Size is important (gentlemen, start your double entendres); The iPod is physically small enough to put in your pants pocket comfortably. It doesn't sound like it's that much smaller than a Nomad Zen or Dell DJ or Archos Jukebox, but the in-person difference is astounding. Those other players would only fit in a pair of those ridiculously baggy jeans that hang below your ass.
The UI on the player is great. Read some of the review about what it takes just to play a signle song on, for example, the DJ. Assorted menu navigation plus three or four clicks on the choose button, which is located, IIRC, obscurely on the side. Now, it can take a lot of menu navigaion to play a PARTICULAR song on the ipod, but one can start the music playing by basically mashing the center button until they hear it.
iTunes: This is what brings it all together. It's what helps a lot of computer non-lits use the whole package quickly and easily. I wouldn't have a problem using a device that mounted and transferred as another drive, but a lot of people do. And iTunes treats the iPod as a synced device. Anything that has changed playlist or song-wise is instantly updated (over firewire, no less), making the whole process simple and easy.
I almost see this as trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
These games are portraying the current "Thug" lifestyle, which is not "black" or "urban" or "Def Jam", but "Thug".
Sort of like how a game that embraced the ideas of The Clash and The Sex Pistols might be labeled "punk", but would not necessarily be equal to "rock" or "white people".
Thug is 24" chrome wheels on your escalade, spraying champagne on a bikini-wearing skank's ass, while threatening violence for anyone who disagrees with you. In short, its a total bastardization of the rap from the 80's or early 90's, and is not in any way directly equal to those subjects. It evokes the same negative connotations in rap fans' heads that Creed would in someone who likes rock.
I would argue that the only two mainstream popular rappers that don't wholly embrace "Thug" are Eminem and Outkast (which is actually two guys, deal with it), and that's a tenuous assertion.
How many of these games deal with the conflicted emotions of loving your child but disliking her mother? What about revealing the state of fear that even a "hardcore" rapper feels when forced to expose his emotions on stage in front of thousands of people who may or may not like him at all? How about the difficulty of growing up in a world of poverty and violence, where cops would just as soon spit on you as look at you?
What's that? None? Oh, you mean they all deal with 24" chrome wheels on an Escalade (Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition), a poseur, disgusting, women as complete and total objects (not Lara Croft here, or even saving the princess, but buying and selling women without the tongue-in-cheek GTA: Vice city attitude) and the "you're tough only if you have a gun" attitude?
What I would love to see is a pseudo two-piece setup. I want to see some sort of "headless" iMac that can either be mated to an existing monitor (single DVI-I out to accomodate flat panel or CRT) with a slightly easier expansion setup. Maybe just make it easier to change the HDD out or give me a single PCI slot. It doesn't need to get massively enormous to do this, just a "box" big enough to offer minor, MINOR expansion to ward off the complaints without detracting from PowerMac sales.
Now build the display (a 15" or 17" version) such that it can seamlessly integrate with that headless model if needed. Maybe the iMac G5 can quickly attach to the back of the LCD to minimize desk space usage. I'm no product designer, so I can't say anything beyond that, but it would have to be seamless and easy to do by a novice.
I own three macs, and my gf and I would both love a G5 iMac. The iBook is doing well in the low-end notebook market because it is a good value for the dollar. I am of the opinion that properly done, a pseudo-all-in-one iMac could offer a similar value proposition for new mac owners without sacrificing the quality or ease-of-use Apple holds dear.
Of course, I also know this is unlikely to happen.
Here's what you need to worry about on your resume: Is everything spelled correctly, laid out in a pleasing manner, one or two, three pages tops. In your situation, a resume doesn't matter.
Unless you were involved in some crazy groundbreaking research, went to an extremely prestigious school that will make a mark based on the name (Ivy League, Cal Tech/MIT/etc.), or work on some readily recognizable OSS in your spare time, your resume is about as good as it's going to get provided you follow the rules above.
Now for the fun part: Remember that cliche about "it isn't what you know, it's who you know?" It didn't achieve cliche status without having a bit of truth. Two of my friends graduated last Spring. One had a pretty good GPA and a degree in Chemical Engineering. Hadn't programmed since High School. He's now a consultant with Accenture, doing minor programming work on site for pretty nice cash, considering he's a first year employee. The other day he mentioned how one of the guys he had graduated with had a better GPA, better extra-curriculars, and sends out a shitload of resumes with no result (He was bemoaning the economy). I answered to him that the reason he ended up with that job was that he showed up everytime Accenture came to campus, be it for some random business school speaking engagement, or at career fairs. He came to be known by the guys there. The second friend graduated at the same time with a BS in EE. He spent about 5 months working on getting hired with one of about three different places, and now he works on the ISS at NASA. A third friend did approximately the same thing, and now works for the State Department (I think, long story but I suspect he works for a more clandestine side of the executive branch, but having had relatives in those positions I know he can't tell me if he does).
These guys are not geniuses, they both went to state schools (albeit good ones, and the third went Ivy League, so I consider his example less representative), and they're not the sort who were posting Summa Cum Laude grades at graduation. In short, they're probably just like you.
So what you need to do is this: Take a look at the companies operating in the region in which you want to be hired. Pick two or three good ones, and make sure to read up on corporate (or govt.) culture, benefits, etc. Know them well. Now start finding out ways to make contacts with the people there. Do their developers participate in some SIG around town? Go get to know them. Speak to guys who might be responsible for recommending a new-hire, but make sure you aren't hounding people. A lot of jobs aren't filled in a position->applicant order, but rather the other way around. In other words, a lot of times a team might need another hand, or a particular task that you're well suited at might need an entry-level programming position. The company probably wouldn't actively go and create a job advertisment, post on Monster.com, etc., but if one of the devs says, "hey, there's that guy I remember from the Linux/Graphics/Networking SIG who could probably help us out", the job will be "created".
At the risk of sounding like some crappy self-help speaker, when you're trying to get a job, you're essentially acting a salesperson, and the product you're selling is yourself. Right now, you're basically a commodity product, nothing but a slightly-better-than-average list of achievements on paper. Your job is to provide that extra push, in whatever way you can, to put yourself above commodity status.
Oh yeah, and please ditch that "objective: To obtain a position in..." section. God I wish those things would go away on resumes. Everyone of them is the same canned line that does nothing but take up space better devoted to anything.
Re:Don't use Promise, for one thing
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SATA vs ATA?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Don't confuse the fact that Promise produces on-mobo RAID "hardware" with the impression that all of their equipment is like that. Promise makes several truly hardware-based SATA and ATA cards, as well as a few enclosures that take numerous (4-16) IDE drives, do RAID in hardware, and interface to a server over U160 SCSI. They are perfectly capable of making hardware RAID solutions, provided you're willing to buy something other than a $60 "RAID" card.
Their only major drawback I saw last time I looked at their hardware was that Linux drivers at the time tended to be binary and proprietary to specific versions (works on redhat but not Suse, etc.), which may or may not matter depending upon the OS you're choosing to run.
I don't work for them, and I don't even use their equipment in any of my stuff (a buddy of mine runs an SX4000 card, though, so I have seen them in action), but I do get a bit peeved when someone dismisses a company's higher-end solutions because of (admittedly) bad experience with their low-end kit.
The only reason I can say that XBox is not currently the market leader is the fact that the PS2 launched a bit early.
I own all three (well, four, as I also own a Dreamcast) of the current-gen systems. If I were starting out today to purchase my consoles, but with my current experience with the systems, XBox and Gamecube would be a toss up for my first and second purchase, and the PS2 would be dead last. Put simply, Nintendo has great, great first party games, and the console just has a certain "character" that the others lack. XBox is vastly superior to the PS2 in hardware specs, from video and audio, even down to the fact that it supports four controls without an additional purchase. This means that cross-platform games end up getting purchased for my XBox because, simply put, they're going to look better and sound better in 99% of the cases. This is compounded by the fact that since I don't really have time to devote to lengthy RPGs or Turn-based strategy games (an area that I understand Sony has been shining in lately), I simply haven't seen a large amount of compelling, PS2-only titles in the last five or six months (although I'm certain someone will be more than happy to post some laundry list for me).
I wasn't always like this; I had a PS2 on the American release date, and I held off on my XBox purchase until they had two games that I was really, genuinely interested in (turned out to be DOA: 3 and Buffy, although I was pleasantly surprised by Halo, which I had discounted as yet another FPS). A year after my XBox purchase, it's rare for me to purchase a PS2 game, but still very common for me to grab GC or XBox games.
Although the first mover has technically lost the last three generations (you'd have to include DC in this one, which I do), the first major mover in the last three gens was also Sega, so I suppose we could simply chalk it up to mismanagement. That said, the only logical reason that I can see for the PS2's success was that it was first out of the gate, and the majority of people, the ones who don't own all the consoles, thus purchase PS2 games by default.
Now, whether or not MS will shoot themselves in the foot with an early XBox2 launch is another story. While there is a lot larger market for game consoles now than there used to be, it's hard to discount the sore feelings of people who "just bought an XBox1."
A lot of people have already pointed out that if you have more than two drives, you should be doing RAID-5. Promise produces a couple of true hardware-level RAID cards in the ~$200-$300 range, depending on how many drives you want, and whether you want IDE or SATA.
3Ware's escalade seems to have much better linux support, but are generally more expensive kit (although many claim they're vastly superior). I have a simple file server that occasionally doubles as a dedicated game server at our monthly LANs, so it has plenty of horsepower, and thus I went with a soft-RAID solution. Highpoint makes a model in the $80 range that implements RAID-5 at the software level, but as long as you have some decent hardware that it's going in, that shouldn't be a huge problem.
Just a few things to remember: if you doing RAID-5, try to have a seperate boot drive so that you can keep swap off of the array disk; swap doesn't need fault tolerance and it will slow you down. If you're planning on using gigabit ethernet and heavily accessing this thing (not sure why in a home situation), look at getting one of the intel 875 or Nforce3 boards that have gigabit on the northbridge, as gigabit and heavy disk access together will saturate your PCI bus. If you only have two discs, ignore all of this, and just mirror them entirely in software.
Hitachi has had 400GB drives (SATA) for a few months now link It looks like the only thing unique here is the "highest areal density", meaning (I assume) that Hitachi is using a four platter system, where Seagate's only has three.
Also, I wonder what problems might arise from 16MB caches on normal desktop machines. One of the issues I seem to recall with larger cache drives is the risk of filesystem corruption. If power is lost while data is sitting in cache, waiting for a write, then you could potentially royally screw up your file or filesystem. Hence, the only 16MB cache drives I've seen are notebook drives (almost always gonna have a battery) and SCSI drives (likely in a server or workstation, which will most likely have a UPS). Before you go countering that these aren't meant for desktop use, keep in mind that DV video, digital photgraphy, and music are all things that home users like the idea of, and they are also the things much more likely to consume massive amounts of storage capacity.
It isn't. I've seen good systems that cost less, but $1,000 is about the point where someone's running something other than a trashy Home Theater in a Box, and that would be about the point where they're going to start to have gear that can do something with a DVD-A/SACD source.
Seriously, below about $1,000, you're talking about full-range drivers, mediocre amps, and the like, and your audio quality is being limited by your equipment, not a CD.
This was a really, really uninformative article. Bonus points for being "blurbed" as about DVD-A/SACD and then having almost nothing about them.
I have a DVD-A/SACD player. It's hooked up to a home theater system that toals out at about $6,000, not counting TV. DVD-As and SACD do definitely sound better than CD, but they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000. Below that point, the limiting factor isn't their media but the speakers.
That said, I really regret having purchased it. I'm not a huge classical music fan, and my interest in jazz is minor. There aren't a huge amount of major releases out there for someone like myself. It is amusing, though, to go to the store and see the completely random stuff that does make it out (The Bangles Greatest Hits? Queensryche?!? The Top Gun Soundtrack?).
You replied to a post by an English major. I do respect education, and if life was happy and friendly, there'd still be a good place and a healthy amount of respect for the "renaissance man" liberal arts education gained at universities other than Ivy League. But every degree does have some bullshit classes, and you're going to learn things that have no practical application to you ever. If you enjoy learning for the pure fact of learning, then that's okay with you; I occasionally get to explain why I, as an English major, have Calculus, proper Biology, and CS on my transcript when "easier" classes would've sufficed, and the answer is that I halfway wanted to learn those subjects and halfway wanted to prove that I could.
You're right, college is more than a way to get a good job and not be poor. I can harp on that subject all day long, tell this kid how he'll come to appreciate the different people he meets, the different viewpoints he's exposed to, the time management skills he picks up, and maybe even that random mandatory class he thought he was going to hate. He'll pick that up along the way. In the meantime, when he gets his first failing grade on a midterm, or when he starts to realize that he is not the only "bright" person out there, he can fall back on the "I just have to trudge through this", because college isn't all happy fun jollies from learning.
About this Ivy League that loves nothing more than education, though... is that the same one where Harvard has come under criticism because almost 90% of their students graduate with some form of honors? I know, I can't see how it's mathematically possible, either. And Harvard isn't the only one in the Ivy League, they're simply being the most flagrant about it. Like most things in life, even presitigious Universities understand that your education isn't a black and white issue of "learning for learning's sake vs. securing a job." It's nice to be in a position where you can spend ~$120,000 on an education, but not everyone has that luxury. Having met plenty an Ivy League graduate, I would completely disagree with your statement; most of them are people who see education not as a thing to strive for or as a means to and end, but rather as a mixture of the two (albeit with a heavier emphasis on "means to an end"). They were simply lucky enough to be in the position where they could invest that much more in their "job acquisition fund".
Oh, and congratulations on managing to simultaneously sound like a complete elitist ass and reinforce every negative steretype about Ivy League-ers. You're the reason that my best friend is always hesitant to tell people he went to Yale.
1) As some others have pointed out, you're basically a kid (although possibly legal) who graduated from high school. Bright though you may claim to be, you haven't really demonstrated anything in terms of practical intelligence. Get off the high horse and prepare for step two.
2) Sit down with your folks and talk this through with them. Spend a year living on your own in the real world. Trust me, it's only gonna take a year. Move out, get an apartment, pay some bills, get a credit card and learn to use it correctly (or better still, royally screw up and be thankful that you're only 18). You don't have to go all out and get a car loan (if you can avoid it, because it's going to keep you tied into this lifestyle, so try to get a car from the folks), but avoid living at home during this experiment at all costs.
Try to obtain and hold down two or three of the following jobs during the year: Retail Sales/clerk, some sort of receptionist/secretarial/clerical work, car sales or some similar "high stakes" sales job, or some sort of construction or low end mechanic work (a jiffy lube or similar). These are the sorts of jobs that a person without a degree can work in and, to a point, actually sustain themselves. While you can hear stories all day long about guys who have sys-admin jobs with no degree to back them up, the fact is that those days are pretty much gone, and there's enough guys out there with a CS degree who will work the same job that it'll keep you at "Mel's Used Cars" indefinitely. The up-side to these jobs is you'll learn some cool stuff that will have a practical application in your life later on. You can pick up some good info on how car dealerships work, and how to keep from getting scammed. You can play retail from the other side of the counter, and chances are that you'll be kinder to retail clerks for the rest of your life. Knowing basic construction skills will save you huge amounts further down the road when you own a house and don't have to pay somebody $1,000 to hang some sheetrock in that room over the garage you want to turn into a LAN lair.
In about 4 months it's going to dawn on you that things like the basic food in your house cost a fair chunk of cash, that car insurance is ludicrously expensive, that landlords aren't always the best people but work well with give-and-take situations, and that living with a roomie isn't always the hilarious life sit-coms make it out to be. You're going to start to realize the amount of money it would take to live and be self-sufficient, and the amount of money it will take to do anything other than "tread water". When you hit December or so, apply to the university or community college of your choice, because come May you're going to be sick of this "real world" crap, but more importantly, you're going to realize that although 50% of college is bullshit classes and random facts that you'll never need to know (I can tell you that the word 'file' came into the English language through middle French, and is named for the thin string originally used to organize 'files' in a cabinet), but part of the point is proving to an employer that you can slog through bullshit. People will change careers, on average, five times in their life. Get a degree in a subject you enjoy, even if it's History or English, and try to study some interesting subjects in your electives. Your first job may not be exciting or pay mad Benjamins, but by this point you'll have already figured out that work isn't fun time. It shouldn't be crap, mind you, and with luck you'll also have learned how to spot crap employers, but you'll be a little more understanding of how life actually works, and you'll realize that work isn't supposed to be demoralizing, but it isn't usually fun either.
When you get a real job, one where you have weekends and two weeks of vacation, you'll have time to pursue your weird side interests and linux and tinkering and everything else you adore. Not oodles, no, but it'll be there. Try to keep yourself reaso
A friend of mine graduated with an ECE degree a couple of years ago. They learned on motorola 68K-series chips that were attached to a PCB with a small-ish amount of RAM. Data was loaded into and read from the PCB over a serial connection.
The advantages of this situation were pretty obvious. You got platform portability, since you just have to find something with a serial connection and whip up an interface program for loading/reading the data. You get the 68K series ASM language, which I'm told is fairly pleasant as far as ASM goes, and you get to learn on a chip that's still very common in embedded markets, which counts for a bit more with ASM where there's so much difference between the various architectures.
And that would be where QoS comes into play. If his company set that system up for him, shame on them for not making the obvious assumption that the connection might occasionally be heavily utilized for data at the same time a call is being placed.
If he set this system up himself, tell him to go get one of the linksys/netgear/whatever router/gateways in a box that support QoS (it's usually the units a step above the basic ones). If his router or gateway is a linux box of some sort, get it setup on there. If he's using Vonage, their VoIP adapter supports it if connect it in front of the PC/router/what-have-you.
This tale is all hearsay, and I've never confirmed it (please don't nitpick on my model numbers, but I believe it was the 8L/4L):
When HP orignally launched their Laserjet 8L, they were having trouble generating enough sales for the product. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it was because a lot of the desktop publishing market at the time belonged to Apple, who had the Laserwriter out on the market. That's neither here nor there, though.
The 8L could do, IIRC something like 10 or 11 ppm. So HP took the 8L, and through the use of a slightly different gearing, produced the 4L, which was nearly identical except for a slower print-rate, somewhere in the 5 ot 6 ppm range, which was still quite nice for the time. They sold the 4L for about half of what the 8L went for. All of a sudden, they were selling a huge amount of 4Ls, but there were also a ton of companies that realized that a 4L wouldn't be enough for their branch office, or whatever, so they purchased the "upgraded" 8L, instead. Enterprising users could, presumably, order the gear set (and whatever associated parts went with the actual 8L) and "hard mod" their 4L into an 8L.
To my understanding (I don't claim to be an expert), plasma doesn't work that way. Two levels of glass are used to seal in a cell of gas, which when charged produces a colored light. It isn't backlit, but rather produces its own light along with the color (presumably three color layers to produce the gamut it needs to). It's really nothing more than a stop-gap technology, though, because LCDs couldn't be fabbed in the sizes plasmas could be produced in.
Now comes the peculiar point. It would seem to me that you could simply have a black background, with the plasma cells above it turned off, and it would produce a perfect black, but it doesn't work that way. For whatever reason, the black is closer to the front of the screen, similar to the way a CRT is layed out. Again, I don't have a full knowledge of the intricate workings of the technology, or the reasons why its laid out that way (perhaps it simply looks weird to have the black at the back), and thus the colors have to penetrate the black to be seen. Because plasmas can't produce as bright a colors as a CRT, their blacks can't be as dark. If an OLED had to abide by similar visual restrictions, such as would be the case if blacks at the back looked strange, then we'd be back to sqaure one.
For the same reason that self-illuminating plasma displays have a weak black level: the amount of light they can put behind those colors. The darker the glass is, the brighter a color has to be to penetrate that black and still look decent, hence the reason a lot of plasmas have a "smoke" black. OLEDs will need to be much brighter to penetrate a true black, and balancing that brightness with MTBF will indeed be a challenge.
Of coursre, all other things being equal, I'll be perfectly happy to forego the heavy power usage of LCDs and the ludicrous power usage of plasma displays.
Re:Simple
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The 3Com Saga
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One thing to consider in this, though, are the newer crop of GigE cards that are integrated in the northbridge. Intel and Nvidia's newer chipsets are shipping with these sorts of chips, as they start to realize the same thing Apple did a while back: GigE plus anything disk intensive can and will max out a traditional 32-bit 33mhz PCI Bus. I dig 3Com products as much as the next guy, but I'll be damned if they could produce a worthwhile Northbridge assembly.
As a side note, their cards are also ridiculously expensive compared to the stuff that a lot of other manufacturers offer, and as has already been pointed out, the other stuff is sufficient for 98% of the jobs.
I purchased a Hanaho HotRod-SE around Christmas. Similar idea; Hanaho is a huge arcade cabinet producer, and gradually got into this as a side business. The controllers have a PS/2 passthrough, and do nothing more than emulate keypresses while using a microcontroller to allow many buttons to be pressed simultaneously. The controller runs $99 rather than the $150 here. The only downsides I can see:
-The controls on both units are spaced too closely. This makes it a little smaller overall than an arcade cabinet's control area, and forces you to get a bit too friendly with your neighbor. The 1-player X-Arcade's would solve this, but they're $99 each instead of the $150 for the dual unit, and with two one-player controls you lose the "feel" of that arcade machine.
-When using a USB->PS/2 adapter, the Hotrod's signal would get "jammed up". If a button or direction was pressed for about two seconds, it would stop responding, unless another button was pressed in there somewhere. Not a big problem with shooters where you're frequently mashing the fire button, but Street Fighter pained me sometimes. I had to abandon my idea of using iton my home theater computer through a USB hub wired in the rear of my livingroom (to minimize wiring), and instead had to run a big-ass PS/2 extension.
-The keys are all hard-wired equivalents of various buttons on the keyboard ('r', 6, etc.). One of these keys is, for no logical reason, 'alt', which MAME ignores but some emulators have an issue with.
-Shipping was $20 for ground, which was pretty damned irritating, as it represented 1/5 the cost of the controller. To be fair, I have no idea what the X-Arcade's shipping costs.
If I had a choice again, I would probably still stick with the Hanaho unit, though. For $50 the USB complaint is extremely minor, and the 'alt' problem can be worked around. I do lust after those adapters that would let me throw down some XBox soul caliber, though.
Definitely true. I guess my tone there didn't communicate my opinion well, but I was simply half-truthfully replying to a joke intimating that it was UPN who killed Buffy. The show had a nice long run, and the UPN jump let it do a couple of things that might not have otherwise happened, but it was in the same sort of territory as any middle-of-the-road sitcom or drama when the move happened anyway. UPN makes plenty of asinine programming decisions, but it's not necessarily a kiss-of-death, and Buffy started on a network that has that same rep.
I would've agreed in the second point as well; SMG certainly could've made a reasonable case that she was trying to avoid typecasting, or that she was burned out, but I'd have been surprised if the show lasted past one or two more seasons.
As a big Buffy fan, I'd have to ask: should they be concerned that their big star is going to get tired of the same thing after 7 years and decide to move on to something else? I don't have the ratings numbers sitting in front of me to reference, but I don't think that there was a significant drop-off during the UPN times (I may stand corrected on that, though).
Buffy might've had another two seasons in it, tops, if Sarah Michelle Gellar hadn't decided that she wanted to do something else.
I honestly couldn't point to the source that says this, but I remember them ultimately deciding that Compaq would be reintroduced as their "enthusiasts" brand, for people who tinkered a bit more with their PCs and demanded a bit more hardware (video editing folks, gamers, the guy who needs the new chip because it's new).
I suppose some market survey showed that Compaq owners did this more often than HP owners, or that people who were a bit more into hardware specs looked more favorably on the compaq name.
Toward the end of Compaq's stand-alone life, they were actually using some nice, deskpro-derived towers and were one of the first big-name companies to embrace the Athlon processor in their higher-range consumer equipment. They were also a big supporter of the Athlon/DDR combo during the P4A days when the only non-RDRAM chipset from intel supported PC133 SDRAM. Both of those things would indicate that, at least from a strategy standpoint, Compaq might have counted on their customers being slightly more informed on the hardware side of things than otherwise. Or it might just have been a gamble, who knows?
Again, I swear the first point about the enthusiast brand was from one of their official statements post-merger, where they started talking about what lines from each company would be dropped. Given those sorts of examples, though, I don't think it's too terribly far fetched.
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No offense taken.
Size is important (gentlemen, start your double entendres); The iPod is physically small enough to put in your pants pocket comfortably. It doesn't sound like it's that much smaller than a Nomad Zen or Dell DJ or Archos Jukebox, but the in-person difference is astounding. Those other players would only fit in a pair of those ridiculously baggy jeans that hang below your ass.
The UI on the player is great. Read some of the review about what it takes just to play a signle song on, for example, the DJ. Assorted menu navigation plus three or four clicks on the choose button, which is located, IIRC, obscurely on the side. Now, it can take a lot of menu navigaion to play a PARTICULAR song on the ipod, but one can start the music playing by basically mashing the center button until they hear it.
iTunes: This is what brings it all together. It's what helps a lot of computer non-lits use the whole package quickly and easily. I wouldn't have a problem using a device that mounted and transferred as another drive, but a lot of people do. And iTunes treats the iPod as a synced device. Anything that has changed playlist or song-wise is instantly updated (over firewire, no less), making the whole process simple and easy.
I almost see this as trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
These games are portraying the current "Thug" lifestyle, which is not "black" or "urban" or "Def Jam", but "Thug".
Sort of like how a game that embraced the ideas of The Clash and The Sex Pistols might be labeled "punk", but would not necessarily be equal to "rock" or "white people".
Thug is 24" chrome wheels on your escalade, spraying champagne on a bikini-wearing skank's ass, while threatening violence for anyone who disagrees with you. In short, its a total bastardization of the rap from the 80's or early 90's, and is not in any way directly equal to those subjects. It evokes the same negative connotations in rap fans' heads that Creed would in someone who likes rock.
I would argue that the only two mainstream popular rappers that don't wholly embrace "Thug" are Eminem and Outkast (which is actually two guys, deal with it), and that's a tenuous assertion.
How many of these games deal with the conflicted emotions of loving your child but disliking her mother? What about revealing the state of fear that even a "hardcore" rapper feels when forced to expose his emotions on stage in front of thousands of people who may or may not like him at all? How about the difficulty of growing up in a world of poverty and violence, where cops would just as soon spit on you as look at you?
What's that? None? Oh, you mean they all deal with 24" chrome wheels on an Escalade (Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition), a poseur, disgusting, women as complete and total objects (not Lara Croft here, or even saving the princess, but buying and selling women without the tongue-in-cheek GTA: Vice city attitude) and the "you're tough only if you have a gun" attitude?
Yeah, that's what we call Thug.
What I would love to see is a pseudo two-piece setup. I want to see some sort of "headless" iMac that can either be mated to an existing monitor (single DVI-I out to accomodate flat panel or CRT) with a slightly easier expansion setup. Maybe just make it easier to change the HDD out or give me a single PCI slot. It doesn't need to get massively enormous to do this, just a "box" big enough to offer minor, MINOR expansion to ward off the complaints without detracting from PowerMac sales.
Now build the display (a 15" or 17" version) such that it can seamlessly integrate with that headless model if needed. Maybe the iMac G5 can quickly attach to the back of the LCD to minimize desk space usage. I'm no product designer, so I can't say anything beyond that, but it would have to be seamless and easy to do by a novice.
I own three macs, and my gf and I would both love a G5 iMac. The iBook is doing well in the low-end notebook market because it is a good value for the dollar. I am of the opinion that properly done, a pseudo-all-in-one iMac could offer a similar value proposition for new mac owners without sacrificing the quality or ease-of-use Apple holds dear.
Of course, I also know this is unlikely to happen.
Here's what you need to worry about on your resume: Is everything spelled correctly, laid out in a pleasing manner, one or two, three pages tops. In your situation, a resume doesn't matter.
Unless you were involved in some crazy groundbreaking research, went to an extremely prestigious school that will make a mark based on the name (Ivy League, Cal Tech/MIT/etc.), or work on some readily recognizable OSS in your spare time, your resume is about as good as it's going to get provided you follow the rules above.
Now for the fun part: Remember that cliche about "it isn't what you know, it's who you know?" It didn't achieve cliche status without having a bit of truth. Two of my friends graduated last Spring. One had a pretty good GPA and a degree in Chemical Engineering. Hadn't programmed since High School. He's now a consultant with Accenture, doing minor programming work on site for pretty nice cash, considering he's a first year employee. The other day he mentioned how one of the guys he had graduated with had a better GPA, better extra-curriculars, and sends out a shitload of resumes with no result (He was bemoaning the economy). I answered to him that the reason he ended up with that job was that he showed up everytime Accenture came to campus, be it for some random business school speaking engagement, or at career fairs. He came to be known by the guys there. The second friend graduated at the same time with a BS in EE. He spent about 5 months working on getting hired with one of about three different places, and now he works on the ISS at NASA. A third friend did approximately the same thing, and now works for the State Department (I think, long story but I suspect he works for a more clandestine side of the executive branch, but having had relatives in those positions I know he can't tell me if he does).
These guys are not geniuses, they both went to state schools (albeit good ones, and the third went Ivy League, so I consider his example less representative), and they're not the sort who were posting Summa Cum Laude grades at graduation. In short, they're probably just like you.
So what you need to do is this: Take a look at the companies operating in the region in which you want to be hired. Pick two or three good ones, and make sure to read up on corporate (or govt.) culture, benefits, etc. Know them well. Now start finding out ways to make contacts with the people there. Do their developers participate in some SIG around town? Go get to know them. Speak to guys who might be responsible for recommending a new-hire, but make sure you aren't hounding people. A lot of jobs aren't filled in a position->applicant order, but rather the other way around. In other words, a lot of times a team might need another hand, or a particular task that you're well suited at might need an entry-level programming position. The company probably wouldn't actively go and create a job advertisment, post on Monster.com, etc., but if one of the devs says, "hey, there's that guy I remember from the Linux/Graphics/Networking SIG who could probably help us out", the job will be "created".
At the risk of sounding like some crappy self-help speaker, when you're trying to get a job, you're essentially acting a salesperson, and the product you're selling is yourself. Right now, you're basically a commodity product, nothing but a slightly-better-than-average list of achievements on paper. Your job is to provide that extra push, in whatever way you can, to put yourself above commodity status.
Oh yeah, and please ditch that "objective: To obtain a position in..." section. God I wish those things would go away on resumes. Everyone of them is the same canned line that does nothing but take up space better devoted to anything.
Don't confuse the fact that Promise produces on-mobo RAID "hardware" with the impression that all of their equipment is like that. Promise makes several truly hardware-based SATA and ATA cards, as well as a few enclosures that take numerous (4-16) IDE drives, do RAID in hardware, and interface to a server over U160 SCSI. They are perfectly capable of making hardware RAID solutions, provided you're willing to buy something other than a $60 "RAID" card.
Their only major drawback I saw last time I looked at their hardware was that Linux drivers at the time tended to be binary and proprietary to specific versions (works on redhat but not Suse, etc.), which may or may not matter depending upon the OS you're choosing to run.
I don't work for them, and I don't even use their equipment in any of my stuff (a buddy of mine runs an SX4000 card, though, so I have seen them in action), but I do get a bit peeved when someone dismisses a company's higher-end solutions because of (admittedly) bad experience with their low-end kit.
The only reason I can say that XBox is not currently the market leader is the fact that the PS2 launched a bit early.
I own all three (well, four, as I also own a Dreamcast) of the current-gen systems. If I were starting out today to purchase my consoles, but with my current experience with the systems, XBox and Gamecube would be a toss up for my first and second purchase, and the PS2 would be dead last. Put simply, Nintendo has great, great first party games, and the console just has a certain "character" that the others lack. XBox is vastly superior to the PS2 in hardware specs, from video and audio, even down to the fact that it supports four controls without an additional purchase. This means that cross-platform games end up getting purchased for my XBox because, simply put, they're going to look better and sound better in 99% of the cases. This is compounded by the fact that since I don't really have time to devote to lengthy RPGs or Turn-based strategy games (an area that I understand Sony has been shining in lately), I simply haven't seen a large amount of compelling, PS2-only titles in the last five or six months (although I'm certain someone will be more than happy to post some laundry list for me).
I wasn't always like this; I had a PS2 on the American release date, and I held off on my XBox purchase until they had two games that I was really, genuinely interested in (turned out to be DOA: 3 and Buffy, although I was pleasantly surprised by Halo, which I had discounted as yet another FPS). A year after my XBox purchase, it's rare for me to purchase a PS2 game, but still very common for me to grab GC or XBox games.
Although the first mover has technically lost the last three generations (you'd have to include DC in this one, which I do), the first major mover in the last three gens was also Sega, so I suppose we could simply chalk it up to mismanagement. That said, the only logical reason that I can see for the PS2's success was that it was first out of the gate, and the majority of people, the ones who don't own all the consoles, thus purchase PS2 games by default.
Now, whether or not MS will shoot themselves in the foot with an early XBox2 launch is another story. While there is a lot larger market for game consoles now than there used to be, it's hard to discount the sore feelings of people who "just bought an XBox1."
/. Got trolled?? Hell no. The editors knew this was a fake.
Wait 'till this guy sees his bandwidth bill.
A lot of people have already pointed out that if you have more than two drives, you should be doing RAID-5. Promise produces a couple of true hardware-level RAID cards in the ~$200-$300 range, depending on how many drives you want, and whether you want IDE or SATA.
3Ware's escalade seems to have much better linux support, but are generally more expensive kit (although many claim they're vastly superior). I have a simple file server that occasionally doubles as a dedicated game server at our monthly LANs, so it has plenty of horsepower, and thus I went with a soft-RAID solution. Highpoint makes a model in the $80 range that implements RAID-5 at the software level, but as long as you have some decent hardware that it's going in, that shouldn't be a huge problem.
Just a few things to remember: if you doing RAID-5, try to have a seperate boot drive so that you can keep swap off of the array disk; swap doesn't need fault tolerance and it will slow you down. If you're planning on using gigabit ethernet and heavily accessing this thing (not sure why in a home situation), look at getting one of the intel 875 or Nforce3 boards that have gigabit on the northbridge, as gigabit and heavy disk access together will saturate your PCI bus. If you only have two discs, ignore all of this, and just mirror them entirely in software.
Hitachi has had 400GB drives (SATA) for a few months now link
It looks like the only thing unique here is the "highest areal density", meaning (I assume) that Hitachi is using a four platter system, where Seagate's only has three.
Also, I wonder what problems might arise from 16MB caches on normal desktop machines. One of the issues I seem to recall with larger cache drives is the risk of filesystem corruption. If power is lost while data is sitting in cache, waiting for a write, then you could potentially royally screw up your file or filesystem. Hence, the only 16MB cache drives I've seen are notebook drives (almost always gonna have a battery) and SCSI drives (likely in a server or workstation, which will most likely have a UPS). Before you go countering that these aren't meant for desktop use, keep in mind that DV video, digital photgraphy, and music are all things that home users like the idea of, and they are also the things much more likely to consume massive amounts of storage capacity.
It isn't. I've seen good systems that cost less, but $1,000 is about the point where someone's running something other than a trashy Home Theater in a Box, and that would be about the point where they're going to start to have gear that can do something with a DVD-A/SACD source.
Seriously, below about $1,000, you're talking about full-range drivers, mediocre amps, and the like, and your audio quality is being limited by your equipment, not a CD.
This was a really, really uninformative article. Bonus points for being "blurbed" as about DVD-A/SACD and then having almost nothing about them.
I have a DVD-A/SACD player. It's hooked up to a home theater system that toals out at about $6,000, not counting TV. DVD-As and SACD do definitely sound better than CD, but they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000. Below that point, the limiting factor isn't their media but the speakers.
That said, I really regret having purchased it. I'm not a huge classical music fan, and my interest in jazz is minor. There aren't a huge amount of major releases out there for someone like myself. It is amusing, though, to go to the store and see the completely random stuff that does make it out (The Bangles Greatest Hits? Queensryche?!? The Top Gun Soundtrack?).
You replied to a post by an English major. I do respect education, and if life was happy and friendly, there'd still be a good place and a healthy amount of respect for the "renaissance man" liberal arts education gained at universities other than Ivy League. But every degree does have some bullshit classes, and you're going to learn things that have no practical application to you ever. If you enjoy learning for the pure fact of learning, then that's okay with you; I occasionally get to explain why I, as an English major, have Calculus, proper Biology, and CS on my transcript when "easier" classes would've sufficed, and the answer is that I halfway wanted to learn those subjects and halfway wanted to prove that I could.
You're right, college is more than a way to get a good job and not be poor. I can harp on that subject all day long, tell this kid how he'll come to appreciate the different people he meets, the different viewpoints he's exposed to, the time management skills he picks up, and maybe even that random mandatory class he thought he was going to hate. He'll pick that up along the way. In the meantime, when he gets his first failing grade on a midterm, or when he starts to realize that he is not the only "bright" person out there, he can fall back on the "I just have to trudge through this", because college isn't all happy fun jollies from learning.
About this Ivy League that loves nothing more than education, though... is that the same one where Harvard has come under criticism because almost 90% of their students graduate with some form of honors? I know, I can't see how it's mathematically possible, either. And Harvard isn't the only one in the Ivy League, they're simply being the most flagrant about it. Like most things in life, even presitigious Universities understand that your education isn't a black and white issue of "learning for learning's sake vs. securing a job." It's nice to be in a position where you can spend ~$120,000 on an education, but not everyone has that luxury. Having met plenty an Ivy League graduate, I would completely disagree with your statement; most of them are people who see education not as a thing to strive for or as a means to and end, but rather as a mixture of the two (albeit with a heavier emphasis on "means to an end"). They were simply lucky enough to be in the position where they could invest that much more in their "job acquisition fund".
Oh, and congratulations on managing to simultaneously sound like a complete elitist ass and reinforce every negative steretype about Ivy League-ers. You're the reason that my best friend is always hesitant to tell people he went to Yale.
Is two-fold.
1) As some others have pointed out, you're basically a kid (although possibly legal) who graduated from high school. Bright though you may claim to be, you haven't really demonstrated anything in terms of practical intelligence. Get off the high horse and prepare for step two.
2) Sit down with your folks and talk this through with them. Spend a year living on your own in the real world. Trust me, it's only gonna take a year. Move out, get an apartment, pay some bills, get a credit card and learn to use it correctly (or better still, royally screw up and be thankful that you're only 18). You don't have to go all out and get a car loan (if you can avoid it, because it's going to keep you tied into this lifestyle, so try to get a car from the folks), but avoid living at home during this experiment at all costs.
Try to obtain and hold down two or three of the following jobs during the year: Retail Sales/clerk, some sort of receptionist/secretarial/clerical work, car sales or some similar "high stakes" sales job, or some sort of construction or low end mechanic work (a jiffy lube or similar). These are the sorts of jobs that a person without a degree can work in and, to a point, actually sustain themselves. While you can hear stories all day long about guys who have sys-admin jobs with no degree to back them up, the fact is that those days are pretty much gone, and there's enough guys out there with a CS degree who will work the same job that it'll keep you at "Mel's Used Cars" indefinitely. The up-side to these jobs is you'll learn some cool stuff that will have a practical application in your life later on. You can pick up some good info on how car dealerships work, and how to keep from getting scammed. You can play retail from the other side of the counter, and chances are that you'll be kinder to retail clerks for the rest of your life. Knowing basic construction skills will save you huge amounts further down the road when you own a house and don't have to pay somebody $1,000 to hang some sheetrock in that room over the garage you want to turn into a LAN lair.
In about 4 months it's going to dawn on you that things like the basic food in your house cost a fair chunk of cash, that car insurance is ludicrously expensive, that landlords aren't always the best people but work well with give-and-take situations, and that living with a roomie isn't always the hilarious life sit-coms make it out to be. You're going to start to realize the amount of money it would take to live and be self-sufficient, and the amount of money it will take to do anything other than "tread water". When you hit December or so, apply to the university or community college of your choice, because come May you're going to be sick of this "real world" crap, but more importantly, you're going to realize that although 50% of college is bullshit classes and random facts that you'll never need to know (I can tell you that the word 'file' came into the English language through middle French, and is named for the thin string originally used to organize 'files' in a cabinet), but part of the point is proving to an employer that you can slog through bullshit. People will change careers, on average, five times in their life. Get a degree in a subject you enjoy, even if it's History or English, and try to study some interesting subjects in your electives. Your first job may not be exciting or pay mad Benjamins, but by this point you'll have already figured out that work isn't fun time. It shouldn't be crap, mind you, and with luck you'll also have learned how to spot crap employers, but you'll be a little more understanding of how life actually works, and you'll realize that work isn't supposed to be demoralizing, but it isn't usually fun either.
When you get a real job, one where you have weekends and two weeks of vacation, you'll have time to pursue your weird side interests and linux and tinkering and everything else you adore. Not oodles, no, but it'll be there. Try to keep yourself reaso
A friend of mine graduated with an ECE degree a couple of years ago. They learned on motorola 68K-series chips that were attached to a PCB with a small-ish amount of RAM. Data was loaded into and read from the PCB over a serial connection.
The advantages of this situation were pretty obvious. You got platform portability, since you just have to find something with a serial connection and whip up an interface program for loading/reading the data. You get the 68K series ASM language, which I'm told is fairly pleasant as far as ASM goes, and you get to learn on a chip that's still very common in embedded markets, which counts for a bit more with ASM where there's so much difference between the various architectures.
And that would be where QoS comes into play. If his company set that system up for him, shame on them for not making the obvious assumption that the connection might occasionally be heavily utilized for data at the same time a call is being placed.
If he set this system up himself, tell him to go get one of the linksys/netgear/whatever router/gateways in a box that support QoS (it's usually the units a step above the basic ones). If his router or gateway is a linux box of some sort, get it setup on there. If he's using Vonage, their VoIP adapter supports it if connect it in front of the PC/router/what-have-you.
This tale is all hearsay, and I've never confirmed it (please don't nitpick on my model numbers, but I believe it was the 8L/4L):
When HP orignally launched their Laserjet 8L, they were having trouble generating enough sales for the product. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it was because a lot of the desktop publishing market at the time belonged to Apple, who had the Laserwriter out on the market. That's neither here nor there, though.
The 8L could do, IIRC something like 10 or 11 ppm. So HP took the 8L, and through the use of a slightly different gearing, produced the 4L, which was nearly identical except for a slower print-rate, somewhere in the 5 ot 6 ppm range, which was still quite nice for the time. They sold the 4L for about half of what the 8L went for. All of a sudden, they were selling a huge amount of 4Ls, but there were also a ton of companies that realized that a 4L wouldn't be enough for their branch office, or whatever, so they purchased the "upgraded" 8L, instead. Enterprising users could, presumably, order the gear set (and whatever associated parts went with the actual 8L) and "hard mod" their 4L into an 8L.
To my understanding (I don't claim to be an expert), plasma doesn't work that way. Two levels of glass are used to seal in a cell of gas, which when charged produces a colored light. It isn't backlit, but rather produces its own light along with the color (presumably three color layers to produce the gamut it needs to). It's really nothing more than a stop-gap technology, though, because LCDs couldn't be fabbed in the sizes plasmas could be produced in.
Now comes the peculiar point. It would seem to me that you could simply have a black background, with the plasma cells above it turned off, and it would produce a perfect black, but it doesn't work that way. For whatever reason, the black is closer to the front of the screen, similar to the way a CRT is layed out. Again, I don't have a full knowledge of the intricate workings of the technology, or the reasons why its laid out that way (perhaps it simply looks weird to have the black at the back), and thus the colors have to penetrate the black to be seen. Because plasmas can't produce as bright a colors as a CRT, their blacks can't be as dark. If an OLED had to abide by similar visual restrictions, such as would be the case if blacks at the back looked strange, then we'd be back to sqaure one.
For the same reason that self-illuminating plasma displays have a weak black level: the amount of light they can put behind those colors. The darker the glass is, the brighter a color has to be to penetrate that black and still look decent, hence the reason a lot of plasmas have a "smoke" black. OLEDs will need to be much brighter to penetrate a true black, and balancing that brightness with MTBF will indeed be a challenge.
Of coursre, all other things being equal, I'll be perfectly happy to forego the heavy power usage of LCDs and the ludicrous power usage of plasma displays.
One thing to consider in this, though, are the newer crop of GigE cards that are integrated in the northbridge. Intel and Nvidia's newer chipsets are shipping with these sorts of chips, as they start to realize the same thing Apple did a while back: GigE plus anything disk intensive can and will max out a traditional 32-bit 33mhz PCI Bus. I dig 3Com products as much as the next guy, but I'll be damned if they could produce a worthwhile Northbridge assembly.
As a side note, their cards are also ridiculously expensive compared to the stuff that a lot of other manufacturers offer, and as has already been pointed out, the other stuff is sufficient for 98% of the jobs.
Junk science has shown that these servers will have quadruple the risk of developing cancer.
Make sure to have the company doctor check them out occasionally, although the servers should be aware that the company doctor does not work for them.
I purchased a Hanaho HotRod-SE around Christmas. Similar idea; Hanaho is a huge arcade cabinet producer, and gradually got into this as a side business. The controllers have a PS/2 passthrough, and do nothing more than emulate keypresses while using a microcontroller to allow many buttons to be pressed simultaneously. The controller runs $99 rather than the $150 here. The only downsides I can see:
-The controls on both units are spaced too closely. This makes it a little smaller overall than an arcade cabinet's control area, and forces you to get a bit too friendly with your neighbor. The 1-player X-Arcade's would solve this, but they're $99 each instead of the $150 for the dual unit, and with two one-player controls you lose the "feel" of that arcade machine.
-When using a USB->PS/2 adapter, the Hotrod's signal would get "jammed up". If a button or direction was pressed for about two seconds, it would stop responding, unless another button was pressed in there somewhere. Not a big problem with shooters where you're frequently mashing the fire button, but Street Fighter pained me sometimes. I had to abandon my idea of using iton my home theater computer through a USB hub wired in the rear of my livingroom (to minimize wiring), and instead had to run a big-ass PS/2 extension.
-The keys are all hard-wired equivalents of various buttons on the keyboard ('r', 6, etc.). One of these keys is, for no logical reason, 'alt', which MAME ignores but some emulators have an issue with.
-Shipping was $20 for ground, which was pretty damned irritating, as it represented 1/5 the cost of the controller. To be fair, I have no idea what the X-Arcade's shipping costs.
If I had a choice again, I would probably still stick with the Hanaho unit, though. For $50 the USB complaint is extremely minor, and the 'alt' problem can be worked around. I do lust after those adapters that would let me throw down some XBox soul caliber, though.
Definitely true. I guess my tone there didn't communicate my opinion well, but I was simply half-truthfully replying to a joke intimating that it was UPN who killed Buffy. The show had a nice long run, and the UPN jump let it do a couple of things that might not have otherwise happened, but it was in the same sort of territory as any middle-of-the-road sitcom or drama when the move happened anyway. UPN makes plenty of asinine programming decisions, but it's not necessarily a kiss-of-death, and Buffy started on a network that has that same rep.
I would've agreed in the second point as well; SMG certainly could've made a reasonable case that she was trying to avoid typecasting, or that she was burned out, but I'd have been surprised if the show lasted past one or two more seasons.
As a big Buffy fan, I'd have to ask: should they be concerned that their big star is going to get tired of the same thing after 7 years and decide to move on to something else? I don't have the ratings numbers sitting in front of me to reference, but I don't think that there was a significant drop-off during the UPN times (I may stand corrected on that, though).
Buffy might've had another two seasons in it, tops, if Sarah Michelle Gellar hadn't decided that she wanted to do something else.
Holy crap.
I even stared straight at that page and didn't see it. And it's not as though her name's short enough to be hiding.
Wow, don't I feel stupid.
I honestly couldn't point to the source that says this, but I remember them ultimately deciding that Compaq would be reintroduced as their "enthusiasts" brand, for people who tinkered a bit more with their PCs and demanded a bit more hardware (video editing folks, gamers, the guy who needs the new chip because it's new).
I suppose some market survey showed that Compaq owners did this more often than HP owners, or that people who were a bit more into hardware specs looked more favorably on the compaq name.
Toward the end of Compaq's stand-alone life, they were actually using some nice, deskpro-derived towers and were one of the first big-name companies to embrace the Athlon processor in their higher-range consumer equipment. They were also a big supporter of the Athlon/DDR combo during the P4A days when the only non-RDRAM chipset from intel supported PC133 SDRAM. Both of those things would indicate that, at least from a strategy standpoint, Compaq might have counted on their customers being slightly more informed on the hardware side of things than otherwise. Or it might just have been a gamble, who knows?
Again, I swear the first point about the enthusiast brand was from one of their official statements post-merger, where they started talking about what lines from each company would be dropped. Given those sorts of examples, though, I don't think it's too terribly far fetched.