And they do these things with rapid speed. Another respondent says it is just a nicely packaged nano-ITX system. Problem is, nano-ITX is barely available a year after the Mini was released. I think he meant mini-ITX, although the mini's motherboard is smaller than that.
The mini-itx has been around for several years. I picked up a fan less one in 2002 for a MP3 player in my car. If you wanted a nano, you had to poke around a bit harder. They tend to sell to folks building 'larger' x86 based embedded devices. Think cable boxes. Easy enough to buy if you know how to shop. You won't find them at compusa, however.
As for size, ever wonder why the mini-itx form factor has an extra cm on the motherboard vs the mini mac? The mini-itx board is as small as it can be and still screw into a bog standard ATX chassis. I know I was surprised to find the screws matched up when I moved it out of the car to a firewall inside my office. If you wanted non-standard mount points, the board could have been smaller (like the nano-itx).
Heh. Did something similar at a previous shop. Moved from an office that had actual offices to cube farm. We ordered a mess of 8x4' white boards, which were turned sideways and lifted up a couple feet on the side of our cubes. Strangely enough, it was just tall enough to make it to the ceiling.
I spent many years hammering out COM components in C, C++, and later ATL. Management tended to look at it as 'hard magic', when in reality it was really no harder than the C++ code we were cooking up for the Unix systems. As things migrated to a web front end where ASP was calling COM, I looked for a bit easier way to test my bug free (TM) code. Found that it was easier to use a VB test client than IIS. Also found that I could prototype a COM component in VB very quickly... which ran faster (if apartment threading worked for the situation and was compiled) than I cared to admit.
Someone who is a solid developer can create good clean code - even in VB. The problem I saw was the folks paying the bills would think that 'VB is easy' and would pay less. When I made the switch to Java, I felt it was C++ for dummies. As things picked up steam and the J2EE specs raised the bar again on what you had to know to make an application work. That is what I view as the Achilles heel to the older VB platform - folks who had no clue what they were doing could wire together an app. (All the normal caveats here, some of the ugliest code I've ever reviewed and then had to fix was done in Java. Tis the people, not the language, more often than not.)
Anyhow, I think.NET suffers from the same mentality. Sure, I've played with it a bit. It was very simple to jump into C# from Java, they had a fairly rich set of core libraries. Microsoft keeps pitching it as 'easy' and I suspect there are too many folks krufting out C# apps rather than crafting them, thus my perception is this new framework does not have a high enough barrier of entry. My assumption is the money will follow the same pattern. That, and the.NET framework is also a bit young. I've worked with a lot of companies, and those few who are making the jump to.NET started in 2005/2004. No 'bleeding edge' bonus money over other platforms/frameworks. Why would I move to it?
Nuts. A big 'me too' on this one. I've kicked around the idea of a mac since the minimac came out, but was waiting for the shift to x86 before I made the plunge. Recently got a chance to use a g4 for a few months due to work, and my wife had a chance to get a feel for the OS. Seems fine, got the blessing to move forward.
For my bride's computer, the only real thing that matters is her Adobe CS2 suite. I talked to Adobe about the time I upgraded to CS2, and they would (more or less) let you change from Win32 to OSX if you wanted to with a few restrictions/activation caveats. I'm not interested in trying the emulation thing, so will probably end up adding more RAM to what was intended to be a transitional box and move with CS3 (or whatever they call it).
. In the long run, reprocessing will reduce the amount of waste that would need to be put in Yucca Mountain (or wherever).
The thing about parking these waste products in the Yucca Mountain style storage is folks tend to think we are planning to store it there until time/decay makes it safe again - requiring centuries, millenniums, etc.... I strongly suspect we will have the technology to do something meaningful with the current by products in the next 50-100 years (possibly less) as we figure out how matter works. Storing it in a geologically stable area should not that big of a deal.
...Capital Gains tax on any stocks held over 1 year is a paltry 15%.
If you hang on to if for less than a year, you tack the amount to your income and pay that rate. Holding it for 12 months helps, as that 'income' gets taxed at a fixed rate rather than what you make at a normal income. But no worries on the tax front. Once you break a certain threshold where you get to play with the glorious ATM (alternative minimum tax) codes, which these guys certainly hit... No changes there at all...
And also why this scenario is likely to fail. I've ripped my CD collection into high grade MP3's. Picked up a Shuffle because it was the best bang for a 1G MP3 player (not caring a bit if it can do AAC or Windows formats in the least) at the time, and also doubled as a memory stick. I plug it into my box, all is good. I plug it into on of my other boxes that has iTunes on it, the software tries to purge out the files and create a new link to the shuffle. The worst is working with customers, however. I bring over a file on the data partition and several times the customer's local iTunes install will wipe my non-DRM'ed songs (just by them saying yes due to the autoplay - argh)
Someone could buy this, but they could never update it or modify the play list without doing some poking about in the iPod's file system.
I misread the post - thought they were talking about OS support on platforms. I spend most of my time writing server side apps or thick clients, so the OS matters more than the browser. Dropped NT support when Microsoft did, dropped SuSE 7 support when Novell did, dropped Solaris 7 support when Sun did, tried (and failed) to drop Solaris 8 when they were moving on. Not to say the kit would not work - it was just I no longer would have the platform in my dev or support areas.
In the Federal space, things tend to last even longer. Still seeing folks using NT4 and older cuts of Solaris. Obviously you don't bite the hand that feeds you, but you quickly find yourself in a n!-1 situation if you don't eliminate variables. Customers paying a healthy support contract could still be running DOS for all I care, as long as the check still clears and it is enough to make it worth the time.
I've got one set of codebase for JDK 1.3 and another that uses the JDK 1.4 stuff. When the last of my WPS 5.0.x customers move on, I'll drop support for it. Not doing anything with JDK 1.5 until BEA, IBM, or Oracle run with it... Always a judgment call. But heck, I know the parent *cares* about what I think, so world according to helix, that is my take. (grin)
That is what I see. When the vendor drops support - and that can range from normal EOL to extended contract based EOL - it is time to stick a fork in it. Sadly, it looks like I get to keep a copy of Solaris 8 running for a few more years....
I've been building pre-patched ISO's using nlite. Slipstreams in all the service packs and lets me pre-patch. The original parent asked why... nothing like an hour of downloading little patches to make me want a roll up of some sort.
.. why the heck is the periodic Service Pack shot so essential to you?
For me, it means I can do most of the security patches from a CD rather than connecting an unpatched OS to the net to download a mess of patches. The fewer patches I need to add is less time exposed. SP2 helps alot, but I've had machines owned before they could finish downloading the service packs and patches...
I went the NForce route myself, and figured I would add a few comments.
Some mainboards have 8 SATA ports, 2 IDE ports - One of the reasons I went with the DFI SLI-DR board for that reason.
Get a solid power supply... you will need it.
Put all those drives in the same chassis, pay attention to airflow. Heat is the drive killer. SATA cables were long enough I moved the drives to a separate chassis.
If this is a file server, you won't burn any mips to speak of. Get the cheaper CPU.
Just picked up a Linksys NSLU2UK nas, which works like a charm as well for 'near-line' storage. A bit slower, but takes 2 USB drives. I'm thinking she will do more, but have not cracked the case and pulled out the soldering iron yet. (grin)
Most hair dryers draw 1200 - 1600 watts so you don't have much, if anything, to worry about.
See, that is just the kind of thinking that gets a person into trouble. I thought my systems were OK until my wife went off and bought a 12A vacuum cleaner. Every time she fires the thing up (depending on if the socket shares the circuit) my UPS is screeching at me. She claims it is stock, but would not put it past her to over clock it. That road leads to madness...
Heh. Think it was matrox. I cheated and read the 'print' version. You are not the only one drinking tonight. (grin) Getting pasted pretty bad in Counter Strike - way to much time to browse/. between rounds....
Stupid money some people spend for a few more fps... I don't get it.
The article was talking about two video cards used in tandem to power (usually) a single display. On the Nvidia side of the fence, this was SLI. ATI calls it crossfire (or something like that). The idea is you can link two cards like you could back in the voodoo days - possibly with the thought to buy one card now, and add another linked to it when you need to bump the performance. This was very much geared to a very small group of gamers who had $600x2 just burning a hole in their pocket. I'd call it a failure as the 6600/6800 series cards can game reasonably well and the price differential between a second card and the latest greatest is not large enough to matter.
Windows has been able to do the dual monitor thing since the 98 days. Can't imagine living without multiple displays.
I'm one of those early adopters / evangelists they lost. Since I've got both an AMD64 CPU and a MSDN universal subscription (via work), I gave it a spin. Several times... Drivers were OK for me - Nvidia video card and nforce 4 chipset both had pretty solid driver support. I've also got 4G of RAM, and it picked it all up without any issues. Should have been an easy sell.
Things fell apart once I started to install programs. Can't remember if it was Rational Application Developer or some other tool/program, but it had problems with the changes they made for the legacy (32-bit) install. Had my normal stack worked - LDAP, DB, App Server, and IDE just worked, I'd be pounding out more 64-bit specific C/C++ code as well. Games were also problematic. Installing stuff is all end user problems. Had things worked reasonably well in XP-64 and/or 2003-64, I would have used it for my primary Win development system and made sure things degraded nicely to Win32 platforms. To be fair, there were plenty of growing pains on the 64-bit Linux side of the fence, but those were a good bit easier to sort out. That, and many people had already pounded that road smooth before I got there. Had things also worked well with legacy applications, I would have also recommended friends and family that have AMD64 to take advantage of the *free* (plus a bit of shipping) offer Microsoft made to swap out copies of WinXP with WinXP-64 this spring. Instead, people got the same 'don't go there' speech I gave them when WinME came out.
I would not use it, nor would I recommend those I give a damn for use it. AMD absolutely nailed the legacy support, making 32-bit OS's run on a 64-bit platform. Had Microsoft been able to do the same, you would have seen a ground swell. As is, I'd say others agree WinXp-64/Win2003-64 is half baked as well.
Did you ask for $2000 worth of kit (or a few weeks of time to figure it out) to do this? Odds are, since you are the only developer, you are not working for a software company. As a boss, I'd say no *IF* you asked me to pull out my checkbook.
I'm not aware of any spyware or virus that would download random.mp3's onto your computer.
I left a Win32 box with a weak password on a raw net connection and it got owned. The reason I noticed something was up was they installed an FTP server and did some stuff that horked the system trying to hide it. I suspect most virus writers are gunning for rootkit rather than funny (or destructive) these days.
I bought SCOX a year or so ago, just so I could order paper copies of the stock certificates before they are delisted. Can't believe they are still kicking. (Paid more for the certificate than I did the stock) Framed, these make *fantastic* white elephant gifts as did the pets.com and a few other stinkers I picked up during the crash. Anyhow, you get tons of paperwork and can usually dial into the calls if you want. Did once just to hear weasel boy work his magic, but did not care enough to queue a question. Point being, I could have.
A public company can be driven by dissenters if they have enough voting shares to matter. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Jack does not have enough to do anything more than possibly ask a question. Most companies are pretty adept at keeping the loons from causing ruckus.
2: We use all means at our disposal to locate terrorists and stop next attack. Terrorists caught or killed before being able to launch attack. I'm alive, but someone may have tapped my phone or e-mail.
Judging from past behavior, it is still not that simple. Looking at what Hoover did with the FBI's largely unfettered power to keep the reds at bay - I've seen how this can be abused. Proably better links, but for example.
Its primary focus is Java, but you can use it for multiple languages. If you were to spend time with an IDE (and some would say that in itself is evil) Eclipse is the one I would pick.
Going further, I'd probably say you want to putter around with web applications. (Tons of people out there doing PHP, etc, but I would stay on the Java side of the fence) Building web apps, you can start with the spaghetti pages filled with scripts, start encapsulating code, pick up on a MVC framework, DB access, or deployment frameworks. I'd shy away from doing client applications. Again, from the Java camp, I'd snag a copy of Tomcat for my local playground. Anything you do inside the JSP/Servlet container is more or less applicable to BEA or IBM's application server. Nice debugging tools that let Eclipse and Tomcat play together.
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And they do these things with rapid speed. Another respondent says it is just a nicely packaged nano-ITX system. Problem is, nano-ITX is barely available a year after the Mini was released. I think he meant mini-ITX, although the mini's motherboard is smaller than that.
The mini-itx has been around for several years. I picked up a fan less one in 2002 for a MP3 player in my car. If you wanted a nano, you had to poke around a bit harder. They tend to sell to folks building 'larger' x86 based embedded devices. Think cable boxes. Easy enough to buy if you know how to shop. You won't find them at compusa, however.
As for size, ever wonder why the mini-itx form factor has an extra cm on the motherboard vs the mini mac? The mini-itx board is as small as it can be and still screw into a bog standard ATX chassis. I know I was surprised to find the screws matched up when I moved it out of the car to a firewall inside my office. If you wanted non-standard mount points, the board could have been smaller (like the nano-itx).
Heh. Did something similar at a previous shop. Moved from an office that had actual offices to cube farm. We ordered a mess of 8x4' white boards, which were turned sideways and lifted up a couple feet on the side of our cubes. Strangely enough, it was just tall enough to make it to the ceiling.
I spent many years hammering out COM components in C, C++, and later ATL. Management tended to look at it as 'hard magic', when in reality it was really no harder than the C++ code we were cooking up for the Unix systems. As things migrated to a web front end where ASP was calling COM, I looked for a bit easier way to test my bug free (TM) code. Found that it was easier to use a VB test client than IIS. Also found that I could prototype a COM component in VB very quickly... which ran faster (if apartment threading worked for the situation and was compiled) than I cared to admit.
.NET suffers from the same mentality. Sure, I've played with it a bit. It was very simple to jump into C# from Java, they had a fairly rich set of core libraries. Microsoft keeps pitching it as 'easy' and I suspect there are too many folks krufting out C# apps rather than crafting them, thus my perception is this new framework does not have a high enough barrier of entry. My assumption is the money will follow the same pattern. That, and the .NET framework is also a bit young. I've worked with a lot of companies, and those few who are making the jump to .NET started in 2005/2004. No 'bleeding edge' bonus money over other platforms/frameworks. Why would I move to it?
Someone who is a solid developer can create good clean code - even in VB. The problem I saw was the folks paying the bills would think that 'VB is easy' and would pay less. When I made the switch to Java, I felt it was C++ for dummies. As things picked up steam and the J2EE specs raised the bar again on what you had to know to make an application work. That is what I view as the Achilles heel to the older VB platform - folks who had no clue what they were doing could wire together an app. (All the normal caveats here, some of the ugliest code I've ever reviewed and then had to fix was done in Java. Tis the people, not the language, more often than not.)
Anyhow, I think
Nuts. A big 'me too' on this one. I've kicked around the idea of a mac since the minimac came out, but was waiting for the shift to x86 before I made the plunge. Recently got a chance to use a g4 for a few months due to work, and my wife had a chance to get a feel for the OS. Seems fine, got the blessing to move forward.
For my bride's computer, the only real thing that matters is her Adobe CS2 suite. I talked to Adobe about the time I upgraded to CS2, and they would (more or less) let you change from Win32 to OSX if you wanted to with a few restrictions/activation caveats. I'm not interested in trying the emulation thing, so will probably end up adding more RAM to what was intended to be a transitional box and move with CS3 (or whatever they call it).
Hmm. All has been completed. With this, I no longer need my wife.
Don't trade her in yet... When they say 'self cleaning', I guess they are only talking about the inside of the stove.
. In the long run, reprocessing will reduce the amount of waste that would need to be put in Yucca Mountain (or wherever).
The thing about parking these waste products in the Yucca Mountain style storage is folks tend to think we are planning to store it there until time/decay makes it safe again - requiring centuries, millenniums, etc.... I strongly suspect we will have the technology to do something meaningful with the current by products in the next 50-100 years (possibly less) as we figure out how matter works. Storing it in a geologically stable area should not that big of a deal.
...Capital Gains tax on any stocks held over 1 year is a paltry 15%.
If you hang on to if for less than a year, you tack the amount to your income and pay that rate. Holding it for 12 months helps, as that 'income' gets taxed at a fixed rate rather than what you make at a normal income. But no worries on the tax front. Once you break a certain threshold where you get to play with the glorious ATM (alternative minimum tax) codes, which these guys certainly hit... No changes there at all...
And also why this scenario is likely to fail. I've ripped my CD collection into high grade MP3's. Picked up a Shuffle because it was the best bang for a 1G MP3 player (not caring a bit if it can do AAC or Windows formats in the least) at the time, and also doubled as a memory stick. I plug it into my box, all is good. I plug it into on of my other boxes that has iTunes on it, the software tries to purge out the files and create a new link to the shuffle. The worst is working with customers, however. I bring over a file on the data partition and several times the customer's local iTunes install will wipe my non-DRM'ed songs (just by them saying yes due to the autoplay - argh)
Someone could buy this, but they could never update it or modify the play list without doing some poking about in the iPod's file system.
I misread the post - thought they were talking about OS support on platforms. I spend most of my time writing server side apps or thick clients, so the OS matters more than the browser. Dropped NT support when Microsoft did, dropped SuSE 7 support when Novell did, dropped Solaris 7 support when Sun did, tried (and failed) to drop Solaris 8 when they were moving on. Not to say the kit would not work - it was just I no longer would have the platform in my dev or support areas.
In the Federal space, things tend to last even longer. Still seeing folks using NT4 and older cuts of Solaris. Obviously you don't bite the hand that feeds you, but you quickly find yourself in a n!-1 situation if you don't eliminate variables. Customers paying a healthy support contract could still be running DOS for all I care, as long as the check still clears and it is enough to make it worth the time.
I've got one set of codebase for JDK 1.3 and another that uses the JDK 1.4 stuff. When the last of my WPS 5.0.x customers move on, I'll drop support for it. Not doing anything with JDK 1.5 until BEA, IBM, or Oracle run with it... Always a judgment call. But heck, I know the parent *cares* about what I think, so world according to helix, that is my take. (grin)
That is what I see. When the vendor drops support - and that can range from normal EOL to extended contract based EOL - it is time to stick a fork in it. Sadly, it looks like I get to keep a copy of Solaris 8 running for a few more years....
I've been building pre-patched ISO's using nlite. Slipstreams in all the service packs and lets me pre-patch. The original parent asked why... nothing like an hour of downloading little patches to make me want a roll up of some sort.
.. why the heck is the periodic Service Pack shot so essential to you?
For me, it means I can do most of the security patches from a CD rather than connecting an unpatched OS to the net to download a mess of patches. The fewer patches I need to add is less time exposed. SP2 helps alot, but I've had machines owned before they could finish downloading the service packs and patches...
Just picked up a Linksys NSLU2UK nas, which works like a charm as well for 'near-line' storage. A bit slower, but takes 2 USB drives. I'm thinking she will do more, but have not cracked the case and pulled out the soldering iron yet. (grin)
Most hair dryers draw 1200 - 1600 watts so you don't have much, if anything, to worry about.
See, that is just the kind of thinking that gets a person into trouble. I thought my systems were OK until my wife went off and bought a 12A vacuum cleaner. Every time she fires the thing up (depending on if the socket shares the circuit) my UPS is screeching at me. She claims it is stock, but would not put it past her to over clock it. That road leads to madness...
Can anyone tell me why Marriot has the SSNs of Customers?
They don't Credit card, yes. SSN, no. I logged 71 days in a Marriot last year, and never once have they asked for a SSN.
You can get an external power brick just like a laptop. Normal ATX connection, usually lower watts.
Heh. Think it was matrox. I cheated and read the 'print' version. You are not the only one drinking tonight. (grin) Getting pasted pretty bad in Counter Strike - way to much time to browse /. between rounds....
Stupid money some people spend for a few more fps... I don't get it.
>>9. iPod still can't do bluetooth
Why would you want your iPod to do bluetooth?
Headphones. Wireless headphones. Possibly link to a bluetooth car audio system as well rather than some rf modulator.
Dual Grapics Cards?
The article was talking about two video cards used in tandem to power (usually) a single display. On the Nvidia side of the fence, this was SLI. ATI calls it crossfire (or something like that). The idea is you can link two cards like you could back in the voodoo days - possibly with the thought to buy one card now, and add another linked to it when you need to bump the performance. This was very much geared to a very small group of gamers who had $600x2 just burning a hole in their pocket. I'd call it a failure as the 6600/6800 series cards can game reasonably well and the price differential between a second card and the latest greatest is not large enough to matter.
Windows has been able to do the dual monitor thing since the 98 days. Can't imagine living without multiple displays.
I'm one of those early adopters / evangelists they lost. Since I've got both an AMD64 CPU and a MSDN universal subscription (via work), I gave it a spin. Several times... Drivers were OK for me - Nvidia video card and nforce 4 chipset both had pretty solid driver support. I've also got 4G of RAM, and it picked it all up without any issues. Should have been an easy sell.
Things fell apart once I started to install programs. Can't remember if it was Rational Application Developer or some other tool/program, but it had problems with the changes they made for the legacy (32-bit) install. Had my normal stack worked - LDAP, DB, App Server, and IDE just worked, I'd be pounding out more 64-bit specific C/C++ code as well. Games were also problematic. Installing stuff is all end user problems. Had things worked reasonably well in XP-64 and/or 2003-64, I would have used it for my primary Win development system and made sure things degraded nicely to Win32 platforms. To be fair, there were plenty of growing pains on the 64-bit Linux side of the fence, but those were a good bit easier to sort out. That, and many people had already pounded that road smooth before I got there. Had things also worked well with legacy applications, I would have also recommended friends and family that have AMD64 to take advantage of the *free* (plus a bit of shipping) offer Microsoft made to swap out copies of WinXP with WinXP-64 this spring. Instead, people got the same 'don't go there' speech I gave them when WinME came out.
I would not use it, nor would I recommend those I give a damn for use it. AMD absolutely nailed the legacy support, making 32-bit OS's run on a 64-bit platform. Had Microsoft been able to do the same, you would have seen a ground swell. As is, I'd say others agree WinXp-64/Win2003-64 is half baked as well.
Did you ask for $2000 worth of kit (or a few weeks of time to figure it out) to do this? Odds are, since you are the only developer, you are not working for a software company. As a boss, I'd say no *IF* you asked me to pull out my checkbook.
I'm not aware of any spyware or virus that would download random .mp3's onto your computer.
I left a Win32 box with a weak password on a raw net connection and it got owned. The reason I noticed something was up was they installed an FTP server and did some stuff that horked the system trying to hide it. I suspect most virus writers are gunning for rootkit rather than funny (or destructive) these days.
I bought SCOX a year or so ago, just so I could order paper copies of the stock certificates before they are delisted. Can't believe they are still kicking. (Paid more for the certificate than I did the stock) Framed, these make *fantastic* white elephant gifts as did the pets.com and a few other stinkers I picked up during the crash. Anyhow, you get tons of paperwork and can usually dial into the calls if you want. Did once just to hear weasel boy work his magic, but did not care enough to queue a question. Point being, I could have.
A public company can be driven by dissenters if they have enough voting shares to matter. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Jack does not have enough to do anything more than possibly ask a question. Most companies are pretty adept at keeping the loons from causing ruckus.
2: We use all means at our disposal to locate terrorists and stop next attack. Terrorists caught or killed before being able to launch attack. I'm alive, but someone may have tapped my phone or e-mail.
Judging from past behavior, it is still not that simple. Looking at what Hoover did with the FBI's largely unfettered power to keep the reds at bay - I've seen how this can be abused. Proably better links, but for example.
Not that black and white...
Its primary focus is Java, but you can use it for multiple languages. If you were to spend time with an IDE (and some would say that in itself is evil) Eclipse is the one I would pick.
http://eclipse.org/downloads/
Going further, I'd probably say you want to putter around with web applications. (Tons of people out there doing PHP, etc, but I would stay on the Java side of the fence) Building web apps, you can start with the spaghetti pages filled with scripts, start encapsulating code, pick up on a MVC framework, DB access, or deployment frameworks. I'd shy away from doing client applications. Again, from the Java camp, I'd snag a copy of Tomcat for my local playground. Anything you do inside the JSP/Servlet container is more or less applicable to BEA or IBM's application server. Nice debugging tools that let Eclipse and Tomcat play together.
http://tomcat.apache.org/