I agree. I think that, while there is often a strong one-way correlation between nerds and smart people, the inverse is not necessarily true....*SNIP*... Some of the smartest people in my high school were NOT nerds....*SNIP*... While they were popular, they seemed to float above the social hierarchy, never taking part in the beatings or humiliation but never exactly seeking a nerd with whom to hang out....*SNIP*... They were popular because they weren't pretentious, they were self-confident, and they knew how to talk to somebody without scaring or boring the shit out of them. -Xthlc
WOW! I was about to make this same comment except you say it so well!
Even this article about the explanation of why "Nerds are Nerds" is so arrogant.
The coolest people in high school were the people who, when you talked to them, just made you feel comfortable being yourself and talked about things that would interest everyone present (They would NOT talking about chess at a poetry recital or recite poetry at a chess club). They also never talked about how smart or great they were but would find things that were good in others.
This article was an excuse to explain why Nerds were unpopular without giving the real reason which is that THEY NEED TO BE HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A CLUESTICK. Example: Don't talk about computers with somebody who does not CARE about computers. Nobody cares if you are smart. Get over it and talk about things that INTEREST your audience.
The Nerds in my high school were not the smartest kids, but the ones who bragged about how smart they were because they knew X and would then proceed to talk about X to people who could not care less.
Your point is valid, but for my part, if I were an actor or director, the box office receipts from my movies would be all the applause I would need. To me that's a much more accurate measure of whether or not people like my work --- or at least, ordinary people, who are the ones whose opinions I'd care about most.
Good box office numbers mean that the product as a whole is good (or not much competition) but it does not say whether anybody specific was good (except for maybe the director). Sometimes people wind up working on stuff that is complete shit and sometimes they are working on something really good. The quality of the product is not the same as praise for ones individual effort.
As CGI and other digital effects become more and more commonplace, there will have to be a change in perception by the Academy (aside: Do they teach something? I thought Academies were teaching institutions???) or they will become increasingly irrelelvant. -dreamchaser
...
Supposedly, top talent have chosen to make movies because they love the artform. So why would an award be meaningful to them? Awards are useful in athletic competitions but are they truly appropriate for art? I would argue that they are not. The creative talent in Hollywood (please don't snicker) should find that the chance to make art they think is meaningful and appreciated by others is reward enough. -GuyMannDude...
The reason we still have awards ceremonies is simple. It makes money for the industry. -dream chaser
I don't know why you guys are so jaded. I did some acting when I was in high school/college and the best praise one can get is applause at the end of the show. The Academy Awards is to give applause to those who did good work and to be appreciated for it. I think if I was a professional actor, I would be irritated if a CGI character was put in the same category as me (even if a real guy was behind the inspiration of the character). Whether you think the awards are a joke or only done for advertising does not take away from the fact that the Academy Awards is the best way (with warts and all) to tell talented entertainers that their work is appreciated. I never watch the awards because I really don't care who wins but if I were an actor/director/whatever, I would love to get an award because it would mean people like my work. It is the applause that filmmakers never get because there is no live audience.
AMD could release Athlon 64 to the Linux community today and they'd snap it up. That would also guarantee that Microsoft worked hard to make their schedule for releasing 64-bit Windows -- they'd be mortified that they'd be left behind.
AAARGH!
They are realeasing thier SERVER version of their product (opteron) in APRIL. They only "delayed" the consumer version (clawhammer) because there is no Microsoft 64 bit system for it yet. So AMD is doing EXACTLY what you suggest and you have not checked the FACTS to KNOW it. I just don't get why there is so much misunderstanding of AMD's release schedule.
On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the/. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.
IBM CISCO AMD Intel (ok -they get some flack but they are not hated) NVidia
The Slashdot crowd (for the most part) do not care how big a corporation is, but how good the service they provide. As long as Google remains just awesome, the slashdot crowd will kiss its solid gold ass.
Its interesting to note that the certification effort was made for the more proprietary (and costlier) Red Hat Advanced Server and not the basic Red Hat distribution...
jht responds:
Why is this even worth noting? Certification efforts aren't especially cheap. If you're going to expend time and resources getting a version of your product certified, why not put the effort into the version that is likeliest to generate enough revenue as a result of the certification to pay for the effort.
You are too kind to these people jht! If they want the 40 dollar version certified, Slashdot whiners should start up a fund to PAY $$$$$$ for the certification (I am sure RedHat would be overjoyed that the Linux community would donate so much money to them) and while complainers on slashdot are about it, I would suggest a fund to get Debian certified too. DO I hear silence from whiners... I thought so.
predictions about the death of Moore's law never faded away, every month there is a new person talking about the death of Moore's Law and that has been going on since he first postulated it.
I never said "Moores law" was over and I remember having a 386 that ran at 33 mhz. Now that computers can run a thousand times faster, I am say that it is probably true. When the 486 was around computers did not even need a heatsink. Now CPU's need a fan and a heat sink or they will fry in less than a minute. 0.13 um is the latest and greatest in silicon shrinkage and even if CPU's shrink to 0.09 um (which they might in six to ten years), the purity and the precision needed to print a chip today is getting to the extremes of what manufacturing is capable of in mass production. "Moores law" has been slowing down over the last 25 years. It used to be it doubles in 6-9 months, then a year and now it is 18 months. Things might start doubling every 36 months and then fade away altogether. I am not saying we won't see ten to twelve ghz CPU's (we will) but that 30 ghz won't be seen in my lifetime (except maybe in some research lab to prove it could be done). If things start "only" doubling every 3 years then that would mean we will have 48 ghz CPU's in 24 years. Heat has been an issue for the last ten to fifteen years and it has not gone away! It has been fought by adding bigger heatsinks and fans on top of the CPU combined with shrinking the "die chanels" inside the CPU to give off less heat. There is a limit to how far "the chanels" can be shrunk and how big the heatsink/fan can be. AMD and Intel have both spent a Fortune (billions) to go over to.13 um and I can't see them going over to.09 anytime soon (can you?). The heatsink/fan combo is already huge so water cooling could be next but I think it is close to the end of the line.
The same applies for security and usability. It's really not a question of programming/technical ability, but a question of mentality. I think programmers need to have a specific (or perhaps not-so-specific) mindset to get a bigger picture, and not very many programmers are willing to do that. Part of it may be inherent to programmer-types, but it also might be cultural (the whole "us vs. them" elitist attitude).
You ALMOST have it except it is not inherent in the programmer but in how programming departments are managed.
Management usually puts an emphasis on more features and fast timelines instead of security and stability. Programmer's must prioritize the demands given to them and when management's views are skewed, so are the employees.
Good management would have code reviews of all programmers code on a periodic basis (no matter how much experience they have) and system designers would have meetings with the programmers (including every senior to junior programmer involved in building the system) and explain why and what their system is supposed to do.
Instead most companies give out specs and nobody knows what the hell their piers are doing either because management is incompetent or lazy and thus leave code reviews and design meetings in a dusty book that could be called "good practices that most don't do".
One of the reasons why the code in open source software is often of a higher quality than commercial software is that:
1. programmers write their code KNOWING that somebody might be looking at it later (and often getting good suggestions back from other developers).
2. Open source projects have developer mailing lists where developers explain what/how they are designing/redesigning something new in the project.
But most company management's are very short sighted and impatient like the rest of society.
# Microsoft Frontpage # Raw HTML # CGI/PHP/etc. # Servlets/Mod-perl/etc. # Object-Oriented black boxes # Documented API's # Public Documented API's # Performance # "The Big Picture" - Architects
Another elitest post without a real clue. A good programmer knows how to get a job done and should ALWAYS have a big picture view of how things work around them. It does not matter whether they are working on a web site or writing a backend database app or a game engine for the latest and greatest game. Somebody writing good PHP code could probably write good backend C++ code. You are associating the tasks people do with how capable they are. Languages and programs are TOOLS and a programmer should be able to quickly learn to use new tools whether it is a new language, interacting with a new API or using a performance profiler. A good programmer really should not care HOW they get things done- ONLY that they DO get them done.
Re:What is an example that can't run in parallel?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I dream of the day when motherboard manufacturors sell cheap 4 cpu boards and AMD/Intel sell low powered/low heat processors (something akin to transmeta). Yeah the Quad Xeon exists but Intel wants you to pay through the nose for those (and they don't run cool). I would love to have 4 (900 mhz "Barton's") Athlon MP cpus in a box that ran cool and reliably. It may not even run as fast as even one Intel P4 3.06 ghz HT for many applications but from what I have seen of smp machines is that they run much SMOOTHER. When smp machines are dished out a lot of work, it does not effect the responsiveness of the whole system. Instead of having one servant who is on supersteriods and is the best at everything but can really only do one thing at a time, I would rather have four servants (which even get in the way of each other at times) who can't do as much but they all can be doing different things at once.
tmp/foo.sock versus/var/tmp/foo/0.sock, what makes you think they will agree on \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Vendors\Foo Corporation\Foo\1.45\Configuration\SocketLocation rather than \\HKEY_USERS\All Users\Software\Foo 1.45\Socket?
You read that it that would be best to create Microsofts registry (which I already said was flawed) and there should be no (\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or \\HKEY_USERS\ or \\HKEY anything) but the fact remains is that nobody has any dificulty finding stuff using Microsofts registry and it is what it does best. Searching through filesystems is ineficient, prone to mistakes and just not what it was designed for. Programs should not NEED TO BE IN A SPECIFIC DIRECTORY. RPM's should ask YOU where you want programs to be and the dependancies should be handled by a database that other programs just find with a simple query. As a side note to.Net using the registry- of course Microsofts.Net framework puts entries into the registry when you install it!
This article's title is like naming your Cisco Router "The Auswitch" because you don't dig the restrictive interface; or equating the VCR with the Boston Strangler.
Ahh... you have met my ex VCR. I would put innocent victums- I mean tapes in and they would never be seen again- I mean played. I have a new Boston Strangler- I mean VCR and so far no one has been killed- I mean destroy.
While it might be economical, it may not be smart. That low-end CPU might be good at running older software well, but how about newer software? New software demand more and more from CPU's, they might be affected negatively by choosing a slower CPU.
You can buy an Athlon XP 1700+ for $70 including shipping/handling, with Fan and 3 year warenty. There is no App. out there that is not snappy on this little critter. In 12 months buy an Athlon XP 3000 for $70 dollars if you feel anything is a tad bit slow. Is waiting a little while to get reasonable prices for hardware that big a deal to you? If so blow your money on the most expensive CPU you can find. Most benchmarks I look at show nothing to impress me enough to go out and get a $400 CPU which is over 5X the price but less than 2X the performance (especially when next year, I will be able to get that $400 CPU for $70 but of course you will be drooling over the AMD Opteron 5000 which will cost you 500+ dollars). Staying on the bleading edge of hardware is just expensive. It is just not worth it to get 10 or 20 fps more in Jedi Knight or compiling a rediculously big application (and it has to be huge in order for the compile times to be noticable) a few extra seconds quicker. It just doesn't add up to spending 5X-6X the price for something that is LESS than 2X the performance. And if you look at benchmarks of "general use" applications, you often don't even see THAT much of an improvement (more on the order of ~50% faster) because MOST applications are not all that CPU bound (disk I/O, memory bandwith, and peripherals like a graphics card often have a larger factor).
The clash between/usr/lib/ and/usr/local/lib/ wouldn't happen under any packaging system (since/usr/local/ is not touched by the package manager)...
*SNIP*
It isn't clear from the article where he got the RPMs from. If they were from a mixture of different places, it's not that surprising that there were difficulties. Maybe the answer is for the package builders to talk to each other a bit more.
This is why Microsoft implimented a registry. Now the registry is badly implimented and has some bad drawbacks (like the fact that it is used for EVERYTHING and thus WAY OVERBLOATED) but a unified configuration database (that just said where a package is located and where its "main" configuration file/s were located) would solve these problems and the RPM packagers would not have to care about that kind of stuff.
When I buy a computer, I don't look at what things I would be doing with it today, I would also think what I would be doing with it in the future. While 3+GHz might be overkill right now, is it overkill few years down the road?
That is waisting money. The economical way to buy cpu/motherboards is to buy "low end" CPU's every 12 - 18 months. The the $400 dollar CPU is $50 dollars 12 months later.
If you buy a "low end" CPU every 12 months, you spend $50 dollars a year on a CPU or you spend $400+ dollars every two years (if you want to keep up with the guy who is buying a cpu every year). The "cheapo guy" stays very well up to date at around $50 a year while the luxury guy winds up averaging around $200 a year.
The "Cheapo guy" in the beginning is one generation behind but at the end he is one generation ahead and he never really ever thinks his apps run slow.
The "Luxury guy" sees his performance really slick at first but starts to see his apps really slowing down before he spends alot on a new CPU.
The "Super Luxury guy" buys a $400 CPU every year despite the old one being perfectly fine just so he can say to his friends "1 rulz ju".
The economical choice for price/performance is second generation CPU's updated 12 - 18 months.
It is how I have been upgrading my machine for the last 4 years. I also do that with graphics cards, motherboards, monitors, printers and etc. Second generation incremental upgrades cost me about $300 - $500 dollars a year (depending on how close to high end I want to slide). If I wanted to buy my machine new, with all the extra's I have in it, would cost me $1600 brand new. Instead, I bought my machine in 1999 for $1100 and added/upgraded it at about $400 dollars a year which in total cost me about 2,700 dollars but my machine always chugs along at a fairly good clip (in comparison to everyone else) and I give away spare parts to friends and family such as several sticks of sdr ram when I went over to ddr ram, (motherboards/cpu's and etc. all the time). The parts I give away are still quite usefull for people who are not on as fast an upgrade cycle as I am (such as those people who buy high end systems every two to four years).
Ok I have rambled for long enough. The point is that math and common sense say paying the premium for the latest and greatest does not work out even in the long run.
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
Actually Linux runs well on 8 CPU's from what I have read, and has even run on a sun E1000 with 31 CPU's (though it is possible someone has even a higher record than that). Linux can scale well up to about 16 CPU's, but beyond 16, performance is not so good. The kernel developers were trying to optimize the kernel to handle between 4 and 8 CPU's in the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 kernel is supposed to have improvements that might even make Linux scale well beyond 16 CPU's. One article about Linux scaling from somebody at IBM who researched this is at http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/news/frye.shtml. If you use google, it is easy to find other info that supports what I have written.
The 1024 CPU's is a beowulf cluster and Linux is very good when clustered. Each machine has it's own operating system (linux) and they work together as one machine by having all the machines networked together and each machine is told to do different tasks. Search "beowulf cluster" on google and it will give you everything you want to know.
Do they post the exact same article in the exact same text three days in a row? Didn't think so.
Jiwana Brawly (sp?)
Joe Buttafuco (sp?)
OJ Simpson
Monica Lewinski
maybe not the same text but the general news LOVES to beat "dead horses".
Slashdot tends to have more new/unique stuff on it than most newspapers and if they slip up on an occassion with a repeat, it is not like there are not ten other NEW stories a day that they DO post.
Plus they don't post very many stories that are just complete shit. This story maybe a repeat but after reading this story a couple of days ago, I checked my motherboard to see if it had any leaky capacitors... it might be a story worth repeating in that many people might have missed it (if they don't read slashdot everyday).
I'm impressed. This is not the second, but the third time this story has been posted. People actually pay money to read this site? I'd do better flushing 5+ bucks a month down the toilet.
I hope you don't watch the news on TV or read the newspaper because when I do, they not only often have the same story on the same page with only a slightly different angle, they keep repeating the story over and over with nothing really new. Newspapers are notorious for that but people don't seem to be bothered that they pay a dollar to do so.
Anyhow, the Mobo manufacturers were loathe to admit the capacitors were exploding
My theory for why the companies don't want to talk about it is that it proves that buying branded products is over-rated today. It used to be that if you bought something from "good brand X", all the parts were made by the company or the company did extensive research and quality testing. But what this article is showing is that this is no longer the case. It seems MB manufacturers are putting the cheapest shit in thier product to keep cost margins down. I read that ABIT is now buying capicitors from Japan because though the Japanese are more expensive, they are more reliable. Once burned- twice shy... at least some of them are learning thier lesson. I only wish quality assurance was a philosophy instead an after thought when costomers start complaining.
Re:Our similar dilema and what we ended up with...
on
.NET or CORBA?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about the fact that there were no BENEFITS to going J2EE?
1. J2EE is a proven technology. It has been around for years and one can be confident that the support and robustness of the platform is there.
2. It is not tied to Microsoft. You can port this infrastructure to some other hardware or operating system. This is not about being against Microsoft but against being reliant on one vendor. It is just sound advice to use open standards whenever possible so that when a specific vendor losses interest in a technology, it won't have an impact on you.
Using Visual Studio.NET to compile C++ code and VB screens is all fine and good but I always get a little nervous when one gets too reliant on one vendor because that path leads to "vendor lock".
ASP is an example:
The most popular web server on the internet is Apache. Are you using it? If not is it because people started using ASP and it would be difficulty rewriting that functionality despite IIS's spotty record and Apache's solid record?
While thinking about that, think about how much it would cost to remain flexible and how important that might be in the future.
Re:Our similar dilema and what we ended up with...
on
.NET or CORBA?
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· Score: 1
This was not where the cost comparison happened. It had to do with purchasing additional toolkits/libraries which were needed to integrate the application into our existing infrastucture. It ended up being just under $4000 for java. And no, we were not interested in reinventing the wheel to save $4000.
If 4G was the reason then that was a mistake. $4000 dollars is nothing. If you gave up flexibilty to go with a very limmited (one platform) proprietary protical for the reason of 4G, your company made a huge mistake. Now if there were REAL reasons to go with.NET like significantly lower development time or hiring/retraining being very expensive then those are things to weigh but $4000 is NOT ONE OF THEM.
I've encountered WinDOS users that would "pull out their hair" if they had to install any of their own software. The "problem" that exists is only one of degree and isn't present with commercially packaged applications.
I remember the DOS days of my childhood and sadly, DOS software installation was much easier in comparison to Linux:
1. Software under DOS would be in the directory you chose to put it in (config files, libraries, data and the executable). 2. Significantly more static linking of libraries or the libraries were packaged with the program.
rant>
Now many programmers think statically linking is blasphemy. The truth is that a balance must be reached. If the developer is using obscure or very new libraries then it is better to statically link them than to demand the user upgrade system libraries (and of course dynamically linking common libraries is desirable). It may add bloat to some packages but it will keep the number of USELESS libraries on the system in general down as well as getting rid of "dependancy hell" and the need to download endless libraries a user only need to upgrade or use for just one program.
Most of the consumer distros get this right. In fact, my experience is that SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake are all easier to install and more logical than Windows
Who cares how easy it is to INSTALL the opperating system. It is once you are up and running and you want to install new hardware/functionality/programs that don't come with the distro or are not default.
One of the reasons I think most Linux distro's come with a TON too much (and often repetetive) software is because they know that if an average user was to try to compile/configure/install it themselves, they would pull out thier hair. RedHat/SUSE/Mandrake/Whatever all have Gigabyte installs because they have not found a solution to software installation issues. And don't get me started when it comes to upgrading things. Try upgrading xfree86 or GCC or Glib or a number of other stuff. Most people just upgrade thier Linux distro before trying to upgrade stuff like that. It is just not a friendly opperating system. In Linux one still need to know how to edit a make file, too much about various config files (which have no standard syntax), be comfortable reading cryptic man pages, and just more patience than the average person who just wants to USE thier computer.
All they have to know is how to press the On/Off button, how to doubleclick on the icon of their account and how to use the browser.
That's it, no compiling, no editing configuration files: it just works.
That works until they want to buy a digital camera and a new printer. Ok so your parents are set in thier ways and don't do things like that but most people say "I saw how you can print pictures from a computer, or I want to watch DVD's on my computer, or how do those webcam things work, or my monitor is old- I want a flat screeen. And on and on. In Windows it is usually 1-2-3. In Linux it is 1-howl at the moon-pray that the hardware is truly compatible-surf the web for documentation-compile software to make new hardware usefull.
The preinstall/preconfigure mantra only works for a subset of users.
Slashdot Mirror
WOW! I was about to make this same comment except you say it so well!
Even this article about the explanation of why "Nerds are Nerds" is so arrogant.
The coolest people in high school were the people who, when you talked to them, just made you feel comfortable being yourself and talked about things that would interest everyone present (They would NOT talking about chess at a poetry recital or recite poetry at a chess club). They also never talked about how smart or great they were but would find things that were good in others.
This article was an excuse to explain why Nerds were unpopular without giving the real reason which is that THEY NEED TO BE HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A CLUESTICK. Example: Don't talk about computers with somebody who does not CARE about computers. Nobody cares if you are smart. Get over it and talk about things that INTEREST your audience.
The Nerds in my high school were not the smartest kids, but the ones who bragged about how smart they were because they knew X and would then proceed to talk about X to people who could not care less.
Good box office numbers mean that the product as a whole is good (or not much competition) but it does not say whether anybody specific was good (except for maybe the director). Sometimes people wind up working on stuff that is complete shit and sometimes they are working on something really good. The quality of the product is not the same as praise for ones individual effort.
I don't know why you guys are so jaded. I did some acting when I was in high school/college and the best praise one can get is applause at the end of the show. The Academy Awards is to give applause to those who did good work and to be appreciated for it. I think if I was a professional actor, I would be irritated if a CGI character was put in the same category as me (even if a real guy was behind the inspiration of the character). Whether you think the awards are a joke or only done for advertising does not take away from the fact that the Academy Awards is the best way (with warts and all) to tell talented entertainers that their work is appreciated. I never watch the awards because I really don't care who wins but if I were an actor/director/whatever, I would love to get an award because it would mean people like my work. It is the applause that filmmakers never get because there is no live audience.
AAARGH!
They are realeasing thier SERVER version of their product (opteron) in APRIL. They only "delayed" the consumer version (clawhammer) because there is no Microsoft 64 bit system for it yet. So AMD is doing EXACTLY what you suggest and you have not checked the FACTS to KNOW it. I just don't get why there is so much misunderstanding of AMD's release schedule.
IBM
CISCO
AMD
Intel (ok -they get some flack but they are not hated)
NVidia
The Slashdot crowd (for the most part) do not care how big a corporation is, but how good the service they provide. As long as Google remains just awesome, the slashdot crowd will kiss its solid gold ass.
You are too kind to these people jht! If they want the 40 dollar version certified, Slashdot whiners should start up a fund to PAY $$$$$$ for the certification (I am sure RedHat would be overjoyed that the Linux community would donate so much money to them) and while complainers on slashdot are about it, I would suggest a fund to get Debian certified too. DO I hear silence from whiners... I thought so.
Whoops ... I doubled the 12 years. That should be 15 years (but then again, I doubt we will have 48 ghz in 50 years).
I never said "Moores law" was over and I remember having a 386 that ran at 33 mhz. Now that computers can run a thousand times faster, I am say that it is probably true. When the 486 was around computers did not even need a heatsink. Now CPU's need a fan and a heat sink or they will fry in less than a minute. 0.13 um is the latest and greatest in silicon shrinkage and even if CPU's shrink to 0.09 um (which they might in six to ten years), the purity and the precision needed to print a chip today is getting to the extremes of what manufacturing is capable of in mass production. "Moores law" has been slowing down over the last 25 years. It used to be it doubles in 6-9 months, then a year and now it is 18 months. Things might start doubling every 36 months and then fade away altogether. I am not saying we won't see ten to twelve ghz CPU's (we will) but that 30 ghz won't be seen in my lifetime (except maybe in some research lab to prove it could be done). If things start "only" doubling every 3 years then that would mean we will have 48 ghz CPU's in 24 years. Heat has been an issue for the last ten to fifteen years and it has not gone away! It has been fought by adding bigger heatsinks and fans on top of the CPU combined with shrinking the "die chanels" inside the CPU to give off less heat. There is a limit to how far "the chanels" can be shrunk and how big the heatsink/fan can be. AMD and Intel have both spent a Fortune (billions) to go over to .13 um and I can't see them going over to .09 anytime soon (can you?). The heatsink/fan combo is already huge so water cooling could be next but I think it is close to the end of the line.
You ALMOST have it except it is not inherent in the programmer but in how programming departments are managed.
Management usually puts an emphasis on more features and fast timelines instead of security and stability. Programmer's must prioritize the demands given to them and when management's views are skewed, so are the employees.
Good management would have code reviews of all programmers code on a periodic basis (no matter how much experience they have) and system designers would have meetings with the programmers (including every senior to junior programmer involved in building the system) and explain why and what their system is supposed to do.
Instead most companies give out specs and nobody knows what the hell their piers are doing either because management is incompetent or lazy and thus leave code reviews and design meetings in a dusty book that could be called "good practices that most don't do".
One of the reasons why the code in open source software is often of a higher quality than commercial software is that: 1. programmers write their code KNOWING that somebody might be looking at it later (and often getting good suggestions back from other developers). 2. Open source projects have developer mailing lists where developers explain what/how they are designing/redesigning something new in the project.
But most company management's are very short sighted and impatient like the rest of society.
Another elitest post without a real clue. A good programmer knows how to get a job done and should ALWAYS have a big picture view of how things work around them. It does not matter whether they are working on a web site or writing a backend database app or a game engine for the latest and greatest game. Somebody writing good PHP code could probably write good backend C++ code. You are associating the tasks people do with how capable they are. Languages and programs are TOOLS and a programmer should be able to quickly learn to use new tools whether it is a new language, interacting with a new API or using a performance profiler. A good programmer really should not care HOW they get things done- ONLY that they DO get them done.
I dream of the day when motherboard manufacturors sell cheap 4 cpu boards and AMD/Intel sell low powered/low heat processors (something akin to transmeta). Yeah the Quad Xeon exists but Intel wants you to pay through the nose for those (and they don't run cool). I would love to have 4 (900 mhz "Barton's") Athlon MP cpus in a box that ran cool and reliably. It may not even run as fast as even one Intel P4 3.06 ghz HT for many applications but from what I have seen of smp machines is that they run much SMOOTHER. When smp machines are dished out a lot of work, it does not effect the responsiveness of the whole system. Instead of having one servant who is on supersteriods and is the best at everything but can really only do one thing at a time, I would rather have four servants (which even get in the way of each other at times) who can't do as much but they all can be doing different things at once.
You read that it that would be best to create Microsofts registry (which I already said was flawed) and there should be no (\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or \\HKEY_USERS\ or \\HKEY anything) but the fact remains is that nobody has any dificulty finding stuff using Microsofts registry and it is what it does best. Searching through filesystems is ineficient, prone to mistakes and just not what it was designed for. Programs should not NEED TO BE IN A SPECIFIC DIRECTORY. RPM's should ask YOU where you want programs to be and the dependancies should be handled by a database that other programs just find with a simple query. As a side note to .Net using the registry- of course Microsofts .Net framework puts entries into the registry when you install it!
Ahh... you have met my ex VCR. I would put innocent victums- I mean tapes in and they would never be seen again- I mean played. I have a new Boston Strangler- I mean VCR and so far no one has been killed- I mean destroy.
You can buy an Athlon XP 1700+ for $70 including shipping/handling, with Fan and 3 year warenty. There is no App. out there that is not snappy on this little critter. In 12 months buy an Athlon XP 3000 for $70 dollars if you feel anything is a tad bit slow. Is waiting a little while to get reasonable prices for hardware that big a deal to you? If so blow your money on the most expensive CPU you can find. Most benchmarks I look at show nothing to impress me enough to go out and get a $400 CPU which is over 5X the price but less than 2X the performance (especially when next year, I will be able to get that $400 CPU for $70 but of course you will be drooling over the AMD Opteron 5000 which will cost you 500+ dollars). Staying on the bleading edge of hardware is just expensive. It is just not worth it to get 10 or 20 fps more in Jedi Knight or compiling a rediculously big application (and it has to be huge in order for the compile times to be noticable) a few extra seconds quicker. It just doesn't add up to spending 5X-6X the price for something that is LESS than 2X the performance. And if you look at benchmarks of "general use" applications, you often don't even see THAT much of an improvement (more on the order of ~50% faster) because MOST applications are not all that CPU bound (disk I/O, memory bandwith, and peripherals like a graphics card often have a larger factor).
*SNIP*
It isn't clear from the article where he got the RPMs from. If they were from a mixture of different places, it's not that surprising that there were difficulties. Maybe the answer is for the package builders to talk to each other a bit more.
This is why Microsoft implimented a registry. Now the registry is badly implimented and has some bad drawbacks (like the fact that it is used for EVERYTHING and thus WAY OVERBLOATED) but a unified configuration database (that just said where a package is located and where its "main" configuration file/s were located) would solve these problems and the RPM packagers would not have to care about that kind of stuff.
That is waisting money. The economical way to buy cpu/motherboards is to buy "low end" CPU's every 12 - 18 months. The the $400 dollar CPU is $50 dollars 12 months later.
If you buy a "low end" CPU every 12 months, you spend $50 dollars a year on a CPU or you spend $400+ dollars every two years (if you want to keep up with the guy who is buying a cpu every year). The "cheapo guy" stays very well up to date at around $50 a year while the luxury guy winds up averaging around $200 a year.
The "Cheapo guy" in the beginning is one generation behind but at the end he is one generation ahead and he never really ever thinks his apps run slow.
The "Luxury guy" sees his performance really slick at first but starts to see his apps really slowing down before he spends alot on a new CPU.
The "Super Luxury guy" buys a $400 CPU every year despite the old one being perfectly fine just so he can say to his friends "1 rulz ju".
The economical choice for price/performance is second generation CPU's updated 12 - 18 months.
It is how I have been upgrading my machine for the last 4 years. I also do that with graphics cards, motherboards, monitors, printers and etc. Second generation incremental upgrades cost me about $300 - $500 dollars a year (depending on how close to high end I want to slide). If I wanted to buy my machine new, with all the extra's I have in it, would cost me $1600 brand new. Instead, I bought my machine in 1999 for $1100 and added/upgraded it at about $400 dollars a year which in total cost me about 2,700 dollars but my machine always chugs along at a fairly good clip (in comparison to everyone else) and I give away spare parts to friends and family such as several sticks of sdr ram when I went over to ddr ram, (motherboards/cpu's and etc. all the time). The parts I give away are still quite usefull for people who are not on as fast an upgrade cycle as I am (such as those people who buy high end systems every two to four years).
Ok I have rambled for long enough. The point is that math and common sense say paying the premium for the latest and greatest does not work out even in the long run.
Actually Linux runs well on 8 CPU's from what I have read, and has even run on a sun E1000 with 31 CPU's (though it is possible someone has even a higher record than that). Linux can scale well up to about 16 CPU's, but beyond 16, performance is not so good. The kernel developers were trying to optimize the kernel to handle between 4 and 8 CPU's in the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 kernel is supposed to have improvements that might even make Linux scale well beyond 16 CPU's. One article about Linux scaling from somebody at IBM who researched this is at http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/news/frye.shtml. If you use google, it is easy to find other info that supports what I have written.
The 1024 CPU's is a beowulf cluster and Linux is very good when clustered. Each machine has it's own operating system (linux) and they work together as one machine by having all the machines networked together and each machine is told to do different tasks. Search "beowulf cluster" on google and it will give you everything you want to know.
I hope you don't watch the news on TV or read the newspaper because when I do, they not only often have the same story on the same page with only a slightly different angle, they keep repeating the story over and over with nothing really new. Newspapers are notorious for that but people don't seem to be bothered that they pay a dollar to do so.
My theory for why the companies don't want to talk about it is that it proves that buying branded products is over-rated today. It used to be that if you bought something from "good brand X", all the parts were made by the company or the company did extensive research and quality testing. But what this article is showing is that this is no longer the case. It seems MB manufacturers are putting the cheapest shit in thier product to keep cost margins down. I read that ABIT is now buying capicitors from Japan because though the Japanese are more expensive, they are more reliable. Once burned- twice shy... at least some of them are learning thier lesson. I only wish quality assurance was a philosophy instead an after thought when costomers start complaining.
1. J2EE is a proven technology. It has been around for years and one can be confident that the support and robustness of the platform is there.
2. It is not tied to Microsoft. You can port this infrastructure to some other hardware or operating system. This is not about being against Microsoft but against being reliant on one vendor. It is just sound advice to use open standards whenever possible so that when a specific vendor losses interest in a technology, it won't have an impact on you.
Using Visual Studio .NET to compile C++ code and VB screens is all fine and good but I always get a little nervous when one gets too reliant on one vendor because that path leads to "vendor lock".
ASP is an example:
While thinking about that, think about how much it would cost to remain flexible and how important that might be in the future.If 4G was the reason then that was a mistake. $4000 dollars is nothing. If you gave up flexibilty to go with a very limmited (one platform) proprietary protical for the reason of 4G, your company made a huge mistake. Now if there were REAL reasons to go with .NET like significantly lower development time or hiring/retraining being very expensive then those are things to weigh but $4000 is NOT ONE OF THEM.
I remember the DOS days of my childhood and sadly, DOS software installation was much easier in comparison to Linux:
1. Software under DOS would be in the directory you chose to put it in (config files, libraries, data and the executable). 2. Significantly more static linking of libraries or the libraries were packaged with the program.
rant>
Now many programmers think statically linking is blasphemy. The truth is that a balance must be reached. If the developer is using obscure or very new libraries then it is better to statically link them than to demand the user upgrade system libraries (and of course dynamically linking common libraries is desirable). It may add bloat to some packages but it will keep the number of USELESS libraries on the system in general down as well as getting rid of "dependancy hell" and the need to download endless libraries a user only need to upgrade or use for just one program.
/rant>
Who cares how easy it is to INSTALL the opperating system. It is once you are up and running and you want to install new hardware/functionality/programs that don't come with the distro or are not default.
One of the reasons I think most Linux distro's come with a TON too much (and often repetetive) software is because they know that if an average user was to try to compile/configure/install it themselves, they would pull out thier hair. RedHat/SUSE/Mandrake/Whatever all have Gigabyte installs because they have not found a solution to software installation issues. And don't get me started when it comes to upgrading things. Try upgrading xfree86 or GCC or Glib or a number of other stuff. Most people just upgrade thier Linux distro before trying to upgrade stuff like that. It is just not a friendly opperating system. In Linux one still need to know how to edit a make file, too much about various config files (which have no standard syntax), be comfortable reading cryptic man pages, and just more patience than the average person who just wants to USE thier computer.
That works until they want to buy a digital camera and a new printer. Ok so your parents are set in thier ways and don't do things like that but most people say "I saw how you can print pictures from a computer, or I want to watch DVD's on my computer, or how do those webcam things work, or my monitor is old- I want a flat screeen. And on and on. In Windows it is usually 1-2-3. In Linux it is 1-howl at the moon-pray that the hardware is truly compatible-surf the web for documentation-compile software to make new hardware usefull.
The preinstall/preconfigure mantra only works for a subset of users.