If you sell software, GPL in a dual license setup seems to be a succesfull combination. The GPL helps in keeping the usage of code transparant.
If you do it through consultancy (implement something for a specific customer) I would pick Apache. It provides the company you worked for security that the specific stuff is theirs without any strings, yet you can create a nice community around it.
Actually, only the postbank uses that system AFAIK, both the Rabobank and the ABN AMRO use a RSA-like token calculator, where the user input is to swipe their card and input their PIN. The Banks then give another number to calculate the token.
While OTP are better, these tokenizers are far more practical as you only need to have the calculator on you to do your bankin business (and you can even borrow the one from a friend or collegue (which I don't really advise, as it could be a nice way to get passnumbers and PINs:) ).
The more input needed the more problems the user has to put them in the more likely it is that it won't be used or circumvented to be practical.
Then IMHO you just found the reason he is teaching a class instead of having a job in the industry (what is left of it anyway).
Requirements aren't the enemy but the boundries of your design. You need the requirements to know what to test. If you don't know how many users a system should support, how fast a user should be helped etc. you can't determine when a project is finished or has reached it's goals.
Requirements and specs form the basis of the box within you create the application and your design. They describe the boundries and those boundries can be tested (an untestable requirement is not a requirement, please tell your boss).
The fact that Open Source is never finished is partly because of this. Most is also due to the fact that most important OS projects started as research projects or proof of concepts or hobby projects (some of which keep to have huge warts until the redesign which breaks all the old stuff, when they find what are the right specs for what they have been building, start to document problems and ideas and start over).
prototyping is a great way to get low level requirements and that should help getting a good user perspective.
Basicly If you don't have requirements, you really don't know what you are supposed to do or when something is finished. "We're finished when we're out of time" is IMO a very weak reason, "We're finished because we've implemented the musthave requirements and are out of time" is better:-)
Have you profiled your application? Do you test on a dedicated test system?
If your only getting 20 concurrent users regardless of platform (could be, it really depends on the setup and complexity of the problem), maybe the technology isn't the problem but it could be network etc.
benchmarking is fine, but if you do it on the whole system you don't know what the problem really is. Find out precisely what the problem is (network/xml parser/your app logic/db connection/db speed). Look at your own code with a profiler to see the bottleneck.
If you do end up blaming the parser, change it! (and i don't mean using a different parsing method as most use a sax parser to generate the tree anyway) there are parsers that are 50% faster than those used as standard (xerces isn't the fastest java parser around!). Also look at the most efficient way of using the tree (java dom is, as already said, slow in usage) or maybe you can go from sax directly to your object model without using a tree but building your own sax parser.
If you can't get a performance gain (which I really doubt), be honest to your client. "If you want to do it that way it's going to cost you" or "it can't be done on one machine" how did they get the idea they could handle 1000's of requests a second anyway? Work on your expectationmanagment (basicly work on making their expectations more realistic). If you promise mountains make sure you can deliver them first. If you can't deliver them make them not want mountains but molehills:-)
Isn't this a bit of a premature question? You as a PDA software developer should have these machines sooner than most. The Sony isn't even on sale yet and the Palm (reviewed at PDABuzz.com) has only been available since what, monday?
Since those are the only 2 devices with Palm 5 at the moment, I'm sure not many have seen them.
If you want this info, get the devices yourself and see. I'm very interested in what the challenges are for a PDA developer with the new Palm 5 OS (although, maybe I should wait until OS 6:-)
It'll take atleast a week before we get a good review in (the guys at pdabuzz got a review version).
It's too bad firewire didn't catch on more ???
The name maybe, but IEEE 1394 not caught on?
IEEE 1394 is also called a DV connector, I.link (sony).
It's used on the playstation 2 (to connect to other playstations 2 among other things), every selfrespecting digital video camera has such a connector, there are a large number of external HD/CD-R/DVD peripherals that use the IEEE 1394 connector. You can get a IEEE 1394 card for your computer from a large number of different vendors.
Firewire is already embedded in the market and while USB 2.0 might become a competitor because of it's name, the peripherals are just now comming into the market. In the PC world however they seem to serve different markets (IEEE 1394 for video, USB 2.0 for peripherals).
I think IEEE 1394 will stay on the PC, although mainly used in video. Apple will continue to push (and improve I've seen stories talking about the next versions going to 1600 MB/s) firewire.
I live in the Netherlands and the SMS stuff I've seen here include: SPAM (only once because the telecom branch isn't totally clueless) joke a day, speed traps, big brother (the game show) updates, F1 updates, trivia games,horoscopes, traffic info, news info, sports info, interactive voting/pooling with TV-shows among many many many others.
It's so easy to subscribe to these things, yet most teens forget that recieving one of those SMSes also cost them money. Since most teens use the prepaid scheme, it does happen that when they need to up their quota it's gone the second they finished because of outstanding debts caused by the SMSes.
I-mode was introduced here and it's target where not the gadget happy geeks but the teen SMS crowd.
It wouldn't suprise me if in europe more SMS messages are sent than actual phonecalls with mobile phones.
For the old unix hacker it looks like you're logging in as root, but that's not really the case. At install time the system creates two users, both have the same name and the same password!
One is just a user, the other is root. In previous versions ( i haven't tested it lately) you could change the password of one but it wouldn't result in a password change of the other (which gave alot of headaches).
Now if you log in you're the normal user, and you can't do anything really dangerous. You need su (which needs to be activated, it isn't possible by default) or sudo to do something as root. Also when you're doing an install that requires root the installer will ask for a super user.
In both cases you use your own username and password (if your user is created at startup). So If somebody sneaks behind my computer when I'm gone to do something else, they can't really do anything dangerous. They would still need a password!
You can make more users if you want without any rights (that's easy), but the system works better than it looks because you don't log in as root!
You can if you want to btw. The password of root is the same as the password of the user. It does nail down the importance of good passwords which is something that alot of macusers are new to.
[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots
Which is not true. There is content to hook people to watch the commercials. Broadcasters make money of the commercials so it's in their best interest to create the content needed to hook the the viewers to their station. Because they are in competition for viewers (who can choose which channel to watch and when) they better have good content (which also includes commercials!). At no time is there a contract between the viewer and the broadcaster for the broadcaster to deliver good content and the viewer to watch the commercials(like there is no contract between a viewer of a billboard and that billboard).
That some broadcasters choose to not use commercials but use a subscription system does not change this fact. The only thing a viewer does in this case is pay to be able to watch that channel.
For a Contract to exist I would have to have put a signature somewhere and there should be some place to view that contract.
The dutch goverment wanted to toll the highways that lead into the mayor city's. Those road are notourious for their traffic jams. However there was much protest (we have nearly no toll roads, only a small amount of tunnels and bridges that do have toll). So the minister dropped the idea (the automatic toll infrastructure was already in pilot testing! (they would use automatic cards that would be read remotely by overhead sensors. those without a card would have their license plate fotografed)).
The minister put some experts on the job and they came up with a new idea, which they will be implementing. The cars will have blackboxes for this. To protect the privacy only the tarif of the road and the amount of kilometers will be used to determine the amount due. The tarifs can change during the day (a busy road would be more expensive to drive on to lower the amount of traffic jams). This would come in place of the general road tax (which taxes whether you drive or not based on car weight,the kind of fuel used etc.)
The goal is very simple, tax those that drive the most on the busiest roads. taxing fuel wouldn't help because a) tax is very high already (fuel is about 1+ dollar a litre here, not 2 per gallon (4+ litres)!) b) it wouldn't tax those in traffic jams, busy roads more than those on quite roads.
The taxes would be used to lighten the load on busy roads by making them bigger and for investments in public transport.
btw. currently i use public transport as it is faster because of those traffic jams.
Re: analogue ---depends on what you're used to
on
Watches for UberGeeks?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I was brought up on a digital clock (real old (atleast 30 years) but it did 24 hours military time).
I've always been more comfortable with a digital clock. It takes more time to understand where I am in the day on an analogue clock face.
So digital is easier for me.
There are smaller digital watches these days (tissot had nice ones with both faces, and I always looked at the digital part).
it fits in with unix being digital:-) .
It all depends on personal preference and what you're used to
I'm still contemplating whether I should or not. Currently I only read the comments on the article not the article itself (for the movie reviews, I usually find a better and shorter idea of what the movie is like that way and for everything else...well maybe it's morbid curiosity:-).
I usually browse at +2 and what strikes me is that nearly every comment is negative, either towards the article or towards the writer.
I do agree that if you don't like the writer you could just turn him off (I haven't done this to any topic or author including Katz as I'm an information junky).
The negativety of the other comments revolve around inaccuracies or a certain lack of knowledge/feeling for the subject by Katz. This can't be determined by the fact that Katz has written it (although it does seem to go into that direction).
I have seldom found any comment (maybe they're modded down) by Katz trying to discuss his point of view (I can see this is an almost undoable task but it is warranted with the amount of posts against the articles). Katz seems to be using slasdot as his personal forum instead of a place to discuss the internet. Very one way.
I wonder what would happen to Katz if we all turn him off. I'm really doubtfull that this would stop Katz from posting (and therefore putting an opinion up on/.) that could be seen as representing the view of the/. community.
I think most would rather say they don't like his articles as to make the point of the diversiveness of the/. community (I don't feel it's that diverse in the opinion of this author) then to ignore him and letting him get away with his articles.
I usually do my talking with mod points. But maybe I should stop bothering, I don't know yet.
I also don't understand why the main/. moderators don't try to figure out what it's readers want or don't want. Sometimes you really need a vote. But that's up to the/. moderators
(damn there goes my karma)
What about the elderly?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
I personally shouldn't buy one, as I would use it instead walking to work (and then I would have to start to think seriously about exercising [shudder])
But what about the elderly? They use walkers to get around and stay balanced. Although this has increased their mobility, it still limits them to how far they can go. There are electric carts, but they are usually big and unweildy.
With this segway there is a better alternative (hopefully with a setting of walking speed, I wouldn't like to be pushed aside by all those grannies). They can stay independend longer. Don't forget that the western population is aging. And the longer the elderly can be independend the better it'll be for sociaty.
What good is a virtual cat if it doesn't even walk?
To be a real virtual cat it should trip me while opening the fridge, leave those mouse corpses on the doormat, put his nails in my ass just because i happened to want to sit in my comfy chair without looking and miauw when it's inside to go out and as soon as it's outside miauw because it wants to go in.
just sitting there doesn't do it....Although if it was sleeping the whole day...
I might pay for that:-)
Actually it's not CDMA (which is IFAIK less than GSM, it's the current protocol of all old US mobile networks, the new ones are GSM I guess). The next version is GRPS, which is currently being rolled out here in the netherlands (by the end of this year it should be in operation). This will be followed by the UMTS standard (if and when).
Doing GSM in the US makes sense as they are now rolling out GSM networks (the US is a couple of years behind Europe, here 30% of the population has one(if not higher)) and ramping up users is still needed.
However I'm planning to replace my palm with a PDA that does atleast GRPS. The higher data rate makes it a nice internet pad (WAP sucks GSM is too slow). I won't buy a phone with pda ability, but a pda with phone ability. With the common handfreesets there is no need for something that fits nicely in your hand and talk to. The motorola palm phone and the nokia, are really convoluted attempts at merging two concepts with different needs in a bad way, too big for a phone, too small for a nice pda.
I still have a year on my current contract. By that time there should be a nice GRPS capable pda.
Sharp showed one at JavaOne, which was going to run Linux.
I've been reading all suggestions and most focus on programming something(even with c++, common it takes about year to properly understand OO) while CS should embrace much more So why not do something simpler, yet still interesting. Let them design a web application. Something like a dynamic generated website.
The following things should be considered:
What are the requirements of the application?
What technology will you use (asp/php/jsp, and for db mySQL/postgreSQL)
how should the user interact with the site?
how should the interface look?
how will it be tested?
documentation
setting up the technology
creating the business code
learn reuse by reusing your interface design (you prototype in html ofcourse:)
testing the application
You can make this as simple or complicated as you want. Both good programmers and the clueless can work on this and learn (basicly because most talented high school programmers learn nothing about testing,documentation,interface and interaction design, while these are 60-70% of the struggle).
I never learned you should make a testplan before writing software(and yes I'd rather just start coding, but for industrial strenght applications knowing what to test for is better because it shouldn't depend on your design!), I won't even talk about documentation and interaction design. All because (appart from taking every CS course our university had on offer (we didn't have a CS degree course, so there are not that many and deep)) most is self taught or from courses my employer send me to.
Hmmmm, almost had the same idea in uni. As a mac user being taught and having to use only Win stuff feels like discrimination. Same goes for linux.
If you don't have your favorite tools at hand ( an OS could be discribed the same way), or you can't use them because of the setup, creates a disadvantage compared to the win jockeys who conform.
That ain't fair! I won't even mention the fact that they had alot more PC stuff on offering compared to the mac stuff in the uni shop.... Although, I now have a more diverse background.
they signed something and IBM is going to include Altivec. the main difference is in using copper and stuff in the chip, they are still battling for fastest speed.
USB.... MS usb hardware runs without an MS driver, The mac generic drivers for USB mice would do alot (many are already using MS usb stuff), but MS bought up a small shareware packet that had drivers for all sorts of USB mice to complement the mice. That's the usual way they get good technologie up there in redmond.
I've been to the WWDC, so i might be a bit brainwashed:) but Apple is really participating in the open source movement. Not only because of Darwin (which is in part based on next/openstep,net and openbsd, but will be synched to freebsd 3 ), but also because of several opensource tools they use and improve (which includes getting bugfixes and improvements back into the code base like they should). They actively work on improving Apache (and they claim to have submitted many bugfixes and improvements) and are standardizing on egcs as a compiler (again they have improved/fixed it and submitted the stuff). Darwin might not even be the last thing they release as opensource, they are looking at all the software projects. While granted most won't be open source, many will be. So bottomline, they are not only taking from the opensource movement but attributing to it as well, unlike a redmond company i could mention (although they are to scared to even touch opensource).
btw,Darwin= mach 3.0 + bsdkernel (including tcp stack)+drivers+file systems on which bsd apps can run.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is how you want to make money?
Through consultancy or by selling software?
If you sell software, GPL in a dual license setup seems to be a succesfull combination. The GPL helps in keeping the usage of code transparant.
If you do it through consultancy (implement something for a specific customer) I would pick Apache. It provides the company you worked for security that the specific stuff is theirs without any strings, yet you can create a nice community around it.
Burt was the first with an airplane, but it was powered by props. Steve is trying to be the first with a jet engine. A single jet engine in this case.
Ehm, not quite:
mac mini = 499 euro including tax
the euro is doing about 1.30, so the mac mini is 30% more expensive compared to the US price of 499 dollars.
The tax is only 19,5%
still missing 10.5 %
how good mac os x would run on a cell processor..../ 2332221&tid=137&tid=136&tid=10 )
(see http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/05
nahhh, ain't gonna happen...
Actually, only the postbank uses that system AFAIK, both the Rabobank and the ABN AMRO use a RSA-like token calculator, where the user input is to swipe their card and input their PIN. The Banks then give another number to calculate the token.
:) ).
While OTP are better, these tokenizers are far more practical as you only need to have the calculator on you to do your bankin business (and you can even borrow the one from a friend or collegue (which I don't really advise, as it could be a nice way to get passnumbers and PINs
The more input needed the more problems the user has to put them in the more likely it is that it won't be used or circumvented to be practical.
Then IMHO you just found the reason he is teaching a class instead of having a job in the industry (what is left of it anyway).
:-)
Requirements aren't the enemy but the boundries of your design. You need the requirements to know what to test. If you don't know how many users a system should support, how fast a user should be helped etc. you can't determine when a project is finished or has reached it's goals.
Requirements and specs form the basis of the box within you create the application and your design. They describe the boundries and those boundries can be tested (an untestable requirement is not a requirement, please tell your boss).
The fact that Open Source is never finished is partly because of this. Most is also due to the fact that most important OS projects started as research projects or proof of concepts or hobby projects (some of which keep to have huge warts until the redesign which breaks all the old stuff, when they find what are the right specs for what they have been building, start to document problems and ideas and start over).
prototyping is a great way to get low level requirements and that should help getting a good user perspective.
Basicly If you don't have requirements, you really don't know what you are supposed to do or when something is finished. "We're finished when we're out of time" is IMO a very weak reason, "We're finished because we've implemented the musthave requirements and are out of time" is better
Have you profiled your application?
/db connection/db speed). Look at your own code with a profiler to see the bottleneck.
:-)
Do you test on a dedicated test system?
If your only getting 20 concurrent users regardless of platform (could be, it really depends on the setup and complexity of the problem), maybe the technology isn't the problem but it could be network etc.
benchmarking is fine, but if you do it on the whole system you don't know what the problem really is.
Find out precisely what the problem is (network/xml parser/your app logic
If you do end up blaming the parser, change it! (and i don't mean using a different parsing method as most use a sax parser to generate the tree anyway) there are parsers that are 50% faster than those used as standard (xerces isn't the fastest java parser around!). Also look at the most efficient way of using the tree (java dom is, as already said, slow in usage) or maybe you can go from sax directly to your object model without using a tree but building your own sax parser.
If you can't get a performance gain (which I really doubt), be honest to your client. "If you want to do it that way it's going to cost you" or "it can't be done on one machine" how did they get the idea they could handle 1000's of requests a second anyway? Work on your expectationmanagment (basicly work on making their expectations more realistic). If you promise mountains make sure you can deliver them first. If you can't deliver them make them not want mountains but molehills
Isn't this a bit of a premature question?
:-)
You as a PDA software developer should have these machines sooner than most. The Sony isn't even on sale yet and the Palm (reviewed at PDABuzz.com) has only been available since what, monday?
Since those are the only 2 devices with Palm 5 at the moment, I'm sure not many have seen them.
If you want this info, get the devices yourself and see. I'm very interested in what the challenges are for a PDA developer with the new Palm 5 OS (although, maybe I should wait until OS 6
It'll take atleast a week before we get a good review in (the guys at pdabuzz got a review version).
IEEE 1394 is also called a DV connector, I.link (sony).
It's used on the playstation 2 (to connect to other playstations 2 among other things), every selfrespecting digital video camera has such a connector, there are a large number of external HD/CD-R/DVD peripherals that use the IEEE 1394 connector. You can get a IEEE 1394 card for your computer from a large number of different vendors.
Firewire is already embedded in the market and while USB 2.0 might become a competitor because of it's name, the peripherals are just now comming into the market. In the PC world however they seem to serve different markets (IEEE 1394 for video, USB 2.0 for peripherals).
I think IEEE 1394 will stay on the PC, although mainly used in video. Apple will continue to push (and improve I've seen stories talking about the next versions going to 1600 MB/s) firewire.
I live in the Netherlands and the SMS stuff I've seen here include:
SPAM (only once because the telecom branch isn't totally clueless)
joke a day, speed traps, big brother (the game show) updates, F1 updates, trivia games,horoscopes, traffic info, news info, sports info, interactive voting/pooling with TV-shows among many many many others.
It's so easy to subscribe to these things, yet most teens forget that recieving one of those SMSes also cost them money. Since most teens use the prepaid scheme, it does happen that when they need to up their quota it's gone the second they finished because of outstanding debts caused by the SMSes.
I-mode was introduced here and it's target where not the gadget happy geeks but the teen SMS crowd.
It wouldn't suprise me if in europe more SMS messages are sent than actual phonecalls with mobile phones.
For the old unix hacker it looks like you're logging in as root, but that's not really the case. At install time the system creates two users, both have the same name and the same password!
One is just a user, the other is root. In previous versions ( i haven't tested it lately) you could change the password of one but it wouldn't result in a password change of the other (which gave alot of headaches).
Now if you log in you're the normal user, and you can't do anything really dangerous. You need su (which needs to be activated, it isn't possible by default) or sudo to do something as root. Also when you're doing an install that requires root the installer will ask for a super user.
In both cases you use your own username and password (if your user is created at startup). So If somebody sneaks behind my computer when I'm gone to do something else, they can't really do anything dangerous. They would still need a password!
You can make more users if you want without any rights (that's easy), but the system works better than it looks because you don't log in as root!
You can if you want to btw. The password of root is the same as the password of the user.
It does nail down the importance of good passwords which is something that alot of macusers are new to.
I get the notion that he has it backwards:
[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots
Which is not true. There is content to hook people to watch the commercials. Broadcasters make money of the commercials so it's in their best interest to create the content needed to hook the the viewers to their station. Because they are in competition for viewers (who can choose which channel to watch and when) they better have good content (which also includes commercials!). At no time is there a contract between the viewer and the broadcaster for the broadcaster to deliver good content and the viewer to watch the commercials(like there is no contract between a viewer of a billboard and that billboard).
That some broadcasters choose to not use commercials but use a subscription system does not change this fact. The only thing a viewer does in this case is pay to be able to watch that channel.
For a Contract to exist I would have to have put a signature somewhere and there should be some place to view that contract.
The dutch goverment wanted to toll the highways that lead into the mayor city's. Those road are notourious for their traffic jams. However there was much protest (we have nearly no toll roads, only a small amount of tunnels and bridges that do have toll). So the minister dropped the idea (the automatic toll infrastructure was already in pilot testing! (they would use automatic cards that would be read remotely by overhead sensors. those without a card would have their license plate fotografed)).
The minister put some experts on the job and they came up with a new idea, which they will be implementing. The cars will have blackboxes for this. To protect the privacy only the tarif of the road and the amount of kilometers will be used to determine the amount due. The tarifs can change during the day (a busy road would be more expensive to drive on to lower the amount of traffic jams). This would come in place of the general road tax (which taxes whether you drive or not based on car weight,the kind of fuel used etc.)
The goal is very simple, tax those that drive the most on the busiest roads.
taxing fuel wouldn't help because
a) tax is very high already (fuel is about 1+ dollar a litre here, not 2 per gallon (4+ litres)!)
b) it wouldn't tax those in traffic jams, busy roads more than those on quite roads.
The taxes would be used to lighten the load on busy roads by making them bigger and for investments in public transport.
btw. currently i use public transport as it is faster because of those traffic jams.
I was brought up on a digital clock (real old (atleast 30 years) but it did 24 hours military time).
:-) .
I've always been more comfortable with a digital clock. It takes more time to understand where I am in the day on an analogue clock face.
So digital is easier for me.
There are smaller digital watches these days (tissot had nice ones with both faces, and I always looked at the digital part).
it fits in with unix being digital
It all depends on personal preference and what you're used to
I'm still contemplating whether I should or not. Currently I only read the comments on the article not the article itself (for the movie reviews, I usually find a better and shorter idea of what the movie is like that way and for everything else...well maybe it's morbid curiosity :-).
/.) that could be seen as representing the view of the /. community.
/. community (I don't feel it's that diverse in the opinion of this author) then to ignore him and letting him get away with his articles.
/. moderators don't try to figure out what it's readers want or don't want. Sometimes you really need a vote. But that's up to the /. moderators
I usually browse at +2 and what strikes me is that nearly every comment is negative, either towards the article or towards the writer.
I do agree that if you don't like the writer you could just turn him off (I haven't done this to any topic or author including Katz as I'm an information junky).
The negativety of the other comments revolve around inaccuracies or a certain lack of knowledge/feeling for the subject by Katz. This can't be determined by the fact that Katz has written it (although it does seem to go into that direction).
I have seldom found any comment (maybe they're modded down) by Katz trying to discuss his point of view (I can see this is an almost undoable task but it is warranted with the amount of posts against the articles). Katz seems to be using slasdot as his personal forum instead of a place to discuss the internet. Very one way.
I wonder what would happen to Katz if we all turn him off. I'm really doubtfull that this would stop Katz from posting (and therefore putting an opinion up on
I think most would rather say they don't like his articles as to make the point of the diversiveness of the
I usually do my talking with mod points. But maybe I should stop bothering, I don't know yet.
I also don't understand why the main
(damn there goes my karma)
I personally shouldn't buy one, as I would use it instead walking to work (and then I would have to start to think seriously about exercising [shudder])
But what about the elderly? They use walkers to get around and stay balanced. Although this has increased their mobility, it still limits them to how far they can go. There are electric carts, but they are usually big and unweildy.
With this segway there is a better alternative (hopefully with a setting of walking speed, I wouldn't like to be pushed aside by all those grannies). They can stay independend longer. Don't forget that the western population is aging. And the longer the elderly can be independend the better it'll be for sociaty.
What good is a virtual cat if it doesn't even walk?
:-)
To be a real virtual cat it should trip me while opening the fridge, leave those mouse corpses on the doormat, put his nails in my ass just because i happened to want to sit in my comfy chair without looking and miauw when it's inside to go out and as soon as it's outside miauw because it wants to go in.
just sitting there doesn't do it....Although if it was sleeping the whole day...
I might pay for that
Actually it's not CDMA (which is IFAIK less than GSM, it's the current protocol of all old US mobile networks, the new ones are GSM I guess). The next version is GRPS, which is currently being rolled out here in the netherlands (by the end of this year it should be in operation). This will be followed by the UMTS standard (if and when).
Doing GSM in the US makes sense as they are now rolling out GSM networks (the US is a couple of years behind Europe, here 30% of the population has one(if not higher)) and ramping up users is still needed.
However I'm planning to replace my palm with a PDA that does atleast GRPS. The higher data rate makes it a nice internet pad (WAP sucks GSM is too slow). I won't buy a phone with pda ability, but a pda with phone ability. With the common handfreesets there is no need for something that fits nicely in your hand and talk to. The motorola palm phone and the nokia, are really convoluted attempts at merging two concepts with different needs in a bad way, too big for a phone, too small for a nice pda.
I still have a year on my current contract. By that time there should be a nice GRPS capable pda.
Sharp showed one at JavaOne, which was going to run Linux.
So why not do something simpler, yet still interesting. Let them design a web application. Something like a dynamic generated website.
The following things should be considered:
You can make this as simple or complicated as you want. Both good programmers and the clueless can work on this and learn (basicly because most talented high school programmers learn nothing about testing,documentation,interface and interaction design, while these are 60-70% of the struggle).
I never learned you should make a testplan before writing software(and yes I'd rather just start coding, but for industrial strenght applications knowing what to test for is better because it shouldn't depend on your design!), I won't even talk about documentation and interaction design. All because (appart from taking every CS course our university had on offer (we didn't have a CS degree course, so there are not that many and deep)) most is self taught or from courses my employer send me to.
Don't just teach them how to code
Hmmmm, almost had the same idea in uni.
As a mac user being taught and having to use only Win stuff feels like discrimination. Same goes for linux.
If you don't have your favorite tools at hand ( an OS could be discribed the same way), or you can't use them because of the setup, creates a disadvantage compared to the win jockeys who conform.
That ain't fair!
I won't even mention the fact that they had alot more PC stuff on offering compared to the mac stuff in the uni shop....
Although, I now have a more diverse background.
they signed something and IBM is going to include Altivec. the main difference is in using copper and stuff in the chip, they are still battling for fastest speed.
USB....
MS usb hardware runs without an MS driver, The mac generic drivers for USB mice would do alot (many are already using MS usb stuff), but MS bought up a small shareware packet that had drivers for all sorts of USB mice to complement the mice.
That's the usual way they get good technologie up there in redmond.
I've been to the WWDC, so i might be a bit brainwashed :) but Apple is really participating in the open source movement.
Not only because of Darwin (which is in part based on next/openstep,net and openbsd, but will be synched to freebsd 3 ), but also because of several opensource tools they use and improve (which includes getting bugfixes and improvements back into the code base like they should).
They actively work on improving Apache (and they claim to have submitted many bugfixes and improvements) and are standardizing on egcs as a compiler (again they have improved/fixed it and submitted the stuff).
Darwin might not even be the last thing they release as opensource, they are looking at all the software projects. While granted most won't be open source, many will be.
So bottomline, they are not only taking from the opensource movement but attributing to it as well, unlike a redmond company i could mention (although they are to scared to even touch opensource).
btw,Darwin= mach 3.0 + bsdkernel (including tcp stack)+drivers+file systems on which bsd apps can run.