I'll chime in because that is my experience as well. with both home and work PCs.
Once I get through the install of the windows updates, the systems performance pretty much hits a steady state, as long as I maintain it.
I do see others having this problem and I really don't know what the difference in usage is. I install and uninstall software fairly routinely in the course of my job, so that can't be the only factor.
By showing bad panda errors instead of the image requested for months so you get people who want to avoid your site at all costs? Yeah, that's how to court users.
That just isn't true. German supermarkets in the UK sell a lot products made in Germany at slightly higher prices than the really cheap Chinese stuff. Tools, gardening equipment, furniture, clothing etc. People are happy to pay a bit more for quality.
Absolutely. When a quality American-made product is available that isn't outrageously more expensive, I go with the American made product. Some examples that I've bought in the last year: floor mats, yard rakes, snow shovels, kids toys... When you compare the quality of the Fisher Price toys that were made in America vs. the ones made overseas the difference is staggering. It is a real shame that they went the Chinese route when Little Tykes can made damn good stuff here for about the same price. Also, I'd rather have a shovel or a rake built to last for years that is twice as a expensive as a cheap Chinese piece of crap that will break after one season of heavy use and force you to go out and buy a replacement mid-task.
Alternatively, these stories are publicized and spread because we have developed an effective strategy against this approach and WANT someone to think we can't win against them.
Pretty much matches my experience. The Windows 7 experience is so good, I have no real desire to spend a lot of time making something else work. Additionally my experience with desktop Linux, even Ubuntu has been no where as good as Windows 7.
Shame we don't have a tax structure in place that actually allows us to do what we did back in the 50's and 60's when it was all built. Maybe we should look at what we were doing differently back then.
I found it very easy to work with and is only slightly more verbose than VB or PowerBuilder.
Frankly a language that forces programmers to do the right thing up front might just be the thing to do. It's always faster to re-type something than to try to find the bug in your code after it is running.
The problem is that they have never seen an instance where they have needed to do what you describe. Just like most of folks have never needed to know how to skin and clean game any more.
Aside from my liberal arts classes in college, I never have used those skills in the 15 years I've been in the workplace.
The ability to find stuff very quickly on search engines is something that I need on a day-to-day basis and has had the president of my company come into my office with requests for me to find something for him.
Virtually any new business problem can be researched, overviewed, found in a highly rated book that describes the topic, one-click on Amazon with over night shipping, and read through the chapter that details how to do what you need to do.
The ability to determine the accuracy of that information, digest that research, mold it to the problem at hand, and write it effectively into proposals, designs, and code is what is useful in my job.
Unfortunately, colleges are just spitting out kids who have never really learned how to work together on a project, reuse code, or share information out of the fear that they will be called a plagiarist by some automated tool. At best their experience is limited to a "software engineering" class or internship.
The skill of being able to find things quickly is paramount in getting them up to speed in that area, because once you let them know they don't have to code EVERYTHING from scratch, they are more than happy to search code libraries for what they need.
I look forward to the day when we have coded better search engines that can search on some of the meta-properties of text rather than just the words or patterns.
My TimeWarner DVR has a second set of outputs and a "Copy to VCR" function. Normally, when you use the DVR, whatever you are watching comes from both outputs. However, when you use "Copy to VCR" whatever is playing on the DVR playback channel goes out Output 2 and you can still watch TV on Output 1.
I've been burning shows for the kids to DVD so we can record more shows on the DVR and still have them for playback.
This is mostly what I am hoping he does. The book actually lends itself nicely to being split into two parts, though I think the first should be cut with them being captured by the wood elves. An interesting bit of filler would be to show the attack on dale, the battle where Smaug takes the Lonely Mountain in the first place, and the escape of the dwarves.
Fossil fuel resources, certain mineral resources, land suitable for agriculture, and ocean stocks are most certainly a zero-sum game, when only taking earth into account. Widespread adoption of solar power won't save us if we kill the oceans or the great plains turn into a desert.
Even the resources that are naturally renewing stop being so when the rate of usage exceeds the rate of renewal, as some evidence suggests is already starting to happen with the oceans.
Solar power only changes one of those variables and introduces its own set of problems if used on a massive enough scale.
Population may be retracting in some first world countries, but the footprint of consumption is not.
Google's actions are a good step in the right direction. But think of what we could have done for our foreign oil dependence if we had spent all the money from the Iraq war on developing alternative energy?
How is this different than the case of the Chinese journalist jailed by information handed over by Yahoo? After all what they did was illegal in China?
Frankly Gates doesn't have to do anything in the renewable energy market, what he is doing through his foundation is saving more lives than can be counted, not exploiting current pc trends towards "everything global warming", doing proven work that benefits people today. Hell, his foundation is more important than Microsoft in my book. Trade some "evil" here for worlds of good elsewhere.
The harsh reality is that the more people that survive, the more resources are consumed. Earth is a zero sum game and we are already running negative on sustainability. The Gates Foundation's goals are laudable, but without efforts like these, they will only worsen our problems.
We need to have an Apollo project for renewable energy and subsidize conversion of our automobile industry away from gas. We need cars that have a minimal environmental impact throughout the WHOLE life cycle, not just when used by a consumer.
They wrote their code stack from scratch. They should have modified an existing one that was proven to work. Either way, I think this is a case of sloppy programming. I don't think it is worth mention aside from the case what the closest thing to a memory leak is that you can have. Unfortunately, that too should have come to mind from them. They ruled that out because "most of [their] code is written in garbage-collected C#". Just because a language is garbage collected, it doesn't mean you can just ignore the issues. All reference to the object must be removed for it to be deleted. This is definitely a case of sloppy programming. I would be embarrassed if my name were attached to this
We have to teach every new developer to share and reuse code and generally avoid continually reinventing the wheel because the anti-cheating rules in college keep them from learning it there. They were probably required to create it from scratch. There needs to be an upper level class where students are given projects that are impossible to complete in the allotted time unless they reuse code that is readily available.
The Orange Box actually had me thinking about backing down from my stance against Steam. I'm glad I didn't spend the $50 after this stunt. Valve won't be getting any of my money.
It seems like what is needed is a WiFi probe that checks to see if the card is known & supported or if firmware is required and then provide a standard way of telling the user that they need to install drivers and pulling them off the manufacturer's CD. All the card makers would then have to do is to create a Linux directory on the CD where the driver, firmware, and INF file was located, files that are installed on the PC anyways.
I had read that WiFi has "solved" in the latest release of Ubuntu and have long been wireless in my home network, even for the desktop machines.
After trying all the non-NDISWRAPPER options, I finally used that tool and was able to get WiFi up and running, but even with that, it fails to initialize properly about half the time and I have to manually restart networking.
Combined with not having support for the latest NVIDIA drivers available through the package manager and having to recompile the drivers after a kernel security patch, this would have been an utter failure if I was new to this. NVIDIA is partially to blame as well, since they could well make their drivers have a safe mode that will work with cards released after the drivers, but the 8X series of cards has been out for how long and the driver still isn't in the package manager?
The lack of fail-safe mode in X after all these years is just insane. Fortunately, we shouldn't have to wait too much longer for that to be a mainstream patch.
VB is great for doing small client/server applications that are user-interface heavy.. aka most business applications.
Needed something for a large client/server project that is user-interface heavy? Well, then you have tools like PowerBuilder.
Need software that does large-scale matrix operations to solve least-cost optimization problems? HINT: VB and PowerBuilder are not the right tools. You can get away with prototyping it with them, but your production code is probably going to be in C or C++.
The same idea can be applied to databases. MySQL, Access, MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2.. they all have a place and a function where they are the best tool for the job.
Bigotry just narrows your options.
On the topic of the use of math in comp-sci... It seems to me, after a lot of years in the software business, that the primary function of all that math was to help teach problem solving and logic. Physics is wonderful for teaching what I call "correct-thinking", since you can "solve" many physics problems in the wrong way and get a "correct" answer, but one that in the long run is a fallacy. This is coming from someone who took all the same courses as a math major through junior year and held the highest GPA in math in his class, at that point I completed my minor.
If we focused more on those topics instead of developing the skills through as a side-effect of other courses taken, then I think we would be a lot better off. I see a lot of people fresh out of computer science who make errors in "correct-thinking", rather than having any kind of error in coding.
Slashdot Mirror
The project lead is one Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz!
Link for further proof: http://phineasandferb.wikia.com/wiki/S%27Winter/Transcript
I'll chime in because that is my experience as well. with both home and work PCs.
Once I get through the install of the windows updates, the systems performance pretty much hits a steady state, as long as I maintain it.
I do see others having this problem and I really don't know what the difference in usage is. I install and uninstall software fairly routinely in the course of my job, so that can't be the only factor.
By showing bad panda errors instead of the image requested for months so you get people who want to avoid your site at all costs? Yeah, that's how to court users.
That just isn't true. German supermarkets in the UK sell a lot products made in Germany at slightly higher prices than the really cheap Chinese stuff. Tools, gardening equipment, furniture, clothing etc. People are happy to pay a bit more for quality.
Absolutely. When a quality American-made product is available that isn't outrageously more expensive, I go with the American made product. Some examples that I've bought in the last year: floor mats, yard rakes, snow shovels, kids toys... When you compare the quality of the Fisher Price toys that were made in America vs. the ones made overseas the difference is staggering. It is a real shame that they went the Chinese route when Little Tykes can made damn good stuff here for about the same price. Also, I'd rather have a shovel or a rake built to last for years that is twice as a expensive as a cheap Chinese piece of crap that will break after one season of heavy use and force you to go out and buy a replacement mid-task.
Alternatively, these stories are publicized and spread because we have developed an effective strategy against this approach and WANT someone to think we can't win against them.
Pretty much matches my experience. The Windows 7 experience is so good, I have no real desire to spend a lot of time making something else work. Additionally my experience with desktop Linux, even Ubuntu has been no where as good as Windows 7.
Shame we don't have a tax structure in place that actually allows us to do what we did back in the 50's and 60's when it was all built. Maybe we should look at what we were doing differently back then.
Not to mention they have an SR-71 at the Intrepid. Shuttle makes a nice addition to that.
I use sleep mode all the time on windows XP with my Inspiron 9400. I've never had a problem with it.
How about letting it expire and acting on making it illegal in the next term?
Think of it this way....
It's ONLY a $50 premium for Microsoft's high-performance OS.
Likewise, I also used Ada in college.
I found it very easy to work with and is only slightly more verbose than VB or PowerBuilder.
Frankly a language that forces programmers to do the right thing up front might just be the thing to do. It's always faster to re-type something than to try to find the bug in your code after it is running.
The problem is that they have never seen an instance where they have needed to do what you describe. Just like most of folks have never needed to know how to skin and clean game any more.
Aside from my liberal arts classes in college, I never have used those skills in the 15 years I've been in the workplace.
The ability to find stuff very quickly on search engines is something that I need on a day-to-day basis and has had the president of my company come into my office with requests for me to find something for him.
Virtually any new business problem can be researched, overviewed, found in a highly rated book that describes the topic, one-click on Amazon with over night shipping, and read through the chapter that details how to do what you need to do.
The ability to determine the accuracy of that information, digest that research, mold it to the problem at hand, and write it effectively into proposals, designs, and code is what is useful in my job.
Unfortunately, colleges are just spitting out kids who have never really learned how to work together on a project, reuse code, or share information out of the fear that they will be called a plagiarist by some automated tool. At best their experience is limited to a "software engineering" class or internship.
The skill of being able to find things quickly is paramount in getting them up to speed in that area, because once you let them know they don't have to code EVERYTHING from scratch, they are more than happy to search code libraries for what they need.
I look forward to the day when we have coded better search engines that can search on some of the meta-properties of text rather than just the words or patterns.
My TimeWarner DVR has a second set of outputs and a "Copy to VCR" function. Normally, when you use the DVR, whatever you are watching comes from both outputs. However, when you use "Copy to VCR" whatever is playing on the DVR playback channel goes out Output 2 and you can still watch TV on Output 1.
I've been burning shows for the kids to DVD so we can record more shows on the DVR and still have them for playback.
This is mostly what I am hoping he does. The book actually lends itself nicely to being split into two parts, though I think the first should be cut with them being captured by the wood elves. An interesting bit of filler would be to show the attack on dale, the battle where Smaug takes the Lonely Mountain in the first place, and the escape of the dwarves.
Fossil fuel resources, certain mineral resources, land suitable for agriculture, and ocean stocks are most certainly a zero-sum game, when only taking earth into account. Widespread adoption of solar power won't save us if we kill the oceans or the great plains turn into a desert.
Even the resources that are naturally renewing stop being so when the rate of usage exceeds the rate of renewal, as some evidence suggests is already starting to happen with the oceans.
Solar power only changes one of those variables and introduces its own set of problems if used on a massive enough scale.
Population may be retracting in some first world countries, but the footprint of consumption is not.
Google's actions are a good step in the right direction. But think of what we could have done for our foreign oil dependence if we had spent all the money from the Iraq war on developing alternative energy?
How is this different than the case of the Chinese journalist jailed by information handed over by Yahoo? After all what they did was illegal in China?
The harsh reality is that the more people that survive, the more resources are consumed. Earth is a zero sum game and we are already running negative on sustainability. The Gates Foundation's goals are laudable, but without efforts like these, they will only worsen our problems.
We need to have an Apollo project for renewable energy and subsidize conversion of our automobile industry away from gas. We need cars that have a minimal environmental impact throughout the WHOLE life cycle, not just when used by a consumer.
We have to teach every new developer to share and reuse code and generally avoid continually reinventing the wheel because the anti-cheating rules in college keep them from learning it there. They were probably required to create it from scratch. There needs to be an upper level class where students are given projects that are impossible to complete in the allotted time unless they reuse code that is readily available.
Wonder if this could be tuned to effect DNA or portions of DNA...
Could this be potentially used to kill?
The Orange Box actually had me thinking about backing down from my stance against Steam. I'm glad I didn't spend the $50 after this stunt. Valve won't be getting any of my money.
Wouldn't it rather be IBM that might offer this, since they actually make the cell?
It seems like what is needed is a WiFi probe that checks to see if the card is known & supported or if firmware is required and then provide a standard way of telling the user that they need to install drivers and pulling them off the manufacturer's CD. All the card makers would then have to do is to create a Linux directory on the CD where the driver, firmware, and INF file was located, files that are installed on the PC anyways.
This was a major pain for me as well.
I had read that WiFi has "solved" in the latest release of Ubuntu and have long been wireless in my home network, even for the desktop machines.
After trying all the non-NDISWRAPPER options, I finally used that tool and was able to get WiFi up and running, but even with that, it fails to initialize properly about half the time and I have to manually restart networking.
Combined with not having support for the latest NVIDIA drivers available through the package manager and having to recompile the drivers after a kernel security patch, this would have been an utter failure if I was new to this. NVIDIA is partially to blame as well, since they could well make their drivers have a safe mode that will work with cards released after the drivers, but the 8X series of cards has been out for how long and the driver still isn't in the package manager?
The lack of fail-safe mode in X after all these years is just insane. Fortunately, we shouldn't have to wait too much longer for that to be a mainstream patch.
Use the right tool for the right problem.
VB is great for doing small client/server applications that are user-interface heavy.. aka most business applications.
Needed something for a large client/server project that is user-interface heavy? Well, then you have tools like PowerBuilder.
Need software that does large-scale matrix operations to solve least-cost optimization problems? HINT: VB and PowerBuilder are not the right tools. You can get away with prototyping it with them, but your production code is probably going to be in C or C++.
The same idea can be applied to databases. MySQL, Access, MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2.. they all have a place and a function where they are the best tool for the job.
Bigotry just narrows your options.
On the topic of the use of math in comp-sci... It seems to me, after a lot of years in the software business, that the primary function of all that math was to help teach problem solving and logic. Physics is wonderful for teaching what I call "correct-thinking", since you can "solve" many physics problems in the wrong way and get a "correct" answer, but one that in the long run is a fallacy. This is coming from someone who took all the same courses as a math major through junior year and held the highest GPA in math in his class, at that point I completed my minor.
If we focused more on those topics instead of developing the skills through as a side-effect of other courses taken, then I think we would be a lot better off. I see a lot of people fresh out of computer science who make errors in "correct-thinking", rather than having any kind of error in coding.