AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
No, it doesn't! Having the fastest CPU is great marketing, but from a business standpoint it doesn't mean much because most customers don't buy the high-end. What matters is the overall system price/performance, stability of the platform (driver support, etc.), and availability.
Intel is worried right now. Why? Because AMD now has Dell as a customer, because they have more retail visibility than ever before, and because they are on the verge of solving their supply problems. Businesses don't care that the X6800 is faster than the FX-62, they care that Dell's 3800+ system is $50 cheaper than Dell's low-end Core 2 Duo system. Is the Core 2 system faster? Yes. Does a business worker running Outlook care? No.
Yeah, and Pocket PC will never kill Palm OS
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Jobs Unfazed by Zune
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Of course Jobs is saying that. Your customers never need features that your product doesn't have.
Want to know another company that said that? PalmSource. Here are some of my favorites:
PDA users don't need a real FS
PDA users don't need real multitasking
PDAs don't need color screens
PDAs don't need high-resolution screens
PDAs don't need MP3 or video playback, or any real audio at all
Palm OS devices now have most of the above. But it was too late. Palm ignored where the market was going and they ended up falling way behind. Pocket PC 2000 was difficult to use. The devices were slow (except for the iPaq), expensive, big, and had poor battery life. But then technology moved forward. Pocket PC 2002 was better, and, more importantly, the hardware got smaller, faster, and better.
Palm OS now looks hopelessly dated. It's still more user-friendly than Windows Mobile, but it is now nothing but hacks on top of hacks. I carry a Treo 650 because it's an excellent device with some excellent software (Chatter Email in particular), but it crashes frequently (at least once per day) and doesn't multitask worth a crap. If there were a decent IMAP client for Windows Mobile, I wouldn't use Palm OS at all.
The moral of the story: don't assume that the device which controls 80% of the market will continue to do so in the long run. The iPod is an excellent device with excellent software - just like the Palm Vx. But it's foolish to tell your customers what they do or do not want.
Wow. Google buys everything and crushes Microsoft. Of course it must be true!
Google hasn't even demonstrated that they are worth the $130 billion that the market thinks they are. Their P/E is 63.0. That's fine for a startup, but Google isn't a startup anymore, and it's not necessarily reasonable to expect exponential earnings growth.
So, yeah, maybe Google will take out the world's largest and most profitable software company. Maybe the open-source movement will. Maybe in 10 years, Microsoft will be just another video game console manufacturer. Maybe they will split up. Maybe the EU will crush them like a bug.
A lot can happen in 10 years. Making wild-ass guesses doesn't make it happen, though.
This is absolutely stupid. There is simply no way that a company that has never made a dime in profit and has yet to figure out how to even break even on their bandwidth costs should be worth $1.65 billion. Particularly not to a company that already operates an extremely similar service already.
Google can't figure out how to spend their money. Exponential growth doesn't work for long in the real world. Unfortunately, that's what the investors expect. And they will be very, very unhappy when Google is unable to deliver.
This, more than anything, shows the failure of passwords. Few people are willing or able to memorize numerous passwords. That's why I don't use them for anything that needs to be really secure. I have a bank password (and PIN), but that's about it. My E-TRADE account uses a cryptographic-RNG-based system and I use key-based authentication for SSH.
I run a small (very small) network of websites called WS Network. We were getting so many fake login attempts that the logfiles were starting to take up 100s of MBs. We're talking about 30,000+ per hour. Although the root password is secure (10-character random password), the situation became so problematic that I simply disabled password authentication altogether (you now need my private key to login).
The open-source music player I wrote (BSoftPlayer) has a feature called "SmartShuffle". One of the biggest problems with shuffle is that it's difficult to understand when the tracks will change order, and it's difficult to know wheter or not a track is going to be played more than once in a single "cycle". Some shuffle features will play the same track twice before playing through your entire library, and some won't.
With SmartShuffle, the order is randomized, but it remains the same until you "reshuffle".
The electricity. Here in California, paying PG&E rates, the cost to drive a mile with a given vehicle size/weight is much less for gasoline than electricity
That's just wrong. The RAV4-EV requires around 30KWh for a full charge and has a range of around 110 miles. PG&E's highest tier for energy usage is $0.21 per KWh, meaning it costs $6.30 to "fill up" your vehicle. At the current national average gas price, $2.27/gal, that's equal to 2.76 gallons of gas. Thus, the RAV4-EV gets 39.9 equiv miles to the gallon, which is significantly higher than the gas-powered variant (28-30MPG).
It looks even better at CA's average residential electric price, $0.14/KWh.
The electricity infrastructure is teetering on the edge of failure now. Adding a bunch of electric cars would collapse the system.
That's a crap argument based on overdramatized supposition. Yes, we are running the grid closer to capacity than we have ever done - but that's because unused capacity is inefficent. Everyone points to the energy shortages in CA (which were caused by market factors) and the 2003 blackout (which was caused by a number of factors, including poor maintenence and inadequete staffing by FirstEnergy).
The grid is more complex than it has ever been. We need more power and we want it at a lower price and with fewer emissions than ever before. Better control systems, tighter monitoring, and better maintenence are necessary to keep the grid operational. The trade-off is that the grid is far more efficent.
As for adding capacity, our electricity usage has more than tripled since 1970. More plants will need to be built to support electric vehicles, but that's not a problem at all. We just have to keep doing what we have been doing for the past 100 years - building enough capacity to meet demand.
The technology for electric vehicles simply isn't there for anything more than a glorified golf-cart.
Wrong. The technology is there, it was just abandoned by the auto-industry. Current conversion EVs may have poor performance, but that's because they were never designed as integrated systems and generally run on low-voltage DC. High-voltage multiphase AC systems (like the system in Toyota's Rav4 EV and GM's EV-1) had no problems maintaining highway speeds and normal acceleration, and achieved ranges of up to 140 miles - that's useful for a lot of people.
Assuming that the tehnology isn't there because conversions don't act like traditional vehicles is foolish. Inverter, motor, and battery technologies are mature and on the road today (Toyota Prius, anyone?). Electric cars may not be economically feasable currently, but that doesn't mean that the technology doesn't exist.
And think those exploding Sony batteries have been a headache to laptop owners, wait until the scenario repeats itself on the scale of an automobile sized battery. Can you say "Car Bomb"?
Ni-MH batteries don't burn when abused, nor do Lithium-Ion-Phosphate batteries. And every time someone says something like "car bomb", I just have to laugh - you're driving around with 10+ gallons of highly flammable fuel as is. Ford Pinto, anyone?
but the manufacture and disposal of large numbers of toxic batteries is not exactly green either
This is a misconception. Ni-MH batteries are not particularly toxic, and they recycle well - there are both economical and ecological reasons for recycling. Toyota, for example, pays $500 for every dead Prius battery packs.
Any production has environmental impact. Oil exploration and refining, for example, requires a huge quantity of energy and carries significant environmental risks.
And as for avoiding pollution, not only does most current electricity generation use fossil fuel and thus pollute at the generation site
Absolutely. But even modern coal power plants are considerably more efficent than the
I've run Vista on a dual-800MHz PIII system with a PCI ATI Rage card. No, the fancy 3D interface doesn't work. Yes, the OS works fine. Of course, having 512M of memory can't hurt.
See if you can get your hands on a demo of Maple. There's a student version available, I don't know if it's crippled, but I know that it's a disgustingly great deal.
Absolutely. Maple is your friend. The student version is every bit as good as the full version (it's the same program), and it's $100. Not bad for a CAS that does just about everything.
Mathematica has better marketing, but I always found it to be a horrible program (at least, its syntax requires you not know anything about programming languages).
Mathematica is not bad if you live Mathematica. For the rest of us, Maple is easier to use, has a better interface (tabs, advanced yet easy to use formatting, etc.) and is much more like the programming languages you're likely to know anyway.
You can't / shouldn't use it for the math courses
That almost made me spit out my Diet Coke. Here at CU, we aren't allowed to use CAS programs on exams (or any calculator at all, for that matter), but on homework assignments they are absolutely essential for checking your work. In fact, we have three labs per course that absolutely require the use of a CAS system - the Applied Math department pushes Mathematica, but I use Maple.
Also see if you can get your hands on a HP48GX calculator. Real engineers use old-school HP calculators. Posers use TI.
Most engineers I know use neither. Numerical computation can be better accomplished using purpose-driven software. Many EEs would be absolutely lost without Matlab, a SPICE simulator, and countless other software packages.
There's nothing wrong with a 12MHz M68000-based portable computer with a math-optimized keyboard, 240x160px screen, and 256k of memory. It's a fine device that works very, very well. You can compile for the calculator using GCC, there's a big standard library, and the built-in software is generally very, very good.
Trust me, if you're an engineer, RPN is your friend.
There's nothing wrong with RPN, but assuming that it is "natural" or "superior" is like saying that we should all use DVORAK keyboards. Use both, choose what you prefer. I'm an algebraic entry person myself, because I like the input to match the problems - it helps me visualize what I'm actually doing and helps eliminate error. Pushing numbers (or symbols) on to the stack is more abstract and, at least in my case, more prone to error. A few saved keystrokes don't mean that much to me.
See if any of the professors in the EE department teach math classes; usually there'll be a few people who have a foot in each department.
No, no, no. I have had mathematics professors who were also EE professors - they tend to spend too much time focusing on specific applications and gloss over the fundamental mathematics. Real-world examples are great, but you need to understand the concepts first - and EE profs, in my experience, frequently do not understand that their students do not.
At CU, we have an entirely separate engineering math department (Applied Mathematics), with different courses and different textbooks. Our text is filled with engineering sample problems and our professors use them in class. But our Applied Mathematics professors do nothing but teach mathematics - they know their material (and how to teach it) very, very well because that's all they do.
In general, I must emphasize that EE is a math intensive major, and it gets very very much uglier than basic calculus. If you truly aren't good at math and you aren't willing to put yourself through dramatic pain and sufferring to learn it anyway, change majors now. Really, seriously. If you're going to hit your limit and change majors, you're better off doing it while you're not as far along and don't have as much work to throw away.
At CU, we call engineering "pre-business". It's not for everyone. If you don't like it now, you won't like it as a career.
Technically, since Pi is infinitely long and never repeats, any finite series of digits must appear at some point. The first 100 million digits of Pi, for example, contain most every 7-digit phone number. Of course, the longer the string you want to find, the further you have to go. But that's not really a problem.
The DOD budget for 2006 is projected to be $419.3 billion, while the Health and Human Services will spend $642 billion, almost 1/3 more.
That doesn't include the Iraq war, which has totaled over $323 billion. Nor does it account for the fact that the DOH includes everything from the CDC to the FDA. I'd agree that Health and Human Services is spending too much money, but it doesn't change the fact that our miliatry spending is huge.
In any case, why carp about one of the things that the constitution says the Feds can spend money on when they're interfering in a hundred other places where powers were supposed to be reserved to that states?
Because we need to decide whether or not it's prudent to spend more on "defense" than the rest of the world combined.
From the "powers were supposed to be reserved to that states" quote, I'd guess that you are a "ibertarian or at least a Libertarian-leaning Republican. Suffice it to say that Libertarianism works great in theory, and it works in practice much of the time as well. But there are situations where the government must step in. There are entire branches of economics devoted to understanding when the government needs to take action and how they should do so to minimize their impact. Things like mandatory drug testing (FDA), basic public health (CDC/NIH), and environmental regulations would likely not be enacted by corporations or the states - which means that the only viable option is to do them at the federal level.
In Europe, it was chosen by the operators who were mandated to meet and settle on a common standard for the 900MHz band.
Sounds like a mandate to me. Now, that's not necesarily a bad thing - we mandate lots of things in the US, including wireless standards (ATSC anyone?).
Regardless of which, it's a great standard
No disagreement there. I walk around with a GSM/GPRS/EDGE Treo 650 on T-Mobile.
By "CDMA" I assume you mean IS-95 (the most recent version of GSM, UMTS, uses a CDMA air interface.)
No, he means CDMA2000. IS-95 was superceded years ago by CDMA2000.
The market for PDA phones is thus tiny, if not non-existant, on IS-95.
Better tell Palm to stop making the Treo 700p/700w and 650 CDMA. Better tell HTC to stop making the Apache. Better tell RIM to stop making CDMA BlackBerry devices. Better tell Motorola to stop making the Q.
Your argument doens't make any sense. Walk into a Verizon or Sprint store - what do you see? PDA phones - more than in a T-Mobile store and as many as in a Cingular store.
Second, as I mentioned above, there are plenty of existing PDA phones in the US that sell fairly well that are limited to the one band (1900MHz).
Not on Cingular. All phones sold by Cingular are at least US dual-band (850/1900); most are US tri-band (850/1800/1900) or quad-band (850/900/1800/1900).
It's a waste of development time to try and develop such a thing for IS-95 users.
Clearly Motorola, HTC, RIM, Palm, and Samsung don't think so.
The user says, "There are too many items in these menus." Microsoft responds with "personalized menus." They addressed the complaint but they didn't help the situation at all. The real solution would be to better organize the menus. Any programmer can look at the menus of, say, Word, and intuit a better arrangement.
That's why Office 2007 has a completely new UI - based primarily on user data that indicates which commands are used most frequently and how they are used. It's rather nice if you give it a try.
The user says, "There are too many things in the Programs menu." Microsoft responds by telling vendors to install programs under submenus which bear the vendor name. It's a horrendous solution. It's the last way anyone would choose to organize anything. No one organizes their books by publisher. Hardly anyone remembers the publisher of most of their books. And indeed, few people remember the publisher of their software.
This is actually something that the publishers chose to do. Microsoft's UI guidelines actually state that Start Menu shortcuts should not be installed in subfolders unless they are part of a group of shortcuts (e.g. Office, Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite).
The user says, "It takes too long to log in." Microsoft responds by showing the desktop before it is "ready"; you can move the mouse, and you can bring up some menus, but they will be forcibly unposted in a few seconds, and attempts to start applications are no faster than they would be if you waited for all the startup items to finish.
This is because of the way that dependencies are resolved in the Windows service starting system. The desktop is "ready" before some services (e.g. networking) have actually started.
The user says, "There are too many icons in my system tray." Microsoft responds with a button that collapses the tray. This is a band-aid solution, which doesn't address the real problem: too many programs staying resident for no reason. The real solution would have been implementing a software certification program (they already have one for drivers, supposedly) that frowns on or utterly fails software which employs undesirable practices like cluttering up the system tray.
That solution wouldn't work. Most Windows applications are not "certified". Microsoft's UI guidelines are much clearer now - don't clutter up the notification area. The real solution would be to have a separate area (e.g. a menu) for non-frequently used programs (such as virus scanners).
I like your sig - it reminds me of a Simpsons episode:
Homer: Ah, not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm! Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, honey. Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away! Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Let me add some perspective. I'm an engineering student who is taking economics to satisfy my humanities requirements. Interesting things that I learned in Intro to Microeconomics, the lowest-level econ course at my university:
Markets do not always arrive at the optimal solution (and economists understand this) - things such as externalities often prevent individuals or corporations from considering the overall impact of their collective actions
At the most basic level, trade benefits are based on differences in marginal cost, not absolute cost. China doesn't have to be more efficent than us for trade to be beneficial
Although some groups may lose in trade and some may win, in the end the total surplus generally increases. In other words, while some individuals may end up worse off because of trade, overall the benefits are positive
Price ceilings / floors and taxes introduce deadweight losses, so we need to be careful about when, where, and how we implement them
The most efficent outcome is often not equitable. It makes sense in many cases to trade efficency for equity.
What seals the deal is being implemented with SSL POP access... so the dinosaurs who refuse to budge don't have to.
Doesn't seal the deal for me at all. I don't want POP - I want my mail to stay on the server so that I can access it on my desktop, on my laptop, and on my PDA. That means IMAP.
Thunderbird is so far ahead of GMail that it's not even funny.
Leveraging a monopoly to gain market share in another market is illegal.
So, you mean that it would be illegal to design a music store that only works with your MP3 player, which only works with your music software?
In this case, Apple has bundled their software music player with OS X. The iPod plays a DRM-ladem music format owned by Apple. If their hardware and software players play it and that ability is not offered to all other software player and hardware player manufacturers, free of charge, than that too is illegal.
It never ceases to amaze me how Macheads can hold Apple to a completely different standard than the rest of the industry. DRM is suddenly OK when it's part of QuickTime, iTunes, and the iPod - but you had better not bring up how Vista has WM-DRM support. Tying a player to a specific music store and a specific desktop application is OK when it's Apple, but Microsoft had better not do it or you'll give them hell.
Oh, and the first person who says "they're a convicted monopolist" gets their head smacked. It is Apple has a monopoly in the MP3 player market. You only have to look at the market share to see that. It is Apple who is using their player monopoly to push their desktop software and their music store.
Try running XP (or Vista if you're feeling masochistic) on a 500mhz Pentium.
XP ran great on the Celeron 300A system I still have sitting around. It had 384MB of memory, of course, which helped quite a bit. There was noticable lag when using heavy web sites in Firefox (e.g. anything that uses Flash), but regular web browsing, word processing, and most other things work just fine. Hell, I ran UT2003 on it - though the GeForce2 MX wasn't exactly fast enoguh to run it at more than the minimum settings.
I have run XP on Pentium II 233 systems with 64MB of memory. It's not fun, but it does work.
Well, actually, they don't use the disk-drive connector anymore, they use the PCIe power connecetor. And they use 12V because a typical high-end GPU draws ~80A+ (at its actual supply voltage). 100W at 5V means 20A, which means some pretty beefy conductors and connectors.
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You mean 154Wh, not 154W.
No, it doesn't! Having the fastest CPU is great marketing, but from a business standpoint it doesn't mean much because most customers don't buy the high-end. What matters is the overall system price/performance, stability of the platform (driver support, etc.), and availability.
Intel is worried right now. Why? Because AMD now has Dell as a customer, because they have more retail visibility than ever before, and because they are on the verge of solving their supply problems. Businesses don't care that the X6800 is faster than the FX-62, they care that Dell's 3800+ system is $50 cheaper than Dell's low-end Core 2 Duo system. Is the Core 2 system faster? Yes. Does a business worker running Outlook care? No.
Want to know another company that said that? PalmSource. Here are some of my favorites:
Palm OS devices now have most of the above. But it was too late. Palm ignored where the market was going and they ended up falling way behind. Pocket PC 2000 was difficult to use. The devices were slow (except for the iPaq), expensive, big, and had poor battery life. But then technology moved forward. Pocket PC 2002 was better, and, more importantly, the hardware got smaller, faster, and better.
Palm OS now looks hopelessly dated. It's still more user-friendly than Windows Mobile, but it is now nothing but hacks on top of hacks. I carry a Treo 650 because it's an excellent device with some excellent software (Chatter Email in particular), but it crashes frequently (at least once per day) and doesn't multitask worth a crap. If there were a decent IMAP client for Windows Mobile, I wouldn't use Palm OS at all.
The moral of the story: don't assume that the device which controls 80% of the market will continue to do so in the long run. The iPod is an excellent device with excellent software - just like the Palm Vx. But it's foolish to tell your customers what they do or do not want.
Wow. Google buys everything and crushes Microsoft. Of course it must be true!
Google hasn't even demonstrated that they are worth the $130 billion that the market thinks they are. Their P/E is 63.0. That's fine for a startup, but Google isn't a startup anymore, and it's not necessarily reasonable to expect exponential earnings growth.
So, yeah, maybe Google will take out the world's largest and most profitable software company. Maybe the open-source movement will. Maybe in 10 years, Microsoft will be just another video game console manufacturer. Maybe they will split up. Maybe the EU will crush them like a bug.
A lot can happen in 10 years. Making wild-ass guesses doesn't make it happen, though.
This is absolutely stupid. There is simply no way that a company that has never made a dime in profit and has yet to figure out how to even break even on their bandwidth costs should be worth $1.65 billion. Particularly not to a company that already operates an extremely similar service already.
Google can't figure out how to spend their money. Exponential growth doesn't work for long in the real world. Unfortunately, that's what the investors expect. And they will be very, very unhappy when Google is unable to deliver.
This, more than anything, shows the failure of passwords. Few people are willing or able to memorize numerous passwords. That's why I don't use them for anything that needs to be really secure. I have a bank password (and PIN), but that's about it. My E-TRADE account uses a cryptographic-RNG-based system and I use key-based authentication for SSH.
I run a small (very small) network of websites called WS Network. We were getting so many fake login attempts that the logfiles were starting to take up 100s of MBs. We're talking about 30,000+ per hour. Although the root password is secure (10-character random password), the situation became so problematic that I simply disabled password authentication altogether (you now need my private key to login).
The open-source music player I wrote (BSoftPlayer) has a feature called "SmartShuffle". One of the biggest problems with shuffle is that it's difficult to understand when the tracks will change order, and it's difficult to know wheter or not a track is going to be played more than once in a single "cycle". Some shuffle features will play the same track twice before playing through your entire library, and some won't.
With SmartShuffle, the order is randomized, but it remains the same until you "reshuffle".
This works similarly to how the protection in Mac OS works - you have admin rights, but to actually use them you have to go through the UAC prompt.
Indeed, this seems to be a pretty serious bug. I do wonder if it was a problem caused by the spyware deliberately disabling UAC, though.
That's just wrong. The RAV4-EV requires around 30KWh for a full charge and has a range of around 110 miles. PG&E's highest tier for energy usage is $0.21 per KWh, meaning it costs $6.30 to "fill up" your vehicle. At the current national average gas price, $2.27/gal, that's equal to 2.76 gallons of gas. Thus, the RAV4-EV gets 39.9 equiv miles to the gallon, which is significantly higher than the gas-powered variant (28-30MPG).
It looks even better at CA's average residential electric price, $0.14/KWh.
That's a crap argument based on overdramatized supposition. Yes, we are running the grid closer to capacity than we have ever done - but that's because unused capacity is inefficent. Everyone points to the energy shortages in CA (which were caused by market factors) and the 2003 blackout (which was caused by a number of factors, including poor maintenence and inadequete staffing by FirstEnergy).
The grid is more complex than it has ever been. We need more power and we want it at a lower price and with fewer emissions than ever before. Better control systems, tighter monitoring, and better maintenence are necessary to keep the grid operational. The trade-off is that the grid is far more efficent.
As for adding capacity, our electricity usage has more than tripled since 1970. More plants will need to be built to support electric vehicles, but that's not a problem at all. We just have to keep doing what we have been doing for the past 100 years - building enough capacity to meet demand.
Wrong. The technology is there, it was just abandoned by the auto-industry. Current conversion EVs may have poor performance, but that's because they were never designed as integrated systems and generally run on low-voltage DC. High-voltage multiphase AC systems (like the system in Toyota's Rav4 EV and GM's EV-1) had no problems maintaining highway speeds and normal acceleration, and achieved ranges of up to 140 miles - that's useful for a lot of people.
Assuming that the tehnology isn't there because conversions don't act like traditional vehicles is foolish. Inverter, motor, and battery technologies are mature and on the road today (Toyota Prius, anyone?). Electric cars may not be economically feasable currently, but that doesn't mean that the technology doesn't exist.
Ni-MH batteries don't burn when abused, nor do Lithium-Ion-Phosphate batteries. And every time someone says something like "car bomb", I just have to laugh - you're driving around with 10+ gallons of highly flammable fuel as is. Ford Pinto, anyone?
but the manufacture and disposal of large numbers of toxic batteries is not exactly green either
This is a misconception. Ni-MH batteries are not particularly toxic, and they recycle well - there are both economical and ecological reasons for recycling. Toyota, for example, pays $500 for every dead Prius battery packs.
Any production has environmental impact. Oil exploration and refining, for example, requires a huge quantity of energy and carries significant environmental risks.
And as for avoiding pollution, not only does most current electricity generation use fossil fuel and thus pollute at the generation site
Absolutely. But even modern coal power plants are considerably more efficent than the
I've run Vista on a dual-800MHz PIII system with a PCI ATI Rage card. No, the fancy 3D interface doesn't work. Yes, the OS works fine. Of course, having 512M of memory can't hurt.
Compared to NeXTstep, they all didn't require a $10,000 computer.
Absolutely. Maple is your friend. The student version is every bit as good as the full version (it's the same program), and it's $100. Not bad for a CAS that does just about everything.
Mathematica is not bad if you live Mathematica. For the rest of us, Maple is easier to use, has a better interface (tabs, advanced yet easy to use formatting, etc.) and is much more like the programming languages you're likely to know anyway.
That almost made me spit out my Diet Coke. Here at CU, we aren't allowed to use CAS programs on exams (or any calculator at all, for that matter), but on homework assignments they are absolutely essential for checking your work. In fact, we have three labs per course that absolutely require the use of a CAS system - the Applied Math department pushes Mathematica, but I use Maple.
Most engineers I know use neither. Numerical computation can be better accomplished using purpose-driven software. Many EEs would be absolutely lost without Matlab, a SPICE simulator, and countless other software packages.
There's nothing wrong with a 12MHz M68000-based portable computer with a math-optimized keyboard, 240x160px screen, and 256k of memory. It's a fine device that works very, very well. You can compile for the calculator using GCC, there's a big standard library, and the built-in software is generally very, very good.
There's nothing wrong with RPN, but assuming that it is "natural" or "superior" is like saying that we should all use DVORAK keyboards. Use both, choose what you prefer. I'm an algebraic entry person myself, because I like the input to match the problems - it helps me visualize what I'm actually doing and helps eliminate error. Pushing numbers (or symbols) on to the stack is more abstract and, at least in my case, more prone to error. A few saved keystrokes don't mean that much to me.
No, no, no. I have had mathematics professors who were also EE professors - they tend to spend too much time focusing on specific applications and gloss over the fundamental mathematics. Real-world examples are great, but you need to understand the concepts first - and EE profs, in my experience, frequently do not understand that their students do not.
At CU, we have an entirely separate engineering math department (Applied Mathematics), with different courses and different textbooks. Our text is filled with engineering sample problems and our professors use them in class. But our Applied Mathematics professors do nothing but teach mathematics - they know their material (and how to teach it) very, very well because that's all they do.
At CU, we call engineering "pre-business". It's not for everyone. If you don't like it now, you won't like it as a career.
Technically, since Pi is infinitely long and never repeats, any finite series of digits must appear at some point. The first 100 million digits of Pi, for example, contain most every 7-digit phone number. Of course, the longer the string you want to find, the further you have to go. But that's not really a problem.
That doesn't include the Iraq war, which has totaled over $323 billion. Nor does it account for the fact that the DOH includes everything from the CDC to the FDA. I'd agree that Health and Human Services is spending too much money, but it doesn't change the fact that our miliatry spending is huge.
Because we need to decide whether or not it's prudent to spend more on "defense" than the rest of the world combined.
From the "powers were supposed to be reserved to that states" quote, I'd guess that you are a "ibertarian or at least a Libertarian-leaning Republican. Suffice it to say that Libertarianism works great in theory, and it works in practice much of the time as well. But there are situations where the government must step in. There are entire branches of economics devoted to understanding when the government needs to take action and how they should do so to minimize their impact. Things like mandatory drug testing (FDA), basic public health (CDC/NIH), and environmental regulations would likely not be enacted by corporations or the states - which means that the only viable option is to do them at the federal level.
Sounds like a mandate to me. Now, that's not necesarily a bad thing - we mandate lots of things in the US, including wireless standards (ATSC anyone?).
No disagreement there. I walk around with a GSM/GPRS/EDGE Treo 650 on T-Mobile.
No, he means CDMA2000. IS-95 was superceded years ago by CDMA2000.
Better tell Palm to stop making the Treo 700p/700w and 650 CDMA. Better tell HTC to stop making the Apache. Better tell RIM to stop making CDMA BlackBerry devices. Better tell Motorola to stop making the Q.
Your argument doens't make any sense. Walk into a Verizon or Sprint store - what do you see? PDA phones - more than in a T-Mobile store and as many as in a Cingular store.
Not on Cingular. All phones sold by Cingular are at least US dual-band (850/1900); most are US tri-band (850/1800/1900) or quad-band (850/900/1800/1900).
Clearly Motorola, HTC, RIM, Palm, and Samsung don't think so.
That's why Office 2007 has a completely new UI - based primarily on user data that indicates which commands are used most frequently and how they are used. It's rather nice if you give it a try.
This is actually something that the publishers chose to do. Microsoft's UI guidelines actually state that Start Menu shortcuts should not be installed in subfolders unless they are part of a group of shortcuts (e.g. Office, Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite).
This is because of the way that dependencies are resolved in the Windows service starting system. The desktop is "ready" before some services (e.g. networking) have actually started.
That solution wouldn't work. Most Windows applications are not "certified". Microsoft's UI guidelines are much clearer now - don't clutter up the notification area. The real solution would be to have a separate area (e.g. a menu) for non-frequently used programs (such as virus scanners).
Windows and Windows Server
Office
Visual Studio
SQL Server
Exchange
Most of Microsoft's products make money.
I like your sig - it reminds me of a Simpsons episode:
Homer: Ah, not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away!
Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
This is just Econ 101 stuff.
What seals the deal is being implemented with SSL POP access... so the dinosaurs who refuse to budge don't have to.
Doesn't seal the deal for me at all. I don't want POP - I want my mail to stay on the server so that I can access it on my desktop, on my laptop, and on my PDA. That means IMAP.
Thunderbird is so far ahead of GMail that it's not even funny.
So, you mean that it would be illegal to design a music store that only works with your MP3 player, which only works with your music software?
It never ceases to amaze me how Macheads can hold Apple to a completely different standard than the rest of the industry. DRM is suddenly OK when it's part of QuickTime, iTunes, and the iPod - but you had better not bring up how Vista has WM-DRM support. Tying a player to a specific music store and a specific desktop application is OK when it's Apple, but Microsoft had better not do it or you'll give them hell.
Oh, and the first person who says "they're a convicted monopolist" gets their head smacked. It is Apple has a monopoly in the MP3 player market. You only have to look at the market share to see that. It is Apple who is using their player monopoly to push their desktop software and their music store.
And the ever-righteous European is the first to turn a story about an augmented strength device into a slam on the US.
Anyone who has seen Aliens or played MechWarrior can see the obvious potential military uses of this device.
Try running XP (or Vista if you're feeling masochistic) on a 500mhz Pentium.
XP ran great on the Celeron 300A system I still have sitting around. It had 384MB of memory, of course, which helped quite a bit. There was noticable lag when using heavy web sites in Firefox (e.g. anything that uses Flash), but regular web browsing, word processing, and most other things work just fine. Hell, I ran UT2003 on it - though the GeForce2 MX wasn't exactly fast enoguh to run it at more than the minimum settings.
I have run XP on Pentium II 233 systems with 64MB of memory. It's not fun, but it does work.
Well, actually, they don't use the disk-drive connector anymore, they use the PCIe power connecetor. And they use 12V because a typical high-end GPU draws ~80A+ (at its actual supply voltage). 100W at 5V means 20A, which means some pretty beefy conductors and connectors.