I'm not American, but from my reading of Tom Clancy novels (yes, dubious source of information), I thought that while the President couldn't outright declare war on another country, he could send the Marines in for limited engagements?
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously.
Well, the difference between feng shui and some of the other superstitions you mentioned is that some feng shui is actually real, meaning that it works. The real problem is that some people have taken what used to be a highly local practice and over generalized it.
For some very simple examples:
- You don't situate a house on a "dragon's tail" because the dragon will become angry or stir in his sleep. A dragon's tail in this context means a certain shape of hill; this obviously comes from earthquake country.
- In Hong Kong, face your windows to the south east. This is probably because if you face east, you avoid the afternoon sun so your home will be cooler when you get back home after work. If you face south, you can catch the breeze off the ocean, again cooling you down. You don't want to face north because the winter wind will make your (unheated) home too cold in the winter. This probably dates from times when whites lived on Hong Kong Island and chinese lived in Kowloon.
- There is some rule about not living in a certain kind of valley; unfortunately I've forgotten exactly what it said. The point of it was to avoid swamps that lay in the bottom of valleys because they were mosquito breeding grounds.
Just because a bunch of con men have taken over the name, doesn't mean that all of feng shui is bogus...
Re:And I thought I liked the Fujitsui Lifebook
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 1
> I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony > laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin > ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem.
Did you read the specs? One of the integrated ports is a "LAN RJ-45 x1" which presumably means ethernet is included.
One cool feature which I haven't seen in other non-unix X servers (not that I've tried many, but I've seen eXceed and Mi/X on a Mac) is that you can set it to open X windows as top level windows managed by MS Windoze's WM. (then you don't need to run a UNIX WM.) You can use the traditional one-big-window style, too.
Well, I've never tried exceed on a Mac, but on the Windows version you can also do what you describe... That is, you can see a complete Unix desktop or you can have a Windows style menu borders etc. on your apps (CDE looks really strange this way) or you can remotely execute single applications and not start an entire desktop.
My suspicion is that probably in India, and maybe in China programming is taught in English.
Well, here in Hong Kong (where the standard of English is arguably higher than in the mainland), computer book shops are full of Chinese language texts interspersed with English phrases now and then. Most people I know also prefer to use Chinese Windows over the English version.
There must be a market out there for people who use laptops all day and can't deal with the higher resolution and refresh rates of a CRT.
[caveat: I write firmware at a company that makes interface boards for LCD displays]
I used to think that the versatility and brightness of CRTs made them superior displays but have now completely reversed my opinion. I use a 16" SXGA panel as my main display right now and it is miles better than staring at a CRT all day. The important things for me are sharpness and flatness.
Current TFT displays have fewer dead pixels than they used to and with power from mains you can get decent brightness (I wish more laptops had brighter displays when jacked into the wall...) With the latest scaling hardware, non-native resolutions look much better than they used to as well. Now, when I go home to my Sony CRT I find it annoyingly fuzzy:(
Also, I live in Hong Kong and space and heat considerations can be important as well (I imagine this is true throughout Asia and possibly Europe as well).
There is still a problem with cost, but a good size panel costs about as much as a 17" monitor used to only a couple of years ago so wait for wider adoption to drop the price (as a matter of fact, I think part of the reason they are so expensive is the high demand right now... as more plants come on line they should become less dear).
Well, one problem with this scenario is that AFAIK both Lotus and WordPerfect were written in assembly language. Is it really worth the pain of translating these to a higher level language and possibly losing some of the speed and efficiency that made them appealing in the first place?
I am assuming that they will need to be translated because a) if you are porting to a different operating system you might as well change languages while you are at it, b) if you want any help in maintaining the source you'll have a lot better luck in C than i86 asm.
I think the amount of effort needed to understand what the asm code does and then port to Linux would be close to as great as writing it from scratch. Also don't forget that something like WordPerfect has a lot of "dead code" that wouldn't be useful anymore (likely the printer driver/font metric stuff wouldn't be useful in a modern environment).
while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.
Well, yes and no. Windows isn't out of the box themeable, but there are third party solutions available. There are also virtual desktops available.
For example, there is a port of Afterstep to Windows called Litestep (I don't have a decent URL to post... you can try Litestep.net but it seems to be dead) which will give you virtual desktops.
Stardock has a product called Windowblinds which will skin titlebars, window borders, menus and buttons (not scroll bars or progress bars yet) as well as allowing translucency and bitmap backgrounds for explorer windows. They also have IconPackager (theme manager for icons) and Control Center (virtual desktops and app launcher [kind of like CDE bar or KDE bar). You can learn more at their web site.
Do I need a P.E. to succeed in today's industry? Will it be a limiting factor? In what situations would you reccomend taking it? I am open for any advice you may have.
As an electrical/electronic or computer engineer, having or lacking a license will probably not affect your career very greatly.
However, I'd still recommend for you to get your license. I'm a computer engineering graduate (working for three years so far, currently in embedded software) studying for my M.Sc. in EE but don't have my license yet (mostly because I am away from my home country and therefore can't fulfill the residency requirement). My dad is a P.Eng. as are many of the people I know (mostly hardware guys with some software thrown in). My wife is a geotechnical engineer and she most definitely will require one in the near future. The consensus seems to be:
Having a license does not get you promoted any faster or help you to find work in high tech.
A license does not mean that you have any particular expertise (contrast with CNE etc) other than a good engineering education from an accredited school and a history of good practice.
A license probably won't mean that you get paid more for a job (unless you are a civil or mechanical engineer in which case you can get paid LOTS more if you have a license in some cases).
It does mean that you are allowed to call yourself an engineer (don't tell me you worked so hard at school only to be prevented from printing the word 'engineer' on your business cards ). In some countries, "Engineer" is a title like Doctor (esp. in Spanish speaking ones I think).
If you are working for a small firm or consulting, this can be very important and in many jurisdictions, there is work that can only be performed by or signed off by engineers. For large corporations, there is sort of a blanket license they can use but this requires them to have a certain ratio of engineers to other staff.
Most P.Eng.s that I know also carry liability insurance (often as a package with their membership in professional associations). This is to cover your liability for designs you sign off on. Again, this applies more to Mechs and Civils. Remember that you are a member of a profession...
Very often, the professional associations will advertise conferences and so on. It is definitely worthwhile to attend these if possible (heck, they're probably subsidised with your membership dues).
A large part of joining a profession is agreeing to follow a code of ethical practice and responsibility (similar to law or medicine). In some places you take an oath swearing this.
Like law and medicine (and accounting I think), engineering is a self-regulating profession. Because of the effect that engineers can have on public safety, they traded some freedom in return for less regulation from the government. Whether this was a good bargain or not remains debatable (but was the right thing to do at the time IMO).
I'm rather surprised that so many Slashdotters don't know more about the profession. When I was an undergrad we were required to take courses about the history and practice of engineering. Does this mean that SDers are mostly computer science weenies?
Why are people comparing this book to Microserfs (which I strongly disliked)? I haven't read it yet, but from the plot summary it appears to be The Soul of a New Machine updated with PCs and the Internet (and Benoit sounds like a ripoff of Jean Louis Gassee to me). If the characters are as badly portrayed as the ones in Douglas Copeland's book (which I have to assume, from reading Po Bonson's Wired articles [most recently Gen Equity]) then all you have is a bunch of people running around being weird (for no other reason than to have "character") trying to get rich.
From the review, the book doesn't sound very interesting at all unless the prose is good (in which case it doesn't matter if it's about Silicon Valley). Do yourselves a favour and read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder or Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steve Levy instead. I think both Kidder and Levy are primarily journallists so they don't have a good grasp of technology, but they do have an excellent grasp of what makes computer geeks tick.
>Often the product is quite good, just an >unforunate language barrier is in place. And >in their defense, they speak English one >heck of a lot better then I speak... heck, >I don't even know *what* their language >is called, let alone how to speak it! But >alas, my fault is still my condition.
If you are talking about Asus, they are based in Taiwan, so presumably they speak Chinese (Mandarin to be more specific...)
I don't have much of a need for these devices except to play around, especially since I'm still a student. Somehow the stigma of being caught dead playing with a device as bulky as this and typing stuff in it is too much for me. Even the palm pilot is too much, although it would be neat to be able to put assignments into that and/or schedule my days a little bit better since I tend to get lazy.
All of these things cost quite a bit for a student, are they worth it? I've only gotten to use a palm pilot for a small period of time. Are there any students out there using palm-size devices with any luck?
Hi Ben,
I picked up a Pilot 5000 when I was finishing school, a Pilot Pro when it came out and a Psion Series 5 last year (and I'm still going to night school ) so I thought I could give you some thoughts on this.
I found that the Pilot was indispensable to me while I was in school. I used to carry a calendar book around with me to jot notes in and keep my schedule etc. Entering data was nice and easy, but *finding* stuff I'd previously written wasn't always fun. The searching abilities for a PDA are very valuable for me. A nice thing about the Pilot is that searching occurs across all apps/data. It's also smaller than a paper planner and you never need to look for a pen.
My schedule and contact list is simple enough that the Pilot has no trouble with it. A lot of people in sales etc. complain that (the address book especially) isn't powerfule enough for them. I don't use a desktop PIM so the included Pilot Desktop is plenty for me (and modern Pilots sync with Outlook).
The downsides to the Pilots were low contrast (steadily improved with each generation... the current ones are quite good), bad case design (but the new Palm V is great), not enough memory (addressed through third parties) and no backlight (introduced with the second generation). I also would have preferred an integrated rechargeable battery instead the ability to use AAA's because I am seldom that far from an outlet. I would love to see the ability to use compact flash or smart media added in the future.
Unfortunately, I was never able to take notes in class. I can't write graffiti fast enough and in engineering classes you often need to scribble diagrams and equations as well. I addition, in hostile environments it can be tough to write things by hand.
I picked up a Psion Series 5 because it offered a keyboard and most of the computing power and PDA functionality that I needed. I considered a Windows CE machine at the time, but found that they all felt too sluggish and had too much decoration clogging the limited screen real estate (an especially big shock if you are used to the Pilot). For the past year, I have successfully used the Psion to touch type notes in my classes. It doesn't have a small document length limit like the Pilot, has bulleting and formatting options and the ability to quickly insert sketches.
I also use the Psion as a serial console for my Linux box and as a serial debug console for embedded devices I program at work. When I wake up early enough, I download my e-mail to read on the bus. The main reason I am using the Psion right now instead of a Pilot even though it is bigger and clumsier (and the build quality is abysmal) is because of the keyboard. I find that I can type in environments wherein I would not dream of trying to write by hand.
Also, I read a lot of e-texts and the 640x240 screen fits a lot more text than the 160x160 of the Pilot (although the screen contrast is also very bad). The S5 can handle HTML and text natively and has automagic conversion for RTF, Word and a host of other word processor formats.
For me, PDAs are definitely worth it. They help to organise my life, help me to keep track of important information. Are they perfect? No, each machine is a different compromise (although the Palm V comes pretty close to perfect for me) but I definitely consider them useful enough to carry around. I'm not sure why you would consider it a "stigma" to carry a device as "big" as a PDA since most are smaller than equivalent paper planners. Then again, some people in my class type their notes on IBM PC110s and Toshiba Librettos (which although bigger, actually have worse keyboards than my S5!)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not American, but from my reading of Tom Clancy novels (yes, dubious source of information), I thought that while the President couldn't outright declare war on another country, he could send the Marines in for limited engagements?
Prioritize the tables that you need to generate.
Do some profiling on a simulation to figure out how much memory it takes to accomodate certain amount of user data.
Based on your profiles, generate only as many tables as you can comfortably fit. Obviously, fit the most important, speed improving, tables first.
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously.
Well, the difference between feng shui and some of the other superstitions you mentioned is that some feng shui is actually real, meaning that it works. The real problem is that some people have taken what used to be a highly local practice and over generalized it.
For some very simple examples:
- You don't situate a house on a "dragon's tail" because the dragon will become angry or stir in his sleep. A dragon's tail in this context means a certain shape of hill; this obviously comes from earthquake country.
- In Hong Kong, face your windows to the south east. This is probably because if you face east, you avoid the afternoon sun so your home will be cooler when you get back home after work. If you face south, you can catch the breeze off the ocean, again cooling you down. You don't want to face north because the winter wind will make your (unheated) home too cold in the winter. This probably dates from times when whites lived on Hong Kong Island and chinese lived in Kowloon.
- There is some rule about not living in a certain kind of valley; unfortunately I've forgotten exactly what it said. The point of it was to avoid swamps that lay in the bottom of valleys because they were mosquito breeding grounds.
Just because a bunch of con men have taken over the name, doesn't mean that all of feng shui is bogus...
> I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony
> laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin
> ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem.
Did you read the specs? One of the integrated ports is a "LAN RJ-45 x1" which presumably means ethernet is included.
peter said the following re: xwin32:
One cool feature which I haven't seen in other non-unix X servers (not that I've tried many, but I've seen eXceed and Mi/X on a Mac) is that you can set it to open X windows as top level windows managed by MS Windoze's WM. (then you don't need to run a UNIX WM.) You can use the traditional one-big-window style, too.
Well, I've never tried exceed on a Mac, but on the Windows version you can also do what you describe... That is, you can see a complete Unix desktop or you can have a Windows style menu borders etc. on your apps (CDE looks really strange this way) or you can remotely execute single applications and not start an entire desktop.
My suspicion is that probably in India, and maybe in China programming is taught in English.
Well, here in Hong Kong (where the standard of English is arguably higher than in the mainland), computer book shops are full of Chinese language texts interspersed with English phrases now and then. Most people I know also prefer to use Chinese Windows over the English version.
University courses are taught in English however.
I've used a Gateway LCD and I wanna ask LCD fans
:(
Why????
There must be a market out there for people who use laptops all day and can't deal with the higher resolution and refresh rates of a CRT.
[caveat: I write firmware at a company that makes interface boards for LCD displays]
I used to think that the versatility and brightness of CRTs made them superior displays but have now completely reversed my opinion. I use a 16" SXGA panel as my main display right now and it is miles better than staring at a CRT all day. The important things for me are sharpness and flatness.
Current TFT displays have fewer dead pixels than they used to and with power from mains you can get decent brightness (I wish more laptops had brighter displays when jacked into the wall...) With the latest scaling hardware, non-native resolutions look much better than they used to as well. Now, when I go home to my Sony CRT I find it annoyingly fuzzy
Also, I live in Hong Kong and space and heat considerations can be important as well (I imagine this is true throughout Asia and possibly Europe as well).
There is still a problem with cost, but a good size panel costs about as much as a 17" monitor used to only a couple of years ago so wait for wider adoption to drop the price (as a matter of fact, I think part of the reason they are so expensive is the high demand right now... as more plants come on line they should become less dear).
LCD screens don't have degauss buttons. It'd be like a power switch on a pair of headphones
Well, my headphones have a power switch because they're cordless... Not everyone is a slave of the wire!
Well, one problem with this scenario is that AFAIK both Lotus and WordPerfect were written in assembly language. Is it really worth the pain of translating these to a higher level language and possibly losing some of the speed and efficiency that made them appealing in the first place?
I am assuming that they will need to be translated because a) if you are porting to a different operating system you might as well change languages while you are at it, b) if you want any help in maintaining the source you'll have a lot better luck in C than i86 asm.
I think the amount of effort needed to understand what the asm code does and then port to Linux would be close to as great as writing it from scratch. Also don't forget that something like WordPerfect has a lot of "dead code" that wouldn't be useful anymore (likely the printer driver/font metric stuff wouldn't be useful in a modern environment).
while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.
Well, yes and no. Windows isn't out of the box themeable, but there are third party solutions available. There are also virtual desktops available.
For example, there is a port of Afterstep to Windows called Litestep (I don't have a decent URL to post... you can try Litestep.net but it seems to be dead) which will give you virtual desktops.
Stardock has a product called Windowblinds which will skin titlebars, window borders, menus and buttons (not scroll bars or progress bars yet) as well as allowing translucency and bitmap backgrounds for explorer windows. They also have IconPackager (theme manager for icons) and Control Center (virtual desktops and app launcher [kind of like CDE bar or KDE bar). You can learn more at their web site.
As an electrical/electronic or computer engineer, having or lacking a license will probably not affect your career very greatly.
However, I'd still recommend for you to get your license. I'm a computer engineering graduate (working for three years so far, currently in embedded software) studying for my M.Sc. in EE but don't have my license yet (mostly because I am away from my home country and therefore can't fulfill the residency requirement). My dad is a P.Eng. as are many of the people I know (mostly hardware guys with some software thrown in). My wife is a geotechnical engineer and she most definitely will require one in the near future. The consensus seems to be:
Having a license does not get you promoted any faster or help you to find work in high tech.
A license does not mean that you have any particular expertise (contrast with CNE etc) other than a good engineering education from an accredited school and a history of good practice.
A license probably won't mean that you get paid more for a job (unless you are a civil or mechanical engineer in which case you can get paid LOTS more if you have a license in some cases).
It does mean that you are allowed to call yourself an engineer (don't tell me you worked so hard at school only to be prevented from printing the word 'engineer' on your business cards ). In some countries, "Engineer" is a title like Doctor (esp. in Spanish speaking ones I think).
If you are working for a small firm or consulting, this can be very important and in many jurisdictions, there is work that can only be performed by or signed off by engineers. For large corporations, there is sort of a blanket license they can use but this requires them to have a certain ratio of engineers to other staff.
Most P.Eng.s that I know also carry liability insurance (often as a package with their membership in professional associations). This is to cover your liability for designs you sign off on. Again, this applies more to Mechs and Civils. Remember that you are a member of a profession...
Very often, the professional associations will advertise conferences and so on. It is definitely worthwhile to attend these if possible (heck, they're probably subsidised with your membership dues).
A large part of joining a profession is agreeing to follow a code of ethical practice and responsibility (similar to law or medicine). In some places you take an oath swearing this.
Like law and medicine (and accounting I think), engineering is a self-regulating profession. Because of the effect that engineers can have on public safety, they traded some freedom in return for less regulation from the government. Whether this was a good bargain or not remains debatable (but was the right thing to do at the time IMO).
I'm rather surprised that so many Slashdotters don't know more about the profession. When I was an undergrad we were required to take courses about the history and practice of engineering. Does this mean that SDers are mostly computer science weenies?
Why are people comparing this book to Microserfs (which I strongly disliked)? I haven't read it yet, but from the plot summary it appears to be The Soul of a New Machine updated with PCs and the Internet (and Benoit sounds like a ripoff of Jean Louis Gassee to me). If the characters are as badly portrayed as the ones in Douglas Copeland's book (which I have to assume, from reading Po Bonson's Wired articles [most recently Gen Equity]) then all you have is a bunch of people running around being weird (for no other reason than to have "character") trying to get rich.
From the review, the book doesn't sound very interesting at all unless the prose is good (in which case it doesn't matter if it's about Silicon Valley). Do yourselves a favour and read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder or Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steve Levy instead. I think both Kidder and Levy are primarily journallists so they don't have a good grasp of technology, but they do have an excellent grasp of what makes computer geeks tick.
>Often the product is quite good, just an
>unforunate language barrier is in place. And
>in their defense, they speak English one
>heck of a lot better then I speak... heck,
>I don't even know *what* their language
>is called, let alone how to speak it! But
>alas, my fault is still my condition.
If you are talking about Asus, they are based in Taiwan, so presumably they speak Chinese (Mandarin to be more specific...)
I don't have much of a need for these devices except to play around, especially since I'm still a student. Somehow the stigma of being caught dead playing with a device as bulky as this and typing stuff in it is too much for me. Even the palm pilot is too much, although it would be neat to be able to put assignments into that and/or schedule my days a little bit better since I tend to get lazy.
All of these things cost quite a bit for a student, are they worth it? I've only gotten to use a palm pilot for a small period of time. Are there any students out there using palm-size devices with any luck?
Hi Ben,
I picked up a Pilot 5000 when I was finishing school, a Pilot Pro when it came out and a Psion Series 5 last year (and I'm still going to night school ) so I thought I could give you some thoughts on this.
I found that the Pilot was indispensable to me while I was in school. I used to carry a calendar book around with me to jot notes in and keep my schedule etc. Entering data was nice and easy, but *finding* stuff I'd previously written wasn't always fun. The searching abilities for a PDA are very valuable for me. A nice thing about the Pilot is that searching occurs across all apps/data. It's also smaller than a paper planner and you never need to look for a pen.
My schedule and contact list is simple enough that the Pilot has no trouble with it. A lot of people in sales etc. complain that (the address book especially) isn't powerfule enough for them. I don't use a desktop PIM so the included Pilot Desktop is plenty for me (and modern Pilots sync with Outlook).
The downsides to the Pilots were low contrast (steadily improved with each generation... the current ones are quite good), bad case design (but the new Palm V is great), not enough memory (addressed through third parties) and no backlight (introduced with the second generation). I also would have preferred an integrated rechargeable battery instead the ability to use AAA's because I am seldom that far from an outlet. I would love to see the ability to use compact flash or smart media added in the future.
Unfortunately, I was never able to take notes in class. I can't write graffiti fast enough and in engineering classes you often need to scribble diagrams and equations as well. I addition, in hostile environments it can be tough to write things by hand.
I picked up a Psion Series 5 because it offered a keyboard and most of the computing power and PDA functionality that I needed. I considered a Windows CE machine at the time, but found that they all felt too sluggish and had too much decoration clogging the limited screen real estate (an especially big shock if you are used to the Pilot). For the past year, I have successfully used the Psion to touch type notes in my classes. It doesn't have a small document length limit like the Pilot, has bulleting and formatting options and the ability to quickly insert sketches.
I also use the Psion as a serial console for my Linux box and as a serial debug console for embedded devices I program at work. When I wake up early enough, I download my e-mail to read on the bus. The main reason I am using the Psion right now instead of a Pilot even though it is bigger and clumsier (and the build quality is abysmal) is because of the keyboard. I find that I can type in environments wherein I would not dream of trying to write by hand.
Also, I read a lot of e-texts and the 640x240 screen fits a lot more text than the 160x160 of the Pilot (although the screen contrast is also very bad). The S5 can handle HTML and text natively and has automagic conversion for RTF, Word and a host of other word processor formats.
For me, PDAs are definitely worth it. They help to organise my life, help me to keep track of important information. Are they perfect? No, each machine is a different compromise (although the Palm V comes pretty close to perfect for me) but I definitely consider them useful enough to carry around. I'm not sure why you would consider it a "stigma" to carry a device as "big" as a PDA since most are smaller than equivalent paper planners. Then again, some people in my class type their notes on IBM PC110s and Toshiba Librettos (which although bigger, actually have worse keyboards than my S5!)
Hope this gives you an additional point of view.