And yet the times Pacman has broken my system (sometimes pretty severely), a quick search of the forums and a half hour of manual tinkering was all it took to set it right again. I had Apt wedge my Ubuntu VM this weekend (ran out of disk space mid-update) and it took over two hours of manual tinkering to get it fixed.
Actually, the human brain can do it quite a bit better. This is just a myth people have embraced to justify never using assembly. The only real difficulty for humans is on Intel architectures where you have to deal with the machine conversion of legacy CISC instructions to the actual microinstructions executed by the processor core. On a proper RISC machine, I've yet to see a compiler that can out optimize a human.
If you want a valid arguments against assembly try portability or programmer productivity.
If the device can send texts and uses a SIM then odds are it's a GSM device. That means in the US you're likely to be best served by T-Mobile or AT&T's networks. You'll need to find out what frequency bands the device supports as that may force you onto one or the other. Aside from that, any of the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) that sell service on AT&T or T-Mobile are viable candidates. They'll sell you a pre-paid SIM card without a phone that will provide voice and SMS access. Wikipedia will help get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators
I'll be switching to AirVoice Wireless once my AT&T contract ends next month. For $10/mo you can get a plan that lets you spend the $10 at a rate of $0.04/min voice and $0.02/msg SMS.
Asking the question "I'm an underachiever, what can I read to change this" is a bit like asking "I'm overweight, what can I read to get fit".
Work with your manager to define a concrete plan (with measurable goals and milestones) that will lead to your next promotion or a transfer to a management role. This will likely require spending time beyond your core working hours (probably working with a mentor), so you're not going to have time to read anything that isn't part of your career advancement plan.
If your company can't facilitate that approach, then use your "book reading time" to find a new job.
This is why many decisions should be left to markets instead of central planning. When the trillion dollars of research grants come from people *choosing* to invest their own money, they will endeavor to get educated in order to minimize the risk to their investment. When it's people voting for how to invest someone else's money (or electing someone to make that decision for them), there's far less incentive to make the effort necessary to make an informed decision.
Commercial and military pilots spend hours upon hours training in simulators to handle failure scenarios. Look at all the failure contingency training NASA puts astronauts through. Yet here in the US, any idiot who can pass an eye test and answer a few basic questions about traffic laws can get a license to operate a motor vehicle.
How many drivers will instinctively reach for the parking brake if the brake pedal fails? How may will reach for neutral if the accelerator sticks? How many have even the vaguest notion how to handle a skid or a blow out? How many have their vehicle fully inspected at least annually?
Bottom line is, stuff breaks. Maybe it's defective by design, maybe it wears out, maybe it has to deal with a combination of events no one ever predicted. If there are things you could do to prepare for these contingencies but you chose not to, who is really responsible for the results?
When the two pedals work at the same time, it can result in pretty horrible accidents.
Help me understand this. At 60 MPH a typical 3600 lb sedan has nearly 590 KJoules of kinetic energy. The brakes are capable of bringing said car to a stop in 4.5 seconds or less which is the equivalent of about 170 horsepower. Granted that may not be enough to overcome both the engine AND momentum of a car with a stuck accelerator, but it is enough to bring the acceleration to pretty near zero while one pops the transmission into neutral and steers the car safely out of harm's way.
I've experienced a stuck throttle (due to failure in the mechanical linkage... no car is completely immune) and as far as "things likely to cause a horrible accident", that one doesn't even make the list.
Awesome WM will do *exactly* what the OP wants. However the OP also insisted on a "classical" window manager. Though Awesome can behave a bit like a classical window manager (floating window mode is, in fact, now the default behavior), the result would be unsatisfying. Trying to manage two screens with nine virtual desktops each by dragging things around with a pointing device is insane. Awesome's keyboard shortcuts for window management make that task vastly more efficient for those willing to invest a little effort in climbing over the learning curve.
Ovi Maps does real-time online map downloads just fine, along with real-time online traffic updates, weather, events, location sharing, etc. However, by allowing you to store maps on the memory card (a few gig can cover the US and most of Europe) you aren't *forced* to be online to use it. Handy for those treks into more rural areas (where 3G coverage, not to mention road signs, is a luxury and offline nav becomes really beneficial). Also nice when you're off-network and don't want to pay crazy data roaming charges.
Really? Taken apart any modern hard drives lately? "Parking" is simply the act of moving the heads to an area of the platters not used for data storage. The heads are still very much in contact with the platters, but if the heads get bounced around, there's no data under them to damage.
Stiction is caused by centripetal force of the spinning platters gradually drawing spindle bearing lubricant across the surface of the platters. This happens gradually over a long period of time. Once that happens, if you leave the drive powered off (parked or not) for a significant period of time, the contaminants can bond the heads to the platters.
Newer drives take steps to prevent this such as using better bearings and parking the heads close to the spindle so they can generate more "break-free" force from for a given amount of motor torque.
If you copy data to a brand new drive (preferably a lower capacity unit with a single platter and only a pair of heads) and then take it offline and store it in a climate controlled environment, stiction is not likely to ever become a problem.
Everyone is missing why biking is such a perfect geek exercise. It's not about the cardio benefits, or how fast you burn calories, or the fresh air... it's about the *machine*!
Biking requires owning (what can be) a very high tech machine. Alloys, composites, frame geometry, gearing systems, braking systems. The amount of stuff to study and upgrade is practically endless:) And of course the desire to go "play" with your fancy machine provides an additional motivational boost to get out and ride.
FreeBSD developers often have to submit a few patches, get a mentor and go through two years of hell to get in.
That "get a mentor" part is very very good advice for any project. Find a project you like and then politely ask the experienced devs if any are willing to mentor you. Think of a mentor as a guide on your first visit to a foreign country. He/she can tell you the easiest way to get started on that particular project (not all projects are alike).
In addition, a mentor can field the inevitable barrage of newbie questions through private communication so you are not forced you to expose your ignorance to the entire project. Even the most patient old-timer can get a bit hostile when the project's communication channel gets flooded with the same batch of newbie questions that they've seen a thousand times before.
Last but not least, keep in mind that the most experienced devs are often not the best mentors. They know too much and often have trouble remembering what it was like to be a beginner. Find someone who has been with the project long enough to know the "landscape" but not so long that they've forgotten the path they took to get there.
True for some FPGA families but not true of FPGAs in general. For example, Xilinx Virtex family of FPGAs are RAM based designs. They can be programmed by having their configuration fed to them by a CPU. As a result they're no more likely to "crap out" from reprogramming than your RAM is. Reconfigurable Computing designs are typically based on these types of devices.
4. Don't tell user's you are not as capable as all the other sites on the "interweb"
When every other site they visit comes up just fine in IE, telling people that yours can't comes off as bitchy and/or incompetent. Keep in mind that most people have no idea how nice sites could look if they didn't have to dumb themselves down for broken browsers. Users don't care how *you* want your site to look. They consider it your job to do whatever you have to so *they* can view it.
Firefox advocacy is all well and good, but I suspect it would be more useful to give 'em a banner with a "tell Microsoft to fix IE" button that lets them sign a petition. Every thousand signatures or so, fire off a copy to Redmond. The only way IE will get fixed is if MS hears users (not developers) say they care.
If you really want your book to work, don't approach it as a reference manual or even a tutorial. People with the inclination to read such material probably already have.
The trick is to write something engaging that just happens to be sprinkled with tidbits of the basic information you're trying to get across. A classic example is "Soul of a New Machine". In that book Kidder does a magnificent job of telling a story. Yes, along the way he has to provide simple explanations of things like microcode and wire-wrapped circuit boards, but it's the story -- the reader's desire to find out what happens next -- that pulls them through the technical bits. The technical bits are explained in a way any average person can understand, but its the fact that knowing them helps you follow the story that provides extra motivation for non-technical readers. If the book had just been a collection of briliantly simplified technical explanations, few readers would have ever made it past the first chapter.
A different approach with a similar objective would be to use humor. A book relating humorous stories from the IT industry (if done well enough) could entice non-techies to read it. As you relate the stories, you'd have an opportunity to sprinkle in the technical bits needed to see the humor. Definitely a challenge. The humor would have to be more "Reader's Digest" style than dry Dilbertesqe sarcasm, but I think a really tallented writer could pull it off and potentially have a big seller.
"Palm development seems to require an expensive IDE to code in."
Not true. Palm provides a free (as in $0) SDK that uses gcc set up as a 68K cross compiler. You can build your own PalmOS apps without spending a dime on tools... which is one of the reasons for the Palm's success.
Not to mention that for $15 you can buy OnBoard C for the Palm and actually create native standalone PalmOS apps right there on your PDA. That's one of the reasons I opted for a Palm device (actually a Handspring Visor) over a PocketPC. As far as development is concerned, Palm is actually far more "open" (yes, I'm using that term very loosely) than most people realize. No, they won't give you the source to the OS, but they are more than happy to show you how to patch it and change it to your heart's content.
I'm eager to see what kind of potential the Agenda has once it finally ships, but I'm not totally convinced that having the source to the OS is going to make development any easier than it already is on the Palm platform.
Actually, Palm/USRobotics/3Com never created a compiler. PalmOS apps are cross compiled using the standard version of gcc or the MetroWorks CodeWarrior tools.
The thing that keeps PalmOS apps small is the the fact that they are straight C code (no C++ inheritance bloat) and the fact that the OS does a very good job of providing all the basic functionality. Everything from GUI controls to strcpy are provided via OS calls. If Linux PDA's are to succeed, someone needs to create a good shared library that provides 90% of the core functionality that a PDA app needs.
libc gets you part way there (though a hacked down version would be a good idea)... add a gui toolkit that doesn't need C++ and doesn't have all the overhead of X and Linux PDA apps could easily rival their PalmOS counterparts in terms of size.
Windows does two things for MS: first, it generates revenue from sales of the OS; second (and probably more important), it creates demand for Windows applications (a large percentage of which are sold by MS). Think about it. Would MS really care about NT Server if it didn't allow them to sell MS SQL Server and BackOffice? If it weren't for sales of MS Office, would MS really make enough money on sales of Win9x to offset development costs?
If MS sees their market share eroding, they will do whatever they think is necessary to correct that. No doubt they see companies like RedHat successfully selling "Free Software" in retail stores for $40+ a copy, largely because "branding" is very important to consumer confidence. If buying Windows became "purchasing a distribution", who's "brand" of Windows would most consumers trust? Sure they'll lose some sales to the more savvy users who can find a distribution for less, but even those users are still potential applications customers.
If the Linux movement doesn't eventually collapse under its own weight, then open source Windows isn't a question of "if" but a question of "when".
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And yet the times Pacman has broken my system (sometimes pretty severely), a quick search of the forums and a half hour of manual tinkering was all it took to set it right again. I had Apt wedge my Ubuntu VM this weekend (ran out of disk space mid-update) and it took over two hours of manual tinkering to get it fixed.
Actually, the human brain can do it quite a bit better. This is just a myth people have embraced to justify never using assembly. The only real difficulty for humans is on Intel architectures where you have to deal with the machine conversion of legacy CISC instructions to the actual microinstructions executed by the processor core. On a proper RISC machine, I've yet to see a compiler that can out optimize a human.
If you want a valid arguments against assembly try portability or programmer productivity.
If the device can send texts and uses a SIM then odds are it's a GSM device. That means in the US you're likely to be best served by T-Mobile or AT&T's networks. You'll need to find out what frequency bands the device supports as that may force you onto one or the other. Aside from that, any of the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) that sell service on AT&T or T-Mobile are viable candidates. They'll sell you a pre-paid SIM card without a phone that will provide voice and SMS access. Wikipedia will help get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators
I'll be switching to AirVoice Wireless once my AT&T contract ends next month. For $10/mo you can get a plan that lets you spend the $10 at a rate of $0.04/min voice and $0.02/msg SMS.
Mod this up!
Asking the question "I'm an underachiever, what can I read to change this" is a bit like asking "I'm overweight, what can I read to get fit".
Work with your manager to define a concrete plan (with measurable goals and milestones) that will lead to your next promotion or a transfer to a management role. This will likely require spending time beyond your core working hours (probably working with a mentor), so you're not going to have time to read anything that isn't part of your career advancement plan.
If your company can't facilitate that approach, then use your "book reading time" to find a new job.
Yes, but failing to recognize correlation != causality certainly is.
This is why many decisions should be left to markets instead of central planning. When the trillion dollars of research grants come from people *choosing* to invest their own money, they will endeavor to get educated in order to minimize the risk to their investment. When it's people voting for how to invest someone else's money (or electing someone to make that decision for them), there's far less incentive to make the effort necessary to make an informed decision.
Commercial and military pilots spend hours upon hours training in simulators to handle failure scenarios. Look at all the failure contingency training NASA puts astronauts through. Yet here in the US, any idiot who can pass an eye test and answer a few basic questions about traffic laws can get a license to operate a motor vehicle.
How many drivers will instinctively reach for the parking brake if the brake pedal fails? How may will reach for neutral if the accelerator sticks? How many have even the vaguest notion how to handle a skid or a blow out? How many have their vehicle fully inspected at least annually?
Bottom line is, stuff breaks. Maybe it's defective by design, maybe it wears out, maybe it has to deal with a combination of events no one ever predicted. If there are things you could do to prepare for these contingencies but you chose not to, who is really responsible for the results?
When the two pedals work at the same time, it can result in pretty horrible accidents.
Help me understand this. At 60 MPH a typical 3600 lb sedan has nearly 590 KJoules of kinetic energy. The brakes are capable of bringing said car to a stop in 4.5 seconds or less which is the equivalent of about 170 horsepower. Granted that may not be enough to overcome both the engine AND momentum of a car with a stuck accelerator, but it is enough to bring the acceleration to pretty near zero while one pops the transmission into neutral and steers the car safely out of harm's way.
I've experienced a stuck throttle (due to failure in the mechanical linkage ... no car is completely immune) and as far as "things likely to cause a horrible accident", that one doesn't even make the list.
Awesome WM will do *exactly* what the OP wants. However the OP also insisted on a "classical" window manager. Though Awesome can behave a bit like a classical window manager (floating window mode is, in fact, now the default behavior), the result would be unsatisfying. Trying to manage two screens with nine virtual desktops each by dragging things around with a pointing device is insane. Awesome's keyboard shortcuts for window management make that task vastly more efficient for those willing to invest a little effort in climbing over the learning curve.
Ovi Maps does real-time online map downloads just fine, along with real-time online traffic updates, weather, events, location sharing, etc. However, by allowing you to store maps on the memory card (a few gig can cover the US and most of Europe) you aren't *forced* to be online to use it. Handy for those treks into more rural areas (where 3G coverage, not to mention road signs, is a luxury and offline nav becomes really beneficial). Also nice when you're off-network and don't want to pay crazy data roaming charges.
Really? Taken apart any modern hard drives lately? "Parking" is simply the act of moving the heads to an area of the platters not used for data storage. The heads are still very much in contact with the platters, but if the heads get bounced around, there's no data under them to damage.
Stiction is caused by centripetal force of the spinning platters gradually drawing spindle bearing lubricant across the surface of the platters. This happens gradually over a long period of time. Once that happens, if you leave the drive powered off (parked or not) for a significant period of time, the contaminants can bond the heads to the platters.
Newer drives take steps to prevent this such as using better bearings and parking the heads close to the spindle so they can generate more "break-free" force from for a given amount of motor torque.
If you copy data to a brand new drive (preferably a lower capacity unit with a single platter and only a pair of heads) and then take it offline and store it in a climate controlled environment, stiction is not likely to ever become a problem.
Everyone is missing why biking is such a perfect geek exercise. It's not about the cardio benefits, or how fast you burn calories, or the fresh air ... it's about the *machine*!
Biking requires owning (what can be) a very high tech machine. Alloys, composites, frame geometry, gearing systems, braking systems. The amount of stuff to study and upgrade is practically endless :) And of course the desire to go "play" with your fancy machine provides an additional motivational boost to get out and ride.
That "get a mentor" part is very very good advice for any project. Find a project you like and then politely ask the experienced devs if any are willing to mentor you. Think of a mentor as a guide on your first visit to a foreign country. He/she can tell you the easiest way to get started on that particular project (not all projects are alike).
In addition, a mentor can field the inevitable barrage of newbie questions through private communication so you are not forced you to expose your ignorance to the entire project. Even the most patient old-timer can get a bit hostile when the project's communication channel gets flooded with the same batch of newbie questions that they've seen a thousand times before.
Last but not least, keep in mind that the most experienced devs are often not the best mentors. They know too much and often have trouble remembering what it was like to be a beginner. Find someone who has been with the project long enough to know the "landscape" but not so long that they've forgotten the path they took to get there.
True for some FPGA families but not true of FPGAs in general. For example, Xilinx Virtex family of FPGAs are RAM based designs. They can be programmed by having their configuration fed to them by a CPU. As a result they're no more likely to "crap out" from reprogramming than your RAM is. Reconfigurable Computing designs are typically based on these types of devices.
4. Don't tell user's you are not as capable as all the other sites on the "interweb"
When every other site they visit comes up just fine in IE, telling people that yours can't comes off as bitchy and/or incompetent. Keep in mind that most people have no idea how nice sites could look if they didn't have to dumb themselves down for broken browsers. Users don't care how *you* want your site to look. They consider it your job to do whatever you have to so *they* can view it.
Firefox advocacy is all well and good, but I suspect it would be more useful to give 'em a banner with a "tell Microsoft to fix IE" button that lets them sign a petition. Every thousand signatures or so, fire off a copy to Redmond. The only way IE will get fixed is if MS hears users (not developers) say they care.
If you really want your book to work, don't approach it as a reference manual or even a tutorial. People with the inclination to read such material probably already have.
The trick is to write something engaging that just happens to be sprinkled with tidbits of the basic information you're trying to get across. A classic example is "Soul of a New Machine". In that book Kidder does a magnificent job of telling a story. Yes, along the way he has to provide simple explanations of things like microcode and wire-wrapped circuit boards, but it's the story -- the reader's desire to find out what happens next -- that pulls them through the technical bits. The technical bits are explained in a way any average person can understand, but its the fact that knowing them helps you follow the story that provides extra motivation for non-technical readers. If the book had just been a collection of briliantly simplified technical explanations, few readers would have ever made it past the first chapter.
A different approach with a similar objective would be to use humor. A book relating humorous stories from the IT industry (if done well enough) could entice non-techies to read it. As you relate the stories, you'd have an opportunity to sprinkle in the technical bits needed to see the humor. Definitely a challenge. The humor would have to be more "Reader's Digest" style than dry Dilbertesqe sarcasm, but I think a really tallented writer could pull it off and potentially have a big seller.
"Palm development seems to require an expensive IDE to code in."
... which is one of the reasons for the Palm's success.
Not true. Palm provides a free (as in $0) SDK that uses gcc set up as a 68K cross compiler. You can build your own PalmOS apps without spending a dime on tools
Not to mention that for $15 you can buy OnBoard C for the Palm and actually create native standalone PalmOS apps right there on your PDA. That's one of the reasons I opted for a Palm device (actually a Handspring Visor) over a PocketPC. As far as development is concerned, Palm is actually far more "open" (yes, I'm using that term very loosely) than most people realize. No, they won't give you the source to the OS, but they are more than happy to show you how to patch it and change it to your heart's content.
I'm eager to see what kind of potential the Agenda has once it finally ships, but I'm not totally convinced that having the source to the OS is going to make development any easier than it already is on the Palm platform.
Actually, Palm/USRobotics/3Com never created a compiler. PalmOS apps are cross compiled using the standard version of gcc or the MetroWorks CodeWarrior tools.
... add a gui toolkit that doesn't need C++ and doesn't have all the overhead of X and Linux PDA apps could easily rival their PalmOS counterparts in terms of size.
The thing that keeps PalmOS apps small is the the fact that they are straight C code (no C++ inheritance bloat) and the fact that the OS does a very good job of providing all the basic functionality. Everything from GUI controls to strcpy are provided via OS calls. If Linux PDA's are to succeed, someone needs to create a good shared library that provides 90% of the core functionality that a PDA app needs.
libc gets you part way there (though a hacked down version would be a good idea)
Windows does two things for MS: first, it generates revenue from sales of the OS; second (and probably more important), it creates demand for Windows applications (a large percentage of which are sold by MS). Think about it. Would MS really care about NT Server if it didn't allow them to sell MS SQL Server and BackOffice? If it weren't for sales of MS Office, would MS really make enough money on sales of Win9x to offset development costs?
If MS sees their market share eroding, they will do whatever they think is necessary to correct that. No doubt they see companies like RedHat successfully selling "Free Software" in retail stores for $40+ a copy, largely because "branding" is very important to consumer confidence. If buying Windows became "purchasing a distribution", who's "brand" of Windows would most consumers trust? Sure they'll lose some sales to the more savvy users who can find a distribution for less, but even those users are still potential applications customers.
If the Linux movement doesn't eventually collapse under its own weight, then open source Windows isn't a question of "if" but a question of "when".