Ick, C++ is not a good language to learn with... in all the classes I've taken using C++, we spent more time debugging memory allocation and stack overflows than actually doing what we were supposed to.
Java was/is still pretty crappy, but at least it pretty much behaves as documented, and standard documentation is more readily available.
By all means, learn some C and assembly to help bridge to the low level stuff. But C++ is such a mess. My University would teach the CS curriculum in other languages and then offered a 2-credit C++ elective to dump all the "practical" shit on you if you wanted it... I think that's probably the best way.
In the 80s, went to some summer camp after 2nd grade that had some science and tech classes... apart from getting into trouble by sticking a knife into an electrical outlet and playing lots of Spy Hunter (I was like, a god for a day because I made it to the boats level), that was probably my first into to Logo. But we didn't do anything amazing with it.
Somewhere around 6th grade at an International Catholic school in Thailand they gave us a touch typing class. That was genuinely useful, and accounts tracked our progress over the sessions, which was pretty remarkable given that they were green-screen DOS boxes or something crappy and barely networked. Later on in HS in the US, maybe 9th or 10th grade, they threw us in a short one-time "computer lab" with some typing tutor software, but that was crap.
Around 11th grade (1994), we had some CAD work on Macs in tech ed., but that was only because we were in a special Science & Tech magnet program... don't think that would have been the norm at most high schools.
Also, I used to spend my lunch breaks in the library, playing with the nice 3D graphing calculator on MacOS9. But I was, like, the only one, even in a magnet school.
That was pretty much it. Everything else I learned from my own tinkering at home with a Turbo Pascal book, playing with POVRay, and reading my TI-85 calculator user's manual straight through and programming a crappy Galaga clone. I never felt like I had what it takes to become a fully-fledged CS programmer like my friends who were self-taught into doing awesome demoscene assembly, so I ran off and majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering instead. Engineers seem to get bigger computers to play with anyway:P
Yep, same thing with the GPU (I assume you have a nice GPU, that's the only thing that would make your PC worth shipping these days)
Even though mine was screwed in, the PC frame got bent slightly while in airline storage. Now if I nudge my case the wrong way, I start getting video corruption:P
Oops, no, wait, she didn't... it was some Albanian soprano with a French actress doing the blue Diva thing.
Geez, it's like I'm some sort of repository of common misconceptions on the internet lately...
OK, I'm with you... I have no idea who Sarah Brightman is. But I do have one of her albums "Harem". It's not very interesting compared to Tori Amos or even the real middle eastern stuff I listen to.
I don't really care about customer service, but I've been a pretty happy T-Mobile customer since the Voicestream days.
They probably have the cheapest plans, and will probably be the most familiar service for international folks... what with using SIM cards and allowing you to use unlocked phones and such. If you already have a quad-band "international" phone, this may be your best bet with finding a phone you can use elsewhere in the world (but do your research... there seem to be some caveats when it comes to max data speed).
Also, don't shy away with buying an unlocked smartphone from Craigslist. You can get lots of equipment like that for pretty cheap, and T-mobile has cheaper monthly rates without a 1-2yr contract that you would have to sign up for when subsidizing a phone purchase through them... though you might have to dig a bit to get to those cheaper plans.
Another side benefit is if you pay for the Android data plan, you could probably get away with tethering Android tablets at no extra charge. They recently started detecting PC browsers and redirecting you to a tethering upsell if you try to tether a laptop, though.
Coverage is great in metropolitan areas and along most interstate corridors. If you want better coverage, then pay out the nose for a Verizon phone... I've had these for work... so I didn't really care about having a locked-down phone as long as I wasn't paying for it.
Oh, so many, many floppies... mostly from old Office installs, outdated games, and a few AOL / Compuserve floppies from before they started mailbombing CDs
Then RH4... until my server got owned by a remote samba exploit. Migrated to Debian that weekend. More or less skipped Ubuntu, but nowadays mostly go to Linux Mint. Somewhere in there I also installed a box off of a KNOPPIX LiveCD. And then I did a lot of stuff on RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6 for work.
I still seem to learn the most from reading through Debian install scripts and conf files, though.
Oh, at some point I installed a minimal Debian distro onto an old 486 laptop with no floppy/usb/cdrom... got it through the serial port onto a ~120MB hard disk that I repartitioned and resized and loaded the kernel through DOS. That was... interesting.
OTOH, Google Maps on the Blackberry was the one killer app that made me go Android as opposed to, say, a Nokia N800. It's probably the one thing that has had the most profound impact on my life and travels... now I rarely / barely plan anymore... I just pop out the map and let it tell me where to go to explore.
Though I'm a bit pissed that Google replaced Yelp ratings with Zagat. Zagat puts way too much emphasis on decor over food quality. Maybe they're a bit more consistent, but I was more interested in what the locals thought. If a small town on the outskirts of a national forest I was exploring on the backroads really thought their Burger King was the best place to eat, then I'd know to push on.
The most powerful Android device I have is a Viewsonic G-Tablet Tegra2 thingy from a couple years ago. I was playing with the TeamDRH 4.1 ROM on it for a few months. It was really nice, but the 512MB of RAM just isn't enough to keep it snappy and responsive while running both the desktop and a few widgets and a couple apps. I eventually went back to the old 2.3 VeganTab build because everything worked and ran fast.
Maybe someday I'll pick up a Nexus 7 for the kids. But no big rush... all the apps I care about run well an run fast. And I don't really want to give up USBdrive support just to have a slightly nicer taskswitcher.
I think developers would enjoy having docs auto-generated by something like doxygen... that way their comments kinda get wrapped up in some kind of deliverable that sort of looks professional and would actually be accessible to non-coders (i.e. their bosses or even maybe their family). They'd feel more pressure to provide comments (so their API doctree doesn't look pathetically empty), and it would be part of maybe an official deliverable and not something only seen by other developers. Plus, devs like getting a lot of nice-looking work done "for free" by the doc generator.
I also like the way Python does things with doctest, so devs are encouraged to put examples of their functions and modules working in their docstrings, and it becomes part of an automated unit test for their code.
Any recent Linux distro should do... just stick with whatever you have expertise with. Scientific Linux would probably be the most suitable RHEL / CentOS clone... but it also comes with OpenAFS (which also has Windows clients) which might allow you another option to improve filesharing performance over Samba (I haven't played with it myself, though). Linux Mint is my current favorite Debian / Ubuntu distro.
Either would likely mount SATA disks that were hotplugged automatically under/media/ You could just configure Samba to share out/media/ (probably need some option to allow it to share files across other filesystems) , and the Windows users will just see disks appear and disappear under that shared tree as disks are added and removed... no fancy unionfs required. Then you just have to worry about giving all of the data disks filesystems with unique, descriptive filesystem labels.
Don't know much about your dataset, but I'd expect the filesystem to be the biggest bottleneck based on past experience. It adds lots of latency and takes a long time to transfer lots of uncompressed files... lots of scientific data sets compress very well (~30x) and often transfer over the network much faster as a few big.zip or.tgz'd files than as a mess of a directory tree (another ~10x). So if you take the extra time to tinker and pipe your data collection directly to some form of compressed archive, you can reap some awesome performance improvements.
Don't know if anyone still does the x-10 thing anymore... but if you aleady have a server set up to turn lights and appliances on and off in your home, you could mount the old phones in various places around the house to act as control pads to a web-based front-end.
But really, what I would do is just use them to entertain the children. Put in a cheap microSD card filled with content, such as:
WikiDroid + the 2GB - 6GB offline wikipedia dump, so you don't even need the data plan
Amazon Kindle or one of the free ebook readers loaded with the public domain books. The US Army Survival Guide is also kinda neat.
Random youtube videos downloaded with TubeMate (from the Amazon AppStore)
Yeah, after a few years of trouble-free tethering, at some point they started doing some sort of browser agent detection, and direct you to a tethering plan upsell.
OTOH, if you're already on one of the Android plans, you can apparently still tether an Android tablet to your Android phone and have full access to everything. Which works well enough for me. (of course, I haven't been trying to get my work laptop into corporate VPNs and crap like that)
I suppose I should be happy for things like Ouya and Raspberry Pi for bringing Linux / Android set-tops to "the masses". But I don't really mind spending an extra $100 to get a full Android tablet with about the same or better specs and a touchscreen. I'll put one in the kitchen, a few in the car, one on my bike, one in the bathroom. Maybe the kids could have one to carry around as well, I dunno. Strap one to the dog as well so I can see what he does when he runs off.
Just hope whatever they do on the Ouya makes it to the tablet segment as well... XBMC would be neat, I suppose. But so far I only see XBMC remote apps on the Market/AppStore/Play/Whatever they call it now.
Firefox (well, "Iceweasel" on Debian) is still ostensibly my "primary" browser, since I still sort of maintain my main set of bookmarks there. Not that I really maintain my set of bookmarks anymore.
Silly enough, I started using Chrome because it reacted much faster on Mafia Wars (I long since kicked the habit and any other Zynga-like "games", but kept the browser). I also sort of enjoy the right-click menu working properly on Google maps.
I want to support Firefox for being there when we really needed it... just wish I had a better reason than "anything but IE"
What happened to all the speculation that Valve/Steam was going to launch their own console, based on a bunch of hardware job postings they had some time ago? I think this Linux strategy probably shoehorns in perfectly if they were going to release a high-end barebones Linux console to run Steam for Linux.
Steam basically owns the PC gaming online distribution market right now. It seems prudent for them to take the next step and come out with their own platform so that people who want a "Steam box" don't have to give a cut to Microsoft and Apple as well. Probably makes it all the more expedient since Windows 8 will also launch with its own competing marketplace.
And even if Linux gamers don't bring in the money, perhaps they expect the more technical Linux gamers to contribute more in the way of game mods and content. Valve/Steam already has decent support for running Linux servers for many of their games, and have shown an affinity for letting indie and user-generated content and gameplay to take off on its own.
Meh, what's the point of good engineering if you never test it? I've heard of a quite a few wonderfully expensive and over-engineered UPS and RAID deployments that failed completely because they never bothered to actually test the procedures. The last company I worked at would often have regular "emergency power off" events where they'd do a complete shutdown of the entire datacenter triggered by various environmental factors. And you know what? More times than not they'd still find a system that somehow missed the trap and didn't get shut down properly, and plenty of caveats with the enterprise-grade UPS infrastructure.
At one of the first companies I worked at, the idea was to engineer a cluster with no SPOF, so we'd actually invite customers (/monkeys) to go to the back and rip out / unplug something, anything, while the cluster was doing something like a distributed POVRay render. It was a pretty simple, elegant test, and a great mindset to have when designing any HA system, not just for fault tolerance, but also to architecturally enable for on-line upgradeability, scalability, and some other niceties.
Slashdot Mirror
Ick, C++ is not a good language to learn with... in all the classes I've taken using C++, we spent more time debugging memory allocation and stack overflows than actually doing what we were supposed to.
Java was/is still pretty crappy, but at least it pretty much behaves as documented, and standard documentation is more readily available.
By all means, learn some C and assembly to help bridge to the low level stuff. But C++ is such a mess. My University would teach the CS curriculum in other languages and then offered a 2-credit C++ elective to dump all the "practical" shit on you if you wanted it... I think that's probably the best way.
Summer school, sure...
In the 80s, went to some summer camp after 2nd grade that had some science and tech classes... apart from getting into trouble by sticking a knife into an electrical outlet and playing lots of Spy Hunter (I was like, a god for a day because I made it to the boats level), that was probably my first into to Logo. But we didn't do anything amazing with it.
Somewhere around 6th grade at an International Catholic school in Thailand they gave us a touch typing class. That was genuinely useful, and accounts tracked our progress over the sessions, which was pretty remarkable given that they were green-screen DOS boxes or something crappy and barely networked. Later on in HS in the US, maybe 9th or 10th grade, they threw us in a short one-time "computer lab" with some typing tutor software, but that was crap.
Around 11th grade (1994), we had some CAD work on Macs in tech ed., but that was only because we were in a special Science & Tech magnet program... don't think that would have been the norm at most high schools.
Also, I used to spend my lunch breaks in the library, playing with the nice 3D graphing calculator on MacOS9. But I was, like, the only one, even in a magnet school.
That was pretty much it. Everything else I learned from my own tinkering at home with a Turbo Pascal book, playing with POVRay, and reading my TI-85 calculator user's manual straight through and programming a crappy Galaga clone. I never felt like I had what it takes to become a fully-fledged CS programmer like my friends who were self-taught into doing awesome demoscene assembly, so I ran off and majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering instead. Engineers seem to get bigger computers to play with anyway :P
Well, in Washington State, most of the power is hydroelectric. 80% - 90%
http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter12.html
Yep, same thing with the GPU (I assume you have a nice GPU, that's the only thing that would make your PC worth shipping these days)
Even though mine was screwed in, the PC frame got bent slightly while in airline storage. Now if I nudge my case the wrong way, I start getting video corruption :P
Oops, no, wait, she didn't... it was some Albanian soprano with a French actress doing the blue Diva thing.
Geez, it's like I'm some sort of repository of common misconceptions on the internet lately...
OK, I'm with you... I have no idea who Sarah Brightman is. But I do have one of her albums "Harem". It's not very interesting compared to Tori Amos or even the real middle eastern stuff I listen to.
She did the space opera in Fifth Element
I don't really care about customer service, but I've been a pretty happy T-Mobile customer since the Voicestream days.
They probably have the cheapest plans, and will probably be the most familiar service for international folks... what with using SIM cards and allowing you to use unlocked phones and such. If you already have a quad-band "international" phone, this may be your best bet with finding a phone you can use elsewhere in the world (but do your research... there seem to be some caveats when it comes to max data speed).
Also, don't shy away with buying an unlocked smartphone from Craigslist. You can get lots of equipment like that for pretty cheap, and T-mobile has cheaper monthly rates without a 1-2yr contract that you would have to sign up for when subsidizing a phone purchase through them... though you might have to dig a bit to get to those cheaper plans.
Another side benefit is if you pay for the Android data plan, you could probably get away with tethering Android tablets at no extra charge. They recently started detecting PC browsers and redirecting you to a tethering upsell if you try to tether a laptop, though.
Coverage is great in metropolitan areas and along most interstate corridors. If you want better coverage, then pay out the nose for a Verizon phone... I've had these for work... so I didn't really care about having a locked-down phone as long as I wasn't paying for it.
Oh, so many, many floppies... mostly from old Office installs, outdated games, and a few AOL / Compuserve floppies from before they started mailbombing CDs
Then RH4 ... until my server got owned by a remote samba exploit. Migrated to Debian that weekend. More or less skipped Ubuntu, but nowadays mostly go to Linux Mint. Somewhere in there I also installed a box off of a KNOPPIX LiveCD. And then I did a lot of stuff on RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6 for work.
I still seem to learn the most from reading through Debian install scripts and conf files, though.
Oh, at some point I installed a minimal Debian distro onto an old 486 laptop with no floppy/usb/cdrom... got it through the serial port onto a ~120MB hard disk that I repartitioned and resized and loaded the kernel through DOS. That was... interesting.
What do you calla guy who can own you without using his arms or feet?
Clever dick!
At least they warn you; I've run into some sites over the years that silently drop characters after an arbitrary limit.
Nah, they'd never do that at a reputable large financial institution... like, say, www.americanexpress.com
Maybe they somehow figured out how to make money from handling fraud claims?
OTOH, Google Maps on the Blackberry was the one killer app that made me go Android as opposed to, say, a Nokia N800. It's probably the one thing that has had the most profound impact on my life and travels... now I rarely / barely plan anymore... I just pop out the map and let it tell me where to go to explore.
Though I'm a bit pissed that Google replaced Yelp ratings with Zagat. Zagat puts way too much emphasis on decor over food quality. Maybe they're a bit more consistent, but I was more interested in what the locals thought. If a small town on the outskirts of a national forest I was exploring on the backroads really thought their Burger King was the best place to eat, then I'd know to push on.
Pretty much this.
The most powerful Android device I have is a Viewsonic G-Tablet Tegra2 thingy from a couple years ago. I was playing with the TeamDRH 4.1 ROM on it for a few months. It was really nice, but the 512MB of RAM just isn't enough to keep it snappy and responsive while running both the desktop and a few widgets and a couple apps. I eventually went back to the old 2.3 VeganTab build because everything worked and ran fast.
Maybe someday I'll pick up a Nexus 7 for the kids. But no big rush... all the apps I care about run well an run fast. And I don't really want to give up USBdrive support just to have a slightly nicer taskswitcher.
I think developers would enjoy having docs auto-generated by something like doxygen... that way their comments kinda get wrapped up in some kind of deliverable that sort of looks professional and would actually be accessible to non-coders (i.e. their bosses or even maybe their family). They'd feel more pressure to provide comments (so their API doctree doesn't look pathetically empty), and it would be part of maybe an official deliverable and not something only seen by other developers. Plus, devs like getting a lot of nice-looking work done "for free" by the doc generator.
I also like the way Python does things with doctest, so devs are encouraged to put examples of their functions and modules working in their docstrings, and it becomes part of an automated unit test for their code.
Thanks, this is exactly the concise satirical synopsis I came to this thread for. Leaving satisfied.
Sounds reasonable.
Any recent Linux distro should do... just stick with whatever you have expertise with. Scientific Linux would probably be the most suitable RHEL / CentOS clone... but it also comes with OpenAFS (which also has Windows clients) which might allow you another option to improve filesharing performance over Samba (I haven't played with it myself, though). Linux Mint is my current favorite Debian / Ubuntu distro.
Either would likely mount SATA disks that were hotplugged automatically under /media/ /media/ (probably need some option to allow it to share files across other filesystems) , and the Windows users will just see disks appear and disappear under that shared tree as disks are added and removed... no fancy unionfs required. Then you just have to worry about giving all of the data disks filesystems with unique, descriptive filesystem labels.
You could just configure Samba to share out
Don't know much about your dataset, but I'd expect the filesystem to be the biggest bottleneck based on past experience. It adds lots of latency and takes a long time to transfer lots of uncompressed files... lots of scientific data sets compress very well (~30x) and often transfer over the network much faster as a few big .zip or .tgz'd files than as a mess of a directory tree (another ~10x). So if you take the extra time to tinker and pipe your data collection directly to some form of compressed archive, you can reap some awesome performance improvements.
Sounds fun and good luck!
Don't know if anyone still does the x-10 thing anymore... but if you aleady have a server set up to turn lights and appliances on and off in your home, you could mount the old phones in various places around the house to act as control pads to a web-based front-end.
But really, what I would do is just use them to entertain the children. Put in a cheap microSD card filled with content, such as:
Yeah, after a few years of trouble-free tethering, at some point they started doing some sort of browser agent detection, and direct you to a tethering plan upsell.
OTOH, if you're already on one of the Android plans, you can apparently still tether an Android tablet to your Android phone and have full access to everything. Which works well enough for me. (of course, I haven't been trying to get my work laptop into corporate VPNs and crap like that)
OK, he did picturebooks for kids, but my challenge to you is to recommend more authors with positive views of the future!
Seconded... my soviet-era educated Russkian wife had me read _We_ ages ago when we first met. Fun times!
My TV only has so many inputs, you know.
Heh, I don't even *have* a TV :P
I suppose I should be happy for things like Ouya and Raspberry Pi for bringing Linux / Android set-tops to "the masses". But I don't really mind spending an extra $100 to get a full Android tablet with about the same or better specs and a touchscreen. I'll put one in the kitchen, a few in the car, one on my bike, one in the bathroom. Maybe the kids could have one to carry around as well, I dunno. Strap one to the dog as well so I can see what he does when he runs off.
Just hope whatever they do on the Ouya makes it to the tablet segment as well... XBMC would be neat, I suppose. But so far I only see XBMC remote apps on the Market/AppStore/Play/Whatever they call it now.
Yeah, it was posted on ArsTechnica yesterday too (kinda like a professional, adult version of Slashdot).
But it's OK, I still stick to Slashdot because I enjoy reading the trolls for some strange reason.
Yeah, same here :P
Firefox (well, "Iceweasel" on Debian) is still ostensibly my "primary" browser, since I still sort of maintain my main set of bookmarks there. Not that I really maintain my set of bookmarks anymore.
Silly enough, I started using Chrome because it reacted much faster on Mafia Wars (I long since kicked the habit and any other Zynga-like "games", but kept the browser). I also sort of enjoy the right-click menu working properly on Google maps.
I want to support Firefox for being there when we really needed it... just wish I had a better reason than "anything but IE"
What happened to all the speculation that Valve/Steam was going to launch their own console, based on a bunch of hardware job postings they had some time ago? I think this Linux strategy probably shoehorns in perfectly if they were going to release a high-end barebones Linux console to run Steam for Linux.
Steam basically owns the PC gaming online distribution market right now. It seems prudent for them to take the next step and come out with their own platform so that people who want a "Steam box" don't have to give a cut to Microsoft and Apple as well. Probably makes it all the more expedient since Windows 8 will also launch with its own competing marketplace.
And even if Linux gamers don't bring in the money, perhaps they expect the more technical Linux gamers to contribute more in the way of game mods and content. Valve/Steam already has decent support for running Linux servers for many of their games, and have shown an affinity for letting indie and user-generated content and gameplay to take off on its own.
Meh, what's the point of good engineering if you never test it? I've heard of a quite a few wonderfully expensive and over-engineered UPS and RAID deployments that failed completely because they never bothered to actually test the procedures. The last company I worked at would often have regular "emergency power off" events where they'd do a complete shutdown of the entire datacenter triggered by various environmental factors. And you know what? More times than not they'd still find a system that somehow missed the trap and didn't get shut down properly, and plenty of caveats with the enterprise-grade UPS infrastructure.
At one of the first companies I worked at, the idea was to engineer a cluster with no SPOF, so we'd actually invite customers (/monkeys) to go to the back and rip out / unplug something, anything, while the cluster was doing something like a distributed POVRay render. It was a pretty simple, elegant test, and a great mindset to have when designing any HA system, not just for fault tolerance, but also to architecturally enable for on-line upgradeability, scalability, and some other niceties.
I submit: https://www.facebook.com/dexter
(OTOH, I unfriended the account because disappointingly it wasn't even a little bit in-character)