But later on in the curriculum, they don't read books as much, more like review articles published in some journals. I guess the same applies for most fields, not only CS. At least in physics it's true.
I also try to catch up on interesting papers now and then. (Granted, I'm not really interested in papers explaining that Prof. XY has discovered mathematical oddity Z that is of absolutely zero practical use.) But books (even in EBook form) are still a necessity. CompSci teaches the core of computer science. After that, things break out into distributed computing, graphics, sound synthesis, compression, cryptology, etc. If you want to "catch up" on the work done in these fields, a book provides an excellent way of doing this. The part that freaks me out here, is that the poor selection of books suggests that no one is "catching up" on these sub fields.
In the end, of course, having a masters degree is no guarantee against idiocy.;-)
Agreed. In fact I'm quite shocked at the number of CompSci students with Masters who need to pick up a "XXX for Dummies" book. CompSci should have given then sufficient foundation to go into just about any computer field (including hardware design when combined with EE). It strikes me that many schools are letting the ball drop and not verifying that these students know what they were taught. Or even more ominously, schools exist which don't even teach students what they need to know.
Developers are as clueless as the rest of the users when it comes to viruses. It's the developers who always come to us to ask for help when they infect their personal machines.
It seems that someone has difficulty in reading the disclaimer at the bottom of my message. No, I don't like these "developers" either. The fact that they can't find their heads from their asses is a sign that they shouldn't be hired in the first place. The core of that problem is a boss who thinks warm bodies == productivity.
Its a lot more than a few minutes of your time each day to protect against said viruses.
Few minutes? I'm losing HOURS of work every day thanks to these stupid scanners. Normally I'd be able to run Netbeans, DataDino, JEdit, Cygwin, Mozilla, and the occasional utility like NSIS, Acrobat, OpenOffice, FileZilla, and GIMP. I'm instead forced to wait several minutes every time a file is touched, the swap is accessed, or a network connection is opened. It takes forever just to type 10 lines of f***ing code, much less run more than one program!
Oh well then sorry, I didn't see your "I'm Special" badge.
I'll forgive you this once.;-)
Because SysAdmins are adept at distinguising between clueless dolts who can't find a compiler with both hands and "Masters of the Universe^M^MTechnology" supermen like you, who are infalable.
I've been an admin myself. It's very easy to fall into the trap of "everyone else is stupid".
Are you going to restore from backup and/or fix the fucking thing after you've broken it?
After I've broken it? Excuse me, but I'm the one who usually has to fix the blasted thing. The SysAdmins know nothing of the code. Nor should they have to. I DO know the code, and I DO need access to the system to keep it running. I'm not asking for root, just access to my software.
Then fuck off.
You're fired. Boss, how long will it take us to get another admin? Two, three days?
Well, I've got a PhD, and I'm presently reading Dock Ellis In The Country Of Baseball by Don Hall and Round Ireland With A Fridge by Tony Hawks
*chuckle* Thanks for the laugh. Just in case anyone missed it though, I was specifically referring to "What the hell are [Masters|PH.D.] compsci majors reading for technical books these days?!" If all the University bookstores are full of the B.S. I described (these stores were practically on the University of Wisconsin's campus), then how are the nextgen compsci professors and system architects learning anything?
What exactly are you talking about? I think you've replied to the wrong person.
The original post (yours?) stated, and I quote:
"I'm developing software on QNX 2.x right now and it BLOWS! "
Shall we assume that the "2.x" was a typo, and that QNX 4.x (or Neutrino 6.x) was the intended version number?
Re:QNX is the bad touch
on
QNX 6.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We needed a real time OS (or at least close to it) so thats why its running on QNX. The QNX box is communicating with embedded microcontrollers over an external bus. [snip] My preference would have been an old Sparc box running SunOS.
The words, "non-realtime OS" keep coming to mind...
They deviate from standards and make you have to dig to find where that deviation is. Is having man pages too much to ask??
Fair enough. But it *is* an embedded system. Footprint is everything. My guess is that you're simply not used to the QNX way of doing things and are thus frustrated. Many of the QNX deviations are actually quite sensible, and some of them are actually choices made by the person customizing the system.
Do yourself a favor. Learn to use offline docs (or at least installable docs) and stop expecting dumb things like BASH on an embedded system. If you don't stop complaining, your boss may decide to give you VxWorks (note the oxymoron here) as a punishment.
The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless.
Agreed. I recently checked out Barnes & Noble and Borders for technical books. Once upon a time, I could find the books on OS Design, Algorithms, Cryptology, Data Compression, Sound Theory, Game Programming, etc. You know what I found instead? EJB for dummies, UNIX for Dummies 3rd edition, Beginners Guide to Linux, J2EE for Business, etc. Talk about dumbed down material. Half of this stuff is useless crap intended for people who won't read specs (or at least tutorials). They simply add "purdy picturz" to a minor amount of information and call it a book.
Maybe it's just me, but you know what I got for an anniversary present from my wife? A book on calculating sounds (i.e. synthesis of sounds produced by real objects) in real time. My wife pulled it from my wish list on Amazon. THAT is something I want on my shelf. Right next to the processor specs from Intel and AMD, Practical File System Design with BeOS, OS Design by Tanenbaum, Introduction to Advanced Data Structures, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, etc, etc, etc.
I don't even have a Masters degree. What the hell are the people who DO have one reading?
Oh, so that explains why I can't read the production log file for errors. Or install a library I need for development. Or download Mozilla and Opera to do compatibility testing.
Developers are NOT "just another class of end user". They should be masters over the technology.* The responsibility of the IT staff is to support their development as best as possible. Instead, they get their machines locked down, virus scanners installed, and regedit disabled. All of which takes me about ten minutes to circumvent so I can get some work done.
In case anyone is wondering, developers need to be capable of doing development without a virus scanner. Their machine may be processing hundreds of files at any given time. Making the machine scan every file before writing to disk only frustrates the developer and slows the development process. Depending on where and why, this slowdown can cost a company thousands to millions of dollars in lost productivity. If Windows vulnerabilities are that great of a concern, buy your developers Sparcs, Macs, or Linux machines (in that order).
Virus scanners can usually be disabled by setting the Windows Service to "manual" instead of automatic. This nicely circumvents that stupid taskbar control. The taskbar control can be removed by killing the process on boot, or hacking the registry to disable to password check. How to edit the registry? That's easy!
In order for programs to run, they must be capable of reading and writing to the registry, right? So why can't some other program modify the registry? Answer: It can! Just download an alternative registry editor and modify the various keys locking you out of your system. You should be good to go in no time flat.
My SysAdmins have pretty much given up on "securing" my machine. Besides, once you demonstrate that you know what you're doing, they tend to leave you alone. Oh, and I have never contracted a virus on my machine. Even when our network became infested with RPC worms.
* Sadly, too many "developers" today are nothing of the sort. Instead of "masters of technology", they are slaves to their desktops. When will businesses understand that warm bodies != more development bandwidth.
This makes my point perfectly. iMacs and eMacs hide the computer inside the monitor base. To the average user, they simply see a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
But isn't SPARC (the standardized part) only an instruction set?
Nope. The whole chip is available. Sun used to have a PDF of it available for download, but that may have gone the way of the "Free Solaris Source" program.
MIPS is also an architecture that is commonly licensed by third parties. It's used everywhere from set-top boxes, to video game machines, all the way up to SGI IRIX machines. In fact, the many incarnations of MIPS probably made MIPS the *most* successful processor in history.
It still sounds sensationalist. Sun has had the Sparc processor as an open standard for years. MIPS is an extremely popular chip for customizing. Despite the thousands of different companies who've customized these chips, neither one has seen a significant divergence in design. A third party will usually add a few instructions specific to their device (e.g. SIMD-like instructions were added to MIPS for video games) and leave it at that.
What history has shown is that general computing is general computing (with an occasional lean toward a certain area such as Desktop processing, number crunching, or network serving). Non-general applications such as GPUs and signal processors tend to require a much different architecture than a general CPU can provide. Thus your car radio is probably processing more data than the PowerBook on your lap, but your PowerBook is running programs that would cause your radio's DSP to choke.
It also seems that IBM is a few years late in that respect. (See: IEEE Standard 1754-1994)
If they succeed it doesn't bode well for the x86 architecture, which seems to be a victim of it's own success. They seem to be trapped into just adding faster clocks instead of changing the architecture.
As much as I can't believe I'm defending the Intel architecture, Intel *has* been modifying their chip design. Out of order instructions, Superscalar execution, instruction pipelining, branch prediction, etc. are all in the current classes of Pentium processors. There are two reasons, however, that these don't affect Intel processors as much as other architectures:
1. The awful Intel instruction set was created as part of a quick "stop-gap" product called the 8088 (and later the 8086). Intel had planned to redesign the thing, but got trapped when IBM used it for PCs. This has led to more crappy instructions being bolted on for 32 bit support. This instruction set has made it somewhat difficult for Intel to use traditional performance enhancements. (e.g. A common block of instructions don't quite fit the superscalar block, resulting in lost performance gains.)
2. Intel tunes their chips for video games. Sorry folks, you've all been asking for single threaded performance. Well, single threaded performance is what you've got. The Intel chips will outdo every other architecture on Quake III. Just start praying that your servers don't need to multitask more than 20 or so concurrent threads.
they fail to understand that developers are not just another category of end-users.
This is true. Unfortunately, few of the "programmers" over the past few years have really been deserving of any special treatment. None the less, the idea that a SysAdmin is going to keep me out of my production system is ludicrous. It may take them a while to understand this, but they always do in the end.;-) (insert maniacal laugh here)
He doesn't really appear to offer any substantial concepts for performance improvements. Shrinking the die and upping the clock speed are the most common performance improvements because they are the most effective. Changes to the chips structure or internal coding only result in a one time 10-20% performance boost. And concepts like programmable gateways still have to follow the laws of physics.
Sure, you may be able to optimize a few very common pathways. But you simply can't optimize all of them. Thus a "perfect" algorithm for pathway adaption would again net you one of those 10-20% increases on a general processor. A dedicated machine (e.g. One attempting to calculate PI to infinity) could of course see several times the performance, but then you have to weigh an expensive programmable chip against a cheap custom chip.
Already liquid cooled, and in a cool aluminium case, enough case fans for a hovercraft. What is left to do?
May I ask a serious question? Why mod it in the first place? I can understand that it's fun to make cases fit a "theme" (i.e. If I've got a bunch of racing memorabilia, I might want my case to have flames and exhaust pipes), but outside of that, what's the point? It's just a box. You might as well mod your dishwasher with a plexiglass window in front, and neon lights that catch the water sprays while it's running.
Beyond that, a computer is a machine that you usually don't want to be visible. You see the screen, you see the mouse, and you see the keyboard. Put the mobo in a closet or a hole in the wall for all I care. The only thing I need it for is to insert a CDROM drive or plug in a USB device.
(Insert comment about Real Unix Geeks keeping their machines in climate controlled rooms.);-)
Indeed. Especially when you consider the perspective of building systems rather than software installation. As a developer, do I REALLY want to be setting up that new Win2003 server? Or rewiring the network to split it between switches? No! I'm far too busy developing! I'll leave the details of managing hardware, credentials, network routes, system security, virus cleanup (I can't believe my colleagues still manage to get these stupid things), etc. to the SysAdmins. I only want to get involved if there's a serious issue that requires the expertise of a developer.
The temperature difference is the key, along with the conversion efficiency of the two metals forming the junction of the device.
I understand this. My (somewhat sarcastic) reply was intended to point out the fact that a peltier would defeat the original intent of the heat shield: To stop some or all of the heat from reaching your lap.
With a 57 deg gradient, I have to think that a pad that size should be able to reclaim some energy, a la peltier effect.
Errm.... doesn't the peltier effect require a heating surface and a cooling surface? So, your laptop heats the top of the pad. And the pad is cooled by... your lap?
it's becoming increasingly apparent that MandrakeSoft doesn't care much about stability anyway:(
No kidding. When I did a review of Mandrake 10.0, I found that nearly all the software was beta stuff, and that the system was about as stable as a dog in flight. That's not to say that it won't work for most people, but they do go out of their way to be "so sharp I bleed before you cut me" edge.
People, do yourselves a favor and read the Intel specs. Please? There is in fact, a bit for defining code segments. These code segments can be marked as read only or execute only. The problem (as I managed to wrangle out of people the LAST time this thing was posted) is that a data block can also be executed without exception. The NX flag merely prevents data blocks from ever executing code.
but the gnutella net has never ceased, nor can it to my knowledge, as long as there are at least two peers interested in trading files.
I didn't say that it ceased. I said that it collapsed. And it did. Into tens of miniature networks, all with varying degrees of connectivity. What happened was that the network became too "top heavy" from the amount of traffic it generated, and nodes were no longer able to keep in communication. Connections started dropping, and nodes splintered into smaller nets with no relation to one another.
Slashdot Mirror
But later on in the curriculum, they don't read books as much, more like review articles published in some journals. I guess the same applies for most fields, not only CS. At least in physics it's true.
;-)
I also try to catch up on interesting papers now and then. (Granted, I'm not really interested in papers explaining that Prof. XY has discovered mathematical oddity Z that is of absolutely zero practical use.) But books (even in EBook form) are still a necessity. CompSci teaches the core of computer science. After that, things break out into distributed computing, graphics, sound synthesis, compression, cryptology, etc. If you want to "catch up" on the work done in these fields, a book provides an excellent way of doing this. The part that freaks me out here, is that the poor selection of books suggests that no one is "catching up" on these sub fields.
In the end, of course, having a masters degree is no guarantee against idiocy.
Agreed. In fact I'm quite shocked at the number of CompSci students with Masters who need to pick up a "XXX for Dummies" book. CompSci should have given then sufficient foundation to go into just about any computer field (including hardware design when combined with EE). It strikes me that many schools are letting the ball drop and not verifying that these students know what they were taught. Or even more ominously, schools exist which don't even teach students what they need to know.
And then they want to know why we don't like giving them local administrator rights.
:-)
Got that. As I said, they gave up on me.
Developers are as clueless as the rest of the users when it comes to viruses. It's the developers who always come to us to ask for help when they infect their personal machines.
;-)
It seems that someone has difficulty in reading the disclaimer at the bottom of my message. No, I don't like these "developers" either. The fact that they can't find their heads from their asses is a sign that they shouldn't be hired in the first place. The core of that problem is a boss who thinks warm bodies == productivity.
Its a lot more than a few minutes of your time each day to protect against said viruses.
Few minutes? I'm losing HOURS of work every day thanks to these stupid scanners. Normally I'd be able to run Netbeans, DataDino, JEdit, Cygwin, Mozilla, and the occasional utility like NSIS, Acrobat, OpenOffice, FileZilla, and GIMP. I'm instead forced to wait several minutes every time a file is touched, the swap is accessed, or a network connection is opened. It takes forever just to type 10 lines of f***ing code, much less run more than one program!
Oh well then sorry, I didn't see your "I'm Special" badge.
I'll forgive you this once.
Because SysAdmins are adept at distinguising between clueless dolts who can't find a compiler with both hands and "Masters of the Universe^M^MTechnology" supermen like you, who are infalable.
I've been an admin myself. It's very easy to fall into the trap of "everyone else is stupid".
You pompous fuck.
Flattery will get you nowhere.
Are you going to restore from backup and/or fix the fucking thing after you've broken it?
After I've broken it? Excuse me, but I'm the one who usually has to fix the blasted thing. The SysAdmins know nothing of the code. Nor should they have to. I DO know the code, and I DO need access to the system to keep it running. I'm not asking for root, just access to my software.
Then fuck off.
You're fired. Boss, how long will it take us to get another admin? Two, three days?
Well, I've got a PhD, and I'm presently reading Dock Ellis In The Country Of Baseball by Don Hall and Round Ireland With A Fridge by Tony Hawks
*chuckle* Thanks for the laugh. Just in case anyone missed it though, I was specifically referring to "What the hell are [Masters|PH.D.] compsci majors reading for technical books these days?!" If all the University bookstores are full of the B.S. I described (these stores were practically on the University of Wisconsin's campus), then how are the nextgen compsci professors and system architects learning anything?
What exactly are you talking about? I think you've replied to the wrong person.
The original post (yours?) stated, and I quote:
"I'm developing software on QNX 2.x right now and it BLOWS! "
Shall we assume that the "2.x" was a typo, and that QNX 4.x (or Neutrino 6.x) was the intended version number?
We needed a real time OS (or at least close to it) so thats why its running on QNX. The QNX box is communicating with embedded microcontrollers over an external bus.
[snip]
My preference would have been an old Sparc box running SunOS.
The words, "non-realtime OS" keep coming to mind...
They deviate from standards and make you have to dig to find where that deviation is. Is having man pages too much to ask??
Fair enough. But it *is* an embedded system. Footprint is everything. My guess is that you're simply not used to the QNX way of doing things and are thus frustrated. Many of the QNX deviations are actually quite sensible, and some of them are actually choices made by the person customizing the system.
Do yourself a favor. Learn to use offline docs (or at least installable docs) and stop expecting dumb things like BASH on an embedded system. If you don't stop complaining, your boss may decide to give you VxWorks (note the oxymoron here) as a punishment.
The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless.
Agreed. I recently checked out Barnes & Noble and Borders for technical books. Once upon a time, I could find the books on OS Design, Algorithms, Cryptology, Data Compression, Sound Theory, Game Programming, etc. You know what I found instead? EJB for dummies, UNIX for Dummies 3rd edition, Beginners Guide to Linux, J2EE for Business, etc. Talk about dumbed down material. Half of this stuff is useless crap intended for people who won't read specs (or at least tutorials). They simply add "purdy picturz" to a minor amount of information and call it a book.
Maybe it's just me, but you know what I got for an anniversary present from my wife? A book on calculating sounds (i.e. synthesis of sounds produced by real objects) in real time. My wife pulled it from my wish list on Amazon. THAT is something I want on my shelf. Right next to the processor specs from Intel and AMD, Practical File System Design with BeOS, OS Design by Tanenbaum, Introduction to Advanced Data Structures, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, etc, etc, etc.
I don't even have a Masters degree. What the hell are the people who DO have one reading?
developers ARE just another category of end user.
Oh, so that explains why I can't read the production log file for errors. Or install a library I need for development. Or download Mozilla and Opera to do compatibility testing.
Developers are NOT "just another class of end user". They should be masters over the technology.* The responsibility of the IT staff is to support their development as best as possible. Instead, they get their machines locked down, virus scanners installed, and regedit disabled. All of which takes me about ten minutes to circumvent so I can get some work done.
In case anyone is wondering, developers need to be capable of doing development without a virus scanner. Their machine may be processing hundreds of files at any given time. Making the machine scan every file before writing to disk only frustrates the developer and slows the development process. Depending on where and why, this slowdown can cost a company thousands to millions of dollars in lost productivity. If Windows vulnerabilities are that great of a concern, buy your developers Sparcs, Macs, or Linux machines (in that order).
Virus scanners can usually be disabled by setting the Windows Service to "manual" instead of automatic. This nicely circumvents that stupid taskbar control. The taskbar control can be removed by killing the process on boot, or hacking the registry to disable to password check. How to edit the registry? That's easy!
In order for programs to run, they must be capable of reading and writing to the registry, right? So why can't some other program modify the registry? Answer: It can! Just download an alternative registry editor and modify the various keys locking you out of your system. You should be good to go in no time flat.
My SysAdmins have pretty much given up on "securing" my machine. Besides, once you demonstrate that you know what you're doing, they tend to leave you alone. Oh, and I have never contracted a virus on my machine. Even when our network became infested with RPC worms.
* Sadly, too many "developers" today are nothing of the sort. Instead of "masters of technology", they are slaves to their desktops. When will businesses understand that warm bodies != more development bandwidth.
Could it be because the AC has found the popular GNU/Linux distributions too bloated for some specific hardware?
;-)
Oooo... that's gonna leave a mark. Perhaps Mr. AC would like to comment?
Most normal stuff you expect to find on a linux install is either broken in some way or missing entirely. It doesn't even have bash!!
Why are you trying to use QNX as a desktop UNIX workstation?
an iMac might be nice touch to a room.
This makes my point perfectly. iMacs and eMacs hide the computer inside the monitor base. To the average user, they simply see a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
But isn't SPARC (the standardized part) only an instruction set?
Nope. The whole chip is available. Sun used to have a PDF of it available for download, but that may have gone the way of the "Free Solaris Source" program.
MIPS is also an architecture that is commonly licensed by third parties. It's used everywhere from set-top boxes, to video game machines, all the way up to SGI IRIX machines. In fact, the many incarnations of MIPS probably made MIPS the *most* successful processor in history.
History of MIPS
History of SPARC
LEON2, an LGPL processor based on SPARC technology
That was quick. While you're waiting, you can check out the shamelessly self-promoted Linux reviews in my journal. ;-) Hmm... there goes my karma.
It still sounds sensationalist. Sun has had the Sparc processor as an open standard for years. MIPS is an extremely popular chip for customizing. Despite the thousands of different companies who've customized these chips, neither one has seen a significant divergence in design. A third party will usually add a few instructions specific to their device (e.g. SIMD-like instructions were added to MIPS for video games) and leave it at that.
What history has shown is that general computing is general computing (with an occasional lean toward a certain area such as Desktop processing, number crunching, or network serving). Non-general applications such as GPUs and signal processors tend to require a much different architecture than a general CPU can provide. Thus your car radio is probably processing more data than the PowerBook on your lap, but your PowerBook is running programs that would cause your radio's DSP to choke.
Seems IBM is embracing open standards
It also seems that IBM is a few years late in that respect. (See: IEEE Standard 1754-1994)
If they succeed it doesn't bode well for the x86 architecture, which seems to be a victim of it's own success. They seem to be trapped into just adding faster clocks instead of changing the architecture.
As much as I can't believe I'm defending the Intel architecture, Intel *has* been modifying their chip design. Out of order instructions, Superscalar execution, instruction pipelining, branch prediction, etc. are all in the current classes of Pentium processors. There are two reasons, however, that these don't affect Intel processors as much as other architectures:
1. The awful Intel instruction set was created as part of a quick "stop-gap" product called the 8088 (and later the 8086). Intel had planned to redesign the thing, but got trapped when IBM used it for PCs. This has led to more crappy instructions being bolted on for 32 bit support. This instruction set has made it somewhat difficult for Intel to use traditional performance enhancements. (e.g. A common block of instructions don't quite fit the superscalar block, resulting in lost performance gains.)
2. Intel tunes their chips for video games. Sorry folks, you've all been asking for single threaded performance. Well, single threaded performance is what you've got. The Intel chips will outdo every other architecture on Quake III. Just start praying that your servers don't need to multitask more than 20 or so concurrent threads.
they fail to understand that developers are not just another category of end-users.
;-) (insert maniacal laugh here)
This is true. Unfortunately, few of the "programmers" over the past few years have really been deserving of any special treatment. None the less, the idea that a SysAdmin is going to keep me out of my production system is ludicrous. It may take them a while to understand this, but they always do in the end.
He doesn't really appear to offer any substantial concepts for performance improvements. Shrinking the die and upping the clock speed are the most common performance improvements because they are the most effective. Changes to the chips structure or internal coding only result in a one time 10-20% performance boost. And concepts like programmable gateways still have to follow the laws of physics.
Sure, you may be able to optimize a few very common pathways. But you simply can't optimize all of them. Thus a "perfect" algorithm for pathway adaption would again net you one of those 10-20% increases on a general processor. A dedicated machine (e.g. One attempting to calculate PI to infinity) could of course see several times the performance, but then you have to weigh an expensive programmable chip against a cheap custom chip.
Already liquid cooled, and in a cool aluminium case, enough case fans for a hovercraft. What is left to do?
;-)
May I ask a serious question? Why mod it in the first place? I can understand that it's fun to make cases fit a "theme" (i.e. If I've got a bunch of racing memorabilia, I might want my case to have flames and exhaust pipes), but outside of that, what's the point? It's just a box. You might as well mod your dishwasher with a plexiglass window in front, and neon lights that catch the water sprays while it's running.
Beyond that, a computer is a machine that you usually don't want to be visible. You see the screen, you see the mouse, and you see the keyboard. Put the mobo in a closet or a hole in the wall for all I care. The only thing I need it for is to insert a CDROM drive or plug in a USB device.
(Insert comment about Real Unix Geeks keeping their machines in climate controlled rooms.)
Indeed. Especially when you consider the perspective of building systems rather than software installation. As a developer, do I REALLY want to be setting up that new Win2003 server? Or rewiring the network to split it between switches? No! I'm far too busy developing! I'll leave the details of managing hardware, credentials, network routes, system security, virus cleanup (I can't believe my colleagues still manage to get these stupid things), etc. to the SysAdmins. I only want to get involved if there's a serious issue that requires the expertise of a developer.
The temperature difference is the key, along with the conversion efficiency of the two metals forming the junction of the device.
I understand this. My (somewhat sarcastic) reply was intended to point out the fact that a peltier would defeat the original intent of the heat shield: To stop some or all of the heat from reaching your lap.
With a 57 deg gradient, I have to think that a pad that size should be able to reclaim some energy, a la peltier effect.
Errm.... doesn't the peltier effect require a heating surface and a cooling surface? So, your laptop heats the top of the pad. And the pad is cooled by... your lap?
it's becoming increasingly apparent that MandrakeSoft doesn't care much about stability anyway :(
No kidding. When I did a review of Mandrake 10.0, I found that nearly all the software was beta stuff, and that the system was about as stable as a dog in flight. That's not to say that it won't work for most people, but they do go out of their way to be "so sharp I bleed before you cut me" edge.
People, do yourselves a favor and read the Intel specs. Please? There is in fact, a bit for defining code segments. These code segments can be marked as read only or execute only. The problem (as I managed to wrangle out of people the LAST time this thing was posted) is that a data block can also be executed without exception. The NX flag merely prevents data blocks from ever executing code.
but the gnutella net has never ceased, nor can it to my knowledge, as long as there are at least two peers interested in trading files.
I didn't say that it ceased. I said that it collapsed. And it did. Into tens of miniature networks, all with varying degrees of connectivity. What happened was that the network became too "top heavy" from the amount of traffic it generated, and nodes were no longer able to keep in communication. Connections started dropping, and nodes splintered into smaller nets with no relation to one another.