As a desktop user you might be able to get away with any old filesystem......
However, if you have a server that has to have high performance and has data that you *really* care about then one of ReiserFS, XFS, EXT3, etc... becomes a *really* good idea.
The only conspiracy story I like goes along the lines of...
"All the conspiracy theories are started by the government to keep all the nutters of the world worring about all sorts of crazy stuff. This way they will never notice now fucked the operations of government really are"
This works unless they are smart enough to use any old standard modem and asscoiated software to send and receieve faxes. If this is the case you have not wasted any of their paper or toner and have simply cost yourself a phone call.
The idea of Mac OS on intel based hardware is not too hard to believe, I think it is a big step to say that Apple would be happy with it running on generic clone PC's.
Apple offerings have allways worked so well because they have controlled the hardware religously. It has hurth them in some ways but also been their greatest strength. (Look at th weird errors that can occur with weird PC hardware and Linux of Windows)
Possibly Microsft have even realised that half their OS programming effort has been to make it work with all the weird hardware configurations. This might be part of their push for Pallidum (but not tha main reason) to get truly standardised hardware to make OS programming easier and more robust.
While I'm not one to agree with the RIAA/MPAA etc.. could the real issue here be bandwidth?
If you look at what is considered broadband in the domestic market (around 1MBit) and compare that to MP3 size vs DivX etc.. size it might just be that bandwidth and the ability to share hasn't caught up with the movie business yet.
If you take domestic broadband to the 10 or 100 Mbit sort of stage then the situation might change dramatically.
This is why software engineering is currently a misnomer. When design and verification is taken as seriously in software development as it is in fields like electrical, civil and mechanical engineering then we can really call it software engineering.
More importantly on the cost issue the cable cost is usually about 5% of the installed price on every job I have worked on. Cable costs nothing, it's electricians that are expensive.
I'm lead to believe this is the default behaviour of Windows XP Embedded. At deployment time you can select if the system is going to allow further applications to be installed or not.
So as it stands currently all the rubbish about not being able to install programs onto Windows XP Embedded is just that rubbish!
(Warning I have worked for the following company during my undergraduate EE degree)
For people interested in seeing how far NLSR (Natural Language Speech Recoginition) can be pushed for specific applications go and look at VeCommerce and their demo clips. The betting system I helped build can take betting sentences of over 100 words with 96% accuracy. (Data from a live system with 1200 lines)
Customers HATE DTMF based systems, this sort of thing is the way of the future.
It is worth nothing that the reson that apple has been producing such small machines (from the Mac Plus, Mac Classic days to the current iMacs) is that they realsied that 99% of all computer users NEVER want to open the case.
As far as I can see this is a fact that the rest of the PC industry has never caught onto properly. If you sensibly match all the components in a machine then most users will never need or want to change a thing.
This is different to the/. crowd who want to do this all the time but we are hardly a random sample are we.
He asked how many drops of solder they were using and why. He was given an answer around 48 (don't have the book Titan in forn of me right at the moment) but they could not give him a good reason for this number.
Thus he required them to start at that number and decrease it untill the process was no longer satisfactory and then incrse by 1 from that point. This insured they used the least amount of solder that performed to the required level.
That's simply smart and efficient use of resources.
This completely misses the beauty of using a stack/RPN based system. The more complex the equations you have to deal with the more you appreicate RPN.
With RPN you will never have to use bracketed notation. The stack can very easily take care of all of that. You simply work across the rows of fractions and functions, nomatter how complex of bracketed it might be to write down. This is the beauty of RPN.
It just happen that it maps across to hardware and a stack much easier than any other system and that's why HP orignally went with RPN.
I would like to take issue with the manner in which the author assumes that error/warning message dumped to the console are automatically bad.
In most cases (particulary GUI programs) there may be little things that the system can't do. Can't find an icon, a pixel map or a help file. How annoying would software be if it asked you to try and find *every* little thing that it could not find, irrespective of how insignificant to the running of the program.
I think it is one of the great things about OSS that on the whole the developers are prepared to print a lot more error/debugging information than most closed source software as it gives you half a chance at working out what went wrong. Much better than hiding them where no one can see (as hapens with a lot of software).
Don't get me wrong we should all be striving towards better quality software but the number of error message you print is a pretty bad metric for software quality.
Java, there's no way to pass variables by reference
On the contrary, all classes are passed by reference under java, as this is the was the system operates there is no need to state it explicitly like a & in C++. This is exactly the type of issue that Java hides from you, making it a much nicer language to propgram in.
Computer programming education needs to reflect the needs of different types of students. My opinion is there are two basic categorisations of students in this regard:
Hardware/OS/Device Level Students
This group encompasses electrical engineers, computer engineers and all such people to whom how the computer is actually going to go about performing an action is important. These people need to be taught in a language that is implementable in hardware, such as C. This was the lesson in my Uni, when after a few years of only Java in 1st and 2nd year courses, people were freaking out when it came to operating systems and wacky concepts like pointers, memory management and the like....
Application Level Students
This group encompasses the type of people who want to talk about information processing, and to who OO deisgn and such things are important. This group of people don't care much about how the computer manages classes, except that they can write them and that it does what it's told. For this group Java is a fantastic language for it gives all the OO design etc... without the memory management etc.. hangovers from C that are in C++ .
I also acknowledge that many students will fit into both of these categories, and such students should be learning both types of languages. A good programming education for a computer engineering student should probably encompass both Java and C/C++ IMHO.
As a point of clarification I believe the distinction between hardwood and softwood is related to the cell structure having radial or longitudinal pours. This is why hardwoods are so much harder to dry than softwoods.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there may have been 1 or 2 more units than that sold.
I have a friend who owns 5 of them for the sole purpose of working on Xbox Linux hacking.....
As a desktop user you might be able to get away with any old filesystem......
However, if you have a server that has to have high performance and has data that you *really* care about then one of ReiserFS, XFS, EXT3, etc... becomes a *really* good idea.
The only conspiracy story I like goes along the lines of...
"All the conspiracy theories are started by the government to keep all the nutters of the world worring about all sorts of crazy stuff. This way they will never notice now fucked the operations of government really are"
This works unless they are smart enough to use any old standard modem and asscoiated software to send and receieve faxes. If this is the case you have not wasted any of their paper or toner and have simply cost yourself a phone call.
Sorry to spoil the fun.........
The idea of Mac OS on intel based hardware is not too hard to believe, I think it is a big step to say that Apple would be happy with it running on generic clone PC's.
Apple offerings have allways worked so well because they have controlled the hardware religously. It has hurth them in some ways but also been their greatest strength. (Look at th weird errors that can occur with weird PC hardware and Linux of Windows)
Possibly Microsft have even realised that half their OS programming effort has been to make it work with all the weird hardware configurations. This might be part of their push for Pallidum (but not tha main reason) to get truly standardised hardware to make OS programming easier and more robust.
While I'm not one to agree with the RIAA/MPAA etc.. could the real issue here be bandwidth?
If you look at what is considered broadband in the domestic market (around 1MBit) and compare that to MP3 size vs DivX etc.. size it might just be that bandwidth and the ability to share hasn't caught up with the movie business yet.
If you take domestic broadband to the 10 or 100 Mbit sort of stage then the situation might change dramatically.
This is why software engineering is currently a misnomer. When design and verification is taken as seriously in software development as it is in fields like electrical, civil and mechanical engineering then we can really call it software engineering.
On *nix systems it's better to just run things is a chroot jail. Don't just disguise things, make sure they are not there to use in the first place.
More importantly on the cost issue the cable cost is usually about 5% of the installed price on every job I have worked on. Cable costs nothing, it's electricians that are expensive.
This is the attraction of wireless systems.
So as it stands currently all the rubbish about not being able to install programs onto Windows XP Embedded is just that rubbish!
For people interested in seeing how far NLSR (Natural Language Speech Recoginition) can be pushed for specific applications go and look at VeCommerce and their demo clips. The betting system I helped build can take betting sentences of over 100 words with 96% accuracy. (Data from a live system with 1200 lines)
Customers HATE DTMF based systems, this sort of thing is the way of the future.
As far as I can see this is a fact that the rest of the PC industry has never caught onto properly. If you sensibly match all the components in a machine then most users will never need or want to change a thing.
This is different to the /. crowd who want to do this all the time but we are hardly a random sample are we.
Kelv!
The Rockerfeller line is incorrect.
He asked how many drops of solder they were using and why. He was given an answer around 48 (don't have the book Titan in forn of me right at the moment) but they could not give him a good reason for this number.
Thus he required them to start at that number and decrease it untill the process was no longer satisfactory and then incrse by 1 from that point. This insured they used the least amount of solder that performed to the required level.
That's simply smart and efficient use of resources.
With RPN you will never have to use bracketed notation. The stack can very easily take care of all of that. You simply work across the rows of fractions and functions, nomatter how complex of bracketed it might be to write down. This is the beauty of RPN.
It just happen that it maps across to hardware and a stack much easier than any other system and that's why HP orignally went with RPN.
In most cases (particulary GUI programs) there may be little things that the system can't do. Can't find an icon, a pixel map or a help file. How annoying would software be if it asked you to try and find *every* little thing that it could not find, irrespective of how insignificant to the running of the program.
I think it is one of the great things about OSS that on the whole the developers are prepared to print a lot more error/debugging information than most closed source software as it gives you half a chance at working out what went wrong. Much better than hiding them where no one can see (as hapens with a lot of software).
Don't get me wrong we should all be striving towards better quality software but the number of error message you print is a pretty bad metric for software quality.
Kelv!
On the contrary, all classes are passed by reference under java, as this is the was the system operates there is no need to state it explicitly like a & in C++. This is exactly the type of issue that Java hides from you, making it a much nicer language to propgram in.
kelv
- Hardware/OS/Device Level Students
- Application Level Students
I also acknowledge that many students will fit into both of these categories, and such students should be learning both types of languages. A good programming education for a computer engineering student should probably encompass both Java and C/C++ IMHO.This group encompasses electrical engineers, computer engineers and all such people to whom how the computer is actually going to go about performing an action is important. These people need to be taught in a language that is implementable in hardware, such as C. This was the lesson in my Uni, when after a few years of only Java in 1st and 2nd year courses, people were freaking out when it came to operating systems and wacky concepts like pointers, memory management and the like....
This group encompasses the type of people who want to talk about information processing, and to who OO deisgn and such things are important. This group of people don't care much about how the computer manages classes, except that they can write them and that it does what it's told. For this group Java is a fantastic language for it gives all the OO design etc... without the memory management etc.. hangovers from C that are in C++ .
As a point of clarification I believe the distinction between hardwood and softwood is related to the cell structure having radial or longitudinal pours. This is why hardwoods are so much harder to dry than softwoods.