Still, it's just one pixel on a map. I am so glad to see progress in the area of battery chemistry that I am making my first post here in years. Slashdot is returning to its roots, by making stories that are meaningfull get posted. It is so exciting to see electric powered everything from houses, to cars, to skateboards, not to mention all of our personal embedded systems devices. Soon, I'll be able to look at my watch and read a report about my health just as regularly as I check the weather forecast... Partly snotty and a chance of cholesterol this week.
Your comment about keeping a spare plane is ridiculous. There is no way even to conceivable have a 2 percent spare in the current market because there is maybe 3 flights per day to a location. To have a spare would be like leaving 30 percent of your capacity unused. This means hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue (every day) for the airline inside a market space with very thin margins already. Not to mention that these jets are hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. It's not like an extra bus, taxi, train trip. Those are cheap vehicles with many more repeated trips daily. It's important to think things through before you comment. There are a lot of impressionable minds that look up to people that use numbers to inflate the meaning of their statements. I'm sure that's not what you intended. So, just help us out and be careful. Thanks for the post though. It definitely leads in the right direction. Maybe there is something that the airline can do to cover the problem... such as not booking all of their flights beyond capacity every trip.
I'm a Linux user myself, and I have installed both on many desktops. (A couple dozen linux, and 1000s of windows) I've never run into a problem that I couldn't solve on either system. I have to say though that it takes on averaage 70% (number I just made up based on my own usage) longer to solve a problem on Linux because it is basically that much harder to do, whether due to out of date documentation, rtfm culture, hacker elite mentality, or just stupid UI design... sometimes meaning no UI at all except for a command line. I usually try not to feed a troll, especially one that uninformed people seem to be applauding as insightful. IMHO I have to point out that XP may have its share of problems, but it has a lot of drivers out of the box or downloadable and they are easy to install. Basically good install is a strength, and one Linux could well continue to try and learn from. XP, Vista, 2k, 2k3, 2k8, 7 are very easy to install on the average. There are also some Linux versions that are easy to install. I like those too. But if you want good performance out of Linux you need to go the extra mile. Linux comes out of the box performing crappy usually. Windows comes out of the box performing good. I like Linux because I don't mind tweaking and recompiling until I get the excellent performance potentail that I deserve. I like windows because sometimes I don't want the hassle of tweaking and recompiling everything.
Your Question: Why is virus fighting software so sucky?
The reason is that viruses are plentiful and always changing or mutating if you will. This is difficult to combat with one software package.
This makes for a moving target that can only be hit as an after thought, sort of like a vaccine developed for a real virus after it has been around for a while.
There are several layers to security. Different attacks need to be filtered out at different layers. Each scan takes time and adds to the suckiness of the virus fighting software. Especially given that most stuff is not virus related.
Point of entry.
Input
Processing Execution
Output
Point of exit
I wish I had some more time to go into it now, but sadly I have too much to do right now. Just compare it to your own home security and look for the ways to break through it and you'll get some more insight that way. Think about how much easier it is to bypass security efforts such as strong doors by going through a whole in the wall, etc.
Maybe the drivers just sucked. Remember that these were basically new embedded hardware systems and that some embedded systems engineer who usually gets paid big bucks because he has like 20 years of experience in the area had to have enough free time and desire to develop some free open drivers as a hobby for a month or so for there even to be drivers for the system at all. Given all that, and given that new hardware tends to have crappy drivers just because new hardware usually has machine level defects in it, maybe you can see the problems here. Now compare that to Microsoft. Why are their drivers good. They were made by real engineers and not by really smart teenagers with a hobby obsession. (There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It's just not as good.) Real engineers and a real lab bench means that hardware level defects can be worked around more robustly. This also leads to some code bloat that few people comprehend. I personally enjoy graceful systems that have a clean code base and a symmetry to be admired in the design. All my projects start that way. Then shit happens as is always the case. Sometimes bad shit that means I should start over. But from business perspective... that would usually take too much time or money.
The bright side is that the more experience that I gain, the better the chances are that my original design had fewer errors in it, and the better its chances of turing out closer to the vision.
Anyway, I'm just trying to add some clarity and bring in a human factor to the discussion. There are feelings and issues that almost always boil down to less than a handful of people's motives and desires that produce a given result.
While wikipedia is good, you are wrong about the meaningfulness of its content relative to good reference material that has been correctly organized and available in a printed tome of work. Wikipedia might one day provide this level of information by they are not even close to that goal today. The "C Programming Language" by K & R is small compact and inclusive of much valuable information. It takes me about 40 minutes to read it cover to cover. It takes me about 2 or 3 hours across several references to find that same material online. The main difference is the internet is a mish-mash of information with no real organization. Knowledge is basically organized information and is typically represented in books. When there are more online books, I'll be satisfied.
By the way, I'm a computer professional and not some idiot that barely knows how to use the internet. I've written webservers and email servers and basically done more technical crap than 99 percent of the people on this forum.
So, feel free to have whatever opinions that you want about this subject and my post, but also be conscience that I'm not speaking from a mal-informed perspective.
Hello,
I'm one of the people that doesn't understand the usefulness of linq. Though I really do want to...
I need to know the answers to a questions before I adopt a new technology:
What enhancement does the new technology give me that I did not already have?
It needs to have something new from the list below:
Speed
accuracy
security
graceful syntax
solution to a problem that I've been longing to solve. (
Memory usage is purposefully left out, since it hasn't greatly impacted me since 10 years ago
Honestly, I don't see what linq does for me out of that list. Mostly, in regards to data I work with xml, and sql, and I don't see how I can truly make code easier to understand or faster or better by using linq instead of using existing technologies.
If you have some advice as to where I should use linq rather than system.xml or when I should use linq instead of a plain old sql query I would love to know?
Usually, I try to avoid replying to incorrect comments, but this time I couldn't help myself.
The best argument that the OP made was that it has a massive install base. This is really important. Making light of that point probably means that you are young in your career.
Wide distribution means that you can count on the stability and safety of knowing that you don't have to do the same work over and over again for no good reason.
The code that has survived the longest is typically written on the most adaptable platforms.
Ruby and Python are probably just fads that will go away within a few more years. They will be replaced by some other new great language of the future. You will end up rewriting all your cool applications in that flavor. And then, after that you will start to gravitate towards the older way of doing things. I'm not talking about green screen and assembler. I am talking about the tried and true languages like Java, C, insert other old but still used heavily language here. The tried and true methods of implementation like using libraries that have existed through multiple platforms on multiple systems.
Sorry, if this seems like a rant. My intention is really just to try to save you some effort in your future endeavors.
Never say never. There are sometimes, especially with old machines that the board does have some video memory on it. It's usually a very small amount of memory though (if it is there at all).
It's irritating that people are still holding onto some of the ideas that are irrelevant in an old book. Either that or they misinterpret them in the first place.
Project Manager: Gosh, I wish I had known there was going to be so much extra work to do. We should have started with more people.
CEO: Yep, me too, let's get some more people on this, so we don't make it even worse later.
Project Manager: Good idea.
Here is the basic idea. Yes, a project will be late if you don't start with enough people. But that does not necessarily mean that you don't add people when you figure out that you don't have enough. You just add them. You already know you are going to be late. At that point it is just mitigating the problem the best way possible.
You misunderstand. I mean the same software running on server hardware and desktop hardware. For example Win2k on a desktop and on a DL 520. Or similar idea with XP.
I also know of a gameshop that develops there game on Win2k and Win2k3 and runs it primarily on XP.
I would guess that mostly they do use the same scheduler though because it would be too difficult to start branching schedulers and the kernel would get more difficult to test. (That's the same thing as perhaps maybe saying that a person may have worked there, and knowing that they try not to make their lives harder if it is possible.)
I think that the majority of the underlings out there that think management is just out to screw you can all step back for a second and get a clue. We overlords actually do care about getting the job done. We don't care about hippy bullshit. Open source is free, so it's better.
Let me break it down for you.
Software is just software. It's a tool. If what you've got works fine then great. Otherwise a change is needed. When a change is needed all options are weighed with respect to desired qualities. Currently most OSS software doesn't meet the quality bar. There are just plain not enough qualified testers working on OSS. Big companies pay for the quality that they get. OSS depends on many unskilled people to try and find the glaring problems with their applications.
This is the reason for bad desktop performance of Linux. This is the reason for poor UI decisions being prevelant in most of the applications that are available for Linux.
There are some applications that go a long ways to bridging the gap here. Unfortunately the incentive isn't great enough for people creating free software to go the extra mile polishing things up. The incentive is quite high in the industry. Why, because if you are big company and you don't put in that extra work, you do so at your great perril.
Here is another management argument. Linux software moves to fast and is often times very unstable because of it. Installation of a new app on Windows means double clicking and waiting for the install to complete. Installation of a new app on Linux requires installation of 10 different dependencies, and that often times fails to work somewhere in the chain.
Now, let me stop all of the whiney arm chair cry babies responding to this post. Take into consideration that I have a lot more experience with Linux than you. I also know what it takes to be a programmer, and a Quality Assurance engineer. If you know what your talking about then feel free to respond. Just don't respond with things like "You must not know about apt-get..." or "my distro is super uber cool, and has mega cool features that disprove your reasoning." The problem with that is that you must be missing that getting your super cool feature to work probably takes a normal user an hour to make work. I've personally spent more than a day getting a database to work on Linux. Sql Server installs in an hour and takes 30 seconds of interacting at the start. And so on and so forth.
It may not be easy to do, but I think a single scheduler could accomplish the task at hand. Being serious no one using a desktop of server in the conventional sense has true real time requirements. Real time maybe for embedded systems, and then I can see where a whole tone of different patches would need to be applied to the kernel in that case.
I suppose I could argue about HPC workloads being different from load to load and perhaps differing needs being prevelant in various situations, but I think that I would likely come back to your same conclusion in the end, so I default to your experience here if you have a lot of HPC experience.
I guess that my main point is that Microsoft has an OS that most of the time plays well with servers and with desktops (without needing a recompile). It's not perfect and of course can be improved. I'm just saying that if they are doing it well, they why can't Linux do it at least as well?
Why do you think two schedulers is better than one? I think that better design should meld the two positive aspects into one algorithm, instead of having two different areas to look for and fix bugs, there will be just one. Quality is more important than speed here, because speed will not change much from one scheduler to the next. I think that the main problem that people are seeing stems from that the games themselves are cpu hogs.
Okay, I see that I am wrong about precedence in age (please accept my humble apology), and also I must admit in hindsight that I am wrong to incorrectly tie maturity to age. I mean no offense here. It is just that I remember when I was quite young being very disappointed at the idea that others may have done that to me, and perhaps I had a momentary lapse in judgment by portraying that same negative behavior in myself.
Though, I am still curious, if you could for a minute ignore my incorrect assumption, based on your life experience would you say that the rest of my comment is also very wrong?
You probably just graduated from College right? You are probably responding to someone still in College. It's interesting how maturity evolves as life's journey progresses. Don't begrudge those that are not as far along as you, for that is the surest path to regression.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeh! Nice reply. Careful though. That guy was just a troll. Keep up the good work.
Still, it's just one pixel on a map. I am so glad to see progress in the area of battery chemistry that I am making my first post here in years. Slashdot is returning to its roots, by making stories that are meaningfull get posted. It is so exciting to see electric powered everything from houses, to cars, to skateboards, not to mention all of our personal embedded systems devices. Soon, I'll be able to look at my watch and read a report about my health just as regularly as I check the weather forecast... Partly snotty and a chance of cholesterol this week.
I for one welcome my all in one pc overlords.
Your comment about keeping a spare plane is ridiculous. There is no way even to conceivable have a 2 percent spare in the current market because there is maybe 3 flights per day to a location. To have a spare would be like leaving 30 percent of your capacity unused. This means hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue (every day) for the airline inside a market space with very thin margins already. Not to mention that these jets are hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. It's not like an extra bus, taxi, train trip. Those are cheap vehicles with many more repeated trips daily. It's important to think things through before you comment. There are a lot of impressionable minds that look up to people that use numbers to inflate the meaning of their statements. I'm sure that's not what you intended. So, just help us out and be careful. Thanks for the post though. It definitely leads in the right direction. Maybe there is something that the airline can do to cover the problem... such as not booking all of their flights beyond capacity every trip.
Where's the proof? Your evidence is just as lacking as any govt official's.
I'm a Linux user myself, and I have installed both on many desktops. (A couple dozen linux, and 1000s of windows) I've never run into a problem that I couldn't solve on either system. I have to say though that it takes on averaage 70% (number I just made up based on my own usage) longer to solve a problem on Linux because it is basically that much harder to do, whether due to out of date documentation, rtfm culture, hacker elite mentality, or just stupid UI design... sometimes meaning no UI at all except for a command line. I usually try not to feed a troll, especially one that uninformed people seem to be applauding as insightful. IMHO I have to point out that XP may have its share of problems, but it has a lot of drivers out of the box or downloadable and they are easy to install. Basically good install is a strength, and one Linux could well continue to try and learn from. XP, Vista, 2k, 2k3, 2k8, 7 are very easy to install on the average. There are also some Linux versions that are easy to install. I like those too. But if you want good performance out of Linux you need to go the extra mile. Linux comes out of the box performing crappy usually. Windows comes out of the box performing good. I like Linux because I don't mind tweaking and recompiling until I get the excellent performance potentail that I deserve. I like windows because sometimes I don't want the hassle of tweaking and recompiling everything.
I can't wait to see a Beowolf cluster of one of these... oh wait...
Sorry.
Couldn't help it.
The reason is that viruses are plentiful and always changing or mutating if you will. This is difficult to combat with one software package.
This makes for a moving target that can only be hit as an after thought, sort of like a vaccine developed for a real virus after it has been around for a while.
There are several layers to security. Different attacks need to be filtered out at different layers. Each scan takes time and adds to the suckiness of the virus fighting software. Especially given that most stuff is not virus related.
I wish I had some more time to go into it now, but sadly I have too much to do right now. Just compare it to your own home security and look for the ways to break through it and you'll get some more insight that way. Think about how much easier it is to bypass security efforts such as strong doors by going through a whole in the wall, etc.
Maybe the drivers just sucked. Remember that these were basically new embedded hardware systems and that some embedded systems engineer who usually gets paid big bucks because he has like 20 years of experience in the area had to have enough free time and desire to develop some free open drivers as a hobby for a month or so for there even to be drivers for the system at all. Given all that, and given that new hardware tends to have crappy drivers just because new hardware usually has machine level defects in it, maybe you can see the problems here. Now compare that to Microsoft. Why are their drivers good. They were made by real engineers and not by really smart teenagers with a hobby obsession. (There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It's just not as good.) Real engineers and a real lab bench means that hardware level defects can be worked around more robustly. This also leads to some code bloat that few people comprehend. I personally enjoy graceful systems that have a clean code base and a symmetry to be admired in the design. All my projects start that way. Then shit happens as is always the case. Sometimes bad shit that means I should start over. But from business perspective... that would usually take too much time or money.
The bright side is that the more experience that I gain, the better the chances are that my original design had fewer errors in it, and the better its chances of turing out closer to the vision.
Anyway, I'm just trying to add some clarity and bring in a human factor to the discussion. There are feelings and issues that almost always boil down to less than a handful of people's motives and desires that produce a given result.
While wikipedia is good, you are wrong about the meaningfulness of its content relative to good reference material that has been correctly organized and available in a printed tome of work. Wikipedia might one day provide this level of information by they are not even close to that goal today. The "C Programming Language" by K & R is small compact and inclusive of much valuable information. It takes me about 40 minutes to read it cover to cover. It takes me about 2 or 3 hours across several references to find that same material online. The main difference is the internet is a mish-mash of information with no real organization. Knowledge is basically organized information and is typically represented in books. When there are more online books, I'll be satisfied.
By the way, I'm a computer professional and not some idiot that barely knows how to use the internet. I've written webservers and email servers and basically done more technical crap than 99 percent of the people on this forum.
So, feel free to have whatever opinions that you want about this subject and my post, but also be conscience that I'm not speaking from a mal-informed perspective.
I was thinking about posting my war stories here, but after reading this I realize that I'm not in the same realm as some. Sorry, for your loss.
I'm one of the people that doesn't understand the usefulness of linq. Though I really do want to...
I need to know the answers to a questions before I adopt a new technology:
What enhancement does the new technology give me that I did not already have?
It needs to have something new from the list below:
Honestly, I don't see what linq does for me out of that list. Mostly, in regards to data I work with xml, and sql, and I don't see how I can truly make code easier to understand or faster or better by using linq instead of using existing technologies.
If you have some advice as to where I should use linq rather than system.xml or when I should use linq instead of a plain old sql query I would love to know?
Usually, I try to avoid replying to incorrect comments, but this time I couldn't help myself.
The best argument that the OP made was that it has a massive install base. This is really important. Making light of that point probably means that you are young in your career.
Wide distribution means that you can count on the stability and safety of knowing that you don't have to do the same work over and over again for no good reason.
The code that has survived the longest is typically written on the most adaptable platforms.
Ruby and Python are probably just fads that will go away within a few more years. They will be replaced by some other new great language of the future. You will end up rewriting all your cool applications in that flavor. And then, after that you will start to gravitate towards the older way of doing things. I'm not talking about green screen and assembler. I am talking about the tried and true languages like Java, C, insert other old but still used heavily language here. The tried and true methods of implementation like using libraries that have existed through multiple platforms on multiple systems.
Sorry, if this seems like a rant. My intention is really just to try to save you some effort in your future endeavors.
Operating systems used to be written in Assembly all the time, and small embedded OS are still written in Assembly.
It installed for me, and I have Visual C# express. It's free, and it is basically a smaller install of vs 2005.
Never say never. There are sometimes, especially with old machines that the board does have some video memory on it. It's usually a very small amount of memory though (if it is there at all).
At least they are athiest though.
It's irritating that people are still holding onto some of the ideas that are irrelevant in an old book. Either that or they misinterpret them in the first place.
Project Manager: Gosh, I wish I had known there was going to be so much extra work to do. We should have started with more people.
CEO: Yep, me too, let's get some more people on this, so we don't make it even worse later.
Project Manager: Good idea.
Here is the basic idea. Yes, a project will be late if you don't start with enough people. But that does not necessarily mean that you don't add people when you figure out that you don't have enough. You just add them. You already know you are going to be late. At that point it is just mitigating the problem the best way possible.
You misunderstand. I mean the same software running on server hardware and desktop hardware. For example Win2k on a desktop and on a DL 520. Or similar idea with XP.
I also know of a gameshop that develops there game on Win2k and Win2k3 and runs it primarily on XP.
I would guess that mostly they do use the same scheduler though because it would be too difficult to start branching schedulers and the kernel would get more difficult to test. (That's the same thing as perhaps maybe saying that a person may have worked there, and knowing that they try not to make their lives harder if it is possible.)
I think that the majority of the underlings out there that think management is just out to screw you can all step back for a second and get a clue. We overlords actually do care about getting the job done. We don't care about hippy bullshit. Open source is free, so it's better.
Let me break it down for you.
Software is just software. It's a tool. If what you've got works fine then great. Otherwise a change is needed. When a change is needed all options are weighed with respect to desired qualities. Currently most OSS software doesn't meet the quality bar. There are just plain not enough qualified testers working on OSS. Big companies pay for the quality that they get. OSS depends on many unskilled people to try and find the glaring problems with their applications.
This is the reason for bad desktop performance of Linux. This is the reason for poor UI decisions being prevelant in most of the applications that are available for Linux.
There are some applications that go a long ways to bridging the gap here. Unfortunately the incentive isn't great enough for people creating free software to go the extra mile polishing things up. The incentive is quite high in the industry. Why, because if you are big company and you don't put in that extra work, you do so at your great perril.
Here is another management argument. Linux software moves to fast and is often times very unstable because of it. Installation of a new app on Windows means double clicking and waiting for the install to complete. Installation of a new app on Linux requires installation of 10 different dependencies, and that often times fails to work somewhere in the chain.
Now, let me stop all of the whiney arm chair cry babies responding to this post. Take into consideration that I have a lot more experience with Linux than you. I also know what it takes to be a programmer, and a Quality Assurance engineer. If you know what your talking about then feel free to respond. Just don't respond with things like "You must not know about apt-get..." or "my distro is super uber cool, and has mega cool features that disprove your reasoning." The problem with that is that you must be missing that getting your super cool feature to work probably takes a normal user an hour to make work. I've personally spent more than a day getting a database to work on Linux. Sql Server installs in an hour and takes 30 seconds of interacting at the start. And so on and so forth.
So you are all for open source, just as long as it is closed to the big companies helping it most.
It may not be easy to do, but I think a single scheduler could accomplish the task at hand. Being serious no one using a desktop of server in the conventional sense has true real time requirements. Real time maybe for embedded systems, and then I can see where a whole tone of different patches would need to be applied to the kernel in that case.
I suppose I could argue about HPC workloads being different from load to load and perhaps differing needs being prevelant in various situations, but I think that I would likely come back to your same conclusion in the end, so I default to your experience here if you have a lot of HPC experience.
I guess that my main point is that Microsoft has an OS that most of the time plays well with servers and with desktops (without needing a recompile). It's not perfect and of course can be improved. I'm just saying that if they are doing it well, they why can't Linux do it at least as well?
Why do you think two schedulers is better than one? I think that better design should meld the two positive aspects into one algorithm, instead of having two different areas to look for and fix bugs, there will be just one. Quality is more important than speed here, because speed will not change much from one scheduler to the next. I think that the main problem that people are seeing stems from that the games themselves are cpu hogs.
Okay, I see that I am wrong about precedence in age (please accept my humble apology), and also I must admit in hindsight that I am wrong to incorrectly tie maturity to age. I mean no offense here. It is just that I remember when I was quite young being very disappointed at the idea that others may have done that to me, and perhaps I had a momentary lapse in judgment by portraying that same negative behavior in myself. Though, I am still curious, if you could for a minute ignore my incorrect assumption, based on your life experience would you say that the rest of my comment is also very wrong?
You probably just graduated from College right? You are probably responding to someone still in College. It's interesting how maturity evolves as life's journey progresses. Don't begrudge those that are not as far along as you, for that is the surest path to regression.