Yup... and the benchmark used for Top500 is pretty simple and is only really relevant to certain algorithms. It's a pretty simple and forgiving benchmark that even clusters can do well on.
I have Linux boxes at home and at work but I wouldn't buy from that store because they only have Linspire and that's not a distribution that I'll run. This is the story all over... with so many Linux distributions and everybody having their own favorite distribution, a company would have to sell and be knowledgable in at least three (maybe four or five) distributions which would costs them a lot to hire knowledgeable sales clerks. They'd have to carry RedHat, Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, and maybe Linspire to cover probably 90% of the Linux base... and it's worse than that because they'd also have to support a number of releases... Mandrake 9, 9.1, 9.2, 10, 10.1... then SuSE 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3, etc. By the time you hire knowledgeable clerks with all that, you'll be paying a fortune just for labor and you have to recoup that somehow... which is by making your merchandise more expensive.
With all the religion, if you don't carry a particular distribution, all the fans of that distro won't buy from you. So, while the OS is "free", labor will certainly be expensive and your prices will reflect this.
So how do you rate someone who does not have a colledge diploma, but has a LOT (25+) of night school courses, formal day courses, and 10+ years of experience?
I take courses as I need them, but never went through the formal process of obtaining a diploma.
It depends greatly. I'd have to interview you first:)
I've met "programmers" with 30 years of experience who know less than a 2nd year CompSci student who had never seen a computer until their first year in CompSci. I've seen programmers with no degree but 2 years experience who are better than a 4-year diploma wielder.
That's kind of the point of my other post... you cannot simply assume that 1. no one needs formal education 2. formal education is worthless 3. degree holders are better than non-degree holders
HOWEVER, without any other information, the odds are that someone with good grades and a 4-year degree and a little experience (1 year - from coop, working locally while in school, or working on a research project at/for school) is a better hire than someone without a formal education and just 5 years of experience. *ANY*body can bang on a computer for 5 years doing almost nothing and claim 5 years of experience. Having a diploma and decent grades at least shows that some work (and exposure to actual Computer Science) has been done.
Heh, from our text, I'd say that you were probably close to getting a diploma with all those night classes:) You should finish it out.
All they have to do is make motherboards with both BIOS and OF chips in them. If your motherboard doesn't have both sets (you can only buy a motherboard that has both from Apple at least initially) trying to startup OSX will simply fail because it can't find OF. Hacking OSX to work would require at the minimum reflashing your EEPROMs and in the worst case, depending on how the hardware is designed, redesigning your motherboard completely (so you have to buy a new motherboard).
It all depends on where you are and who you are working with. It's easy to be a big fish in a small pond and you never mentioned where you are or how many people are in group at work.
I know some folks who are extremely intelligent. My roommate in school was a guy who was hand optimizing assembly for laser ocean soundings for NASA when he was 16. However, he was also smart enough to know that he needed formal education for a number of reasons (not the least of which is to get exposure to many more things than working in his niche for the rest of his life).
For every story like you and your wife, there are 1000s of stories where people actually got something out of school. I'm a self taught programmer as well. I started writing BASIC when I was 14ish and was writing assembly on the 6502 when I was 15 (I'm 36 now - and realize back in 1981 a teenager with a computer was MUCH more rare than a teenager with a computer is today. I think in my highschool of about 1300 students, maybe six of us had computers). However, there were *so* many things I realize that I didn't know and I'm glad I went to school if only to be exposed to lots of different areas of study so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel over and over.
Just as a sidenote, the other major things I learned from school were discipline (to tough out even the classes I didn't like) to get things done, how to deal with people from diverse backgrounds, and how to figure out and work through problems for which I didn't have an immediate solution. In my experience, those that haven't gone through school tend to lack in several, if not all, of those skills.
Bottom line, just because someone has a degree does not necessarily make them better. Its the "real world" experience that counts the most IMHO.
I can see this too. I'm always skeptical of someone just out of school with nothing but a degree and I'd probably take someone with 5 years experience over them for any junior level position. However, I'd probably take someone with a degree and 5 years experience over someone with just 5 years experience for any job unless the later has some serious work qualifications (and you just can't tell that by a resume).
I know a number of people who are "self taught" in many areas of IT and it seems that they all have the same attitude - "I didn't need no edukation and look how gud I'm doin". I guess the thing that interests me about that is... how do you know? How do you know that you wouldn't be 10x better with some education? You can't know. I *know* that formal education helped me become a better computer scientist and programmer (the two are not the same thing, btw, if you think they are, then maybe you need some more education).
How much did I learn in school? It's very hard to say because all of computer related engineering classes and computer science classes were interesting so I tended to not even have to study for them and still duke it out with a friend for being #1 in the class (who was just like me - didn't have to study at all for these classes). Does that mean I already knew the stuff? Doubtful. I think a lot of the stuff just got into my head by osmosis and combined and refined what was already there. At least, that's what it feels/felt like. It just 'made sense' and why would it have been any other way?
Anyway, I've gotten long winded, but the point is... yes, you can be successful without a college degree IF you are very self motivated, lucky, smart, and a host of other things. I'd also say that 9 times out of 10, there's a noticable difference between an enthusiast who has learned to program (even if programming well) and someone who has a formal education and programs decently, at least in my experience and I've seen many of both types.
If the code in that file is so complex that a single simple core running at 4GHz takes too long to compile the file than you need to reexamine how you're writing your code. If it takes long enough that its annoying something is wrong.
Ever compile C++ code that uses a lot of templates?
A large percentage of males in the USA are circumcised regardless of religious affiliation. I was betting that this guy is from the USA and he certainly implies that he is a Christian.
I was pointing out that if this poster is a Christian and blasts tattoos, piercings, and body modifications AND is circumcised... well...
I don't necessarily want to know the answer to this question... but... are you circumcised? That is a body modification. How do you feel about circumcision? If body modification is pagan, what about all your Christian friends who are circumcised? (note: I'm not saying what religion I follow, nor am I slamming any religion, just pointing out a possible/probable hypocrisy in the parent post.)
Yes, but unfortunately, most people with tattoos have the generic tribals or barbed wire or some other tattoo they saw in a movie somewhere and everybody else has one. Those are sure signs of 'in the box' thinking.
I have two tattoos, neither of which are visible when I wear a t-shirt. I plan on getting more as I'm 'inspired' to get them. Both of my tattoos mean something to *me* and that's all that matters and they are far from the standard images that you see these days.
I agree. I use OpenOffice exclusively now (for a year or so) but not because it's better or faster.... it's because I don't want to pay Microsoft's price for a word processor when OO.o does "good enough" for my purposes. (I almost never need a word processor but my wife uses one from time to time because she is in school.)
Anyway, my experience is that OO.o is slower to open, slower all around, and just slower to use than Word. It also doesn't have as many features and is just as buggy if not more so. However, it does have a few things that seem to work better than Word - I thought the bullet/lists were better at first but haven't been able to find the promote/demote hotkeys yet (which I used in Word a lot) but... at least it has the right price tag for my budget for word processors.
Doesn't sound like he knows much about alpha or beta software either...
He complains because it doesn't do things the way he expects (like PS or whatever).... well... duh.
He complains because it is slow.... well... it's probably compiled in debug mode so that the developers can get meaningful information on crashes and such... duh.
I stopped reading after that. After some obvious things like I mentioned above, I decided it wasn't worth wasting any more of my time reading it.
Ah... history fails to be remembered again...
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
but most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?
Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do IEEE754 floating point either so did we really need the FPUs?
Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do 3D graphics at 30fps. Do we really need dedicated high performance graphics cards?
It isn't the creation of threads (because it isn't, as others have said). Look at some of the inter-thread communication performance numbers.... very slow comparatively.
I don't exactly hate to point this out, but not running protection software on a Windows machine makes you a very dangerous administrator. You decided that your setup is better than the attackers' skills, and you set up a situation that can result in complete compromise due to your arrogance.
No arrogance here at all. I do other things that bang some buttons, install some unknown quantity of sof tware that offers me some unknown quality of protection, and call it done.
Truth is that you can't patch a Windows server without taking it offline. You can apply most UNIX patches while leaving everything running. You know damn well that's the truth, or you're making up your story. I've never seen a server "just work" either. You must have some very interesting magical powers.
a) I never claimed anything about online or offline patches. I simply stated that I apply patches to my SuSE boxes far more often than my Windows boxes. I said nothing about bringing it up or down. 2) It depends on what you want to do with your server. If it is a 'generic' web server, for example, the n that is pretty easy to set up. If you get into heavily customized sites, sure, those are more work if you don't already have the system ghosted or the like where they *can* be turnkey. D) While some folks have attributed magical powers to me, I don't think I actually have any. I just 'get
along' with computers.
Yes, sometimes poorly written software doesn't port well. Shame about your example being backwards ofthe point repeatedly driven home by the parent, grandparent, etc. Your poorly written application doesn't work on newer versions of the OS. The point was for newer software to work on an older OS.
Forwards compatibility is not guaranteed by *any* OS. Backwards compatibility is a feature of most. How
will you design an API to encompass features that haven't yet been defined? It doesn't make sense.
I would wager a guess that if you got off of your high horse and installed the necessary software to safely run a Windows machine on a network, you would find a good number of viruses and spyware apps installed on it.
Actually, there are zero, and I do monitor regularly. Again, my machines aren't directly exposed to the outside world and I use such things as filters and the like to strip suspect attachments and do other typ es of things (isolate a machine that is behaving in a suspect manner).
Hopefully you will be fired if you actually run some poor company's machines this way. It is irrespons ible to a quite high degree. Pull this kind of crap in my shop, and you'd be more than out the door; I'd try to hold you responsible for the puposeful actions that jeopardized my business operations.
Not at all. I'm responsible in other ways than bogging machines down with those type applications. I di dn't say I didn't protect the network and the servers on it. My/our solution just doesn't involve having
to buy a machine with 2X the processing power necessary because I have to saddle it with several deffici ency applications that will chew up resources. There *are* other ways of protecting your systems than be ing a slave to Symmatec and the like. Spending 2X as much money to cover equipment costs would also be a
frowned-upon practice, in my book:)
Yeah, a PPU has been in the rags for about 6 months now. Asus is one of the first to support the hardware, several game companies have already pledged support. There were a number of threads here on/. about it.
Yup. I remember back in the 80s and early 90s downloading TONS of stuff (source and all) and never had heard of either GPL or RMS. Back then, pretty much anything you downloaded was *really* Free (not any of the GPL restrictions.) I remember making mods to all kinds of stuff. A guy I know wrote some circuit layout tools that he *still* gets email about every once in a while today (that was 20 years ago now). Another guy I know gets email occassionally about his terminal emulation software he wrote about 25 years ago.
Yeah... except a single core processor can't be used to test multithreaded software the same way a dual core can be used.
Other uses, I'd upgrade my home server to a dual 1.6GHz if one were available because I also want a dual core/cpu machine to develop and test software on a budget.
Slashdot Mirror
it'll be the rich guy bull-dozing the normal person's house whether they agree or not.
Why the distinction? Are you implying that if one is rich, he/she isn't normal? This is a very clear case of "us against them".
Yup... and the benchmark used for Top500 is pretty simple and is only really relevant to certain algorithms. It's a pretty simple and forgiving benchmark that even clusters can do well on.
and thanks for all the silicon!
Thanks for helping develop something that is a major part of my (and many others') life both for entertainment and for employment.
I have Linux boxes at home and at work but I wouldn't buy from that store because they only have Linspire and that's not a distribution that I'll run. This is the story all over... with so many Linux distributions and everybody having their own favorite distribution, a company would have to sell and be knowledgable in at least three (maybe four or five) distributions which would costs them a lot to hire knowledgeable sales clerks. They'd have to carry RedHat, Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, and maybe Linspire to cover probably 90% of the Linux base... and it's worse than that because they'd also have to support a number of releases... Mandrake 9, 9.1, 9.2, 10, 10.1... then SuSE 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3, etc. By the time you hire knowledgeable clerks with all that, you'll be paying a fortune just for labor and you have to recoup that somehow... which is by making your merchandise more expensive.
With all the religion, if you don't carry a particular distribution, all the fans of that distro won't buy from you. So, while the OS is "free", labor will certainly be expensive and your prices will reflect this.
So how do you rate someone who does not have a colledge diploma, but has a LOT (25+) of night school courses, formal day courses, and 10+ years of experience?
:)
:) You should finish it out.
I take courses as I need them, but never went through the formal process of obtaining a diploma.
It depends greatly. I'd have to interview you first
I've met "programmers" with 30 years of experience who know less than a 2nd year CompSci student who had never seen a computer until their first year in CompSci. I've seen programmers with no degree but 2 years experience who are better than a 4-year diploma wielder.
That's kind of the point of my other post... you cannot simply assume that
1. no one needs formal education
2. formal education is worthless
3. degree holders are better than non-degree holders
HOWEVER, without any other information, the odds are that someone with good grades and a 4-year degree and a little experience (1 year - from coop, working locally while in school, or working on a research project at/for school) is a better hire than someone without a formal education and just 5 years of experience. *ANY*body can bang on a computer for 5 years doing almost nothing and claim 5 years of experience. Having a diploma and decent grades at least shows that some work (and exposure to actual Computer Science) has been done.
Heh, from our text, I'd say that you were probably close to getting a diploma with all those night classes
I think we've finally found #2...
1. Adopt OSS as your platform
2. Get geeks around the world to write your software for you for free
3. Profit!!!
All they have to do is make motherboards with both BIOS and OF chips in them. If your motherboard doesn't have both sets (you can only buy a motherboard that has both from Apple at least initially) trying to startup OSX will simply fail because it can't find OF. Hacking OSX to work would require at the minimum reflashing your EEPROMs and in the worst case, depending on how the hardware is designed, redesigning your motherboard completely (so you have to buy a new motherboard).
It all depends on where you are and who you are working with. It's easy to be a big fish in a small pond and you never mentioned where you are or how many people are in group at work.
I know some folks who are extremely intelligent. My roommate in school was a guy who was hand optimizing assembly for laser ocean soundings for NASA when he was 16. However, he was also smart enough to know that he needed formal education for a number of reasons (not the least of which is to get exposure to many more things than working in his niche for the rest of his life).
For every story like you and your wife, there are 1000s of stories where people actually got something out of school. I'm a self taught programmer as well. I started writing BASIC when I was 14ish and was writing assembly on the 6502 when I was 15 (I'm 36 now - and realize back in 1981 a teenager with a computer was MUCH more rare than a teenager with a computer is today. I think in my highschool of about 1300 students, maybe six of us had computers). However, there were *so* many things I realize that I didn't know and I'm glad I went to school if only to be exposed to lots of different areas of study so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel over and over.
Just as a sidenote, the other major things I learned from school were discipline (to tough out even the classes I didn't like) to get things done, how to deal with people from diverse backgrounds, and how to figure out and work through problems for which I didn't have an immediate solution. In my experience, those that haven't gone through school tend to lack in several, if not all, of those skills.
Bottom line, just because someone has a degree does not necessarily make them better. Its the "real world" experience that counts the most IMHO.
I can see this too. I'm always skeptical of someone just out of school with nothing but a degree and I'd probably take someone with 5 years experience over them for any junior level position. However, I'd probably take someone with a degree and 5 years experience over someone with just 5 years experience for any job unless the later has some serious work qualifications (and you just can't tell that by a resume).
I know a number of people who are "self taught" in many areas of IT and it seems that they all have the same attitude - "I didn't need no edukation and look how gud I'm doin". I guess the thing that interests me about that is... how do you know? How do you know that you wouldn't be 10x better with some education? You can't know. I *know* that formal education helped me become a better computer scientist and programmer (the two are not the same thing, btw, if you think they are, then maybe you need some more education).
How much did I learn in school? It's very hard to say because all of computer related engineering classes and computer science classes were interesting so I tended to not even have to study for them and still duke it out with a friend for being #1 in the class (who was just like me - didn't have to study at all for these classes). Does that mean I already knew the stuff? Doubtful. I think a lot of the stuff just got into my head by osmosis and combined and refined what was already there. At least, that's what it feels/felt like. It just 'made sense' and why would it have been any other way?
Anyway, I've gotten long winded, but the point is... yes, you can be successful without a college degree IF you are very self motivated, lucky, smart, and a host of other things. I'd also say that 9 times out of 10, there's a noticable difference between an enthusiast who has learned to program (even if programming well) and someone who has a formal education and programs decently, at least in my experience and I've seen many of both types.
I was wondering this myself... seems that it would be more fuel efficient to launch vertically and glide in for the landing.
If the code in that file is so complex that a single simple core running at 4GHz takes too long to compile the file than you need to reexamine how you're writing your code. If it takes long enough that its annoying something is wrong.
Ever compile C++ code that uses a lot of templates?
A large percentage of males in the USA are circumcised regardless of religious affiliation. I was betting that this guy is from the USA and he certainly implies that he is a Christian.
I was pointing out that if this poster is a Christian and blasts tattoos, piercings, and body modifications AND is circumcised... well...
Cool :)
I have a Booboo bear (Yogi's sidekick) over my heart because that was my grandfather's nickname for me (Booboo) and he is/was very dear to me.
My other tattoo is on the back of my neck like a shirt tag and is:
01100111
01100101
01100101
01101011
Which is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out.
I don't necessarily want to know the answer to this question... but... are you circumcised? That is a body modification. How do you feel about circumcision? If body modification is pagan, what about all your Christian friends who are circumcised? (note: I'm not saying what religion I follow, nor am I slamming any religion, just pointing out a possible/probable hypocrisy in the parent post.)
Yes, but unfortunately, most people with tattoos have the generic tribals or barbed wire or some other tattoo they saw in a movie somewhere and everybody else has one. Those are sure signs of 'in the box' thinking.
I have two tattoos, neither of which are visible when I wear a t-shirt. I plan on getting more as I'm 'inspired' to get them. Both of my tattoos mean something to *me* and that's all that matters and they are far from the standard images that you see these days.
I agree. I use OpenOffice exclusively now (for a year or so) but not because it's better or faster.... it's because I don't want to pay Microsoft's price for a word processor when OO.o does "good enough" for my purposes. (I almost never need a word processor but my wife uses one from time to time because she is in school.)
Anyway, my experience is that OO.o is slower to open, slower all around, and just slower to use than Word. It also doesn't have as many features and is just as buggy if not more so. However, it does have a few things that seem to work better than Word - I thought the bullet/lists were better at first but haven't been able to find the promote/demote hotkeys yet (which I used in Word a lot) but... at least it has the right price tag for my budget for word processors.
Doesn't sound like he knows much about alpha or beta software either...
He complains because it doesn't do things the way he expects (like PS or whatever).... well... duh.
He complains because it is slow.... well... it's probably compiled in debug mode so that the developers can get meaningful information on crashes and such... duh.
I stopped reading after that. After some obvious things like I mentioned above, I decided it wasn't worth wasting any more of my time reading it.
but most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?
Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do IEEE754 floating point either so did we really need the FPUs?
Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do 3D graphics at 30fps. Do we really need dedicated high performance graphics cards?
The list goes on... but no one learns...
It isn't the creation of threads (because it isn't, as others have said). Look at some of the inter-thread communication performance numbers.... very slow comparatively.
Good suggestion, but I also need/want 64-bit capability for testing as well as normal use.
I don't exactly hate to point this out, but not running protection software on a Windows machine makes you a very dangerous administrator. You decided that your setup is better than the attackers' skills, and you set up a situation that can result in complete compromise due to your arrogance.
:)
No arrogance here at all. I do other things that bang some buttons, install some unknown quantity of sof
tware that offers me some unknown quality of protection, and call it done.
Truth is that you can't patch a Windows server without taking it offline. You can apply most UNIX patches while leaving everything running. You know damn well that's the truth, or you're making up your story. I've never seen a server "just work" either. You must have some very interesting magical powers.
a) I never claimed anything about online or offline patches. I simply stated that I apply patches to my
SuSE boxes far more often than my Windows boxes. I said nothing about bringing it up or down.
2) It depends on what you want to do with your server. If it is a 'generic' web server, for example, the
n that is pretty easy to set up. If you get into heavily customized sites, sure, those are more work if
you don't already have the system ghosted or the like where they *can* be turnkey.
D) While some folks have attributed magical powers to me, I don't think I actually have any. I just 'get
along' with computers.
Yes, sometimes poorly written software doesn't port well. Shame about your example being backwards ofthe point repeatedly driven home by the parent, grandparent, etc. Your poorly written application doesn't work on newer versions of the OS. The point was for newer software to work on an older OS.
Forwards compatibility is not guaranteed by *any* OS. Backwards compatibility is a feature of most. How
will you design an API to encompass features that haven't yet been defined? It doesn't make sense.
I would wager a guess that if you got off of your high horse and installed the necessary software to safely run a Windows machine on a network, you would find a good number of viruses and spyware apps installed on it.
Actually, there are zero, and I do monitor regularly. Again, my machines aren't directly exposed to the
outside world and I use such things as filters and the like to strip suspect attachments and do other typ
es of things (isolate a machine that is behaving in a suspect manner).
Hopefully you will be fired if you actually run some poor company's machines this way. It is irrespons
ible to a quite high degree. Pull this kind of crap in my shop, and you'd be more than out the door; I'd
try to hold you responsible for the puposeful actions that jeopardized my business operations.
Not at all. I'm responsible in other ways than bogging machines down with those type applications. I di
dn't say I didn't protect the network and the servers on it. My/our solution just doesn't involve having
to buy a machine with 2X the processing power necessary because I have to saddle it with several deffici
ency applications that will chew up resources. There *are* other ways of protecting your systems than be
ing a slave to Symmatec and the like. Spending 2X as much money to cover equipment costs would also be a
frowned-upon practice, in my book
Yeah... except both the Motorola 680x0 family of processors and Sparc processors are both big-endian.
Yeah, a PPU has been in the rags for about 6 months now. Asus is one of the first to support the hardware, several game companies have already pledged support. There were a number of threads here on /. about it.
I've been saying this for a long time now (check my post history). IBM gets tons of free labor.
Yup. I remember back in the 80s and early 90s downloading TONS of stuff (source and all) and never had heard of either GPL or RMS. Back then, pretty much anything you downloaded was *really* Free (not any of the GPL restrictions.) I remember making mods to all kinds of stuff. A guy I know wrote some circuit layout tools that he *still* gets email about every once in a while today (that was 20 years ago now). Another guy I know gets email occassionally about his terminal emulation software he wrote about 25 years ago.
Yeah... except a single core processor can't be used to test multithreaded software the same way a dual core can be used.
Other uses, I'd upgrade my home server to a dual 1.6GHz if one were available because I also want a dual core/cpu machine to develop and test software on a budget.