I was betting that it would use an IBM 4xx series embedded PowerPC processor myself! A top of the range one of course. I was willing to expand that to the 7xx series (aka G3) if the power consumption was low enough (under 10W should be ample, and most of IBM's G3s meet that requirement). Certainly not a G4 or G5!
What I like about it is that later this year, I'll be able to buy a dual-PCIe x16 motherboard utilising the nForce 4 chipset (and VIA have also announced that they are going to put this into their chipsets later this year) and a cheapish graphics card. Then the year after, when I buy the latest game and it chugs a bit on my system, I can buy another card (for less, as the price has dropped) and boost my performance by 80-90%.
However my next system upgrade will be next year at the moment, but I'm happy with my 17 month old computer still, things haven't moved on a lot since I got it.
My 128MB 9500 does better than that... unless you are running a 1GHz processor or something I suggest completely uninstalling all ATI drivers, etc, and then re-installing them after a couple of reboots.
I read online that Half Life 2 will be in ATI's favour though.
But yeah, ~50fps in Doom 3 at 1280x1024 at high settings is quite a compelling reason to buy a $200 graphics card.
I mean, that will mean all those licenses they have charged for will effectively have been fraudulent won't it? That's kinda illegal in most parts of the world, so what will SCO do? Refund everybody? haha right.
Mobile phones are coming out now that store your credit card details, and you can use them to pay for goods at suitably equipped terminals. There was a story about it recently.
So you are happy for an application to access your credit card details, then send them in an SMS to a bad person? All without your knowledge? And you get charged for the text message?
I want my details secure. I want a secure device. To be honest, I'd rather the OS provider / phone maker / service provider checked all apps and signed them digitally, and the phone only ran apps signed by these entities. It would be a lot harder to get a malicious application onto a phone then. of course that would mean I couldn't download a hacked set of applications and run them for free... otoh if you do this and one of the apps is trojaned, then you deserve to get owned.
Does allowing an application to send a text message strike people as being a pretty bad design decision?
Phone applications/games should not be able to access any function that might cost the user money. Or if they do, then the OS itself should intercept and ask the user if they wish to allow the application to send the SMS / phone call / data call. "PsychoSolitaire wishes to send a message to +XX.YYYYYYYYY. This will cost £x. Yes/No/Never"
Some of those are just spam, but less intrusive - spam is like someone pasting ads all over your doors and windows. And then coming back and putting more up once you've spent time removing them.
Billboards? I dunno, the consumer isn't getting anything from them as far as I can see, an ad agency is. Maybe the location of the billboards might mean that the ad agency is paying a company or local government for the location, so it benefits very indirectly the viewer.
I wonder how many of the board of that company also moved with the profitable portion of the company, leaving the employees and the unpopular directors and managers with the loss making portion?
Ads were "an annoyance you have to deal with in a free society," lawyer Anthony J. Dain is quoted as saying.
No.
Ads are an annoyance that you have to deal with in order to receive something else funded by those ads for free or cheaper than it would otherwise cost.
In this case, the pop-up ads were not subsidising anything else for the people that got them. They just appeared unwanted and unexpected. You expect ads on the TV, on the radio, on websites. In return you get free TV, free radio, free websites. What is the consumer gaining from these popup adverts.
Hell, even junk mail probably subsided the postal service, allowing stamps to be made a little cheaper.
The same theory should apply to spam. The recipient is not benefitting from the spam in any way. The spammers aren't subsidising their internet connection. It goes from Win-Win (free service for the consumer and products being presented to people for the company) to Win-Lose (products being presented to people, but nothing in return except a waste of time).
Each card in new nVidia SLI (doesn't stand for Scan Line Interleave anymore, it is something else poncey using the same acronym) allocates a portion of the screen to render. E.g., top half and bottom half. There was an article a few weeks back which was featured on Slashdot that explained this.
The new one divides the screen up into two sections, I assume that if both cards are equally powerful then it will be 50:50 or thereabouts. I assume a little bit of overlap so that anti-aliasing and whatnot works correctly on the seam.
Then one card sends its generated half of the scene to the other, and they are merged and output to the display.
I think that this is fine for company e-mail, but it shouldn't be an option for personal e-mail.
If you are at work, you shouldn't use your work e-mail address for sending or receiving personal e-mails. Quite hard to enforce though. Instant Messaging has taken a reasonable amount of the small e-mail market though, and it does have a lot less spam issues to contend with as well.
Important e-mails like "sell those shares in XYZZY tomorrow, I've heard that they're doing badly, on the grapevine, like" should not be deletable though, so that illegal insider trading type scenarios cannot occur. OTOH why not a phone call with the same information?
Basically, you have to consider that anything that goes through a computer system can and will be recorded for a long time.
No it isn't. It is still using my bandwidth. And with 3000 spam e-mails a day currently, AFTER spamassassin has a go at what comes in I want a real solution to the problem.
Computer Science is certainly not being taught how to be a code monkey in any decent university.
I think that coding was around 5% - 10% of the course I did, for example. The course was much higher on mathematics types courses and theory type courses. That seems to make it qualify as a 'science' subject.
I wouldn't put Software Engineering as a type of engineering, nor as a science. It is merely a part of one of those courses. In a similar way Programming is a part of many courses, not just Computer Science.
Code/Admin Monkey (as a university course, as this article is about) is a different subject than Computer Science. It incorporates some of the same courses like other courses do. It adds in a lot of real-world programming and administration stuff, whereas a Computer Science course puts in lots of Mathematics and Theory amongst other things.
Yeah, if you've just done Computer Science degree and move up looking to do a PhD within the university, then you'll be treated as a code monkey for a while within that university's computer lab. But hey, that's no different from being the person that washes the lab equipment in chemistry and so on. A PhD shows an employer that (1) you value yourself a lot, (2) you can do a large research project singlehandedly from conception to completion, (3) you can manage your time in some manner, (4) you have specialised knowledge, and work experience in research.
I run my own company, they can't take my job, I'm perfectly capable of lazing myself out of my own job, thank you very much.
I also wasn't dissing the course, as I pointed out elsewhere, these people will be the builders, compared to the Computer Science qualified software architects and engineers.
You are correct in that programming isn't an elite profession any more. That's because it isn't hard to do. Experience means a lot more than a lot of theoretical knowledge as well in the real world. Still doesn't mean that their diploma style degree will be treated as good as a full computer science degree.
These people aren't looking to be "hard core coders" either. They want to get a job that pays reasonably after they realised that their degree in classics isn't getting them anywhere, or that they have no other option in life. They won't have any desire for the subject. They might be thick as a short plank. Not that real CS graduates have much enthusiasm for any programming job that someone else wants them to do either.
The first two years should focus on math, the Sciences, English, etc. Very necessary coursework.
Isn't this stuff you should have been taught at school PRIOR to going to university? Especially English and Science. A good CS degree will off course include a lot of Maths courses of the type that you won't be taught in school.
You'd be better off going to a computer software company and asking them if you can work for them for free for two years,
In fact I know people that have done that, except they were paid a wage. Start off in the software testing area, learn how to use software tools, learn to read code, learn to code, move to development team at the bottom but with valuable knowledge about that company's software. Your skills will be rather focussed on certain things, but that isn't any different from what this 'degree' will give you... apart from the real world experience that is useful.
Getting a degree shows an employer certain things, amongst which are:
1) You lasted university, didn't give up, didn't flake out 2) You are clever enough to do a full degree 3) What university you went to
these are useful. The degree itself hardly matters. What matters is the university you got it from.
These degrees are short 2 year monkey degrees. They are useful if you are in your thirties, want to change career, have a degree under your belt in something else, and you want to do an intensive retraining course. You already can show that you have the ability to work hard enough to get a degree.
What this course shows is that Programming is not a specialist thing anymore, it is a job for code monkeys, nothing special. It won't create Software Engineers though. Software Engineers (real CS people) will design stuff, and offload the boring stuff to the Code Monkeys (these trained people). Not much difference from an Architect or Engineer offloading the creation to the Builders.
This is going to be a degree in Computer Programming, or Computer Administration at the most.
These people are not going to be taught a wide spread of stuff like in Computer Science that goes from lots of maths and theoretical stuff through to real world stuff through to hardware and all that.
You can but hope that this course will create people that are more than unthinking code monkeys or button clickers.
As a UK citizen, she should just go to the police with the threatening legal letters, and raise a charge of harrassment against Penguin Publishing. Point out that Penguin Publishing published her e-mail address everywhere in order to get a lot of people to harrass her. I'm sure that there is a lot of stuff she can do under UK law to stop this illegal baiting.
Penguin are clearly in the wrong here. I will just choose to not buy any book published by Penguin, it is the least I can do.
I hope that a lawyer sees this and decides to help this person out... it would be nice to see a lawyer with a heart for a start... I'm not holding my breath though.
But who is going to buy a dual-G5 system, and then get rid of the high-class Unix based OS with a lovely front-end, and replace it with a variant of Linux?
Maybe for the G5 based XServes... but then again, MacOSX has all that lovely server management software inside - does Yellowdog have that?
Why? It messes up rendering Slashdot, a table layouted site, which it shouldn't however badly the HTML otherwise... table cells shouldn't overlap, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Firefox can render it correctly given a reformat. It is a problem with Firefox, a minor, rare, problem, but still a problem.
Nah, Livejournal problems I've had in Firefox are, regardless of post, after a certain amount down the page the right border of the angst entry boxes goes right too far. I think those boxes are merely divs as well (haven't checked) so it is a problem in Firefox's layout routines that calculate width of elements to fit in a page.
Slashdot Mirror
You should watch Highlander III then ... damn that's even worse. As is Critturs 4.
I hated Hulk, one of the few films I've actively not watched to the end of because it was so dire.
Some films are so bad they're good, like Mosquito and a whole bunch of other cheap films.
I was betting that it would use an IBM 4xx series embedded PowerPC processor myself! A top of the range one of course. I was willing to expand that to the 7xx series (aka G3) if the power consumption was low enough (under 10W should be ample, and most of IBM's G3s meet that requirement). Certainly not a G4 or G5!
What I like about it is that later this year, I'll be able to buy a dual-PCIe x16 motherboard utilising the nForce 4 chipset (and VIA have also announced that they are going to put this into their chipsets later this year) and a cheapish graphics card. Then the year after, when I buy the latest game and it chugs a bit on my system, I can buy another card (for less, as the price has dropped) and boost my performance by 80-90%.
However my next system upgrade will be next year at the moment, but I'm happy with my 17 month old computer still, things haven't moved on a lot since I got it.
Something is wrong with your system.
... unless you are running a 1GHz processor or something I suggest completely uninstalling all ATI drivers, etc, and then re-installing them after a couple of reboots.
My 128MB 9500 does better than that
I read online that Half Life 2 will be in ATI's favour though.
But yeah, ~50fps in Doom 3 at 1280x1024 at high settings is quite a compelling reason to buy a $200 graphics card.
I mean, that will mean all those licenses they have charged for will effectively have been fraudulent won't it? That's kinda illegal in most parts of the world, so what will SCO do? Refund everybody? haha right.
Really?
... otoh if you do this and one of the apps is trojaned, then you deserve to get owned.
Mobile phones are coming out now that store your credit card details, and you can use them to pay for goods at suitably equipped terminals. There was a story about it recently.
So you are happy for an application to access your credit card details, then send them in an SMS to a bad person? All without your knowledge? And you get charged for the text message?
I want my details secure. I want a secure device. To be honest, I'd rather the OS provider / phone maker / service provider checked all apps and signed them digitally, and the phone only ran apps signed by these entities. It would be a lot harder to get a malicious application onto a phone then. of course that would mean I couldn't download a hacked set of applications and run them for free
Does allowing an application to send a text message strike people as being a pretty bad design decision?
Phone applications/games should not be able to access any function that might cost the user money. Or if they do, then the OS itself should intercept and ask the user if they wish to allow the application to send the SMS / phone call / data call. "PsychoSolitaire wishes to send a message to +XX.YYYYYYYYY. This will cost £x. Yes/No/Never"
That is just sensible and obvious design.
Some of those are just spam, but less intrusive - spam is like someone pasting ads all over your doors and windows. And then coming back and putting more up once you've spent time removing them.
Billboards? I dunno, the consumer isn't getting anything from them as far as I can see, an ad agency is. Maybe the location of the billboards might mean that the ad agency is paying a company or local government for the location, so it benefits very indirectly the viewer.
I wonder how many of the board of that company also moved with the profitable portion of the company, leaving the employees and the unpopular directors and managers with the loss making portion?
Ads were "an annoyance you have to deal with in a free society," lawyer Anthony J. Dain is quoted as saying.
No.
Ads are an annoyance that you have to deal with in order to receive something else funded by those ads for free or cheaper than it would otherwise cost.
In this case, the pop-up ads were not subsidising anything else for the people that got them. They just appeared unwanted and unexpected. You expect ads on the TV, on the radio, on websites. In return you get free TV, free radio, free websites. What is the consumer gaining from these popup adverts.
Hell, even junk mail probably subsided the postal service, allowing stamps to be made a little cheaper.
The same theory should apply to spam. The recipient is not benefitting from the spam in any way. The spammers aren't subsidising their internet connection. It goes from Win-Win (free service for the consumer and products being presented to people for the company) to Win-Lose (products being presented to people, but nothing in return except a waste of time).
Each card in new nVidia SLI (doesn't stand for Scan Line Interleave anymore, it is something else poncey using the same acronym) allocates a portion of the screen to render. E.g., top half and bottom half. There was an article a few weeks back which was featured on Slashdot that explained this.
This new SLI is not the same as old skool SLI.
The new one divides the screen up into two sections, I assume that if both cards are equally powerful then it will be 50:50 or thereabouts. I assume a little bit of overlap so that anti-aliasing and whatnot works correctly on the seam.
Then one card sends its generated half of the scene to the other, and they are merged and output to the display.
I think that this is fine for company e-mail, but it shouldn't be an option for personal e-mail.
If you are at work, you shouldn't use your work e-mail address for sending or receiving personal e-mails. Quite hard to enforce though. Instant Messaging has taken a reasonable amount of the small e-mail market though, and it does have a lot less spam issues to contend with as well.
Important e-mails like "sell those shares in XYZZY tomorrow, I've heard that they're doing badly, on the grapevine, like" should not be deletable though, so that illegal insider trading type scenarios cannot occur. OTOH why not a phone call with the same information?
Basically, you have to consider that anything that goes through a computer system can and will be recorded for a long time.
Spamfiltering in all clients is a better aproach.
No it isn't. It is still using my bandwidth. And with 3000 spam e-mails a day currently, AFTER spamassassin has a go at what comes in I want a real solution to the problem.
Computer Science is certainly not being taught how to be a code monkey in any decent university.
I think that coding was around 5% - 10% of the course I did, for example. The course was much higher on mathematics types courses and theory type courses. That seems to make it qualify as a 'science' subject.
I wouldn't put Software Engineering as a type of engineering, nor as a science. It is merely a part of one of those courses. In a similar way Programming is a part of many courses, not just Computer Science.
Code/Admin Monkey (as a university course, as this article is about) is a different subject than Computer Science. It incorporates some of the same courses like other courses do. It adds in a lot of real-world programming and administration stuff, whereas a Computer Science course puts in lots of Mathematics and Theory amongst other things.
Yeah, if you've just done Computer Science degree and move up looking to do a PhD within the university, then you'll be treated as a code monkey for a while within that university's computer lab. But hey, that's no different from being the person that washes the lab equipment in chemistry and so on. A PhD shows an employer that (1) you value yourself a lot, (2) you can do a large research project singlehandedly from conception to completion, (3) you can manage your time in some manner, (4) you have specialised knowledge, and work experience in research.
I run my own company, they can't take my job, I'm perfectly capable of lazing myself out of my own job, thank you very much.
I also wasn't dissing the course, as I pointed out elsewhere, these people will be the builders, compared to the Computer Science qualified software architects and engineers.
You are correct in that programming isn't an elite profession any more. That's because it isn't hard to do. Experience means a lot more than a lot of theoretical knowledge as well in the real world. Still doesn't mean that their diploma style degree will be treated as good as a full computer science degree.
These people aren't looking to be "hard core coders" either. They want to get a job that pays reasonably after they realised that their degree in classics isn't getting them anywhere, or that they have no other option in life. They won't have any desire for the subject. They might be thick as a short plank. Not that real CS graduates have much enthusiasm for any programming job that someone else wants them to do either.
I'm from the UK. Degrees are all from University. Didn't know that there was a difference in the States.
Isn't this stuff you should have been taught at school PRIOR to going to university? Especially English and Science. A good CS degree will off course include a lot of Maths courses of the type that you won't be taught in school.
You'd be better off going to a computer software company and asking them if you can work for them for free for two years,
... apart from the real world experience that is useful.
In fact I know people that have done that, except they were paid a wage. Start off in the software testing area, learn how to use software tools, learn to read code, learn to code, move to development team at the bottom but with valuable knowledge about that company's software. Your skills will be rather focussed on certain things, but that isn't any different from what this 'degree' will give you
You are entirely wrong.
Getting a degree shows an employer certain things, amongst which are:
1) You lasted university, didn't give up, didn't flake out
2) You are clever enough to do a full degree
3) What university you went to
these are useful. The degree itself hardly matters. What matters is the university you got it from.
These degrees are short 2 year monkey degrees. They are useful if you are in your thirties, want to change career, have a degree under your belt in something else, and you want to do an intensive retraining course. You already can show that you have the ability to work hard enough to get a degree.
What this course shows is that Programming is not a specialist thing anymore, it is a job for code monkeys, nothing special. It won't create Software Engineers though. Software Engineers (real CS people) will design stuff, and offload the boring stuff to the Code Monkeys (these trained people). Not much difference from an Architect or Engineer offloading the creation to the Builders.
This is going to be a degree in Computer Programming, or Computer Administration at the most.
These people are not going to be taught a wide spread of stuff like in Computer Science that goes from lots of maths and theoretical stuff through to real world stuff through to hardware and all that.
You can but hope that this course will create people that are more than unthinking code monkeys or button clickers.
As a UK citizen, she should just go to the police with the threatening legal letters, and raise a charge of harrassment against Penguin Publishing. Point out that Penguin Publishing published her e-mail address everywhere in order to get a lot of people to harrass her. I'm sure that there is a lot of stuff she can do under UK law to stop this illegal baiting.
... it would be nice to see a lawyer with a heart for a start ... I'm not holding my breath though.
Penguin are clearly in the wrong here. I will just choose to not buy any book published by Penguin, it is the least I can do.
I hope that a lawyer sees this and decides to help this person out
But who is going to buy a dual-G5 system, and then get rid of the high-class Unix based OS with a lovely front-end, and replace it with a variant of Linux?
... but then again, MacOSX has all that lovely server management software inside - does Yellowdog have that?
Maybe for the G5 based XServes
Why? It messes up rendering Slashdot, a table layouted site, which it shouldn't however badly the HTML otherwise ... table cells shouldn't overlap, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Firefox can render it correctly given a reformat. It is a problem with Firefox, a minor, rare, problem, but still a problem.
Nah, Livejournal problems I've had in Firefox are, regardless of post, after a certain amount down the page the right border of the angst entry boxes goes right too far. I think those boxes are merely divs as well (haven't checked) so it is a problem in Firefox's layout routines that calculate width of elements to fit in a page.