Just saw this last week. In retail grocery we pump a lot of data back and forth between head office, store back office, and the lanes. Anything -- and I mean anything that keeps us from having to lay another cable or put another piece of bulky hardware under the sales counter is a bonus. I could see these things used in the C racks at the front to stage price changes, etc. and being retail the fact that they are utterly dirt cheap will have a broad appeal.
How much is "a lot" ? I am asking because it is not obvious why the sales counter needs gigabytes of data and for anything smaller just put a 1Gbit line to it and you are done
(one can buy 8-port gbit switches for less than $200 nowadays - and they are pretty small).
Would you care to elaborate on that? I can't recall a situation I've had with FAT or NTFS volumes that I couldn't attribute to someone (myself, on occasion) just not understanding how things work.
Well, it is hard to figure out a good way to use it. For example, in Linux, I know that if I have plenty of free space (at least 10%) and one program writes or reads a single file you are going to access the disk in sequential mode - and get the maximum transfer rate the drive is capable of.
With NTFS the files get fragmented unless one preallocates a chunk of space before writing the file (how the hell am I supposed the size of the gzip file I am unpacking ?) and even after defragmentation some files read pretty slow as if they were doing seeks all the time.
Also, I would expect that if I create a small file, run some other program on it (quickly) and then delete the file it should never hit the disk. Yet this is not very fast.
Also when creating lots of files the directories that hold them get fragmented.. This is just bizarre.
What are you doing supporting these computers? If you need to Ask Slashdot to get the answer to this fairly basic problem, then you are not qualified to do the job.
You might be surprised, but I found that nothing to do with Windows qualifies as "basic", despite my extensive experience with Linux/Unix..
The problem is that Windows functions and interface are just thrown together and then modified to mollify average user. Unlike Unix which is built to implement an abstraction,
there is no operation in Windows that has a well-defined effect and can be automated to produce that effect again and again.
For example, if you see a file on a "Desktop" chances are you won't see it in c:/windows/desktop and even if you do a locate it sometimes still cannot be found.
If you name a file "a.txt" then it can get saved as "A.TXT".
And forget about optimization - the system call performance is hard to understand, the filesystem behaves unpredictably, heck, there are no programming languages at all on the installation disk !
Can somebody please explain this dual licensing scheme. Why do they even have the GPL in there? If you can obtain the source code under the MIT license, can't you do whatever you want with it, including dropping it in a GPL project?
Basically, Intel is being extremely nice and using licenses of the projects it submits code to.
Linux kernel is under GPL - so the kernel driver is being submitted as GPL.
Xserver (Xorg) is under MIT license - so they submit Xorg driver as MIT
The reason Xorg is under MIT is two fold - first of all the code traces its roots to the codebase developed at MIT way, way back and, secondly, this is an attempt to entice contributions from commercial vendors so they can make closed-source derivative products.
They idea used (?) to be that the vendor gives documentation to developer, developer has fun writing driver, vendor has code they can point embedded developers to (set top boxes, etc).
As you can see from NVidia and ATI binary blobs this is not working too well, but not completely broken either as both companies did contribute some code or documentation, at least for 2d acceleration parts.
I'd be willing to bet the REAL reason they don't open their drivers is because they're using stuff they know is the intellectual property of others. Just a guess, though;
I am quite certain this is not the case. In fact, my opinion is that there is no good reason to withhold the specs and the only business reason is if some entity stipulated this as part of the contract.
The reason is that hardware interface is usually very close to what DirectX exposes, with fairly minimal translation.
What one needs for driver development is usually not the explanation of how card works (which is often public), but the knowledge that a particular DirectX field is accessed through register X or that memory controller is configured by writing certain values in some registers.
There is truly nothing very special (as far as "intellectual" property is concerned) about how one configures the DAC or video PLL.
Even for more advanced things like pixel or vertex shaders the bulk of the architecture is usually explained in documentation and all that one needs is to know how the elementary operations the card supports are packed into C structure.
I can't say I particularly care (not using any on-board graphics)
One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks - especially those thin and light ones.
A choice of video card is rare, especially if one cares about battery life.
Traditionally, Linux support of new notebook video chips was very uncertain, as it is not possible to get a new notebook with a 2 year old graphics controller. Thus the fact that all-Intel notebooks are a safe choice (with not only 2d, but also 3d and wireless working under Linux) is a truly wonderful news.
Also, the new Xserver features have to be implemented on something before there are binary blobs that support them.
So having an open code to experiment with, say, Render, impacts other graphics cards as well.
.. $419.3 billion (2006 official), it's no surprise that they have to cut certain other projects. Poor NASA, sadly there's not as much profit in exploring / colonizing space as there is in invading countries with rich oil sources.
Profit ? How about Titan (Saturn's moon) which is covered in liquid methane and has 1/8th of Earth gravity ?
Not to mention Kuiper belt..
For that kind of money one could have launched a train of dumb nuclear powered ships and have enough hydrocarbons to drown the planet..
I think it's a good idea. All of the problems that immediately jump out at me-- things getting outdated and such-- would seem to be dealt with very easily by making the internal software updatable, some simple solid-state memory.
No, it is a terrible idea. The right way is to release the specs to the damn hardware. CPU manufacturers do it, why not video cards ?
We already have driver built in the video card. It is called VIDEO BIOS. The latest VESA specification allows for fancy things like requesting memory map of the framebuffer so one can have direct video access. It is easy to envision making a specs for 3d acceleration as well. It could even be in pseudocode - one could compile the driver to whatever hardware is using it.
So why this does not work ? Because, aside from graphics companies making shitty BIOS to begin with, companies like Dell intentionally cut down BIOS to safe a couple of dollars on flash RAM. Ask yourself - when was the last time you saw a widescreen laptop which video BIOS knew how to setup the widescreen mode ? And this is one of the most basic things.
Good and thorough description of the hardware is a requirement for doing interesting things with it.
Coming from someone who has looked at the written priorities for their D1 school. 1. Research 2. Students 3. Obtaining grants(it seems like 1 and 3 are the same thing...apparently not) 4. Spin off companies We are not on the top of the list. Academia is not about the students.
Yes, but what do people actually do ?
Are the graduate students greeted with "we are a research department and research is the most important thing here" followed by 3 hour lecture about importance of good evaluations and how to get them ?
Right... I am an undergrad student going into my senior year at a technology institute heavily focused on research. Maybe its supposed to be about teaching students, but its not. The majority of professors are only there to do their own research. It feels like the only reason my college even has undergrads is because without us they wouldnt really be a college.
And this is the paradox of it. There is a whole science (pedagogy) of how to teach other people. Yet none of it is even mentioned to graduate students. When I entered grad school we had a 3-day training session which suggested such helpful things as organizing students in groups
(which is mostly silly when teaching math) and said absolutely nothing about what it is that makes people learn.
In a way the system is symmetric - the undergrads are shoehorned into calculus classes without basic algebra skills and find them hard and difficult, while grad students with science background are asked to teach classes without any background in pedagogy, public speaking etc.
"Green's function is a type of function used to solve inhomogeneous differential equations subject to boundary conditions. Technically, a Green's function of a linear operator L acting on distributions over a manifold M, at a point x0, is any solution of (Lf)(x) = (x x0), where is the Dirac delta function." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green's_function
I don't know what highschool you went to...
A good one. While the explanation is correct there are better and more accessible ways.
For example, one could say that the Green's function is the field produced by a single charge - and the solution for a family of charges is a sum of Green's functions for individual charges with appropriate coefficients.
Instructional faculty includes tenured positions. Also, there is a question of whether they include law, business and medical schools - which would skew the average.
But consider that these are top schools - other places would pay less.
Also, I notice that University of Michigan is on the 32nd place. I happen to have a link to the salaries of all employees there (this is public data). Have fun browsing ! (and there are plenty of postdoc positions which pay 40K).
I think that the perception that students are worse today is largely based in poor performance at the high school level due to crumbling educational infrastructure. Student calibre increases dramatically once people get away from their 1st and 2nd year prerequisites and start getting into the subject material at some meaningful depth.
I do not think think the students are worse in their potential, but they are definitely not there in preparation.
Generally, a person that finished the first (or sometimes second) year of grad school is on the level they should have been when granted a bachelor. Really !
If this sounds strange consider that people who graduate with Physics major often have never been exposed to Green's function. How can you practice physics in a modern world without knowing this ? This is highschool level.
What should happen is that instead of doing a curve and giving the top 1/3 A's students should be checked (thoroughly) for knowledge of basic concepts in the course and failed if they miss a single one. And the A's should go to those who know the material through and through.
This is mostly hearsay, but I would find out their publication policy first. If they don't let you publish you might get screwed in a major way when you are looking for a new job.
Often, the companies with the best publication policy are those that are slightly behind in the field but with the funds to hope to catch up - they publish lots in an attempt to boost their image.
Perhaps today's cutting-edge research is much more complicated or requires more prior knowledge to understand than it was years ago. This makes sense. We have accumulated a lot of knowledge, and many questions in science today requires knowledge of what yesterday's scientist figured out.
In my own experience as an undergraduate student in psychology at UC Davis, quite a few professors make regular use of actual research papers in place of textbooks. I think it is a great technique since it exposes me to both classic studies and cutting edge research. Furthermore, it allows me to judge the research on its merits. Textbooks to often just cite the results of a research paper, which amounts to a bunch of uncritical fact learning. Another challenge of reading cutting edge research is that a lot of prior knowledge is required to comprehend it.
Phychology might be different - more self-contained for example. What I do know about are math, physics and engineering. I see the level of incoming students just not being where they can contribute, heck, even be interested, with a few exceptions which are there because the students or their parents or both bypassed the system.
For example, I regularly saw students take advanced calculus that had problems with basic algebra (like what is 1/a+1/b). Bright students at that - they simply were not taught in highschool properly.
I am sorry, but you are not going to appreciate modern research without knowing algebra so you can do it without thinking. You could get away with unsure calculus (by replacing it with computers and algebra - though this is not ideal either), but algebra is a must. And, to think of it, geometry would be nice too.
Neither of these are anything cutting edge. It is just in the race to get all engineering students "know" calculus we end up with them missing on something a whole lot more basic - algebra, analytic geometry, logic.
And lastly, would not you think there should be progress ? Should not a student today be at least as good as average student 50 years ago ? After all back then some of these things were somewhat new and modern kids had lots of time to adapt.
Which field ? How many of these positions are available ? At that time in many places tenured faculty were paid just slightly above (around 60K). Also, take into account taxes and expenses of the postdoc (compared to a grad student). After you do see how much spare money you have left and whether you can go to conference without applying for a grant first.
You might think I am talking about luxury but it is not.
The attraction of academy for many years were special privileges of tenured faculty. Well, with more focus on short-term objectives these are being eroded - slowly or not so slowly.
For example, there used to be departments which did pure research (and did not teach anyone but grad students) - I don't know of a single one right now (except, perhaps, biomed - not really sure about this).
There were universities with provisions that immediate family gets their tuition expenses paid - these benefits are being phased out. One can go on.
I would not necessarily give up on academia. Granted, the last five years has been particularly hard on basic science research (especially in biosciences), but there are still good options for the best and brightest. In academia, you really need to have the PhD if you want the flexibility that you are looking for.
These are all fine words, but in most places this is not what happens by default.
First of all academia is about teaching students. It used to be that the students were advanced enough so that teaching a course actually related to the research work, but this is not true anymore. Today undergrad is like a highschool especially if one considers the development in science and technology.
Secondly, at best, postdoc is a three-year position, often less. Which means you will not be thinking about any longterm research - in the time you have left over from comittee meetings, teaching classes and applying for grants.
Thirdly, there is a question of money. I know that it is often considered good manners not consider this, but I always found this silly. Money is a way to apply engineering to resource problems. If you are in science you should practice it.
So, one benchmark is to see whether you can freely afford the tools to do your research.
Can you buy a computer that you need ? Does your grant/salary has enough to buy those Wiley or Springer books that you wanted ? Can you take them with you when you go on to the next job ? Can you buy a car or have an apartment close by so you don't waste time getting to and from office ? Can you go to the conference you are interested in ? More often then not the postdoc gets a small cut above a grad student..
A second benchmark is to look at sustainability - will you get paid enough (eventually) to let your children take the same path ? Would you be able to send them to the best school suited to their abilities ?
Lastly, on a more positive note (for the original poster), there are places when you can have fun - but these are defined by particular people, not establishments. Find someone you would like to work with.. Don't look for a university.
Ohh, and there are places like Lincoln labs or LANL which can be a whole lot of fun.
Only because almost no-one has any interest in attacking them. Were there organised groups actively seeking to do them harm, that would be a rather different story.
They are called wolves and the farmers delt with them.
The unfortunate part is that a lot of people in this country really would rather be safe than free. Or to be more precise, they want to FEEL safe than be free. True safety will never occur.
Nonsense. Milk cows on a farm are safe.
Re:Is this from Outer-space?
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 1
Is this from Outer-space?
Or is it of Earthen origin?
It is from alternative reality called "user space"
Slashdot Mirror
Next time you are in a meeting think about this..
Well, it is hard to figure out a good way to use it. For example, in Linux, I know that if I have plenty of free space (at least 10%) and one program writes or reads a single file you are going to access the disk in sequential mode - and get the maximum transfer rate the drive is capable of.
With NTFS the files get fragmented unless one preallocates a chunk of space before writing the file (how the hell am I supposed the size of the gzip file I am unpacking ?) and even after defragmentation some files read pretty slow as if they were doing seeks all the time.
Also, I would expect that if I create a small file, run some other program on it (quickly) and then delete the file it should never hit the disk. Yet this is not very fast.
Also when creating lots of files the directories that hold them get fragmented.. This is just bizarre.
You might be surprised, but I found that nothing to do with Windows qualifies as "basic", despite my extensive experience with Linux/Unix..
The problem is that Windows functions and interface are just thrown together and then modified to mollify average user. Unlike Unix which is built to implement an abstraction, there is no operation in Windows that has a well-defined effect and can be automated to produce that effect again and again.
For example, if you see a file on a "Desktop" chances are you won't see it in c:/windows/desktop and even if you do a locate it sometimes still cannot be found.
If you name a file "a.txt" then it can get saved as "A.TXT".
And forget about optimization - the system call performance is hard to understand, the filesystem behaves unpredictably, heck, there are no programming languages at all on the installation disk !
Basically, Intel is being extremely nice and using licenses of the projects it submits code to.
Linux kernel is under GPL - so the kernel driver is being submitted as GPL. Xserver (Xorg) is under MIT license - so they submit Xorg driver as MIT
The reason Xorg is under MIT is two fold - first of all the code traces its roots to the codebase developed at MIT way, way back and, secondly, this is an attempt to entice contributions from commercial vendors so they can make closed-source derivative products.
They idea used (?) to be that the vendor gives documentation to developer, developer has fun writing driver, vendor has code they can point embedded developers to (set top boxes, etc).
As you can see from NVidia and ATI binary blobs this is not working too well, but not completely broken either as both companies did contribute some code or documentation, at least for 2d acceleration parts.
I am quite certain this is not the case. In fact, my opinion is that there is no good reason to withhold the specs and the only business reason is if some entity stipulated this as part of the contract.
The reason is that hardware interface is usually very close to what DirectX exposes, with fairly minimal translation.
What one needs for driver development is usually not the explanation of how card works (which is often public), but the knowledge that a particular DirectX field is accessed through register X or that memory controller is configured by writing certain values in some registers.
There is truly nothing very special (as far as "intellectual" property is concerned) about how one configures the DAC or video PLL.
Even for more advanced things like pixel or vertex shaders the bulk of the architecture is usually explained in documentation and all that one needs is to know how the elementary operations the card supports are packed into C structure.
One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks - especially those thin and light ones. A choice of video card is rare, especially if one cares about battery life.
Traditionally, Linux support of new notebook video chips was very uncertain, as it is not possible to get a new notebook with a 2 year old graphics controller. Thus the fact that all-Intel notebooks are a safe choice (with not only 2d, but also 3d and wireless working under Linux) is a truly wonderful news.
Also, the new Xserver features have to be implemented on something before there are binary blobs that support them. So having an open code to experiment with, say, Render, impacts other graphics cards as well.
Profit ? How about Titan (Saturn's moon) which is covered in liquid methane and has 1/8th of Earth gravity ? Not to mention Kuiper belt..
For that kind of money one could have launched a train of dumb nuclear powered ships and have enough hydrocarbons to drown the planet..
No, it is a terrible idea. The right way is to release the specs to the damn hardware. CPU manufacturers do it, why not video cards ?
We already have driver built in the video card. It is called VIDEO BIOS. The latest VESA specification allows for fancy things like requesting memory map of the framebuffer so one can have direct video access. It is easy to envision making a specs for 3d acceleration as well. It could even be in pseudocode - one could compile the driver to whatever hardware is using it.
So why this does not work ? Because, aside from graphics companies making shitty BIOS to begin with, companies like Dell intentionally cut down BIOS to safe a couple of dollars on flash RAM. Ask yourself - when was the last time you saw a widescreen laptop which video BIOS knew how to setup the widescreen mode ? And this is one of the most basic things.
Good and thorough description of the hardware is a requirement for doing interesting things with it.
Yes, but what do people actually do ?
Are the graduate students greeted with "we are a research department and research is the most important thing here" followed by 3 hour lecture about importance of good evaluations and how to get them ?
And this is the paradox of it. There is a whole science (pedagogy) of how to teach other people. Yet none of it is even mentioned to graduate students. When I entered grad school we had a 3-day training session which suggested such helpful things as organizing students in groups (which is mostly silly when teaching math) and said absolutely nothing about what it is that makes people learn.
In a way the system is symmetric - the undergrads are shoehorned into calculus classes without basic algebra skills and find them hard and difficult, while grad students with science background are asked to teach classes without any background in pedagogy, public speaking etc.
A good one. While the explanation is correct there are better and more accessible ways.
For example, one could say that the Green's function is the field produced by a single charge - and the solution for a family of charges is a sum of Green's functions for individual charges with appropriate coefficients.
If you hear them struggling to piece a coherent sentence together it is time to sell the stock.
Instructional faculty includes tenured positions. Also, there is a question of whether they include law, business and medical schools - which would skew the average.
But consider that these are top schools - other places would pay less.
Also, I notice that University of Michigan is on the 32nd place. I happen to have a link to the salaries of all employees there (this is public data). Have fun browsing ! (and there are plenty of postdoc positions which pay 40K).
Generally, a person that finished the first (or sometimes second) year of grad school is on the level they should have been when granted a bachelor. Really !
If this sounds strange consider that people who graduate with Physics major often have never been exposed to Green's function. How can you practice physics in a modern world without knowing this ? This is highschool level.
What should happen is that instead of doing a curve and giving the top 1/3 A's students should be checked (thoroughly) for knowledge of basic concepts in the course and failed if they miss a single one. And the A's should go to those who know the material through and through.
Often, the companies with the best publication policy are those that are slightly behind in the field but with the funds to hope to catch up - they publish lots in an attempt to boost their image.
For example, I regularly saw students take advanced calculus that had problems with basic algebra (like what is 1/a+1/b). Bright students at that - they simply were not taught in highschool properly.
I am sorry, but you are not going to appreciate modern research without knowing algebra so you can do it without thinking. You could get away with unsure calculus (by replacing it with computers and algebra - though this is not ideal either), but algebra is a must. And, to think of it, geometry would be nice too.
Neither of these are anything cutting edge. It is just in the race to get all engineering students "know" calculus we end up with them missing on something a whole lot more basic - algebra, analytic geometry, logic.
And lastly, would not you think there should be progress ? Should not a student today be at least as good as average student 50 years ago ? After all back then some of these things were somewhat new and modern kids had lots of time to adapt.
You might think I am talking about luxury but it is not.
The attraction of academy for many years were special privileges of tenured faculty. Well, with more focus on short-term objectives these are being eroded - slowly or not so slowly.
For example, there used to be departments which did pure research (and did not teach anyone but grad students) - I don't know of a single one right now (except, perhaps, biomed - not really sure about this).
There were universities with provisions that immediate family gets their tuition expenses paid - these benefits are being phased out. One can go on.
These are all fine words, but in most places this is not what happens by default.
First of all academia is about teaching students. It used to be that the students were advanced enough so that teaching a course actually related to the research work, but this is not true anymore. Today undergrad is like a highschool especially if one considers the development in science and technology.
Secondly, at best, postdoc is a three-year position, often less. Which means you will not be thinking about any longterm research - in the time you have left over from comittee meetings, teaching classes and applying for grants.
Thirdly, there is a question of money. I know that it is often considered good manners not consider this, but I always found this silly. Money is a way to apply engineering to resource problems. If you are in science you should practice it.
So, one benchmark is to see whether you can freely afford the tools to do your research. Can you buy a computer that you need ? Does your grant/salary has enough to buy those Wiley or Springer books that you wanted ? Can you take them with you when you go on to the next job ? Can you buy a car or have an apartment close by so you don't waste time getting to and from office ? Can you go to the conference you are interested in ? More often then not the postdoc gets a small cut above a grad student..
A second benchmark is to look at sustainability - will you get paid enough (eventually) to let your children take the same path ? Would you be able to send them to the best school suited to their abilities ?
Lastly, on a more positive note (for the original poster), there are places when you can have fun - but these are defined by particular people, not establishments. Find someone you would like to work with.. Don't look for a university.
Ohh, and there are places like Lincoln labs or LANL which can be a whole lot of fun.
They are called wolves and the farmers delt with them.
Nonsense. Milk cows on a farm are safe.
It is from alternative reality called "user space"