I think a significant amount of Spiderman's success is due to timing. I was really the first 'summer' film to come out. People have been 'waiting' for a 'feel good' action movie and Spiderman delivered. Thus a decent movie that comes out before any 'real', Scorpion King doesn't count, competition gets a good head start.
Just wondering if there are any tools that 'test' how good a password might be. I have plenty of different passwords that I think are 'strong', but are they really?
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
It depends on what kind of lab it is. Most of these school labs are general purpose. This means that in the M$ world they will have a lot more then Windows installed. They will also have a full blown install of M$ Office which would add a few hundred dollars more per PC.
You also have to count the server software. With Windows you need users access licences for file and printer sharing. You need an email server and Exchange isn't cheap.
You might need a database server, and SQL Server cost a few thousand minimum.
Throw in SMS for each PC and you have added another few hundred per PC. Not to mention the CAL for each authenicated user.
When you total up all of this quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars to each lab, which can quickly equal or exceed the hardware costs.
I would guess it is to address things like embedded binary code. Thus it is not 'free' if you create a binary loader and then have a bunch or precompiled code as text.
It might also be meant to restrict the use of linked libraries. If all your 'free' source code does is link to a bunch of closed source libraries it defeats the whole purpose.
Find out what 'school' the CS program is under. For example at the school I went to oh so long ago the CS program was in the School of Mathematics. At others schools it was in the School of Engineering. Still others may have a School of CS.
This can often give you the general 'tone' of the CS program. For example a math prgram tends to be more theory, while an engineering program is more practical. Of course like most factors, other then actually attending the classes, this will not tell the whole story or even be a correct assumption. Some engineering programs are very theory oriented.
I would also ask about how much publication is done by and/or required of professors. This can have a significant effect on how professors really spend their time. A prof that publishes two new books every year, really isn't spending time teaching.
Also find out how much use is made of TA's(teaching assistants). At some schools these are the only people you as an undergrad ever get to talk to. At others they are just there to help out for things like labs. Still others have none.
Finally ask about class size. THis mostly depends on the size of the school, but not always. Some places do the 200 student lecture thing and all questions go through TA's. Other schools will have classes no larger then 20-30. Makes a big difference in teaching methods. There is no real way to have a debate in a 200 person class.
Oddly enough size has little to do with, or even has a reverse effect on, what ammenities you get.
Most of the deployments of fiber to every home you read about are in small to medium sized towns.
Good food can be found almost anywhere.
As for movies, a little place called Three Oaks MI, population ~2000, has a first run art theater(http://www.vickerstheatre.com/index.html), that occasionally gets stuff before the art houses in Chicago.
Depends on the product. There is little point in announcing a Segway long before it is ready, except to get the media hype working.
To have a successful microprocessor launch you pretty much need a year so third party vendors can get up to steam on their products(compilers, motherboards, chipsets, etc.). You also want to get some end user projects rolling, with alpha chips, so you can brag about design wins when you do start shipping in volume.
Of course this is all in addition to marketing and stock market reasons for early announcements.
I have had bad luck getting optical mice to work with a number of KVM switches from multiple manufacturers. If you use an optical mouse confirm with the manufacturer that it supports your mouse of choice. Also try to check around with other users of the KVM switch about mouse support. I had one manufacturer that was not quite truthful about a switch supporting optical mice.
My education was specifically in embedded micro processor systems and it took me over six months to land a job in the area.
As mentioned elsewhere, even if they are asking for certain experience send you resume anyway. Many times what is listed in a job posting are what the ideal requirements. Often they will not find anyone that meets all of them. This was true in my case. They told me I didn't get the job offer because of my lack of experience. They ended up calling a month later to offer me the job after the two people ahead of me on the list that they did offer the job to didn't work out. One didn't show up, and the other was found to have 'imbelished' their resume a bit more then they could accept.
Finally, as mentioned elsewhere as well, embedded systems development is as much hard knowledge as software. You may not be designing the hardware yourself, this was true for my, but you had better have a real good understand of the underlying hardware and how it works. This also includes being able to use scopes and logic analysers.
What do you see as the social and legal impact of so called 'digital divide' between the 'haves' with ready net access and the 'have nots' without such access? Are there steps, legal, social or otherwise, that should be taken to minimize this divide? If so what should those steps be?
For the majority of embedded applications Linux is more then is needed. Sure something like Tivo profits from a 'full blown' OS, but most embedded situations don't need this. For most all that is really need is a fast task switcher and a couple of communication stacks.
What you might need is a change. In school you have been doing basically the same kind of stuff for a few years now and it has lost it's appeal.
I've been doing software development professionally for 12 years now and find that I get bored after about 3 years of working on the 'same thing'.
Also as mentioned by others try to apply your CS knowledge to other areas that interest you. I know I find developing a database for my own hobby website to be more interesting then maintaning the payroll or customer database at work.
So tough it out and finish your degree. Get yourself a job and see if the change gets you motivated again. If not you can always go back to school after 6-12 months and try something else.
Yeah, live and learn, as they say. We switched to a different vendors compiler about a year later and were worried about similar things. Ended up having no real problems with the new vendors tools.
In fact while double checking things we found the cause of display bug we had. It was so minor, meaning it did not effect functionality just made one screen look odd, we never spent the time to track down the problem. The bug disappeared completely with the new compiler. Once again a strange optimization by the old compiler.
It is possible to accurately estimate how long a project will take. The problem is you can only really do this if you have done something very similar before. It comes down to experience within a given project domain.
Once you developed your third payroll system, with the same development team, you can pretty easily estimate how long the fourth one will take. This does not however mean you can accurately estimate how long it will take the same team to develop a fleet maintenance system.
If you haven't done it before you can not provide an accurate esitimate.
At the time we were using C for about 90% of the code and assembler for the other 10%. We were using the volitile keyword. Problem was when the highest optimization setting was used, with the newer version of the compiler, it basically ignored the volatile keyword and optimized it out.
I worked on a controller for high voltage switch gear for 6 years and came across a couple of weird 'bugs'. High voltage switch gear is basically the 'light switch' for a whole building or subdivision. Most of them are in big boxes, 8'x6'x4' that hold the switches, fuses and controller, switching up to 35kV@12kA. The overhead switch systems are the stuff you see in utility substations and 140kV@25kA.
ANyway, in the first case we had a problem where once in a great while, once in every 50-100 operations, one set of outputs would change state to all zeros. Banged my head against the wall for a week because we could not reproduce it in the lab. So I hauled all my equipment(PC, logic analyser, digital scope, analog scope) down to the shop floor. I was able to reproduce the problem about once per day for two weeks before finding the problem. The latch chip was getting screwed up by the EMF of a large motor that was nearby. We couldn't change the hardware layout so the solution was to add code to rewrite all output ports whenever the sampling interupt occur, 360/second.
We had never seen this happen in the lab in 4 years of development. Of course in the lab the entire package was laid out differently, for ease of access, so the same EMF effect did not occur. The moral is you need to test under 'real world' conditions.
The second one was simpler to find, but more of a pain in the end. I did a point update on the compiler, something like going from version 3.2 to 3.3. After this one of our logging functions, to an EEPROM, no longer worked. This one at least could be reproduced every time. After running around in circles for a couple days I finally recompiled the code to assembly instead of binary and started reading line by line. Ends up the new version of the compiler had optimized out the write to the EEPROM. Ends up there was a bug in how the new version of the compiler was a little too overagressive in its optimization.
The moral here is watch out for changes in the tools. They can have just as much of an effect on things as anything you might write and you may never realize it unless you look really close.
How well this will work out depends greatly on what kind of software is installed and what kind of work people do. They tried it where I worked and had mixed results.
For software developers it just plain doesn't work. There are too many times when you need to install or patch something when developing software. This assumes of course that you are developing for Windows on Windows. If your PC is Windows, but you really develop and deploy on another platform, i.e. PHP on a Linux box, you can get by with just the basics on your PC.
If you are forced into this situation as a developer demand 1-2 test boxes that are not 'locked' so you can try stuff out.
For the typical office application user this can work and save time and money ONLY if everyones PC is EXACTLY the same. The logic behind an SOE is that all the PCs are the same. This can however end up costing a lot of money in software costs if you need to install many applications on all the PC's that only a few people use.
They ran into this problem here. When you totaled up the number of applications used you ended up with a list of 100+. Most of these were only used by about 50-100 people each. They realised that it would be way too expensive to pay the cost of having all these applicatons on 1000 PCs just to keep them all the same.
It sounds from your post that you will be needing to use multiple IP addresses. Most of these 'routers' will only route a single external IP address and automatically do some type of NAT. In particular this applies to all of the less then $150 routers I have seen.
When checking the specs make sure that the one you choose does support multiple routable IP addresses.
I have had Telocity/DirectTV DSL since they started. They have had a few problems along the way but are okay.
The only problem with switching to them is that DirectTV/DSL uses lines from Rhythms and Covad for many of there customers.
In the Ameritech area(Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) in particular almost all of their customers are provisioned through Rhythms and Ameritech doesn't want to deal with them. The current word is when Rhytm=hms goes belly up the customers in this area, of which I am one, are SOL.
The price of a 'real cel' varies greatly. For older big name movies like your snow white example the price is going to be extravagant due to rarity. For newer less well known titles the prices are much more reasonable. It is mostly a matter of knowning where to get authentic items at a good price.
My girl friend buys cels, mostly Tenchi, from a guy in Japan at very reasonable prices, i.e. $20-$50 shipped. Sure it takes up a week for them to get here, but they are the real thing. Apparently the guy runs an anime store and has contacts with many of the studios and artists.
Also from what I hear most of the non-US anime cels come from the original artists/studios. The cels are typically not kept by the major corporations like here in the US.
You got it pretty much right. There are two minor errors.
Non-profit and not-for-profit are legally the same thing. The name used is dependant on how and where you are registered as an organization. Being tax deductible is determined by the federal government based on what your organization actually does.
The other thing that isn't correct is the statement that they can't "make a profit at the end of the year". These organizations can 'make a profit'. The problem is that you have to explain it to the federal government in order to keep you tax exempt status.
There are plenty of legitmate reasons for 'making a profit', i.e. you are building up a trust fund, you are going to make a large capital investment next year, you get a large indowment to be spent over multiple years, etc. For many organizations it is easier to spend any extra money then it is to explain it to the IRS.
If by 'major' Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols meant 'comercial' versions of Linux sold in large numbers by US companies, then yes there will be only 2-3 left in a few years. There will be plenty of other 'major' distros around the world however. There will also be a few European distros, a couple Japanese distros, a Brasilian distro, etc.
There will also be a plethora of smaller distros that fit various niches, just as we have today. It's just too easy to make your own customised distro, that exactly fits your needs, for this not to occur.
It is not an across the board fiber shortage. It's a case of not enough fiber in the right places. There is plenty of fiber, and in some cases a glut, in major metropolitain areas. There is a significant lack of fiber to non-metropolitain areas.
My parents spend the winters in southern Texas. My dad has told me that although his modem speeds are fine, his internet performance sucks. Turns out that the fiber to the CO, and in fact the entire town of 25000, is well past saturated and no new capacity will be installed for at least 12 months.
So its a case of where you are and how well the infrastructure is built up.
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I think a significant amount of Spiderman's success is due to timing. I was really the first 'summer' film to come out. People have been 'waiting' for a 'feel good' action movie and Spiderman delivered. Thus a decent movie that comes out before any 'real', Scorpion King doesn't count, competition gets a good head start.
Just wondering if there are any tools that 'test' how good a password might be. I have plenty of different passwords that I think are 'strong', but are they really?
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
It depends on what kind of lab it is. Most of these school labs are general purpose. This means that in the M$ world they will have a lot more then Windows installed. They will also have a full blown install of M$ Office which would add a few hundred dollars more per PC.
You also have to count the server software. With Windows you need users access licences for file and printer sharing. You need an email server and Exchange isn't cheap.
You might need a database server, and SQL Server cost a few thousand minimum.
Throw in SMS for each PC and you have added another few hundred per PC. Not to mention the CAL for each authenicated user.
When you total up all of this quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars to each lab, which can quickly equal or exceed the hardware costs.
But, hmm, hat does rule d.3 mean?
I would guess it is to address things like embedded binary code. Thus it is not 'free' if you create a binary loader and then have a bunch or precompiled code as text.
It might also be meant to restrict the use of linked libraries. If all your 'free' source code does is link to a bunch of closed source libraries it defeats the whole purpose.
Find out what 'school' the CS program is under. For example at the school I went to oh so long ago the CS program was in the School of Mathematics. At others schools it was in the School of Engineering. Still others may have a School of CS.
This can often give you the general 'tone' of the CS program. For example a math prgram tends to be more theory, while an engineering program is more practical. Of course like most factors, other then actually attending the classes, this will not tell the whole story or even be a correct assumption. Some engineering programs are very theory oriented.
I would also ask about how much publication is done by and/or required of professors. This can have a significant effect on how professors really spend their time. A prof that publishes two new books every year, really isn't spending time teaching.
Also find out how much use is made of TA's(teaching assistants). At some schools these are the only people you as an undergrad ever get to talk to. At others they are just there to help out for things like labs. Still others have none.
Finally ask about class size. THis mostly depends on the size of the school, but not always. Some places do the 200 student lecture thing and all questions go through TA's. Other schools will have classes no larger then 20-30. Makes a big difference in teaching methods. There is no real way to have a debate in a 200 person class.
Oddly enough size has little to do with, or even has a reverse effect on, what ammenities you get. Most of the deployments of fiber to every home you read about are in small to medium sized towns. Good food can be found almost anywhere. As for movies, a little place called Three Oaks MI, population ~2000, has a first run art theater(http://www.vickerstheatre.com/index.html), that occasionally gets stuff before the art houses in Chicago.
Depends on the product. There is little point in announcing a Segway long before it is ready, except to get the media hype working.
To have a successful microprocessor launch you pretty much need a year so third party vendors can get up to steam on their products(compilers, motherboards, chipsets, etc.). You also want to get some end user projects rolling, with alpha chips, so you can brag about design wins when you do start shipping in volume.
Of course this is all in addition to marketing and stock market reasons for early announcements.
I have had bad luck getting optical mice to work with a number of KVM switches from multiple manufacturers. If you use an optical mouse confirm with the manufacturer that it supports your mouse of choice. Also try to check around with other users of the KVM switch about mouse support. I had one manufacturer that was not quite truthful about a switch supporting optical mice.
My education was specifically in embedded micro processor systems and it took me over six months to land a job in the area.
As mentioned elsewhere, even if they are asking for certain experience send you resume anyway. Many times what is listed in a job posting are what the ideal requirements. Often they will not find anyone that meets all of them. This was true in my case. They told me I didn't get the job offer because of my lack of experience. They ended up calling a month later to offer me the job after the two people ahead of me on the list that they did offer the job to didn't work out. One didn't show up, and the other was found to have 'imbelished' their resume a bit more then they could accept.
Finally, as mentioned elsewhere as well, embedded systems development is as much hard knowledge as software. You may not be designing the hardware yourself, this was true for my, but you had better have a real good understand of the underlying hardware and how it works. This also includes being able to use scopes and logic analysers.
It's knowing those algorithms, and how to efficeintly implement them, that can get you the big bucks.
What do you see as the social and legal impact of so called 'digital divide' between the 'haves' with ready net access and the 'have nots' without such access? Are there steps, legal, social or otherwise, that should be taken to minimize this divide? If so what should those steps be?
For the majority of embedded applications Linux is more then is needed. Sure something like Tivo profits from a 'full blown' OS, but most embedded situations don't need this. For most all that is really need is a fast task switcher and a couple of communication stacks.
What you might need is a change. In school you have been doing basically the same kind of stuff for a few years now and it has lost it's appeal.
I've been doing software development professionally for 12 years now and find that I get bored after about 3 years of working on the 'same thing'.
Also as mentioned by others try to apply your CS knowledge to other areas that interest you. I know I find developing a database for my own hobby website to be more interesting then maintaning the payroll or customer database at work.
So tough it out and finish your degree. Get yourself a job and see if the change gets you motivated again. If not you can always go back to school after 6-12 months and try something else.
Yeah, live and learn, as they say. We switched to a different vendors compiler about a year later and were worried about similar things. Ended up having no real problems with the new vendors tools.
In fact while double checking things we found the cause of display bug we had. It was so minor, meaning it did not effect functionality just made one screen look odd, we never spent the time to track down the problem. The bug disappeared completely with the new compiler. Once again a strange optimization by the old compiler.
It is possible to accurately estimate how long a project will take. The problem is you can only really do this if you have done something very similar before. It comes down to experience within a given project domain.
Once you developed your third payroll system, with the same development team, you can pretty easily estimate how long the fourth one will take. This does not however mean you can accurately estimate how long it will take the same team to develop a fleet maintenance system.
If you haven't done it before you can not provide an accurate esitimate.
At the time we were using C for about 90% of the code and assembler for the other 10%. We were using the volitile keyword. Problem was when the highest optimization setting was used, with the newer version of the compiler, it basically ignored the volatile keyword and optimized it out.
I worked on a controller for high voltage switch gear for 6 years and came across a couple of weird 'bugs'. High voltage switch gear is basically the 'light switch' for a whole building or subdivision. Most of them are in big boxes, 8'x6'x4' that hold the switches, fuses and controller, switching up to 35kV@12kA. The overhead switch systems are the stuff you see in utility substations and 140kV@25kA.
ANyway, in the first case we had a problem where once in a great while, once in every 50-100 operations, one set of outputs would change state to all zeros. Banged my head against the wall for a week because we could not reproduce it in the lab. So I hauled all my equipment(PC, logic analyser, digital scope, analog scope) down to the shop floor. I was able to reproduce the problem about once per day for two weeks before finding the problem. The latch chip was getting screwed up by the EMF of a large motor that was nearby. We couldn't change the hardware layout so the solution was to add code to rewrite all output ports whenever the sampling interupt occur, 360/second.
We had never seen this happen in the lab in 4 years of development. Of course in the lab the entire package was laid out differently, for ease of access, so the same EMF effect did not occur. The moral is you need to test under 'real world' conditions.
The second one was simpler to find, but more of a pain in the end. I did a point update on the compiler, something like going from version 3.2 to 3.3. After this one of our logging functions, to an EEPROM, no longer worked. This one at least could be reproduced every time. After running around in circles for a couple days I finally recompiled the code to assembly instead of binary and started reading line by line. Ends up the new version of the compiler had optimized out the write to the EEPROM. Ends up there was a bug in how the new version of the compiler was a little too overagressive in its optimization.
The moral here is watch out for changes in the tools. They can have just as much of an effect on things as anything you might write and you may never realize it unless you look really close.
How well this will work out depends greatly on what kind of software is installed and what kind of work people do. They tried it where I worked and had mixed results.
For software developers it just plain doesn't work. There are too many times when you need to install or patch something when developing software. This assumes of course that you are developing for Windows on Windows. If your PC is Windows, but you really develop and deploy on another platform, i.e. PHP on a Linux box, you can get by with just the basics on your PC.
If you are forced into this situation as a developer demand 1-2 test boxes that are not 'locked' so you can try stuff out.
For the typical office application user this can work and save time and money ONLY if everyones PC is EXACTLY the same. The logic behind an SOE is that all the PCs are the same. This can however end up costing a lot of money in software costs if you need to install many applications on all the PC's that only a few people use.
They ran into this problem here. When you totaled up the number of applications used you ended up with a list of 100+. Most of these were only used by about 50-100 people each. They realised that it would be way too expensive to pay the cost of having all these applicatons on 1000 PCs just to keep them all the same.
It sounds from your post that you will be needing to use multiple IP addresses. Most of these 'routers' will only route a single external IP address and automatically do some type of NAT. In particular this applies to all of the less then $150 routers I have seen.
When checking the specs make sure that the one you choose does support multiple routable IP addresses.
I have had Telocity/DirectTV DSL since they started. They have had a few problems along the way but are okay.
The only problem with switching to them is that DirectTV/DSL uses lines from Rhythms and Covad for many of there customers.
In the Ameritech area(Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) in particular almost all of their customers are provisioned through Rhythms and Ameritech doesn't want to deal with them. The current word is when Rhytm=hms goes belly up the customers in this area, of which I am one, are SOL.
The price of a 'real cel' varies greatly. For older big name movies like your snow white example the price is going to be extravagant due to rarity. For newer less well known titles the prices are much more reasonable. It is mostly a matter of knowning where to get authentic items at a good price.
My girl friend buys cels, mostly Tenchi, from a guy in Japan at very reasonable prices, i.e. $20-$50 shipped. Sure it takes up a week for them to get here, but they are the real thing. Apparently the guy runs an anime store and has contacts with many of the studios and artists.
Also from what I hear most of the non-US anime cels come from the original artists/studios. The cels are typically not kept by the major corporations like here in the US.
You got it pretty much right. There are two minor errors.
Non-profit and not-for-profit are legally the same thing. The name used is dependant on how and where you are registered as an organization. Being tax deductible is determined by the federal government based on what your organization actually does.
The other thing that isn't correct is the statement that they can't "make a profit at the end of the year". These organizations can 'make a profit'. The problem is that you have to explain it to the federal government in order to keep you tax exempt status.
There are plenty of legitmate reasons for 'making a profit', i.e. you are building up a trust fund, you are going to make a large capital investment next year, you get a large indowment to be spent over multiple years, etc. For many organizations it is easier to spend any extra money then it is to explain it to the IRS.
Head over to www.webhostingtalk.com and post your question there. I am sure you will get some good input.
If by 'major' Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols meant 'comercial' versions of Linux sold in large numbers by US companies, then yes there will be only 2-3 left in a few years. There will be plenty of other 'major' distros around the world however. There will also be a few European distros, a couple Japanese distros, a Brasilian distro, etc.
There will also be a plethora of smaller distros that fit various niches, just as we have today. It's just too easy to make your own customised distro, that exactly fits your needs, for this not to occur.
It is not an across the board fiber shortage. It's a case of not enough fiber in the right places. There is plenty of fiber, and in some cases a glut, in major metropolitain areas. There is a significant lack of fiber to non-metropolitain areas.
My parents spend the winters in southern Texas. My dad has told me that although his modem speeds are fine, his internet performance sucks. Turns out that the fiber to the CO, and in fact the entire town of 25000, is well past saturated and no new capacity will be installed for at least 12 months.
So its a case of where you are and how well the infrastructure is built up.