There are some things to love about this system. It seems to genuinely be small enough while having a good enough screen. But it has the same problem as other notebooks: there is a computer in there instead of just an interface + a wireless fast network connection.
Take the away the CPU, memory and disk from this system and make it a terminal of some sort, X terminal or Windows Terminal or Citrix client, whatever. Voila, battery life goes way up, weight and thickness go way down. (Do I hear 10mm thick and four ounces?) Add a slice to it if you're going on a plane and you really need to be disconnected. But as long as you're around the home or office, just use it as a connection to your application server. Suddenly its useful life is "until it breaks" rather than "until Longhorn".
You can do it in your head without a hitch if you use exponential notation. 192kbps = 2.4 x 10^4 bytes/sec. A day has 8.6 x 10^4 seconds. A year has 3.6 x 10^2 days. So neighborhood of 80 x 10^10 = 8 x 10^11 bytes/year. That's 800 gigs a year. The original poster was right, with the largest available drives you could have about 3 years of uninterrupted MP3s.
"Why do you use CISCO routers when NT does routing?" (No lie..actually happened!)
Not as stupid a question as you think. When the 'Net was young, general purpose computers with multiple network interfaces were indeed the normal thing to use for routing. Of course they ran Unix, but if NT were around back then it could have been used as well. Dedicated routers are just a more reliable, lower maintenance, hopefully better performing evolution; they are not necessary.
Now listen, I'm no commie, but it is senseless to take your ideological opposition to a political philosophy and apply it places it doesn't belong. In this case we're talking about a group of people that is small enough so that a collective responsibility and reward system can promote a high level of motivation and commitment.
If there does happen to be a slacker in the bunch, the most powerful motivator for him to get on board or get out of the company would be a strong sense of commitment among those around him.
Are you fucking with me? No, really. More secure? More secure because the source code is hidden better? You deserve a +1 Funny for that crack.
I assume you mean the source code of the Flash movie... Guessing the security of the (secret, proprietary, implemented by the trained monkeys at Macromedia) code in the plugin is left as an exercise to the reader. OMFG. More secure. Your talents are wasted in development, you need to switch to network security consulting.
Listen mister "even on a 700 MHz P3", just because you are a luddite who does not use the word gigahertz when describing his computer doesn't mean that the rest of us have to stay in the bad old days of postage stamp video and black-on-grey. And in case you can't tell I'm being sarcastic.
Absolutely right. I am on a cable modem, and I am under 200 milliseconds away from the entire US web, with upwards of 1 megabit of bandwidth. Using HTML I should be seeing the first page of text load up within 300 milliseconds of hitting a link, which is close enough to be considered instantaneous. The rest of that first page should follow within the first second.
There is no public site that I have seen achieving this level of speed. Yahoo is as good as it gets and they generally over take a second. Why? And as you note, Flash sites are always worse than the most responsive HTML sites because they never give you anything but "please wait" until the initial 100+KB chunk of movie is loaded. That alone disqualifies Flash.
I am a big Abit fan and I visit their site fairly often. When I do, I always have to take a moment to throw up into my wastebasket as the Flash menu bar comes in.
It is a terrible part of the site. It is the last thing on the page to load; its hot spots are insane; it is a monstrosity; and of course it doesn't work with all browsers. Abit should have their head examined for putting it in.
Flash: it is for more than making a spectacular piece of crap, it can also help make a nonintrusive piece of crap.
That is a sound analysis of the failure of Java to exploit its early start in the same arena in which Flash is now competing successfully. Poor authoring tools plus the proliferation of JVMs. You hit the nail on the head.
The vast majority of Flash authors never would have had a prayer of doing their work in Java, just because of the authoring tool situation. Everyone created Java IDEs for propellorheads instead of tools to let art school dropouts create shiny, brightly colored objects. There were a few people who drank the koolaid and created horrifying animated buttons using Java, but there were very few beautiful little Java widgets. There are tons of beautiful little (mostly useless) Flash widgets, because of the tool.
I think this is a nice example of Geoff Moore's popularisation of the idea of a chasm between techy early adopters and a mass audience. The early adopters like the generality and abstraction of something like Java, with its potential to be everything. A larger audience prefers its tools to be more narrow in scope. Not just easier to use but also easier to understand. Less is more. Flash is now being repositioned as a general tool for doing everything, but its more narrow focus on animation, then on pretty widgets, is what attracted the critical mass of authors that exists today.
Macromedia looks to be in deep trouble. They have large losses and aren't even predicting a return to profitability until Q1/03. Looking at their current financials is positively scary. They are trading at three times their sales, they lost $240M for the year on sales of $350M, they have only $160M cash, their stock has been at its 1998 level of $10-30/share after collapsing in late 2000/early 2001. Their total market capitalization right now is only $1.1Bn.
It would not be at all surprising to see these folks disappear through acquisition. This nonsense of positioning Flash as the next web is probably just an executive level effort to fluff the stock price and generate buzz so they can attract a higher acquisition offer.
Re:More DOS out there than you think
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 1
My last company used computers mostly as call center terminals. They used DOS 6.22 plus Netware on most of the systems to run a custom multiuser application written years ago in Clipper. The thing also ran fine in a DOS box on any Windows but they preferred DOS because it is impossible to spend any time playing with a DOS system instead of doing your job.
Based on what real retailers are offering now, the non-discounted price for a consumer Microsoft OS in a new system looks to be in the $95-$100 range. That is a lot less than your $200-$400 figure. I believe that number goes down quite a bit further for many large MS customers, so that the OS price can still be manageable in a $400 system.
Your points about ease of installation are more or less irrelevant; real world users don't install operating systems. They make do, or get someone else to do it, or get a new computer.
To complete your argument, the set of strings (files) of any particular length that is compressible using gzip is much much smaller than the set of strings of that length that would just get larger going through gzip, by the same pigeonhole argument that everyone else is repeating here. So that one extra bit would kill you.
I stand corrected; thanks, yerricde. It is indeed possible to mess with your Perl during the compilation process. You can define your own little language. But if I'm reading the man page you referenced correctly, this module includes its own custom parser and translator. At the end of the parsing-translating process it spits out a string of text.
That is a psychotic, albeit powerful, approach to extending a language's syntax. And it is not a macro system. Wouldn't you agree?
Actually, what he should do is use a real terminal: a mechanical teletype. Then he could always have the output right in front of him, plus he would have a permanent record. He could always whip out a pair of scissors to make use of copy & paste.
After all, mechanical teletypes are the reason we have the ed editor, two-character command names, three-character system directory names... maybe these uppity undergraduates just have never experienced the pleasure of a real Unix interface.
Word to your mother. Code reuse via copy-n-paste is one of many basic software engineering blunders that is committed constantly in, I would guess, most software development organizations.
Ultimately it's a culture problem. The more junior software engineers in a lot of places just don't care about quality, so they don't pay attention and learn from each other and from more senior people. They don't criticize the flaws that they are no doubt observing in each other's work. A few senior staff can't do all the teaching and critiquing; it has to be an effort from all the developers.
At some point you have to blame management for creating perverse incentives that ignore or discourage high quality results from developers.
Well of course you are quite right: it is a catastrophe to hide tens or hundreds of cases in a nest of code. The logic of a program has to be visible to the maintainer and this means using a language that is appropriate to the problem at hand. A tabular language might be the right one for a particular problem.
It should be observed that there are unpleasant performance implications to doing things this way. For performance reasons it would be nice to have that stuff hard coded! But how do you resolve these two wishes?
You use a code generator that builds code (which is later compiled) using the tables. Now everyone is happy. Speed plus maintainability. What approach should be used for code generation?
You could build your own code generator by hand, spitting out program text by generating strings. But that is not very nice. There are many ways to screw that up both in terms of correctness and in terms of the power you provide to the programmer who uses the code generator.
And so we arrive at the point of this little screed: a macro system is the correct approach for creating a little language inside of a large program. This is one reason why programmers should care about the macro facilities of a language. Perl and Java have none built in. C has the unpleasant cpp. Lisps have lovely macros, making it absurdly easy to do tabular programming, complete with breaking out special cases easily.
Right, that doesn't mean what you think it means. You wanted to blow away textbook.pdf and textbook.ps. Your command gets textbook.pd textbook.pf textbook.p, textbook.ps. And, the -f and -R are likely pointless here. This csh syntax, which also works in bash, would work:
Actually MS-DOS 1.0 did not have pipes and filters. Nor did it have hierarchical directories or hard drive support. All those things were borrowed from Unix in version 2. Too bad they didn't borrow more.
I first used MS-DOS back in primary school in 1987. Those Unix-ish features did exist, but nobody knew how to use them. A typical DOS user knew how to move around, copy, delete and rename. In the intervening years I have taught dozens of college students (non-CS) to use Unix. Most of them never retained anything beyond moving around, copying, deleting and renaming files.
Not too many people can handle learning the Unix shell.
Everyone knows (or knew at one time) that an "operating system" is nothing but a massive waste of a valuable automatic computer facility. In fact IIRC, John von Neumann (one of the fathers of the modern computer) was disdainful of using computer based editors and assemblers for preparing programs, on that same basis of wastefulness. That is what you have secretaries for.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some things to love about this system. It seems to genuinely be small enough while having a good enough screen. But it has the same problem as other notebooks: there is a computer in there instead of just an interface + a wireless fast network connection.
Take the away the CPU, memory and disk from this system and make it a terminal of some sort, X terminal or Windows Terminal or Citrix client, whatever. Voila, battery life goes way up, weight and thickness go way down. (Do I hear 10mm thick and four ounces?) Add a slice to it if you're going on a plane and you really need to be disconnected. But as long as you're around the home or office, just use it as a connection to your application server. Suddenly its useful life is "until it breaks" rather than "until Longhorn".
You can do it in your head without a hitch if you use exponential notation. 192kbps = 2.4 x 10^4 bytes/sec. A day has 8.6 x 10^4 seconds. A year has 3.6 x 10^2 days. So neighborhood of 80 x 10^10 = 8 x 10^11 bytes/year. That's 800 gigs a year. The original poster was right, with the largest available drives you could have about 3 years of uninterrupted MP3s.
"Why do you use CISCO routers when NT does routing?" (No lie..actually happened!)
Not as stupid a question as you think. When the 'Net was young, general purpose computers with multiple network interfaces were indeed the normal thing to use for routing. Of course they ran Unix, but if NT were around back then it could have been used as well. Dedicated routers are just a more reliable, lower maintenance, hopefully better performing evolution; they are not necessary.
Now listen, I'm no commie, but it is senseless to take your ideological opposition to a political philosophy and apply it places it doesn't belong. In this case we're talking about a group of people that is small enough so that a collective responsibility and reward system can promote a high level of motivation and commitment.
If there does happen to be a slacker in the bunch, the most powerful motivator for him to get on board or get out of the company would be a strong sense of commitment among those around him.
Could this be el primero español spelling flame on slashdot?
echo `apt-get update`
This is a useless use of backquotes and echo. This line would do just the same thing:
apt-get update
I visited your site, but it uses javascript popups just to open the front door. Thank you for playing.
I assume you mean the source code of the Flash movie... Guessing the security of the (secret, proprietary, implemented by the trained monkeys at Macromedia) code in the plugin is left as an exercise to the reader. OMFG. More secure. Your talents are wasted in development, you need to switch to network security consulting.
Listen mister "even on a 700 MHz P3", just because you are a luddite who does not use the word gigahertz when describing his computer doesn't mean that the rest of us have to stay in the bad old days of postage stamp video and black-on-grey. And in case you can't tell I'm being sarcastic.
Absolutely right. I am on a cable modem, and I am under 200 milliseconds away from the entire US web, with upwards of 1 megabit of bandwidth. Using HTML I should be seeing the first page of text load up within 300 milliseconds of hitting a link, which is close enough to be considered instantaneous. The rest of that first page should follow within the first second.
There is no public site that I have seen achieving this level of speed. Yahoo is as good as it gets and they generally over take a second. Why? And as you note, Flash sites are always worse than the most responsive HTML sites because they never give you anything but "please wait" until the initial 100+KB chunk of movie is loaded. That alone disqualifies Flash.
I am a big Abit fan and I visit their site fairly often. When I do, I always have to take a moment to throw up into my wastebasket as the Flash menu bar comes in.
It is a terrible part of the site. It is the last thing on the page to load; its hot spots are insane; it is a monstrosity; and of course it doesn't work with all browsers. Abit should have their head examined for putting it in.
Flash: it is for more than making a spectacular piece of crap, it can also help make a nonintrusive piece of crap.
Joecartoon just exploded my Flash 5 plugin and took Opera down with it. Flash, feh!
That is a sound analysis of the failure of Java to exploit its early start in the same arena in which Flash is now competing successfully. Poor authoring tools plus the proliferation of JVMs. You hit the nail on the head.
The vast majority of Flash authors never would have had a prayer of doing their work in Java, just because of the authoring tool situation. Everyone created Java IDEs for propellorheads instead of tools to let art school dropouts create shiny, brightly colored objects. There were a few people who drank the koolaid and created horrifying animated buttons using Java, but there were very few beautiful little Java widgets. There are tons of beautiful little (mostly useless) Flash widgets, because of the tool.
I think this is a nice example of Geoff Moore's popularisation of the idea of a chasm between techy early adopters and a mass audience. The early adopters like the generality and abstraction of something like Java, with its potential to be everything. A larger audience prefers its tools to be more narrow in scope. Not just easier to use but also easier to understand. Less is more. Flash is now being repositioned as a general tool for doing everything, but its more narrow focus on animation, then on pretty widgets, is what attracted the critical mass of authors that exists today.
It would not be at all surprising to see these folks disappear through acquisition. This nonsense of positioning Flash as the next web is probably just an executive level effort to fluff the stock price and generate buzz so they can attract a higher acquisition offer.
Search for ", Funny" instead, you lazy fuck.
My last company used computers mostly as call center terminals. They used DOS 6.22 plus Netware on most of the systems to run a custom multiuser application written years ago in Clipper. The thing also ran fine in a DOS box on any Windows but they preferred DOS because it is impossible to spend any time playing with a DOS system instead of doing your job.
Based on what real retailers are offering now, the non-discounted price for a consumer Microsoft OS in a new system looks to be in the $95-$100 range. That is a lot less than your $200-$400 figure. I believe that number goes down quite a bit further for many large MS customers, so that the OS price can still be manageable in a $400 system.
Your points about ease of installation are more or less irrelevant; real world users don't install operating systems. They make do, or get someone else to do it, or get a new computer.
To complete your argument, the set of strings (files) of any particular length that is compressible using gzip is much much smaller than the set of strings of that length that would just get larger going through gzip, by the same pigeonhole argument that everyone else is repeating here. So that one extra bit would kill you.
I stand corrected; thanks, yerricde. It is indeed possible to mess with your Perl during the compilation process. You can define your own little language. But if I'm reading the man page you referenced correctly, this module includes its own custom parser and translator. At the end of the parsing-translating process it spits out a string of text.
That is a psychotic, albeit powerful, approach to extending a language's syntax. And it is not a macro system. Wouldn't you agree?
Actually, what he should do is use a real terminal: a mechanical teletype. Then he could always have the output right in front of him, plus he would have a permanent record. He could always whip out a pair of scissors to make use of copy & paste.
After all, mechanical teletypes are the reason we have the ed editor, two-character command names, three-character system directory names... maybe these uppity undergraduates just have never experienced the pleasure of a real Unix interface.
Word to your mother. Code reuse via copy-n-paste is one of many basic software engineering blunders that is committed constantly in, I would guess, most software development organizations.
Ultimately it's a culture problem. The more junior software engineers in a lot of places just don't care about quality, so they don't pay attention and learn from each other and from more senior people. They don't criticize the flaws that they are no doubt observing in each other's work. A few senior staff can't do all the teaching and critiquing; it has to be an effort from all the developers.
At some point you have to blame management for creating perverse incentives that ignore or discourage high quality results from developers.
Well of course you are quite right: it is a catastrophe to hide tens or hundreds of cases in a nest of code. The logic of a program has to be visible to the maintainer and this means using a language that is appropriate to the problem at hand. A tabular language might be the right one for a particular problem.
It should be observed that there are unpleasant performance implications to doing things this way. For performance reasons it would be nice to have that stuff hard coded! But how do you resolve these two wishes?
You use a code generator that builds code (which is later compiled) using the tables. Now everyone is happy. Speed plus maintainability. What approach should be used for code generation?
You could build your own code generator by hand, spitting out program text by generating strings. But that is not very nice. There are many ways to screw that up both in terms of correctness and in terms of the power you provide to the programmer who uses the code generator.
And so we arrive at the point of this little screed: a macro system is the correct approach for creating a little language inside of a large program. This is one reason why programmers should care about the macro facilities of a language. Perl and Java have none built in. C has the unpleasant cpp. Lisps have lovely macros, making it absurdly easy to do tabular programming, complete with breaking out special cases easily.
or the more oblique but one character shorter
Actually MS-DOS 1.0 did not have pipes and filters. Nor did it have hierarchical directories or hard drive support. All those things were borrowed from Unix in version 2. Too bad they didn't borrow more.
I first used MS-DOS back in primary school in 1987. Those Unix-ish features did exist, but nobody knew how to use them. A typical DOS user knew how to move around, copy, delete and rename. In the intervening years I have taught dozens of college students (non-CS) to use Unix. Most of them never retained anything beyond moving around, copying, deleting and renaming files.
Not too many people can handle learning the Unix shell.
Everyone knows (or knew at one time) that an "operating system" is nothing but a massive waste of a valuable automatic computer facility. In fact IIRC, John von Neumann (one of the fathers of the modern computer) was disdainful of using computer based editors and assemblers for preparing programs, on that same basis of wastefulness. That is what you have secretaries for.