The Dell Optiplex line was also similar in those regards, although a few items did need a screwdriver.
As far as motherboard access goes, I agree that
they're pretty good (although many of the
Optiplex boxes from two years or so ago had this
removable PCI riser that seemed like an
unnecessary step). I'm not so happy with
the drive bay access; it's a pain in the rear
to remove the front and get at the the removable
tray/shelf that the drives sit in, and I never
have gotten the knack of putting the tray back
in without it catching about a quarter of an inch
before the final position.
For any system above the tiniest complexity,
there's a lot that has to be
documented outside the code. Just for starters:
Persistent and temporary file formats
User interface
Network protocols
System and architectural design
Relationships between data elements (or objects if you think that way)
Some of the above are addressed by UML and associated tools,
but for things like network protocols the
RFC-type format is
the hands-down winner. A particular implementation of a good idea in code might last
a couple of years, but the protocols for a truly
revolutionary idea will live for decades. (Look
at Mosaic and HTTP/HTML for a good recent example.)
In other words - slower growth, collapse of hardware industry (why buy a new
machine if its not any faster) and programmers out of jobs (what do we need
you for - we have all the word processors we need).
I disagree. What you're saying is that the
only reason any of us have jobs right now is
that computers are cheap and getting cheaper,
and that once the balloon pops everything will
collapse.
In fact, once the balloon pops those of us who
actually know how to deliver value to the
customer will make it big, while all those
who provide no value but only glitz and marketing
brochures will perish.
but I think that if you were raking in an amount near 75$/hour (150k a year) you could have certainly put
away enough savings
Actually, it's not that easy as an independent
contractor to do well at just $75/hour. First
of all, paying work is often not 40 hours/week.
It takes a certain amount of legwork to round
up interesting work, it takes some effort to
get customers to pay, etc. Then take off
15 percent for self-employment tax. Then
subtract health insurance for yourself and your
family. Then subtract the cost of your phone
line, internet connection, and the journals
and books you buy to keep current in your
field. In the end, if you're only contracting at
$75/hour you're really just scraping along.
It's nice to *think* that you're making $75
for each billable hour, but if you put that
number down on your resume you're really
stating gross, not net, income.
The team analysed more than a million earthquake records for signs of strangelets hitting Earth, reports The Sunday
Telegraph.
Oooh, I'm sure the authors of the scientific
paper had a tough bunch of high-energy-particle
physicists at The Sunday Telegraph reviewing their submitted
paper:-)
I mean, it's nice to see something having to
do with physics make the Sunday Paper (at least
I'm not listening to the Joe Jackson song that disparages that
media) but shouldn't we have slightly higher
standards for something to make the Slashdot
front page?
Recently, my company discovered that cultural aspects impact
significantly on the expectations for a piece of software. For example, we
found that the features which the Japanese would like differ markedly from
those demanded in the US.
You don't say how you discovered and found these things. In
my (very limited) experience, most questionnaire-type research about "what do you care about" can be strongly driven by recent
bad experiences. In most cases these are isolated events, based on bad experiences with one or two
vendors, and not really representative of what the
customer really needs.
To determine what the customer really needs, as
opposed to what they think they want, you have
to do some serious legwork, including in many
cases prototyping. It's tough, but it does
give results which are less biased by previous "bad" vendors.
I think that us techies should be reminded
of something by this story:
Be Careful what Features you add to your Product.
They may be used in some future lawsuit as a
way to violate your customer's privacy.
There have been too many instances over the
years where a "feature" not really needed by
anybody has been misappropriated. See,
in particular, creeping featurism
for other documented side-effects. Unfortunately
I think legalism will soon make this entry.
License plates don't have to be universally
approved or politically correct to have meaning and relevance. If that were the case, we'd have nothing but boring "beige" plates on all the cars.
Let's see, off the top of my head:
New Hampshire - Live Free or Die. Luckily this resonates strongly
on both sides of the aisle.
District of Colubmia - Taxation without Representation. Makes a point, does so with historical relevance, yet the possibility of a DC vote in congress is hated and despised by the majority of congress - who are forced to view it every day:-)
Excising the Manhattan Project and the Cold War from history is something I'm sure that a
certain fraction of the world would like to do. But face it, millions of Japanase civilians and probably a million US serviceman would've died if the conventional war had continued. If Nevada wants to take pride in this, it's fine by me.
Someone explain to me how complaining about a site's lynx (or other
text-mode browser) unfriendliness is unlike driving a Ford Model T on the
freeway,
Maybe you don't understand what WIPOUT is about,
so you don't see the irony: WIPOUT nominally
is against arbitrary restrictions by IP owners
which remove or diminish the use and freedom
of "little-guy" writers and readers.
Yet they choose to publish their website in a
form that requires you to use a proprietary browser, and which makes it nigh-impossible for a visually impaired person to use it.
You gotta wonder about wipout.net...
on
Wipout Essay Results
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It was only in August that the
K6
was discontinued. Of course they plan to
continue shipping K6-II's and III's through the
year 2003 to embedded-type customers with contracts. (It really is an excellent low-power
processor for such applications, though a new
design would almost certainly use one of the
VIA C3's.)
But when it's "tweaks" and support for some or other hardware, I find it irrelevant, and redundant.
I certainly do not think that, for example,
hot-swappable PCI is redundant. Once you start
aiming for uptimes of several years, the ability
to change out and upgrade hardware over time
becomes increasingly important.
Of course, there are several ways to achieve
a "virtual" uptime of years by clustering
several machines, but there are many applications out there where linux-style
clustering is not an option. By getting
hardware-hot-swap down to the PCI level, Linux
is starting to play with the "big boys", and
this could be vitally important for the future
of Linux, in the same way that
Parallel Sysplex is for IBM. (Yes, hot-swapping PCI is very different from geographically-diverse clusters, but it's a step in a similar direction.)
Sure, if you look at your typical newstand or
big-box electronics store you'll get the
impression that hobbyist electronics/science
has died off.
But most, if not all, the activity has actually
moved somewhere else: The Net.
I can pop open a browser and buy radio parts over
the web that no big-city electronics store ever
stocked, even in the heday of the 50's and 60's.
I can go to a usenet group and read
sci.electronics.design or go one of literally
millions of hobbyist websites where folks
are absolutely doing their own thing,
completely unfettered by the publishing industry.
Wasn't Randy Wiggington (who did some of the "hard" coding in Applesoft BASIC and Apple DOS) under 18 when he was helping Woz out with Apple II software?
Naming a product after an easily recognizable, representative word, even be it
a common word, just makes sense for any company trying to sell said product.
Very true. It was a true marketing genius at the
Kimberly-Clark corporation who decided to name
a brand of facial tissues after the commonly
used generic term "Kleenex".
Here it is: An explicit smiley:-) for the humor impaired who have never sat through an introductory trademark
course!
1. Public library. Really. They'll certainly
have several books dating back to the 70's about
all the neat things you can do with plastic.
2. Your local plastic dealer. It depends on
what brand of acrylic they carry, but all the
major manufacturers publish little booklets
about basic plastic techniques.
Even better, your local plastic dealer will
also have tools specifically for plexiglass. It's
not that ordinary metal or wood tools won't work;
they will, but the cuts won't be as smooth
and you're likely to jam on the chips until
you learn the basic moves and good feed rates.
The tools intended specifically for acrylic
plastics are much more forgiving.
Someone else here recommended epoxy adhesives,
which are truly a sign of poor workmanship
with acrylic. Quality acrylic stuff is bonded
by making the gap be very small and using
a cement with the consistency of water. Done
properly, the joint is optically clear and
seamless. It does take some practice.
When I said "DVD companies" I meant what
you call "content providers". Sorry for the
confusion.
Not that I have any financial interest in
the blue laser companies, but in some respects
it's a shame that their proposals (which
really *do* pack more bits on a disk) may
not be implemented sooner. Blue lasers
are expensive right now, but the sure way
to make them cheaper is to build them into
every DVD player made. And the sooner that
happens the sooner we see 20 or 30 or 50 GB
DVD-ROM media for cheap prices in the mass market.
I don't see a benifit especially in storage space for the red laser format.
Of course not - there is no such benefit.
The "new red laser format" doesn't actually
put more bits on the disk, it just uses more
compression to (supposedly) get more out of each
bit.
The benefit is to the companies making DVD disks;
red lasers are cheaper so that more folks will
buy DVD players and thus buy more DVD disks.
OTOH, the electronics companies benefit from the
blue laser format, since blue lasers are still Really
Expensive. Guess which format the electronics
companies are pushing?
More compression. Needs
CPU horsepower somewhere (drive? your desktop
CPU?), but CPU horsepower is dirt cheap today.
Blue lasers. The shorter
your wavelength, the higher your recording
density. But red lasers are widespread and cheap,
while blue lasers in consumer devices are not
all that well understood and there is a very
limited supply at the moment.
If you're in the business of selling blue lasers,
of course you want to promote method #2 above.
But DVD companies are not in the business of
selling blue lasers - they're in the business
of selling content.
Of course, the decision to not use blue lasers
impacts those who use the disks for purposes
other than what the DVD companies want. If
you want to store data on the disk, the "new"
DVD compression doesn't help you any. And if
you want to play the new DVD's on your non-DVD-consortium-approved player, the new
compression techniques will probably make your
attempts more complicated (if not more illegal...)
And a listener's log listing: 1) The name of the service or entity
2) The channel or program
3) the date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone)
4) the date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone)
5) The time zone where the signal was received (user)
6) Unique User identifier
7) The country in which the user received the transmissions
Don't most European countries already have
internet privacy laws which protect users
from many kinds of content logging?
Somebody modded my comment to "funny". I'm
dead serious - I've wanted an HP-01 for the
past 25 years, ever since I saw it in an issue
of Radio-Electronics. It has truly
serious cool-geekiness factor among anyone in
my age group!
In the early 90's I saw one at a flea-market
for $400, and ever since I've regretted not
buying it. (Never mind that
I was a starving grad student.)
WATCH the damned thing. Shows, even shitty ones, don't get cancelled if people WATCH them
Problem: for the last two months of the
football season, here on the East coast I
was unable to watch Futurama at all in its
7PM-on-Sunday timeslot. The football games
always went past their scheduled end and Fox
chose to not show Futurama at all here; instead
These were mostly new Futurama episodes, too, dammit.
whatever remaining time was eaten by pointless
Football jabber.
Slashdot Mirror
- Persistent and temporary file formats
- User interface
- Network protocols
- System and architectural design
- Relationships between data elements (or objects if you think that way)
Some of the above are addressed by UML and associated tools, but for things like network protocols the RFC-type format is the hands-down winner. A particular implementation of a good idea in code might last a couple of years, but the protocols for a truly revolutionary idea will live for decades. (Look at Mosaic and HTTP/HTML for a good recent example.)I disagree. What you're saying is that the only reason any of us have jobs right now is that computers are cheap and getting cheaper, and that once the balloon pops everything will collapse.
In fact, once the balloon pops those of us who actually know how to deliver value to the customer will make it big, while all those who provide no value but only glitz and marketing brochures will perish.
It's nice to *think* that you're making $75 for each billable hour, but if you put that number down on your resume you're really stating gross, not net, income.
Oooh, I'm sure the authors of the scientific paper had a tough bunch of high-energy-particle physicists at The Sunday Telegraph reviewing their submitted paper :-)
I mean, it's nice to see something having to do with physics make the Sunday Paper (at least I'm not listening to the Joe Jackson song that disparages that media) but shouldn't we have slightly higher standards for something to make the Slashdot front page?
You don't say how you discovered and found these things. In my (very limited) experience, most questionnaire-type research about "what do you care about" can be strongly driven by recent bad experiences. In most cases these are isolated events, based on bad experiences with one or two vendors, and not really representative of what the customer really needs.
To determine what the customer really needs, as opposed to what they think they want, you have to do some serious legwork, including in many cases prototyping. It's tough, but it does give results which are less biased by previous "bad" vendors.
Let's see, off the top of my head:
- New Hampshire - Live Free or Die. Luckily this resonates strongly
on both sides of the aisle.
- District of Colubmia - Taxation without Representation. Makes a point, does so with historical relevance, yet the possibility of a DC vote in congress is hated and despised by the majority of congress - who are forced to view it every day
:-)
Excising the Manhattan Project and the Cold War from history is something I'm sure that a certain fraction of the world would like to do. But face it, millions of Japanase civilians and probably a million US serviceman would've died if the conventional war had continued. If Nevada wants to take pride in this, it's fine by me.Maybe you don't understand what WIPOUT is about, so you don't see the irony: WIPOUT nominally is against arbitrary restrictions by IP owners which remove or diminish the use and freedom of "little-guy" writers and readers. Yet they choose to publish their website in a form that requires you to use a proprietary browser, and which makes it nigh-impossible for a visually impaired person to use it.
Under lynx, of course, all you see is an vast landscape of clickable (and un-ALT tagged) GIF's.
They may be all for freedom of expression, but they haven't yet mastered freedom of browsing!
It was only in August that the K6 was discontinued. Of course they plan to continue shipping K6-II's and III's through the year 2003 to embedded-type customers with contracts. (It really is an excellent low-power processor for such applications, though a new design would almost certainly use one of the VIA C3's.)
Duron is a popular brand of professional house-pain here on the East Coast of the US. I don't think that it is going to be discontinued!
I certainly do not think that, for example, hot-swappable PCI is redundant. Once you start aiming for uptimes of several years, the ability to change out and upgrade hardware over time becomes increasingly important.
Of course, there are several ways to achieve a "virtual" uptime of years by clustering several machines, but there are many applications out there where linux-style clustering is not an option. By getting hardware-hot-swap down to the PCI level, Linux is starting to play with the "big boys", and this could be vitally important for the future of Linux, in the same way that Parallel Sysplex is for IBM. (Yes, hot-swapping PCI is very different from geographically-diverse clusters, but it's a step in a similar direction.)
But most, if not all, the activity has actually moved somewhere else: The Net. I can pop open a browser and buy radio parts over the web that no big-city electronics store ever stocked, even in the heday of the 50's and 60's. I can go to a usenet group and read sci.electronics.design or go one of literally millions of hobbyist websites where folks are absolutely doing their own thing, completely unfettered by the publishing industry.
Wasn't Randy Wiggington (who did some of the
"hard" coding in Applesoft BASIC and Apple DOS)
under 18 when he was helping Woz out with Apple
II software?
Very true. It was a true marketing genius at the Kimberly-Clark corporation who decided to name a brand of facial tissues after the commonly used generic term "Kleenex".
Here it is: An explicit smiley :-) for the humor impaired who have never sat through an introductory trademark
course!
2. Your local plastic dealer. It depends on what brand of acrylic they carry, but all the major manufacturers publish little booklets about basic plastic techniques.
Even better, your local plastic dealer will also have tools specifically for plexiglass. It's not that ordinary metal or wood tools won't work; they will, but the cuts won't be as smooth and you're likely to jam on the chips until you learn the basic moves and good feed rates. The tools intended specifically for acrylic plastics are much more forgiving.
Someone else here recommended epoxy adhesives, which are truly a sign of poor workmanship with acrylic. Quality acrylic stuff is bonded by making the gap be very small and using a cement with the consistency of water. Done properly, the joint is optically clear and seamless. It does take some practice.
Some classic websites:
Rohm and Hass make the "plexiglass" brand of acrylic, but I've never found anything useful at their website.
Nothing beats a visit to a local plastic dealer, IMHO. Especially if you're looking for lively colors or advice about working the material.
Not that I have any financial interest in the blue laser companies, but in some respects it's a shame that their proposals (which really *do* pack more bits on a disk) may not be implemented sooner. Blue lasers are expensive right now, but the sure way to make them cheaper is to build them into every DVD player made. And the sooner that happens the sooner we see 20 or 30 or 50 GB DVD-ROM media for cheap prices in the mass market.
Of course not - there is no such benefit. The "new red laser format" doesn't actually put more bits on the disk, it just uses more compression to (supposedly) get more out of each bit.
The benefit is to the companies making DVD disks; red lasers are cheaper so that more folks will buy DVD players and thus buy more DVD disks.
OTOH, the electronics companies benefit from the blue laser format, since blue lasers are still Really Expensive. Guess which format the electronics companies are pushing?
- More compression. Needs
CPU horsepower somewhere (drive? your desktop
CPU?), but CPU horsepower is dirt cheap today.
- Blue lasers. The shorter
your wavelength, the higher your recording
density. But red lasers are widespread and cheap,
while blue lasers in consumer devices are not
all that well understood and there is a very
limited supply at the moment.
If you're in the business of selling blue lasers, of course you want to promote method #2 above. But DVD companies are not in the business of selling blue lasers - they're in the business of selling content.Of course, the decision to not use blue lasers impacts those who use the disks for purposes other than what the DVD companies want. If you want to store data on the disk, the "new" DVD compression doesn't help you any. And if you want to play the new DVD's on your non-DVD-consortium-approved player, the new compression techniques will probably make your attempts more complicated (if not more illegal...)
Don't most European countries already have internet privacy laws which protect users from many kinds of content logging?
You only see the Linux options on certain machines, and only if you are looking at their business or small-business offerings.
In the early 90's I saw one at a flea-market for $400, and ever since I've regretted not buying it. (Never mind that I was a starving grad student.)
See this picture and this list of features.
Problem: for the last two months of the football season, here on the East coast I was unable to watch Futurama at all in its 7PM-on-Sunday timeslot. The football games always went past their scheduled end and Fox chose to not show Futurama at all here; instead
These were mostly new Futurama episodes, too, dammit. whatever remaining time was eaten by pointless Football jabber.