It seems strange to introduce functional programming early & then abandon it for imperative programming. The general trend, when introducing FP early is to carry it through the early part of the curriculum to help stress the importance of doing things right & somewhat separate the theory from 'real world' work (it also puts people on a more even basis and prevents the PHP/VB/HTML kiddies from being able to pretend they know everything comming into the program). Some good arguments can be made towards this approach, but I think the real secret to a good CS program is having good professors who care about their work and motivated students; the language of instruction isn't really too important (unless it's exceptionally bad).
OTOH, when you see FP towards the end of the program, it's generally a case of "here's some things that we think you should be familiar with so you can sound educated at cocktail parties". In my case, it was "Programming Paradigms" class that talked about functional & logical programming (SML and Prolog) along with various abstract/theoretical language design ideas (and the professor introduced the unit on Prolog by saying "It's an interesting toy language but I can't see ever actually using it for anything productive").
At least CLI apps and text-based config files are documented. You obviously haven't spent much time trying to fix windows machines used by clueless users; digging through the registry trying to figure out how to remove the spyware/adware/viruses/worms/backdoors that invariably end up on these machines. Fighting with programs that won't even let the admin kill them and/or remove the registry entries and files associated with them is not my idea of a user-friendly system.
and no, adaware and virus scanners don't take care of everything.
Umm... last I checked, people were always in the computer labs at work using cadence pspice (and other circuit stuff; I'm fuzzy on the details being a CS guy) under Linux.
Unfortunately, it's a picky little bitch; it doesn't work on about half the machines in the lab because they were using a newer glibc (like one minor revision x.y.z -> x.y.z+1). And don't get me started on what a flaming pile of shit flexlm is (this isn't just a cadence thing; a lot of the high-end apps we have to deal with (in Linux and Windows) force us to use this worthless excuse for copy protection.
There's quite a few high-end engineering apps that have been ported over to Linux. I've seen circuit design, CAD, FEA, matlab... Really, anything that was written with a reasonable degree of portability for a commercial Unix should be able to run on Linux with a little work and testing. It's just a matter of customers having the balls to ask for it instead of saying "this only works on Windows and Sun, I won't mention the massive Linux installation I have when I renew licenses".
Probably because anyone who wants to put together a high-end workstation will
a) have trouble getting the exact combination of parts they want from an OEM without getting fscked on the price (Compare the cost of upgrading memory when ordering a Dell to what Pricewatch lists for the same sticks of RAM)
b) They're going to want their own custom setup of Linux rather than some one-size-fits-all distro that the OEMs are going to use for every Linux PC they sell. I mean, really... look how hard it is to get people around here to even agree on KDE v. GNOME; imagine trying to get them to all agree on one distro and one set of applications installed on that distro...
nVidia's binary drivers smoke ATI's drivers in performance and general quality. I wasn't talking about the 'official' drivers, just that the Radeon 8500/9000/9100/9200 chips are the best chips that have open drivers. They are directly supported by XFree and Mesa (for GL/3D) without having to rely on closed-source binary-only drivers.
The problem is that current-generation Radeons (9500 and up) are almost a completely different architecture and nobody's really figured out how to do much with them yet...
The kicker is that the Radeon 8500/9100/9000/9200 (all essentially the same chip) is currently the fastest GPU that's well supported by Open drivers (Xfree/Mesa stuff).
Heck, even where I work (tech-support/admin for a University EE department) we've finally managed to get a policy in place refusing to work on student computers because of liability reasons (acutally, it was because fixing idiots' laptops is a waste of time, but the 'liability' angle goes over better with the administration). Right now, the limit of what we are allowed/required to do is type in the WEP key on laptops; if they don't have drivers installed or their network stack is fubared (as many often are) it's not our problem.
Now I can spend my time doing important things like remove viruses, spyware and worms from lab machines.
I just wanted to tack on another pointless post to this story to get see about pushing this up into Slashdot's top three stories (by postcount). I can't really see why this story's generating so much feedback since it's such an obvious thing to do. There's only so many threads about "benchmarks lie" and "AMD/Apple did it first" you can have without some major redundancy.
At first I suspected some major troll action but it looks to me like they're mostly legit posts. Very odd.
While this won't eliminate games that are below average (by one definition, 50% of games fit that bill)
WTF do people keep saying crap like this? It's only true if you make assumptions about the distribution of game qualities. The average of 10,10,10 and 1 is 7.75; only one element is less than the average yet 50% of the set would require 2 elements to be below average.
It's a hype thing. Everyone wanted to see it 'cuz "everyone" was looking at it already. When coupled with the fact that she's in the richest 1% of the population, somewhat famous & better looking than most women it's all the more interesting.
But she's not that hot; I can go downtown to any bar in the city & get turned town by a dozen prettier girls.
Any banner ad service that's going to be able to stay in business is going to notice that they're getting thousands of impressions per hour from the same IP and reject all of them.
OTOH, if MLB doesn't have Real video now, for spring training, it's a pretty clear sign that they don't plan on running it during the regular season. We're talking the kind of operation that is going to have everything nailed into place during the off season.
Of course, that doesn't give Real a leg to stand on in court if the contract was only for the regular season, but it's definately a sign that they need to start preparing a case...
Blame ATI for not giving OSS developers enough information to write proper drivers for the video card. If you had any radeon before the 9500, you'd have great support from the Free drivers (which is more than can be said about nVidia; you're not going to see any support through Free drivers).
Go to here to pick up the (binary-only) drivers for your Radeon.
uhh... Even then, Celerons weren't exactly the kind of thing you'd find in a box of Crackerjacks. They may have made less money than they would've by selling the chips as 450s but, short of creative accounting, they were making enough money off of them as Celerons to at least break even.
Wow. Less than 10 posts on this when the one above it has 200 some odd. This must be some kind of record for the least-cared about story to ever hit the front page.
The problem is that a lot of (poorly written) Windows software refuses to run properly unless the user is at least made into a Power User; a level where they can start a lot of problems.
Secondly, most of your viruses that come in through IE or OE (as well as anything that relies on exploits and comes in without any assistance) can do quite a bit of damage even when users don't have access to damage the machine directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Was this a heart attack caused by his poor lifestyle decisions or just old age setting in?
Of course, one could argue that installing Gentoo counts as a poor lifestyle decision...
It seems strange to introduce functional programming early & then abandon it for imperative programming. The general trend, when introducing FP early is to carry it through the early part of the curriculum to help stress the importance of doing things right & somewhat separate the theory from 'real world' work (it also puts people on a more even basis and prevents the PHP/VB/HTML kiddies from being able to pretend they know everything comming into the program). Some good arguments can be made towards this approach, but I think the real secret to a good CS program is having good professors who care about their work and motivated students; the language of instruction isn't really too important (unless it's exceptionally bad).
OTOH, when you see FP towards the end of the program, it's generally a case of "here's some things that we think you should be familiar with so you can sound educated at cocktail parties". In my case, it was "Programming Paradigms" class that talked about functional & logical programming (SML and Prolog) along with various abstract/theoretical language design ideas (and the professor introduced the unit on Prolog by saying "It's an interesting toy language but I can't see ever actually using it for anything productive").
I think these guys have you covered.
You want to know what's worse? My initials are SWM.
Well... unless you know that Dells use non-standard "ATX" power-supplies, you're going to fry some hardware doing some otherwise basic repairs...
We already can. They give us all the tools neccessary.
fdisk.com
format.com
At least CLI apps and text-based config files are documented. You obviously haven't spent much time trying to fix windows machines used by clueless users; digging through the registry trying to figure out how to remove the spyware/adware/viruses/worms/backdoors that invariably end up on these machines. Fighting with programs that won't even let the admin kill them and/or remove the registry entries and files associated with them is not my idea of a user-friendly system.
and no, adaware and virus scanners don't take care of everything.
Umm... last I checked, people were always in the computer labs at work using cadence pspice (and other circuit stuff; I'm fuzzy on the details being a CS guy) under Linux.
Unfortunately, it's a picky little bitch; it doesn't work on about half the machines in the lab because they were using a newer glibc (like one minor revision x.y.z -> x.y.z+1). And don't get me started on what a flaming pile of shit flexlm is (this isn't just a cadence thing; a lot of the high-end apps we have to deal with (in Linux and Windows) force us to use this worthless excuse for copy protection.
There's quite a few high-end engineering apps that have been ported over to Linux. I've seen circuit design, CAD, FEA, matlab... Really, anything that was written with a reasonable degree of portability for a commercial Unix should be able to run on Linux with a little work and testing. It's just a matter of customers having the balls to ask for it instead of saying "this only works on Windows and Sun, I won't mention the massive Linux installation I have when I renew licenses".
Probably because anyone who wants to put together a high-end workstation will
a) have trouble getting the exact combination of parts they want from an OEM without getting fscked on the price (Compare the cost of upgrading memory when ordering a Dell to what Pricewatch lists for the same sticks of RAM)
b) They're going to want their own custom setup of Linux rather than some one-size-fits-all distro that the OEMs are going to use for every Linux PC they sell. I mean, really... look how hard it is to get people around here to even agree on KDE v. GNOME; imagine trying to get them to all agree on one distro and one set of applications installed on that distro...
nVidia's binary drivers smoke ATI's drivers in performance and general quality. I wasn't talking about the 'official' drivers, just that the Radeon 8500/9000/9100/9200 chips are the best chips that have open drivers. They are directly supported by XFree and Mesa (for GL/3D) without having to rely on closed-source binary-only drivers.
The problem is that current-generation Radeons (9500 and up) are almost a completely different architecture and nobody's really figured out how to do much with them yet...
The kicker is that the Radeon 8500/9100/9000/9200 (all essentially the same chip) is currently the fastest GPU that's well supported by Open drivers (Xfree/Mesa stuff).
Well, compared to game review sites, hardware review sites are a paragon of journalistic integrity.
Heck, even where I work (tech-support/admin for a University EE department) we've finally managed to get a policy in place refusing to work on student computers because of liability reasons (acutally, it was because fixing idiots' laptops is a waste of time, but the 'liability' angle goes over better with the administration). Right now, the limit of what we are allowed/required to do is type in the WEP key on laptops; if they don't have drivers installed or their network stack is fubared (as many often are) it's not our problem.
Now I can spend my time doing important things like remove viruses, spyware and worms from lab machines.
I just wanted to tack on another pointless post to this story to get see about pushing this up into Slashdot's top three stories (by postcount). I can't really see why this story's generating so much feedback since it's such an obvious thing to do. There's only so many threads about "benchmarks lie" and "AMD/Apple did it first" you can have without some major redundancy.
At first I suspected some major troll action but it looks to me like they're mostly legit posts. Very odd.
3 words :
Little Computer People.
WTF do people keep saying crap like this? It's only true if you make assumptions about the distribution of game qualities. The average of 10,10,10 and 1 is 7.75; only one element is less than the average yet 50% of the set would require 2 elements to be below average.
Having 3 friends not difficult to comprehend?
You must be new here.
It's a hype thing. Everyone wanted to see it 'cuz "everyone" was looking at it already. When coupled with the fact that she's in the richest 1% of the population, somewhat famous & better looking than most women it's all the more interesting.
But she's not that hot; I can go downtown to any bar in the city & get turned town by a dozen prettier girls.
Any banner ad service that's going to be able to stay in business is going to notice that they're getting thousands of impressions per hour from the same IP and reject all of them.
OTOH, if MLB doesn't have Real video now, for spring training, it's a pretty clear sign that they don't plan on running it during the regular season. We're talking the kind of operation that is going to have everything nailed into place during the off season.
Of course, that doesn't give Real a leg to stand on in court if the contract was only for the regular season, but it's definately a sign that they need to start preparing a case...
Blame ATI for not giving OSS developers enough information to write proper drivers for the video card. If you had any radeon before the 9500, you'd have great support from the Free drivers (which is more than can be said about nVidia; you're not going to see any support through Free drivers).
Go to here to pick up the (binary-only) drivers for your Radeon.
Chlamidia is not a flower.
'lost money'?
uhh... Even then, Celerons weren't exactly the kind of thing you'd find in a box of Crackerjacks. They may have made less money than they would've by selling the chips as 450s but, short of creative accounting, they were making enough money off of them as Celerons to at least break even.
Wow. Less than 10 posts on this when the one above it has 200 some odd. This must be some kind of record for the least-cared about story to ever hit the front page.
The problem is that a lot of (poorly written) Windows software refuses to run properly unless the user is at least made into a Power User; a level where they can start a lot of problems.
Secondly, most of your viruses that come in through IE or OE (as well as anything that relies on exploits and comes in without any assistance) can do quite a bit of damage even when users don't have access to damage the machine directly.