rare. In the late 1970's I worked with a guy who had 25 years of experience writing compilers. He literally could write his own ticket with the larger software companies.
Today, a person with that much experience might be valued, but maybe not. The compiler coding techniques employed by recently graduated masters of computer science might be too different. A close fit in a mixed team would seem too hard to the hiring manager.
Starting in the nineties, the image of the young dot com web coder and of the young (teenage!) hacker captured the majority of the public mind-space. What we called script kiddies passed for deep-thinking intellectuals in the public mind. Executives are creatures of fad, as any American worker (or Dilbert-reader) knows all to well.
All this fluff just provides cover, though for deeper trends. One trend of long standing is the difficulty that managers have of picking the best or the most productive code workers.
I worked at a company many of you have heard of, where the company-driving code was written in tremendous haste by a pampered over-paid coder who just never had time to do anything right. His bosses needed everything yesterday. The problems this troubled code base caused everybody else in the company were legion. The company has not progressed either technically or financially since that time three years ago. How could the financially-driven invstors who wanted to ride the dot-com cash cow have known that he lacked the depth for the job? May as well hire a promising youngster who'll work 80 hours a week.
Other trends are the aging of the workforce, the lower salaries being paid to younger coders and guest workers from the third world. One trend not noticed much is the negative value of management. Which, nowadays, happens to be young management.
For example, any living observer has noticed the popularity of Linux. Lots has been said about this. I'd like to add the fact that there are no (or few?) non-coding managers on the development team. Probably no MBA's at all. Since most of the collaberation is done at a distance, the age of most of the participants probably isn't known to the central figures of the project. There were few or no face-to-face interviews, no intense puzzle-oriented interviews. If several of the key people do all their coding between midnight and 9 AM, no executive committee frowns.
Is there a Text-to-Morse realtime converter? So we can do "Messaging"? Now just pop over to systran or babel fish and hook in the automatic translation services between your text and the traslation to morse code... I think I have the recipe for a disaster or a comedy. I should sell this idea to Hollywood; Hacker in Pacoima starts Panic in Kinshasa!
When lightning hits your antenna, you could lose your SW radio. Your computer, however, is (or should be) more expensive. Of course modem lines pose a similar threat, but without the big lightning rod on your roof being connected to your PC. With a little bad luck, you could take out your entire network.
Some schools have discount purchase plans that can give you a better deal than Dell. Call them up and check it out. Some schools sell PC's in the bookstore for more than Dell.
Don't buy until the end of the summer, to get the benefit of all the price drops and upgrades until then.
If you're getting a desktop, order it (by phone) or have your parents do it, on the first day you live in the dorm. That way, UPS ships it instead of you lugging it across the state or country.
Consider that, unless you're well off, you're going to have to use this for 5 years (unless you're getting another as a graduation present). So buy a box that will hold 4 gigabytes of RAM, but only fill in 1 slot with half a gigabyte. In a year or two, buy more ram. Nobody ever complained about having a screen that was too large or too sharp or having too much memory.
See if the school network has a printer in the dorm, this can save money. On the other hand, you can probably get a printer for less than the price of a single textbook.
Microsoft Word has an "Equation editor" that might be good for taking math notes. I haven't tried it. I'll bet that StarOffice and Open Office have something like it. I did a quick google on "Equation editor" and came up with even more alternatives. You could even ask a math professor.
Back in the Jurassic, I learned that the science courses, especially the freshman trio of Chemistry, Physics and Calculus, were made easier by having a competitor's text available. If the standard text was too obscure, read some other text on the subject. Better too easy than complete, as I was more likely to use it. Most of this stuff is understanding the core principles, and the simpler texts include only the basics. Once I had my mind wrapped around the basic concept, the more complete text was actually fun to read. This was especially true (for me) in calculus and physics. YMMV (Your Mind May Vary). Also, this technique sounds like it would have worked in history, had I tried it, but I don't think it would have helped much in English Literature.
You also can download the online notes from a course at some other university you find on the web. If you have WiFi, of course, you wouldn't need to do even that. Thinking outside the box helps in study strategies.
So if you can bring 6 or 8 eBooks to the lecture and the library, you've made your life that much easier. I don't think you want to read the eBook on a little PDA screen.
Additional hint on dealing with courses that use the paradigm "Read the chapter then solve the homework": Read the homework questions thoroughly before you read the chapter. Then, when you come across the paragraph on, say "Relativistic stoichiometry" in the chapter, you'll automatically perk up.
Scared Straight
Way back when; I knew a guy at college, a physics major who was clearly smarter than I was. Great guy. He decided to do LSD as an undergrad, and he liked it. A couple of months later I ran across him sitting under a tree on campus. He was leaving school because he just couldn't think like he used to. He was very unhappy about what he'd done to himself. I never saw him again and can't even remember his name now, but I've never forgotten him.
The next year a girl I knew was checking out of school with a similar story. she had used LSD and "DMT" or "MDA", or maybe all three. She just couldn't think straight enough to do the work anymore, and had to leave. I've never forgetten her either. And I've never forgetten the deep current of fear that ran through me as she told me her story. She had made it through to her sophmore or junior year and had to drop out.
And we don't even know if these people really took exactly the drugs they paid for. There is no FDA watching for purity and correct formulation. So even if somebody "Proves" that the illegal drug you're so fond of is "Harmless", you have to realize nobody knows exactly what it is you are actually taking. Plant products shouldn't suffer from this problem as much; But if you think about all the reasons people have begun to prefer organic foods, you'll realize that illegally imported plant products may have pesticides and other things you really don't want.
If you think about it, you'll realize that damaging your own brain is probably worse than suicide, because you have all those decades to blame yourself.
Re:Wow...it took them this long to ANNOUNCE it
on
The Costs of Patching
·
· Score: 1
Obviously they've done a study of some costs and the guy announced what everybody already knew. Patching is more expensive for server and for workstations than keeping up anti-virus libraries.
Microsoft does test the various releases, and it tests the patched systems, but they have a tremendous number of users and of hackers to contend with. The mind-set at Microsoft for many years was; One computer, one user. And deliver the promise of the microprocessor. When they did the big Internet switchover they networked together systems that were "Secure enough" for single-user usage. The whole idea of hackers and hacking just wasn't properly understood by of a lot of the developers and managers. (I'm sure there were a few choice e-mails, by the smarter visionaries about network security, that they wished they'd paid more attention to).
You can look at Microsofts security problems as a fallout of the dot-com bubble, when MS and everybody else tried to very quickly adjust to the new Internet-business reality. The microprocessor revolution ran into the Internet revolution, and a certain amount of roughness resulted.
The idea that these problems are happening because of a lack of testing or of code review or of understanding how to do good software just doesn't add up. Creating good software is hard, creating good software for a large market is harder.
I am reasonably certain that Microsoft tests their products more than the Linux vendors do. Microsoft has teams of thousands of full-time testers using tens or hundreds of thousands of test machines running both automated and hands-on tests. I dont' think any Linux vendor does that. Did you think all of the 30,000 employees were coders and marketers?
GPS is more than one needs for nuclear weapons targeting, but is very convenient. The electronics are available anywhere, and the techniques for connecting it to an autopilot are readily available. If you're on a budget, you can test it out near home, reprogram it, bring your airplane in range, and just let it go.
If GPS is used this way, it will certainly be the most important use of GPS. The hard part, of course, is building the bomb. But that's getting easier. And if North Korea has its way, there will be a free market in nuclear warheads.
The most important use for high accuracy is in targeting weapons by GPS, what the US Air Force is doing in Iraq this very day...
Thanks to Moore's law, it won't be long before we'll able to convert a street address to coordinates, and feed those to our robotic model airplane (or RPV) and drop a load of semtex on the house of the guy who cut us off in traffic the other day. Take that! you arrogant bastard!
Fortunately, the day is coming soon when maybe 30 countries (and perhaps their terrorist proxies) will have nuclear weapons, which, combined with a good navigation system, means the human race won't have to worry about navigation for too much longer. We'll be extinct.
If hydrogen costs more than gasoline per delivered horsepower (or watts, if you like) then it won't catch on. Hydrogen costs money to make, and it costs energy. You have to burn and consume oil (extract the hydrogen from the crude) or run a hydroelectric plant to get the hydrogen. If you're burning oil to create hydrogen, you're wasting crude oil and putting as much carbon into the air as before. If you're using hydroelectric, you've got to replace the power.
I suppose if a good system of nuclear power plants were implented, you could use the electricity to generate hydrogen. Could the publicity being given to hydrogen power be a stalking horse for building nuclear plants?
The resource cost of Open Source Development is unmeasured and unmeasurable -- it is also distributed unfairly, as the major burden falls upon the developers.
The resource cost of Proprietary Development is measured very carefully indeed, but the information is also very Proprietary, and hence unknown to us. The burden is, presumably, paid by the customers.
Your question asks to compare an unknowable to a secret; It is unlikely that an answer will be forthcoming.
The companys bug scan software looked at TCP/IP stacks from different OSes. Presumably they implemented the same functionality. The statistics given are not for the stacks as a whole, but are given in "Defects per 1000 lines of code".
Think about that.
If Stack A is 3 times as large (bloated code) but has only 2 times the bugs as stack B, then stack A (worse in all respects) gets a better grade!!!
You can halve your defect count by doubling the number of lines of code in your module. What a rip! How could so many people read and write about this and not see the problem.
Before the internet and hacking became so popular, it was often necessary for a system vendor to leave a hard-coded backdoor so when the client (user) totally broke the thing and called complaining, you could fix it. Sometimes this would save the downtime required to send somebody flying cross country. This was especially useful when selling systems to organizations that didn't really understand computers. In more sophisticated and security-conscious organizations, we would tell them to turn on the modem in the back when they needed our assistance, and they were willing to pay for the connectivity.
The less sophisticated customers would never authorize anything like that until and unless they were in a panic, so we learned to pre-install it. In general, saving the customer from himself is necessary to maintain good customer relations, and is probably the origin of the term "Customer Engineering".
If you're changing architectures, adding more code-visible registers just makes sense. Linuses idea that making something deliberately slow so that you're forced to make something else faster just doesn't hold up.
Hopefully the person thanked <deity>, not some diet guru...
Slashdot Mirror
This is one reason why I was very ready to believe that C# would use a much better programming environment than Microsoft C++. The other reason was my familiarity with Microsoft Java.
If you want quality with MS software development products, you will have to put up with lack of platform-portability. Obvious now. See also ATL/WTL.
The challenges can be special. First, vision. Many seniors have bifocal reading glasses and/or varifocal near-far glasses. Neither is great for reading a computer screen. If they don't have good computer glasses, it is quite normal for them to
- not even see a dialog box right in front of them
- not read the screen
- tilt their head upward whenever they need to read the screen
- be unable to read the smaller print
A large (19 or 21 inch) screen with moderate resolution (less than 1024 X 768) helps a lot. Lowering resolution can improve readability tremendously.Next, arthritis. Mousing and keyboard use can be quite challenging for some seniors. I've seen right-handed people use the mouse in the left hand and refuse to let me switch the buttons because it would be too confusing. Head and neck angle ergonomics matter more for arthritics.
Memory. It's tough for them to learn and use the keyboard shortcuts, since there is no visual prompt, so don't teach them. Rely on things with a visual prompt like menus. Even the edit menu. I've given up on teaching windows seniors the alt-tab switcher numerous times. Finger pain from arthritis plays a role here too.
New abstractions. It's tough to teach a tree control directory structure to someone whose life experience has been raising children. The difference between main memory and the disk escapes them.
Rigorous maintainance. Visiting a senior relative after an absence of a few years, I found that 19 Critical Updates from Windows Updates were pending and had not been installed. Likewise for backups, defrag, anti-virus... If a TV doesn't require it, they won't remember it.
The computer will often not get the priority that it would get in a work or student situation. The computer table will be used for other things, such as board games, eating, putting on makeup, writing checks, and so on. The computer books and the installation disks get lost. There may not be any organization to the place where the computer is. The chair so carefully selected may be in another room.
Opportunities
Seniors like games more than I thought they would. Card games, backgammon, and computerized versions of board and table-top games go over well. Shooter games are less interesting than to the younger crowd, but ymmv.
Human communication. Email, voice over ip, photos by mail, and all that are all very interesting to seniors. Especially women.
Persistance. They will keep at it for a decade or more, learning as they go.
Gizmophilia. Back-to-nature, home-cooking, earth mothers eventually succumb to a fascination with the latest gizmos and start exploring.
Finally, be warned that some seniors like porn and aren't sophisticated enough to hide it well. Don't go exploring in their hard drive unless you're ready to deal with the consequences. If the old man is having computer trouble but won't accept help, it might be pride, but it might be an attempt to prevent grossing out the youngsters!
Isn't Apache enough?
The answer is too simple. If you have a postscript printer you can just use the command line "print" command to send the .ps file to the printer. Works great.
I've been told that some of the large-format printing devices in use are essentially RGB raster graphic devices that have 3 paintball guns in a mount that scans across the surface in a grid pattern. The size of the paintballs is governed by the current pixel of the bitmap. Obviously, three nozzles each connect via hose to a separate reservoir of paint could be made to work as well.
I would expect the current report from Reasoning to be bogus also. The previous report (on TCP/IP stacks) was about code density. This means a code base that was 3 times as bloated (code size) but only had twice the number of bugs would come out as being better than its competitors. And that report did not give information on code size or total number of bugs or on the performance of the tcp/ip stack.
For children, try LOGO. The programming language developed for kids!!
Also, try Kids Freeware for other ideas.
This is the programming system that is so powerful that the virus writers all use it for those HTML and Outlook email viruses. And the documentation is very complete and thorough. And it's on every windows machine. These languages also have an object model that can be used to program every aspect of a windows client or server machine, including active directory. Look up WMI and ADSI to learn how to use VBSCript and JScript to totally control your windows system or entire network. Also, you can look up those two keywords on Amazon if you want to spring for a book. Furthermore, there are web sites with lots of free scripts that run on Windows.
Plus, you can get free cygwin tools from cygwin.com that will enable you to program in all those GCC languages.
Plus, you can download a FREE Java environment from the Sun website. Mostly command line.
Plus, you can download for FREE, the entire suite of .NET Framework programming tools, at this web page, provided you are willing to live with Command Line tools! You are slashdot, are you willing to live with command line tools to use FREE C# and so on? It's a big download, though.
Plus, you can download FREE perl and Python, already compiled and adopted to Windows from Active State.
Wait -- there's more! Batch files! The latest 32 bit OS's have a powerful batch system with real if-then-else structure! And, on XP, it's even documented !.
Wait -- there's more! Inside Cygwin, there's emacs, and inside emacs, there's Elisp!.
Complete enough for you?
No? Okay how about free command line C++ compiler from Borland?
I kid you not.
This is why crime shows and police dramas are always standard. Plenty of odd and unusual behavior. Same with hospital shows. A stream of patients. Not too many prime time weekly series about life on farm in the middle of nowhere (Little House being the exception) or life in a senior citizens home. TV Series located in restaurants, bars, and diners are periodically tried, but it's hard to generate crisis after crisis in a diner.
Now one thing you don't get while programming is a stream of new and odd people coming through each week. There have been office comedies, (Yes Minister) but these are the exception. Sara Michelle Gellar had new demons to slay each week. But imaging trying to carry a series modeled on the movie "The Net" for a few years! Each week another abandoned secret agent types mysterious messages onto Sandra Bullocks computer screen. What's the variation, new fonts?
Programming isn't the center of TV series for the same reason that chess players, writers, philosophers, lexicographers, poets, and mathemeticians aren't --- the interesting things aren't dramatically visible.
I've got it! Each week the wacky cast tries to decode another 100 line error message about syntax errors in C++ templates. A laff riot! For sweeps week, the compiler crashes on a divide by zero error. I can't wait.
Today, a person with that much experience might be valued, but maybe not. The compiler coding techniques employed by recently graduated masters of computer science might be too different. A close fit in a mixed team would seem too hard to the hiring manager.
Starting in the nineties, the image of the young dot com web coder and of the young (teenage!) hacker captured the majority of the public mind-space. What we called script kiddies passed for deep-thinking intellectuals in the public mind. Executives are creatures of fad, as any American worker (or Dilbert-reader) knows all to well.
All this fluff just provides cover, though for deeper trends. One trend of long standing is the difficulty that managers have of picking the best or the most productive code workers.
I worked at a company many of you have heard of, where the company-driving code was written in tremendous haste by a pampered over-paid coder who just never had time to do anything right. His bosses needed everything yesterday. The problems this troubled code base caused everybody else in the company were legion. The company has not progressed either technically or financially since that time three years ago. How could the financially-driven invstors who wanted to ride the dot-com cash cow have known that he lacked the depth for the job? May as well hire a promising youngster who'll work 80 hours a week.
Other trends are the aging of the workforce, the lower salaries being paid to younger coders and guest workers from the third world. One trend not noticed much is the negative value of management. Which, nowadays, happens to be young management.
For example, any living observer has noticed the popularity of Linux. Lots has been said about this. I'd like to add the fact that there are no (or few?) non-coding managers on the development team. Probably no MBA's at all. Since most of the collaberation is done at a distance, the age of most of the participants probably isn't known to the central figures of the project. There were few or no face-to-face interviews, no intense puzzle-oriented interviews. If several of the key people do all their coding between midnight and 9 AM, no executive committee frowns.
When lightning hits your antenna, you could lose your SW radio. Your computer, however, is (or should be) more expensive. Of course modem lines pose a similar threat, but without the big lightning rod on your roof being connected to your PC. With a little bad luck, you could take out your entire network.
Don't buy until the end of the summer, to get the benefit of all the price drops and upgrades until then.
If you're getting a desktop, order it (by phone) or have your parents do it, on the first day you live in the dorm. That way, UPS ships it instead of you lugging it across the state or country.
Consider that, unless you're well off, you're going to have to use this for 5 years (unless you're getting another as a graduation present). So buy a box that will hold 4 gigabytes of RAM, but only fill in 1 slot with half a gigabyte. In a year or two, buy more ram. Nobody ever complained about having a screen that was too large or too sharp or having too much memory.
See if the school network has a printer in the dorm, this can save money. On the other hand, you can probably get a printer for less than the price of a single textbook.
Microsoft Word has an "Equation editor" that might be good for taking math notes. I haven't tried it. I'll bet that StarOffice and Open Office have something like it. I did a quick google on "Equation editor" and came up with even more alternatives. You could even ask a math professor.
You also can download the online notes from a course at some other university you find on the web. If you have WiFi, of course, you wouldn't need to do even that. Thinking outside the box helps in study strategies.
So if you can bring 6 or 8 eBooks to the lecture and the library, you've made your life that much easier. I don't think you want to read the eBook on a little PDA screen.
Additional hint on dealing with courses that use the paradigm "Read the chapter then solve the homework": Read the homework questions thoroughly before you read the chapter. Then, when you come across the paragraph on, say "Relativistic stoichiometry" in the chapter, you'll automatically perk up.
It's fair to prevent MS from giving away their OS if you also forbid the Linux and BSD companies from likewise donating their software.
Way back when; I knew a guy at college, a physics major who was clearly smarter than I was. Great guy. He decided to do LSD as an undergrad, and he liked it. A couple of months later I ran across him sitting under a tree on campus. He was leaving school because he just couldn't think like he used to. He was very unhappy about what he'd done to himself. I never saw him again and can't even remember his name now, but I've never forgotten him.
The next year a girl I knew was checking out of school with a similar story. she had used LSD and "DMT" or "MDA", or maybe all three. She just couldn't think straight enough to do the work anymore, and had to leave. I've never forgetten her either. And I've never forgetten the deep current of fear that ran through me as she told me her story. She had made it through to her sophmore or junior year and had to drop out.
And we don't even know if these people really took exactly the drugs they paid for. There is no FDA watching for purity and correct formulation. So even if somebody "Proves" that the illegal drug you're so fond of is "Harmless", you have to realize nobody knows exactly what it is you are actually taking. Plant products shouldn't suffer from this problem as much; But if you think about all the reasons people have begun to prefer organic foods, you'll realize that illegally imported plant products may have pesticides and other things you really don't want.
If you think about it, you'll realize that damaging your own brain is probably worse than suicide, because you have all those decades to blame yourself.
Microsoft does test the various releases, and it tests the patched systems, but they have a tremendous number of users and of hackers to contend with. The mind-set at Microsoft for many years was; One computer, one user. And deliver the promise of the microprocessor. When they did the big Internet switchover they networked together systems that were "Secure enough" for single-user usage. The whole idea of hackers and hacking just wasn't properly understood by of a lot of the developers and managers. (I'm sure there were a few choice e-mails, by the smarter visionaries about network security, that they wished they'd paid more attention to).
You can look at Microsofts security problems as a fallout of the dot-com bubble, when MS and everybody else tried to very quickly adjust to the new Internet-business reality. The microprocessor revolution ran into the Internet revolution, and a certain amount of roughness resulted.
The idea that these problems are happening because of a lack of testing or of code review or of understanding how to do good software just doesn't add up. Creating good software is hard, creating good software for a large market is harder.
I am reasonably certain that Microsoft tests their products more than the Linux vendors do. Microsoft has teams of thousands of full-time testers using tens or hundreds of thousands of test machines running both automated and hands-on tests. I dont' think any Linux vendor does that. Did you think all of the 30,000 employees were coders and marketers?
If GPS is used this way, it will certainly be the most important use of GPS. The hard part, of course, is building the bomb. But that's getting easier. And if North Korea has its way, there will be a free market in nuclear warheads.
Thanks to Moore's law, it won't be long before we'll able to convert a street address to coordinates, and feed those to our robotic model airplane (or RPV) and drop a load of semtex on the house of the guy who cut us off in traffic the other day. Take that! you arrogant bastard!
Fortunately, the day is coming soon when maybe 30 countries (and perhaps their terrorist proxies) will have nuclear weapons, which, combined with a good navigation system, means the human race won't have to worry about navigation for too much longer. We'll be extinct.
I suppose if a good system of nuclear power plants were implented, you could use the electricity to generate hydrogen. Could the publicity being given to hydrogen power be a stalking horse for building nuclear plants?
The resource cost of Proprietary Development is measured very carefully indeed, but the information is also very Proprietary, and hence unknown to us. The burden is, presumably, paid by the customers.
Your question asks to compare an unknowable to a secret; It is unlikely that an answer will be forthcoming.
Yes, great question...
Think about that.
If Stack A is 3 times as large (bloated code) but has only 2 times the bugs as stack B, then stack A (worse in all respects) gets a better grade!!!
You can halve your defect count by doubling the number of lines of code in your module. What a rip! How could so many people read and write about this and not see the problem.
The less sophisticated customers would never authorize anything like that until and unless they were in a panic, so we learned to pre-install it. In general, saving the customer from himself is necessary to maintain good customer relations, and is probably the origin of the term "Customer Engineering".
Hopefully the person thanked <deity>, not some diet guru...