umm maybe it's just me, but I always thought that the source RPMS provided by NVIDIA actually contained source code. And as far as I know those things are indeed drivers. Possibly not windows drivers, but that doesn't matter.
You can see them here.
Umm...people at Sun. I hate to break it to you, but the Sun Ray system is not at all responsive. My university (University of the Pacific) is participating in a Sun Ray pilot program. We have 2 e-something-or-other boxes with 16 UltraSparcs running at 400mHz and 20 Gigs of RAM in each box. We typically have 100-200 users on at a time distributed between the two boxes. Most of the issues I have with the Sun Rays does have to do with the administration here and quotas...yada yada yada. Biggest issue: speed. I use the Sun Rays all the time. I ssh in. They are very responsive and work excellent using CLI. When I use CDE though...ouch. They are slow. It takes forever for the programs to launch. Well maybe not dtterm, but that's not that much of a program now is it. I ran real world benchmarks on the system. I created a few apps the test integer operations and test memory operations. Now I realize that FP stuff is pretty fast and that's why people do use them for simulation stuff, but most of what I do is integer. For the memory test I did some pretty massive memory allocation. I will admit that it was kinda fun to suck up 2 Gigs of RAM, but sucking the first 256 was by far faster on my home dell pc, which was very similar to the integer test I ran. Given the price of the Sun Rays themselves you can't even argue that its cheaper to do Sun Rays. The other problem is bugs. Specific to our boxes was a unique netscape problem. You couldn't type in Multiline text boxes (I dare you to try and make a slashdot post like that). I will readily admit that I like the Sun Rays as a UNIX system. They're reliable...what more can I say.
As an experienced C/C++ programmer, I suppose I have a fairly large slant on the issue. I think the phrases bring up the question of which language is most useful in the programmer world. I recently started dealing with Java because my work required me to write an application extention for their web database software. This only supports Java as a plugin language because it is a cross platform database platform. From my experiences with Java, it has a few problems. Java for has too many functions that are prebuilt. It becomes difficult to choose, just for things as simple as console io and file io. Also, the appropriateness of OO being used all the time is questionable. There are times when it's appropriate and can save lots of time and work (applets are a good example of this), but in many cases thing should be traditional code. Java also has some nice things about it. When C++ is the introductory language, GUI cannot be taught. If GUI is taught, the course is not proper because an introductory course should only deal with built-in language constructs such as file io, memory and algorithms. It would be nice nice for people to learn GUI programming in an introductory course because it is often hard for beginning programmers to grasp the importance of what they are doing when it looks like something from the early '80s, but is that what's important? However, I think C++ should remain the introductory language because of one main reason: professional programming. When a programmer is out in the work force, full blown Java apps don't exist for the most part. "Killer" Java apps are simply too slow. For an example try out JBuilder foundation (Forte for Java is not as guilty, but it's still not great). Java seems to offer no distinct advantages over C++ except for the GUI ability which is unimportant in an introductory course.
Whatever happened to BASIC for introductory programming?
Slashdot Mirror
umm maybe it's just me, but I always thought that the source RPMS provided by NVIDIA actually contained source code. And as far as I know those things are indeed drivers. Possibly not windows drivers, but that doesn't matter.
You can see them here.
Umm...people at Sun. I hate to break it to you, but the Sun Ray system is not at all responsive. My university (University of the Pacific) is participating in a Sun Ray pilot program. We have 2 e-something-or-other boxes with 16 UltraSparcs running at 400mHz and 20 Gigs of RAM in each box. We typically have 100-200 users on at a time distributed between the two boxes. Most of the issues I have with the Sun Rays does have to do with the administration here and quotas...yada yada yada. Biggest issue: speed. I use the Sun Rays all the time. I ssh in. They are very responsive and work excellent using CLI. When I use CDE though...ouch. They are slow. It takes forever for the programs to launch. Well maybe not dtterm, but that's not that much of a program now is it. I ran real world benchmarks on the system. I created a few apps the test integer operations and test memory operations. Now I realize that FP stuff is pretty fast and that's why people do use them for simulation stuff, but most of what I do is integer. For the memory test I did some pretty massive memory allocation. I will admit that it was kinda fun to suck up 2 Gigs of RAM, but sucking the first 256 was by far faster on my home dell pc, which was very similar to the integer test I ran. Given the price of the Sun Rays themselves you can't even argue that its cheaper to do Sun Rays. The other problem is bugs. Specific to our boxes was a unique netscape problem. You couldn't type in Multiline text boxes (I dare you to try and make a slashdot post like that). I will readily admit that I like the Sun Rays as a UNIX system. They're reliable...what more can I say.
As an experienced C/C++ programmer, I suppose I have a fairly large slant on the issue. I think the phrases bring up the question of which language is most useful in the programmer world. I recently started dealing with Java because my work required me to write an application extention for their web database software. This only supports Java as a plugin language because it is a cross platform database platform. From my experiences with Java, it has a few problems. Java for has too many functions that are prebuilt. It becomes difficult to choose, just for things as simple as console io and file io. Also, the appropriateness of OO being used all the time is questionable. There are times when it's appropriate and can save lots of time and work (applets are a good example of this), but in many cases thing should be traditional code. Java also has some nice things about it. When C++ is the introductory language, GUI cannot be taught. If GUI is taught, the course is not proper because an introductory course should only deal with built-in language constructs such as file io, memory and algorithms. It would be nice nice for people to learn GUI programming in an introductory course because it is often hard for beginning programmers to grasp the importance of what they are doing when it looks like something from the early '80s, but is that what's important? However, I think C++ should remain the introductory language because of one main reason: professional programming. When a programmer is out in the work force, full blown Java apps don't exist for the most part. "Killer" Java apps are simply too slow. For an example try out JBuilder foundation (Forte for Java is not as guilty, but it's still not great). Java seems to offer no distinct advantages over C++ except for the GUI ability which is unimportant in an introductory course.
Whatever happened to BASIC for introductory programming?