On Windows, the initial argument kind of makes sense. And, with something like Firefox (which seems content to use the last directory path as its save target, or the $HOME directory, at whim) or what have you which tends to put things in a different location.
But really, this should NOT be an issue in Linux - or any other Unix. We have a $HOME directory for a reason: it's where we keep our shit, just as God intended. This Xorg nonsense, which creates various "data" directories within the home dir for video, music, and what have you is just plain irritating. And any mechanism which tries to latch on to these directories (or the equivalent in Windows) only makes things more difficult still.
Basically, the problem seems to arise from programmers trying to make data organization too easy, at too high a level - or incompletely at that higher level. A user, no matter how stupid, does not need directories to be made for them, or for applications to have their own specific default save/open/dialog path. They need to default to the user's root path - in linux, $HOME; on OS X, $HOME\Documents (iirc?), and in Windows, "My Documents".
Unfortunately for Windows, there are several "root paths" - the Desktop and My Documents, as well as C:\ (due to the bolted-onto-legacy nature of the operating system). Likewise, MacOS has the Desktop default clinging on.
And yet, here we are, manufacturing the same damn problem for ourselves in Linux with Xorg default file location specifications, which really shouldn't be.
STOP IT. I know of no better way to start losing files (or to have to frequently search for files) when the user has to guess which default path has been used, or the application scopes change without the user's knowledge/consent. This is just like the usefulness Clippy provided to MS Office, but on a filesystem level, without the entirely GLOCKable avatar.
YES! Please, please: we need something like this. I've wanted it since I first had interaction with a VAX.
Think of how much extra time we currently spend doing something so trivial as saving different document revisions, creating revision history, and things like this. It's a very, very common thing for a competent computer user to do, in one way or another. It confounds me that something like this - which would be almost universally useful, not just be end users, sysadmins, or what have you - isn't available, never mind ubiquitous.
You realize that it's a fundamental human characteristic to violate laws/rules/guidelines which humans see to be self-advantageous to do so?
Unlike a robot, a "law" isn't something that can be hardwired. It matters little if we pass laws requiring such "laws" to be ingrained in robots. Once the technology is out of the bag, someone, somewhere, will modify it to turn it into a weapon.
(And then someone will modify it again to counteract the original weapon, and someone else will make something superior, and so on and so forth - this is the fundamental trend in human technological advance.)
Besides, I have to wonder why you weren't modified "+5 funny" instead of "insightful". The trend on slashdot of late seems to be knee-jerk emotional response, not reasoned thought. Was it "too late for humanity" after the nuclear weapons were used? Would a "law" have made any difference? How about the first gun, or the first spear? Would "laws" saying they couldn't be used against another human have made any difference? How about the human fist?
No, such laws are self-masturbatory fantasy. They only "work" in science fiction, where machines are completely autonomous.
Now, being concerned about sentient/autonomous machines, that MIGHT be something else to start thinking about. But I still hold that the same "laws" are pretty pointless to think about outside the context of a closed-system fantasy.
Sounds to me like they should pick a different architecture than x86.
For instance, I believe it's MIPS (big or small endian? I don't recall) which requires an off-by-two bit error level in order to create an actual error. That is, you need to have to sequential bit errors (iirc) in order for the processor to actually error.
There are a myriad of reasons why commercial desktop processors shouldn't be used in space, and this is just one of them. Heat, power utilization, and overall electronic longevity, are just a few of these reasons.
You think that's bad: an old IT manager of mine did that. Though I got sacked in this situation, because apparently the role of "system administrator" wasn't actually supposed to take initiative to solve problems which kept popping up time and time again. Apparently that's how she showed her competence to management - fixing the same damn thing, over and over.
Might also be why there were still 10-year-old "servers" kicking around.
If I'd have to wager a guess, they don't intend to give out the $30k (or any amount) as a "prize" and intended to donate it to charity (as its tax-deductible) from the start.
Not only is it cheap way to do advertisement, it's great viral advertising. While many people might buy the game, and even more play it, if they were to know about it, a lot more people are going to both know about it and play it now due to the $30k "prize".
As far as it not being reverse engineerable: I'd guess they might not even have an end-game condition. Or, if they do, it'd be all but impossible to reach it within the 30 days of the competition (maybe even with a known solution to all puzzles).
Hell, at 320x240, you'd have to pan and scan for half a minute just to see all of the icons on your MS Office toolbar/rip-off menus.
At that resolution, an article's name would wordwrap in an RSS feed, and you might get 10 (short) words across the screen at a time.
By the way: that resolution is just -maybe- usable for an 80x25 character terminal. That puts each of your characters at 4 pixels wide, and ~9.6 pixels high.
PASS. This device is something designed by people who are trying to cut costs at every corner without any regard for the finished product. What? No connectivity? They can use their phone! Oh, we can make the screen smaller, they'll still buy it! Et cetera.
This is nuts: why can't portable products which are usable on their own be available?
As someone else said, this thing basically differs very little from a cell phone - except for its software and lack of connectivity. It's essentially useless on its own.
Personally, I want to see those yet-undelivered "$100 laptops" we've seen promised several times (and made available through bulk buy or self-import) which appear to be based on the Skytone Alpha 400/Hivision Mininote (the variant with built-in wireless) (seen here: link).
Yes, I want one; I want one very badly. They're basically 8-year-old technology, but with some newer additions such as wifi. You can run a fair amount of "modern" software on those old HPC computers, and the best of them only have 64Mb RAM. I'm currently running ion 3 as a window manager (matchbox-wm was an option, but it wasn't as intuitive) with dillo2, wordgrinder, irssi/bitlbee, and half a dozen xterms on a Mobilepro 780 without the need for swap. This is on NetBDS. Not "full featured" but well worth $100 - if I could get another one with twice the RAM. $200, well, that'd be cutting it a bit close to what an Eee costs given the feature set.
This really has little to do with internet use and everything to do with the age of the participants.
I don't doubt that, if they were to take two sample groups in the mid-20s range from, say, an Amish or Hutterite colony and downtown Manhattan, the results would be almost identical.
The topic on this/. post is very misleading.
Biologically, the human brain 'naturally' decays over time. It's going to happen. Yes, you can slow it down, but most people don't try to - they don't even think about it, or particularly like thinking anymore. With age, people typically get bored with life and start looking inwardly, resulting in mental stagnation.
There is nothing intrinsically special about the Internet. Could it be that reading simply isn't all that stimulating? Why not try the same experiment, but with video games, too?
Buddy, I'd be interested in actually getting a stable download of the fucking thing before the sources changed mid-checkout. I'd be bloody overjoyed to use it on my desktop.
(Makes me wonder why they don't pull Win98se out of moth balls, hide DOS and work from there.) WindowsCE seems like something they might try to use but it doesn't "look" suitable in all the places I have seen it applied... I could be wrong, but as Microsoft's efforts seem to be focused on putting WindowsXP on everything that a small computer that normally sells with Linux, I would have to say that Microsoft sees WinCE as functionally unsuitable to compete in that arena.
Windows CE basically is Windows 9x; or, at least, many of the API calls are very similar. I would not be surprised if they share the same code base, way back when. And since WinCE can run on multiple arch, it'd make a much better choice than W9x.
(Note that Windows Mobile is not Windows CE; Windows Mobile runs on top of Windows CE - the shell. I see no reason why MS couldn't replace this shell with something more suitable for general computing for users.)
Fact is, most computers are entirely over-scoped for what most people use them for. Most people could get along just fine with a CE device, provided it had a decent web browser, Office, image and video viewing, audio playing, silly flash games and cards, and access to their MFD printers. That's entirely obtainable for Microsoft, I think: put WinCE on an Eee type device (with a MIPS or ARM processor with additional media decoding chips), write a "portable" office suite (think: just the basics - spellcheck, etc.), and make sure IE works properly on the device, and they'd have something which would, IMO, sell very well.
It has been shown repeatedly - and several times by Apple in the last couple years - that simplicity sells well. People like simply functional devices, and with the way things are going culturally, they/we also like efficient, hassle-free devices.
The "general purpose" PC was never designed, primarily, with the user in mind. It was designed as a general purpose machine, and the "programmer's utility" was never far from the surface. But we've gotten to the point where PCs are literally everywhere, and we need to move beyond that for common computing devices: accessible is necessary, but most users would prefer it all be hidden under a pretty widget. Think: OS X, iPods, the dashboard on most US made vehicles.
Simple complex devices appeal because they speak of luxury - simply enough.
The problem with Enlightenment (and thus Raster's work) is that it's always been in development; there hasn't been a release made in the past 8 or so years, and in that time there have been at least two or three (that I'm aware of - probably a lot more) code disposals, rewrites, and general reconstruction/redesign.
With E, it's always been: it'll be done "real soon now" and if you want to try it you've got to pull it from cvs and build it yourself. Also, if it doesn't build, don't tell us about it; we either know, or don't care. You're pulling from a cvs development tree, so why would you expect otherwise?
If they'd actually had a release every couple years, or even a "working snapshot" which was reasonably stable every couple months, I'm fairly certain they'd have maintained a sizeable following. Six, seven, eight years ago E (for E16 and early E17) had a fairly substantial (and growing) following; now, I don't know anyone who uses it, and very few of new users even know what it is. (There are also a lot of other options now than there were then which look "just as pretty" and work, which I'm sure is a big part of no attention as well.)
This is pretty funny on several levels for someone who's been dabbling with old (circa 2000-2002) HPCs and linux/netbsd, used E16 (and briefly E17) in the 1999-2002 time frame. It just astounds me that E could run on something like this.
Anyone remember how E was (still is?) a bloated hog and required a LOT of system resources to run? Now, can you imagine E running on a portable handheld from the same computing era? That blows my mind.
Any chance of this scaled down E being available for desktop use? At the very least, I'm going to have to give that snapshot a try!
I'm going to have to see if this can build/run on my Mobilepro 780 - a 167MHz mipsel with 32Mb RAM. Doubtful - though I'm sure it'll run on something a little newer just fine.
I'm sorry, we're not communicating. Let's take a step back.
We aren't heating data centers (intentionally), therefore humidity is not an issue. Outside air - the cold variety - is less moist than the warm variety. This is due to water moisture (both vapor and liquid) freezing into what is called "ice". This ice does not travel through the air freely, and falls to the ground. Additionally, cold air has less buoyancy for moisture in general, and water moisture does not readily evaporate in cold air.
This is significant when your data center is located in a semi-arid climate which has a winter temperature around 0F. There is no moisture in the air, and, in fact, many people actually run humidifiers to cut down on static electricity and keep the air moist enough to not be uncomfortable to breath when it is at a habitable temperature.
What astounds me is why companies like Google aren't moving data centers to places like rural Minnesota, Michigan, or even somewhere like South Dakota. These places are colder year-round than current data center locations by quite a bit, and the winters are substantially colder. It's likely they'd not even have a cooling bill at all during the winter (and, in fact, would just duct the heat into the offices/run AC into the offices).
Personally, I think somewhere like South Dakota would be an awesome place for a corporate data center. If a state like Texas appeals to companies like RackSpace due to its "right to work' status, they'd love a state like South Dakota (which has an even lower cost of living and per capita income with the
Yes, most of South Dakota is pretty desolate; however, the Black Hills region is very beautiful and still quite undeveloped. There is a lot of open space, land is cheap, and the cost of living is substantially lower than the "metro areas". For a small city like Rapid City, there is a fair amount of culture and life is much more pleasant than in an urban area, or even sprawling suburbia (because RC isn't capable of supporting such a thing due to the topography).
There are some companies which are moving to smaller towns (Northrop just put a facility in locally) to save money; it just surprises me that companies like Google, which have a geographically distributed clientel and are only dependent on a proper fiber run, aren't moving to the smaller towns. They'd get cheaper facilities, cheaper employees who (most likely) want to settle down/not jump jobs, and a more distributed network (making growth and recession within the organization a more organic, less chaotic process).
Anyway, just thought I'd plug my town for this kind of development; I like it here and would like there to be more local opportunities. In the case of Google, it seems to me that simply requiring for processors to be able to handle a higher temperature is thinking inside the box - ie, fairly increatively. Something like this should be only one of many steps taken to cut overhead and improve the product.
The point is that, short of complex management suites for IPv6, IPv6 will be, and is, almost completely impossible to effectively administrate at the human level. Even for a simple office network on IPv6, you'll need full DNS services in order to be able to effectively keep track of what is where.
The days of being able to write down an IP address on a pad of paper for reference are (close to) being gone due to the inconvenience of doing so, I think.
The stats were even surprising to a sceptic. In the past four years in my state there's been one fatality on a scooter and only three other fatalities on motorcycles less than 250cc. Once you go over 250cc, people seem to become retards and there are a lot more deaths.
That's funny, because most motorcycles are over 250cc. A 250cc motorcycle isn't really safe for highways (you're not going to have much power, if any, for acceleration over 55-60mph). Anything under 70mph comfortable cruising speed is, in most of America, a "town bike".
You don't even hit the power utility equilibrium on most bikes until around 500cc, and Harley Davidson doesn't even make anything under 750cc or so.
So yeah, short version: there are hardly any deaths or injuries on scooters because a) nobody buys them b) there are a LOT more motorcycles out there, and c) you will naturally have a higher likelihood of injuring yourself on a motorcycle because you will both be going faster and driving it more places/more often due to its increased utility.
My excuse, as you put it, is that I can't a) carry a 2nd person under the age of 12 on a scooter, b) can't justify the the economic or ecological impact of buying another vehicle, and c) I can't stand it when people justify their own life choices to the point of a cultural imperative. See also: Apple.
1) On black ice (as well as snow and rain), steering is actually quite a bit more tactile without power steering, and I feel, much safer, provided you're strong enough to turn the wheel (especially on the highway). IMO, power steering is a compromise: you gain some comfort/ease and lose feedback with the road.
2) It's a bad idea to accelerate when hitting black ice. Seriously. Accelerating while skidding on black ice is the last thing you want to do - right after jerking the wheel sharply to the side (note slight hyperbole). No, the best thing to do if you hit ice and feel your vehicle lose traction is to coast and wait to respond until you've got road purchase again.
The power steering went out in a Ford Taurus I drove for a number of years (actually, the AC compressor), and instead of spend the $1000 or whatever it would've to replace it I drove without it after realizing that it was both doable and better in bad weather conditions.
I recently tested out a handful of "increase fuel efficiency" techniques.
The first one I tried was "drive slow". This was on the highway in the Midwest, where the road is literally straight for hundreds of miles, and the wind often travels West to East at around 10-30mph. I took the "going there" (Eastward) leg of the trip at 55mph with cruise control. I took the trip back at 78mph (into the wind). The round trip is about 700 miles; one-way 350.
Long of the short of it: the return trip took about two more gallons of gas. not even close to worth the agitation/fatigue of the longer trip there.
(Caveat: there was one less person in the vehicle for the return trip - that'd be 1 less 150lb person, for a total of four on the first leg and 3 on the return).
What I've seen prove the best results, in terms of driving style, is to accelerate slowly. Don't stomp the accelerator. Glide into red lights (ie don't stop right when you get to the light; just let off the gas and break slowly if you see a red light ahead). Yes, it slows overall driving speed, but I still go at (or above:P) the speed limit, and I'd wager in-town driving gets a 10-20% boost in efficiency. Though, this is difficult to do in traffic of any sort, obviously. I imagine it'd be all but impossible in populated coastal areas.
Something else I've seen prove (substantially) successful results are the "HHO" hydrogen augmenters. You'll spend about $15-20 for the parts and spend an afternoon tinkering with them and finding the proper place in your vehicle for mounting (if you're technically inclined), but I've seen some astounding results - 30-50% fuel economy increase, with (in some vehicles) better horsepower. Took my Ford Focus (2000) from about 27mpg to 35-40mpg average.
Rant: Personally, I can't help but think that automotive makers are intentionally not providing our vehicles with the innovations necessary to get better fuel economy (and this is exasperated by government emission regulation which monitors fuel emissions by the gallon not mile). I think they know how to get high-efficiency vehicles which don't suck, even without using hybrid/augmentation technologies. We had cars in the 1980s which got 30, 35mpg. My Focus only gets 27 or so, stock - which is only about 7mpg better than my neighbor's V8 Dodge work van, which is full to the brim with tools and supplies. With hybrid technology, we're only just barely getting what we used to get out of our vehicles.
Yes, I realize that our vehicles are now (mostly) much more reliable than they were 20 years ago, and that they've made a lot of compromises in things like fuel economy to get there. (Or, at least, so the story goes.) Just the same, there are a lot of easy, cheap ways to improve fuel economy (at the very least, on-demand HHO) which the automotive industry isn't implementing - and I have to wonder: why, if a guy unfamiliar with cars can pull 30% better fuel mileage out of his car in an afternoon with $20, why can't automotive manufacturers?
You're kidding yourself if you think this wouldn't impact their bottom line.
For instance: mechanically/electronically, my IBM Thinkpad X30 is identical to how it was when I got it. It works great (though software has gotten more bloated in the meantime, and its argueable whether the Intel graphic chip in it is worth half a damn - point being, it works as designed.)
However, the plastic case has cracked, broken, and otherwise been deformed over the past 5 years I've had it. The hard drive cover - held in by a screw - is long broken and gone. The thin plastic frame around the sides of the keyboard is broken in several places. Overall, it makes the laptop feel "old" and "busted".
Would I pay a couple bucks to bring the Thinkpad back to "new"? Certainly; it'd put me off from buying another one for a while.
There are a LOT of people who would rather fix what they've got for cheap than buy a replacement. Not everyone's a gadgethead.
Most certainly: having stuff on-site is important, if for no other reason than external connectivity issues (cut wires, routing issues, whatever). What is the university going to do, shut down for a day if (when) calendaring and email stop working due to something out of your control?
Also, the benefits of keeping it in-house are small and suplimental - things you won't realize until they come up, such as when a $boss asks someone to do x or y with the "new system". How much frustration and hard work is it worth to you (and the others involved) now to not have to say "uh, sorry, we can't do that" in a situation like this? Wouldn't it be preferable to say "ok, we'll put that on the requested features list and have the dev team look at it as soon as possible"?
The library is often staffed and run by the English department (or, at least, English majors). And also those taking "Library Studies" (surprise)!
(And I should add, for viewing CS as a discipline, you sure don't seem to see its adherents as terribly disciplined.)
The IT departments at the schools I've attended have been staffed by students to a large degree - and not just "tech support". I've interviewed as a post-grad at several universities for positions, and yes, the "IT" departments were employing students (full and part-time) for jobs such as this. It is common and, in my opinion, suggested for a number of reasons:
1) It gives the students work experience. 2) It provides the brightest students with an opportunity to familiarize with the campus network/facilities. 3) It may potentially provide the university with an avenue to employ said bright student full-time after graduation (and in several instances I've seen, before).
If you're done this before and run into snags, I suspect it's due to poor professor/professional oversight on the projects, and poor selection of "candidates" to perform the work.
It seems entirely reasonable to me for the campus to organize some Jrs./Srs. together under a work study program, or such, and have them either implement such a solution or write it themselves. I know "academics" aren't typically fond of work experience, but it's an essential part of becoming competent in your field. Universities are there to train people and, yes, sometimes that results in problems. But it was (and continues to be) a travesty when universities started "outsourcing" this kind of work, as it denied a lot of budding IT and CS students actual experience.
I don't know what you might mean by "legacy systems", but unless you're using something completely anachronistic (no SMTP, no POP or IMAP), it's not so "legacy" that it wouldn't be fixable and expandable internally.
If you've got POP/SMTP/IMAP capability in your existing infrastructure and it isn't "scaling" you're either doing something wrong and/or the physical infrastructure isn't substantial enough to deal with it.
There is a handful of "snap in" products out there which would allow you do have any number of services, even "Microsoft compatible", if that tickles your winky. Take Zarafa, for instance: it's an "exchange replacement", with email, calendaring, contacts, and tasks - more than 90%+ of campus students are likely to utilize, and substantial enough for the other 10% and the adventurous professors. It integrates with existing Windows infrastructure, and
Personally, I'd say go that route over anything Microsoft would offer you. Seriously, it's not even an argument worth making if you can't figure it out on your own. Which would you rather put on your resume: "Helped pick Microsoft mail and calendaring system replacement for campus" or "Planned, designed, and implemented Zarafa information gateway for campus" (or similar, in either situation)?
Failing that, there are dozens of other web-based mail/calendar systems available. Some even tailored to things like project management, which can be useful - and they can all be tailored to the specific needs of the university.
As far as picking from the three you've got, I'd pick Google without even thinking about it (if for no other reason than the fact that that's what students are familiar with).
I'd only have one question for them: what benefits can your product offer us which can not be realized through the efforts of students? If you really need whatever benefit they mention, and you can't get it from a student's efforts, regardless of time-to-implement (within reason) there's no reason to consider their product.
If a person honestly and objectively looks at the costs involved (even if it's just software, or hardware), Microsoft products are the last choice you'd want. For a larger campus you'd be looking at, what... 20, 30 servers for Sharepoint? More?
A university SHOULD NOT be paying for vendored software, in my opinion. Implementing these sorts of things for work experience is the rough equivalent to a "work study" in some other field, and not allowing students to (at least!) install existing stuff and maintain it is paramount to giving preferential treatment to the other science disciplines which, you know, get hands on experience (biology, forestry, chemistry, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
On Windows, the initial argument kind of makes sense. And, with something like Firefox (which seems content to use the last directory path as its save target, or the $HOME directory, at whim) or what have you which tends to put things in a different location.
But really, this should NOT be an issue in Linux - or any other Unix. We have a $HOME directory for a reason: it's where we keep our shit, just as God intended. This Xorg nonsense, which creates various "data" directories within the home dir for video, music, and what have you is just plain irritating. And any mechanism which tries to latch on to these directories (or the equivalent in Windows) only makes things more difficult still.
Basically, the problem seems to arise from programmers trying to make data organization too easy, at too high a level - or incompletely at that higher level. A user, no matter how stupid, does not need directories to be made for them, or for applications to have their own specific default save/open/dialog path. They need to default to the user's root path - in linux, $HOME; on OS X, $HOME\Documents (iirc?), and in Windows, "My Documents".
Unfortunately for Windows, there are several "root paths" - the Desktop and My Documents, as well as C:\ (due to the bolted-onto-legacy nature of the operating system). Likewise, MacOS has the Desktop default clinging on.
And yet, here we are, manufacturing the same damn problem for ourselves in Linux with Xorg default file location specifications, which really shouldn't be.
STOP IT. I know of no better way to start losing files (or to have to frequently search for files) when the user has to guess which default path has been used, or the application scopes change without the user's knowledge/consent. This is just like the usefulness Clippy provided to MS Office, but on a filesystem level, without the entirely GLOCKable avatar.
For the children: please, don't do it.
YES! Please, please: we need something like this. I've wanted it since I first had interaction with a VAX.
Think of how much extra time we currently spend doing something so trivial as saving different document revisions, creating revision history, and things like this. It's a very, very common thing for a competent computer user to do, in one way or another. It confounds me that something like this - which would be almost universally useful, not just be end users, sysadmins, or what have you - isn't available, never mind ubiquitous.
You realize that it's a fundamental human characteristic to violate laws/rules/guidelines which humans see to be self-advantageous to do so?
Unlike a robot, a "law" isn't something that can be hardwired. It matters little if we pass laws requiring such "laws" to be ingrained in robots. Once the technology is out of the bag, someone, somewhere, will modify it to turn it into a weapon.
(And then someone will modify it again to counteract the original weapon, and someone else will make something superior, and so on and so forth - this is the fundamental trend in human technological advance.)
Besides, I have to wonder why you weren't modified "+5 funny" instead of "insightful". The trend on slashdot of late seems to be knee-jerk emotional response, not reasoned thought. Was it "too late for humanity" after the nuclear weapons were used? Would a "law" have made any difference? How about the first gun, or the first spear? Would "laws" saying they couldn't be used against another human have made any difference? How about the human fist?
No, such laws are self-masturbatory fantasy. They only "work" in science fiction, where machines are completely autonomous.
Now, being concerned about sentient/autonomous machines, that MIGHT be something else to start thinking about. But I still hold that the same "laws" are pretty pointless to think about outside the context of a closed-system fantasy.
Sounds to me like they should pick a different architecture than x86.
For instance, I believe it's MIPS (big or small endian? I don't recall) which requires an off-by-two bit error level in order to create an actual error. That is, you need to have to sequential bit errors (iirc) in order for the processor to actually error.
There are a myriad of reasons why commercial desktop processors shouldn't be used in space, and this is just one of them. Heat, power utilization, and overall electronic longevity, are just a few of these reasons.
You think that's bad: an old IT manager of mine did that. Though I got sacked in this situation, because apparently the role of "system administrator" wasn't actually supposed to take initiative to solve problems which kept popping up time and time again. Apparently that's how she showed her competence to management - fixing the same damn thing, over and over.
Might also be why there were still 10-year-old "servers" kicking around.
Glad I'm not there anymore.
Maybe. I'd guess: probably not.
If I'd have to wager a guess, they don't intend to give out the $30k (or any amount) as a "prize" and intended to donate it to charity (as its tax-deductible) from the start.
Not only is it cheap way to do advertisement, it's great viral advertising. While many people might buy the game, and even more play it, if they were to know about it, a lot more people are going to both know about it and play it now due to the $30k "prize".
As far as it not being reverse engineerable: I'd guess they might not even have an end-game condition. Or, if they do, it'd be all but impossible to reach it within the 30 days of the competition (maybe even with a known solution to all puzzles).
Hell, at 320x240, you'd have to pan and scan for half a minute just to see all of the icons on your MS Office toolbar/rip-off menus.
At that resolution, an article's name would wordwrap in an RSS feed, and you might get 10 (short) words across the screen at a time.
By the way: that resolution is just -maybe- usable for an 80x25 character terminal. That puts each of your characters at 4 pixels wide, and ~9.6 pixels high.
PASS. This device is something designed by people who are trying to cut costs at every corner without any regard for the finished product. What? No connectivity? They can use their phone! Oh, we can make the screen smaller, they'll still buy it! Et cetera.
This is nuts: why can't portable products which are usable on their own be available?
As someone else said, this thing basically differs very little from a cell phone - except for its software and lack of connectivity. It's essentially useless on its own.
Personally, I want to see those yet-undelivered "$100 laptops" we've seen promised several times (and made available through bulk buy or self-import) which appear to be based on the Skytone Alpha 400/Hivision Mininote (the variant with built-in wireless) (seen here: link).
Yes, I want one; I want one very badly. They're basically 8-year-old technology, but with some newer additions such as wifi. You can run a fair amount of "modern" software on those old HPC computers, and the best of them only have 64Mb RAM. I'm currently running ion 3 as a window manager (matchbox-wm was an option, but it wasn't as intuitive) with dillo2, wordgrinder, irssi/bitlbee, and half a dozen xterms on a Mobilepro 780 without the need for swap. This is on NetBDS. Not "full featured" but well worth $100 - if I could get another one with twice the RAM. $200, well, that'd be cutting it a bit close to what an Eee costs given the feature set.
No. They're old.
This really has little to do with internet use and everything to do with the age of the participants.
I don't doubt that, if they were to take two sample groups in the mid-20s range from, say, an Amish or Hutterite colony and downtown Manhattan, the results would be almost identical.
The topic on this /. post is very misleading.
Biologically, the human brain 'naturally' decays over time. It's going to happen. Yes, you can slow it down, but most people don't try to - they don't even think about it, or particularly like thinking anymore. With age, people typically get bored with life and start looking inwardly, resulting in mental stagnation.
There is nothing intrinsically special about the Internet. Could it be that reading simply isn't all that stimulating? Why not try the same experiment, but with video games, too?
Interested in using it on their phone?
Buddy, I'd be interested in actually getting a stable download of the fucking thing before the sources changed mid-checkout. I'd be bloody overjoyed to use it on my desktop.
(Makes me wonder why they don't pull Win98se out of moth balls, hide DOS and work from there.) WindowsCE seems like something they might try to use but it doesn't "look" suitable in all the places I have seen it applied... I could be wrong, but as Microsoft's efforts seem to be focused on putting WindowsXP on everything that a small computer that normally sells with Linux, I would have to say that Microsoft sees WinCE as functionally unsuitable to compete in that arena.
Windows CE basically is Windows 9x; or, at least, many of the API calls are very similar. I would not be surprised if they share the same code base, way back when. And since WinCE can run on multiple arch, it'd make a much better choice than W9x.
(Note that Windows Mobile is not Windows CE; Windows Mobile runs on top of Windows CE - the shell. I see no reason why MS couldn't replace this shell with something more suitable for general computing for users.)
Fact is, most computers are entirely over-scoped for what most people use them for. Most people could get along just fine with a CE device, provided it had a decent web browser, Office, image and video viewing, audio playing, silly flash games and cards, and access to their MFD printers. That's entirely obtainable for Microsoft, I think: put WinCE on an Eee type device (with a MIPS or ARM processor with additional media decoding chips), write a "portable" office suite (think: just the basics - spellcheck, etc.), and make sure IE works properly on the device, and they'd have something which would, IMO, sell very well.
It has been shown repeatedly - and several times by Apple in the last couple years - that simplicity sells well. People like simply functional devices, and with the way things are going culturally, they/we also like efficient, hassle-free devices.
The "general purpose" PC was never designed, primarily, with the user in mind. It was designed as a general purpose machine, and the "programmer's utility" was never far from the surface. But we've gotten to the point where PCs are literally everywhere, and we need to move beyond that for common computing devices: accessible is necessary, but most users would prefer it all be hidden under a pretty widget. Think: OS X, iPods, the dashboard on most US made vehicles.
Simple complex devices appeal because they speak of luxury - simply enough.
The problem with Enlightenment (and thus Raster's work) is that it's always been in development; there hasn't been a release made in the past 8 or so years, and in that time there have been at least two or three (that I'm aware of - probably a lot more) code disposals, rewrites, and general reconstruction/redesign.
With E, it's always been: it'll be done "real soon now" and if you want to try it you've got to pull it from cvs and build it yourself. Also, if it doesn't build, don't tell us about it; we either know, or don't care. You're pulling from a cvs development tree, so why would you expect otherwise?
If they'd actually had a release every couple years, or even a "working snapshot" which was reasonably stable every couple months, I'm fairly certain they'd have maintained a sizeable following. Six, seven, eight years ago E (for E16 and early E17) had a fairly substantial (and growing) following; now, I don't know anyone who uses it, and very few of new users even know what it is. (There are also a lot of other options now than there were then which look "just as pretty" and work, which I'm sure is a big part of no attention as well.)
This is pretty funny on several levels for someone who's been dabbling with old (circa 2000-2002) HPCs and linux/netbsd, used E16 (and briefly E17) in the 1999-2002 time frame. It just astounds me that E could run on something like this.
Anyone remember how E was (still is?) a bloated hog and required a LOT of system resources to run? Now, can you imagine E running on a portable handheld from the same computing era? That blows my mind.
Any chance of this scaled down E being available for desktop use? At the very least, I'm going to have to give that snapshot a try!
I'm going to have to see if this can build/run on my Mobilepro 780 - a 167MHz mipsel with 32Mb RAM. Doubtful - though I'm sure it'll run on something a little newer just fine.
Ok: you're crazy.
Milspec stuff always costs more. ALWAYS. If Google is trying to cut costs, spending more isn't the solution.
I'm sorry, we're not communicating. Let's take a step back.
We aren't heating data centers (intentionally), therefore humidity is not an issue. Outside air - the cold variety - is less moist than the warm variety. This is due to water moisture (both vapor and liquid) freezing into what is called "ice". This ice does not travel through the air freely, and falls to the ground. Additionally, cold air has less buoyancy for moisture in general, and water moisture does not readily evaporate in cold air.
This is significant when your data center is located in a semi-arid climate which has a winter temperature around 0F. There is no moisture in the air, and, in fact, many people actually run humidifiers to cut down on static electricity and keep the air moist enough to not be uncomfortable to breath when it is at a habitable temperature.
What astounds me is why companies like Google aren't moving data centers to places like rural Minnesota, Michigan, or even somewhere like South Dakota. These places are colder year-round than current data center locations by quite a bit, and the winters are substantially colder. It's likely they'd not even have a cooling bill at all during the winter (and, in fact, would just duct the heat into the offices/run AC into the offices).
Personally, I think somewhere like South Dakota would be an awesome place for a corporate data center. If a state like Texas appeals to companies like RackSpace due to its "right to work' status, they'd love a state like South Dakota (which has an even lower cost of living and per capita income with the
Yes, most of South Dakota is pretty desolate; however, the Black Hills region is very beautiful and still quite undeveloped. There is a lot of open space, land is cheap, and the cost of living is substantially lower than the "metro areas". For a small city like Rapid City, there is a fair amount of culture and life is much more pleasant than in an urban area, or even sprawling suburbia (because RC isn't capable of supporting such a thing due to the topography).
There are some companies which are moving to smaller towns (Northrop just put a facility in locally) to save money; it just surprises me that companies like Google, which have a geographically distributed clientel and are only dependent on a proper fiber run, aren't moving to the smaller towns. They'd get cheaper facilities, cheaper employees who (most likely) want to settle down/not jump jobs, and a more distributed network (making growth and recession within the organization a more organic, less chaotic process).
Anyway, just thought I'd plug my town for this kind of development; I like it here and would like there to be more local opportunities. In the case of Google, it seems to me that simply requiring for processors to be able to handle a higher temperature is thinking inside the box - ie, fairly increatively. Something like this should be only one of many steps taken to cut overhead and improve the product.
The point is that, short of complex management suites for IPv6, IPv6 will be, and is, almost completely impossible to effectively administrate at the human level. Even for a simple office network on IPv6, you'll need full DNS services in order to be able to effectively keep track of what is where.
The days of being able to write down an IP address on a pad of paper for reference are (close to) being gone due to the inconvenience of doing so, I think.
Yeah, I do try to drive RPM not MPG - keep the RPMs ~2000 (or in my case, since I don't have a meter for that, just try to listen).
Excuse?
There are a couple.
The stats were even surprising to a sceptic. In the past four years in my state there's been one fatality on a scooter and only three other fatalities on motorcycles less than 250cc. Once you go over 250cc, people seem to become retards and there are a lot more deaths.
That's funny, because most motorcycles are over 250cc. A 250cc motorcycle isn't really safe for highways (you're not going to have much power, if any, for acceleration over 55-60mph). Anything under 70mph comfortable cruising speed is, in most of America, a "town bike".
You don't even hit the power utility equilibrium on most bikes until around 500cc, and Harley Davidson doesn't even make anything under 750cc or so.
So yeah, short version: there are hardly any deaths or injuries on scooters because a) nobody buys them b) there are a LOT more motorcycles out there, and c) you will naturally have a higher likelihood of injuring yourself on a motorcycle because you will both be going faster and driving it more places/more often due to its increased utility.
My excuse, as you put it, is that I can't a) carry a 2nd person under the age of 12 on a scooter, b) can't justify the the economic or ecological impact of buying another vehicle, and c) I can't stand it when people justify their own life choices to the point of a cultural imperative. See also: Apple.
I don't know about your third point, but:
1) On black ice (as well as snow and rain), steering is actually quite a bit more tactile without power steering, and I feel, much safer, provided you're strong enough to turn the wheel (especially on the highway). IMO, power steering is a compromise: you gain some comfort/ease and lose feedback with the road.
2) It's a bad idea to accelerate when hitting black ice. Seriously. Accelerating while skidding on black ice is the last thing you want to do - right after jerking the wheel sharply to the side (note slight hyperbole). No, the best thing to do if you hit ice and feel your vehicle lose traction is to coast and wait to respond until you've got road purchase again.
The power steering went out in a Ford Taurus I drove for a number of years (actually, the AC compressor), and instead of spend the $1000 or whatever it would've to replace it I drove without it after realizing that it was both doable and better in bad weather conditions.
I recently tested out a handful of "increase fuel efficiency" techniques.
The first one I tried was "drive slow". This was on the highway in the Midwest, where the road is literally straight for hundreds of miles, and the wind often travels West to East at around 10-30mph. I took the "going there" (Eastward) leg of the trip at 55mph with cruise control. I took the trip back at 78mph (into the wind). The round trip is about 700 miles; one-way 350.
Long of the short of it: the return trip took about two more gallons of gas. not even close to worth the agitation/fatigue of the longer trip there.
(Caveat: there was one less person in the vehicle for the return trip - that'd be 1 less 150lb person, for a total of four on the first leg and 3 on the return).
What I've seen prove the best results, in terms of driving style, is to accelerate slowly. Don't stomp the accelerator. Glide into red lights (ie don't stop right when you get to the light; just let off the gas and break slowly if you see a red light ahead). Yes, it slows overall driving speed, but I still go at (or above :P) the speed limit, and I'd wager in-town driving gets a 10-20% boost in efficiency. Though, this is difficult to do in traffic of any sort, obviously. I imagine it'd be all but impossible in populated coastal areas.
Something else I've seen prove (substantially) successful results are the "HHO" hydrogen augmenters. You'll spend about $15-20 for the parts and spend an afternoon tinkering with them and finding the proper place in your vehicle for mounting (if you're technically inclined), but I've seen some astounding results - 30-50% fuel economy increase, with (in some vehicles) better horsepower. Took my Ford Focus (2000) from about 27mpg to 35-40mpg average.
Rant: Personally, I can't help but think that automotive makers are intentionally not providing our vehicles with the innovations necessary to get better fuel economy (and this is exasperated by government emission regulation which monitors fuel emissions by the gallon not mile). I think they know how to get high-efficiency vehicles which don't suck, even without using hybrid/augmentation technologies. We had cars in the 1980s which got 30, 35mpg. My Focus only gets 27 or so, stock - which is only about 7mpg better than my neighbor's V8 Dodge work van, which is full to the brim with tools and supplies. With hybrid technology, we're only just barely getting what we used to get out of our vehicles.
Yes, I realize that our vehicles are now (mostly) much more reliable than they were 20 years ago, and that they've made a lot of compromises in things like fuel economy to get there. (Or, at least, so the story goes.) Just the same, there are a lot of easy, cheap ways to improve fuel economy (at the very least, on-demand HHO) which the automotive industry isn't implementing - and I have to wonder: why, if a guy unfamiliar with cars can pull 30% better fuel mileage out of his car in an afternoon with $20, why can't automotive manufacturers?
You're kidding yourself if you think this wouldn't impact their bottom line.
For instance: mechanically/electronically, my IBM Thinkpad X30 is identical to how it was when I got it. It works great (though software has gotten more bloated in the meantime, and its argueable whether the Intel graphic chip in it is worth half a damn - point being, it works as designed.)
However, the plastic case has cracked, broken, and otherwise been deformed over the past 5 years I've had it. The hard drive cover - held in by a screw - is long broken and gone. The thin plastic frame around the sides of the keyboard is broken in several places. Overall, it makes the laptop feel "old" and "busted".
Would I pay a couple bucks to bring the Thinkpad back to "new"? Certainly; it'd put me off from buying another one for a while.
There are a LOT of people who would rather fix what they've got for cheap than buy a replacement. Not everyone's a gadgethead.
Most certainly: having stuff on-site is important, if for no other reason than external connectivity issues (cut wires, routing issues, whatever). What is the university going to do, shut down for a day if (when) calendaring and email stop working due to something out of your control?
Also, the benefits of keeping it in-house are small and suplimental - things you won't realize until they come up, such as when a $boss asks someone to do x or y with the "new system". How much frustration and hard work is it worth to you (and the others involved) now to not have to say "uh, sorry, we can't do that" in a situation like this? Wouldn't it be preferable to say "ok, we'll put that on the requested features list and have the dev team look at it as soon as possible"?
... but, but, but...
The library is often staffed and run by the English department (or, at least, English majors). And also those taking "Library Studies" (surprise)!
(And I should add, for viewing CS as a discipline, you sure don't seem to see its adherents as terribly disciplined.)
The IT departments at the schools I've attended have been staffed by students to a large degree - and not just "tech support". I've interviewed as a post-grad at several universities for positions, and yes, the "IT" departments were employing students (full and part-time) for jobs such as this. It is common and, in my opinion, suggested for a number of reasons:
1) It gives the students work experience.
2) It provides the brightest students with an opportunity to familiarize with the campus network/facilities.
3) It may potentially provide the university with an avenue to employ said bright student full-time after graduation (and in several instances I've seen, before).
If you're done this before and run into snags, I suspect it's due to poor professor/professional oversight on the projects, and poor selection of "candidates" to perform the work.
It seems entirely reasonable to me for the campus to organize some Jrs./Srs. together under a work study program, or such, and have them either implement such a solution or write it themselves. I know "academics" aren't typically fond of work experience, but it's an essential part of becoming competent in your field. Universities are there to train people and, yes, sometimes that results in problems. But it was (and continues to be) a travesty when universities started "outsourcing" this kind of work, as it denied a lot of budding IT and CS students actual experience.
I don't know what you might mean by "legacy systems", but unless you're using something completely anachronistic (no SMTP, no POP or IMAP), it's not so "legacy" that it wouldn't be fixable and expandable internally.
If you've got POP/SMTP/IMAP capability in your existing infrastructure and it isn't "scaling" you're either doing something wrong and/or the physical infrastructure isn't substantial enough to deal with it.
There is a handful of "snap in" products out there which would allow you do have any number of services, even "Microsoft compatible", if that tickles your winky. Take Zarafa, for instance: it's an "exchange replacement", with email, calendaring, contacts, and tasks - more than 90%+ of campus students are likely to utilize, and substantial enough for the other 10% and the adventurous professors. It integrates with existing Windows infrastructure, and
Personally, I'd say go that route over anything Microsoft would offer you. Seriously, it's not even an argument worth making if you can't figure it out on your own. Which would you rather put on your resume: "Helped pick Microsoft mail and calendaring system replacement for campus" or "Planned, designed, and implemented Zarafa information gateway for campus" (or similar, in either situation)?
Failing that, there are dozens of other web-based mail/calendar systems available. Some even tailored to things like project management, which can be useful - and they can all be tailored to the specific needs of the university.
As far as picking from the three you've got, I'd pick Google without even thinking about it (if for no other reason than the fact that that's what students are familiar with).
I'd only have one question for them: what benefits can your product offer us which can not be realized through the efforts of students? If you really need whatever benefit they mention, and you can't get it from a student's efforts, regardless of time-to-implement (within reason) there's no reason to consider their product.
If a person honestly and objectively looks at the costs involved (even if it's just software, or hardware), Microsoft products are the last choice you'd want. For a larger campus you'd be looking at, what... 20, 30 servers for Sharepoint? More?
A university SHOULD NOT be paying for vendored software, in my opinion. Implementing these sorts of things for work experience is the rough equivalent to a "work study" in some other field, and not allowing students to (at least!) install existing stuff and maintain it is paramount to giving preferential treatment to the other science disciplines which, you know, get hands on experience (biology, forestry, chemistry, etc.).