I haven't measured it (and wouldn't want to release any numbers if I had, as it's just not fair to benchmark a pre-release build of anything, let alone an OS). But it seems very responsive for everything I do with it (and it's running on a not terribly fast iLamp), but Panther was also pretty snappy on the same hardware.
I suspect there'll be some amount of performance improvement, as the pre-release of Tiger 'feels' as fast as the production release of Panther, yet is bound to have been built with a lot of debugging code.
Safari seems a fair bit faster to render, as does Mail.app, but I suspect that's improvements with those apps rather than anything OS related.
Pre-release versions for developers have been out for a while. I'm using the current one on my desktop machine and it seems stable and pretty much production-ready.
Spotlight and Dashboard are both very neat, but the biggest improvement (or at least the stuff I miss when I'm on my 10.3 laptop) is the new Safari build. Apart from the (really nice) integrated RSS reader the changes aren't that major, but it's a more pleasant app to use.
I don't understand how companies can sell printers that don't support Postscript.
Easy. It costs money to develop, license and ship a postscript based printer, and your typical home user doing nothing fancy and running windows doesn't need it - but they're very sensitive to
up-front price.
The real question is why do people buy non-postscript
printers when they know that their operating system will
work trivially with a postscript printer, but will require a lot
of effort to work (often badly) with a non-postscript
printer?
The same line of reasoning explains the "demo" toner cartridges shipped with low-end printers. Your typical home user is very sensitive to up-front price (and probably never
looks at the per-page cost). If the population of people buying
printers wanted manufacturers to behave this way they just
need to, en masse, be less stupid.
What you want as your manager is a good manager. If they're
a good manager then whether they're good at $YOUR_JOB
is almost irrelevant. If they're a bad manager then they're a bad
manager regardless of their level of knowledge of $YOUR_JOB.
Good managers know which of their staff to trust the opinions of, and which not too. They ask their staff for recomendations, and take that into account in their decision
making. They know enough of the field and the language to
understand those recomendations, even if they don't have the specific skills to do the job themselves (for instance, as a software developer some of the best managers I've had could code circles around me, some of them hadn't programmed in years, some of them didn't have a background in development at all).
Good managers protect their staff from the crap going
on in the rest of the company, but make sure they know what they need to about what all else is going on. They make sure that their staff get the resources and training they need. They know what all their staff, and ideally staff in related groups are doing on a general level, and do a lot of "Hey, you should talk to $OTHER_PERSON, as the stuff they're doing is similar to what you're looking for." - making sure that people actually get the benefits of working together.
Good managers are like gold. When you find one, do your best to keep them. Becoming one is tricky and takes a lot of work and experience. Strive for it. Meanwhile, don't call meetings for your whole group more than once a week, keep 'em short and bring donuts. Your staff will cut you a lot of slack for donuts.
Either the journalist drastically misunderstood and misinterpreted what they were told, or one of the people
interviewed is launching some magic snake-oil product
that'll "solve" this non-existant problem.
(Yes, I know exactly what spammers do. That's my job. I
know exactly what DNS does, that was my previous job.
This article is fiction.)
ASA Computers. It's typically cheaper or only a few bucks
more than building from components. It's built, burned-in
and has an OS installed.
And it's not Dell. Baby Jesus cries any time you buy
a server from Dell. (They look nice at first, but they're
such badly architected pieces of crap...)
Enders Game is an excellent book. Tight writing,
compelling story, interesting concept. The second and third
books in the series are... well... completely unrelated to the
first one, seemingly written separately and just glued on
to Enders Game with a few passages changed to fix,
and otherwise are fairly mediocre-to-average generic s.f.. Not terrible bad, by any means, but not great.
All he did was sign up for a free ADC account and he got tiger?
No. A paying member of the ADC programme sent him
a copy (well, actually sent him a key that allowed him to
download it) in violation of that members ADC agreement.
Are paid ADC members allowed to give out a key to other ADC members?
ADC members are not allowed to give out download keys
to anyone other than others in the same organization (which
probably means "same employer" - I suspect that being
a member of the "Apple Warez Kollektive" wouldn't apply...).
Two people violated contracts with Apple - the paid developer who shared the download key with someone they weren't authorized to and the idiot who used that key to download a pre-release of Tiger and then uploaded it to the
world for all to enjoy.
I suspect Apple wouldn't have cared,
even if they'd noticed, if he hadn't uploaded it to the world.
But releasing warez copies of pre-release software?
You have to stomp on that, even if it's just done by someone
being stupid, or everyone will start doing it.
Actually it would be possible to become a self-taught chip designer, though not quite trivial. And it'd be cheaper and faster to do a
quick college course (I learned enough about mask level design
in one fifth of a one-year undergrad course to get a job in the industry...) to pick up the basics.
Anyone who knows some basic electronics can design complex gate-based circuits very easily (it's just 74xx design, which is so not rocket science). Gate level simulators
are easily available (and not too hard to write from scratch if
you're not concerned about the details of timing too much). At that point
you can easily do FPGA design, especially if you learn some
Verilog.
Want more? Static CMOS transistor level design is trivial (as long as you're not overly concerned about area or performance). Mask level design of those transistors is a little trickier, but given the mask level
layout tool, a netlist extractor and a copy of spice anyone who's good at SimCity could pick it up with not much more than a copy of Weste and Eshragian
Fabbing them, now, that's much trickier.
So a consultant gate array designer is... not terribly
exciting, and were she doing anything of the low level of complexity other than retrocomputing, noone would care.
Not that retrocomputing isn't cool, an' all, but there are
hobbyists who have made new CPU designs for new architectures,
got them fabbed, developed software for them and so
on.
There are some very nice open-source schematic capture tools being developed out there (at least one of them in python - and it's more than competitive with the commercial tools already.). There are a bunch on sourceforge too. gEDA is one of the
better known toolchains. There are still some backend tools
for which there aren't good freely available equivalents but you can cobble together most of a toolchain already.
OS X just works. (Almost - I've seen occasional issues with the
CUPS subsystem in older releases that needed either a reboot
or a manual daemon restart to fix. But almost.)
Ease of connecting wifi is one example. To get this powerbook
to connect to a netgear AP with WPA was trivial. It just worked.
Trying the same connection from an XP laptop was a nightmare
of driver upgrades and obscure hex strings.
The GUI isn't perfect, but it's better than Windows, KDE or
Gnome, IMO. (Even if you prefer KDE or Gnome you'll probably
still consider the GUI quite workable).
And it's a BSD box under the covers, with a decent X server, and
lots of (good) development software bundled with the system.
The downside is that while the software that's available tends
to be really good there isn't quite the vast range of software
you'll see under windows (particularly games).
I've had two major hardware failures on my powerbook (both
fairly normal laptoppy failures - HD started getting flaky and
the smart charge circuit in the battery went bad). My laptop
gets around 12x7 usage, so no big surprise. Under the AppleCare contract, though, they fixed 'em both (HD was out to
be repaired for 4 or 5 days, battery was a no questions swap
in the store). That's about the same failure rate I've seen with
Dell and Sony laptops - but trying to get Dell or Sony to support
them (or even sell spare parts) was an exercise in futility.
So, while it's not as Truly Perfect as the Apple True Believers
will try and tell you, it is a damn fine system. I have a range
of systems that I use (Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac) but
both the laptop and my main desktop are Macs by choice.
Actually, no. I'm fairly sure that current PowerPC chips don't
have hardware dividers.
I'm very sure that x86 don't, as I looked very hard at
the Intel FPUs while designing the Athlon FPU. They both consist of a large-ish register file, a microcode engine and three main
execution units - an 87 bit bit adder, an 87 bit multiplier
and a "store unit" which does some of the more tedious bit
twiddling operations (normalisation - ick!).
All the rest of the x87 instruction set is implemented using
those basic operations via microcode. There's a nice picture
and summary of the Athlon here
It's much easier to do this for something like a graphics
card, too. You don't need the accuracy that you need to implement the x87 80 bit spec, and more importantly you don't
need to be exactly IEEE 754 compliant. That means you can
get away with far less circuitry for multipliers, you can go fixed
point rather than floating if you feel like it. Designing non 754
arithmetic units is a quite a lot easier and QA for them is much,
much easier.
Odds are that your CPU doesn't have a divider on it either.
Google for Newton-Raphson.
Fast hardware dividers are big and expensive - somewhat
more expensive than a multiplier. But if you have a multiplier and you're not too concerned about performance, or are happy to tradeoff precision for performance, then you can do division using your multiplier, a small seed ROM and a microcode engine.
You certainly can produce excellent icon-level art, even if
you have no talent at drawing at all. You still need a decent
sense of aesthetics, though.
As one example, I've generated several icons for the (commercial) application I develop using an almost perversely
hackish approach.
I write a perl script that uses GD::Image to
draw a large (512x512) version of the shape I want, using plain
flat colours for each region. No drawing skill required, no need
for pixel-accurate mouse movements. When I'm happy with the
shape and colours of the icon I run it through aquatint to give
it a glassy 3d look and a drop-shadow. Looks great.
(But for the toolbar icons and so on I licensed a generic
iconset from IconExperience. An excellent investment in software that doesn't look like it sucks, for
less than the price of a legal copy of PhotoShop.)
My first thought on reading the OP was "If they don't have the expertise to port a small build environment they built themselves, in-house to Windows then why do they think they have a hope in hell of porting their application?"
I have some trivial build scripts (bash) that check out a copy of the current source tree from the central CVS repository over ssh, setup a clean build environment, build the application (using a mix of qmake+make and cons) and run some basic regression tests.
I'm using the same scripts on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X and Windows. On Windows they run under Cygwin, elsewhere under bash. There's some conditional stuff in the qmake files and the Construct files that sets compilers and commandline flags correctly (using Forte on Solaris, cl.exe from Visual C++ on Windows and gcc everywhere else).
It all works fine under cygwin. It took a little tweaking with environment variables to make everything happy (Cygwin + VC++ needs some configuration), but took less than a day
to get running cleanly.
Combined with a central bash script that spawns a build on each machine (via ssh), takes the built and packaged result and uploads it to the distribution server it means I can release a build of all five architectures I support from a single source tree with a single command. I'm not using multiple machines for each architectures build farm, but that could be plugged in using distcc on some architectures fairly easily.
Invest a little time in making your build environment platform agnostic and it'll all run nicely. Unless money is very
tight use a commercial compiler on Windows - Visual C++, Intel,
maybe Borland - the quality of code generated is somewhat better than cygwin/gcc or mingw, the compile times are
vastly better, and the pain in getting it to work well in a production environment a lot lower - due to the better "impedance match" between the compiler and the win32 tools. You'll only get the full advantages if you also use a cross-platform development library too - I use Qt, but wxWindows is pretty good for the cheapskates.
My actual development environment is emacs, bash and make/nmake. It's identical on Windows and the unixen. The fastest build environment is VC++ on Windows (due to better pre-compiled header support and a native compiler). The best for debugging varies depending on what I'm doing (Linux has valgrind and friends. Solaris has the Forte debugger which integrates with emacs very nicely). The same environment is installed on my PowerBook, so I can take the code offsite too, as long as I have occasional ssh access to the CVS server. As I'm building from a single source tree I can do 98%+ of the work on whichever platform is more comfortable and only very rarely have to worry about building debugging on a specific platform. QA is another matter, of course, but again the vast majority of bugs are in the platform independent code.
For C/C++ coding... If I was doing windows-only coding I'd strongly consider using Visual Studio, with embedded Emacs and some CVS (or revisions control system-du-jour). If I were doing Linux+Solaris-only coding I'd almost certainly use Vesta and either emacs or, perhaps, eclipse. For Mac-only XCode or, perhaps, eclipse would be the way to go.
But I don't foresee myself ever working on a single platform application again. And if I'm using native code (as opposed to, say, tcl or perl or python or even something that compiles to a JVM) I'll use the best system that runs cleanly on all those platforms. Right now that's emacs, Qt, perl+cons and a commandline compiler, IMO. And it scales fairly nicely if you have a decent source control system - CVS isn't that decent, but it works for small teams. For bigger teams I think you need a dedicated build engineer to handle source control and release anyway, but that's a whole other story.
Well... Assuming that the laser was intentionally pointed
at the cockpit...
Attempting to blind the pilots of an airliner, with the possible
result of having the airliner crash is terrorism.
Of course it's as likely as not to be terrorism by stupid white
american kids, but attempting to kill several hundred people
at once is certainly an attempt at mass murder, and quite
probably a terrorist act.
Just because the US government is trying to provoke fear of
Arabs to get more control over the proletariat (and to get
reelected) doesn't mean that terrorism doesn't exist.
Spoofing caller ID is trivial, no great hack at all, and fairly commonly done. I'm amazed anyone cares (and have a sneaky
suspicion that the news coverage and the "death threats"
might well have been a way to sell a company for considerably more than
the $5,000 or so it would have taken to set it up).
If you have anything bigger than an analogue copper
phone line you can configure your PBX to send any number
you like as your outgoing CallerID. It's no cleverer a trick
than configuring your fax machine to send the wrong
originating number.
Companies of all sorts have done this for years. Not
just debt collectors and PIs, either. If you get a 'phone call
from anyone at the New York Times you'll likely see a
CallerID of 000-000-0000. Other companies will often
send the main switchboard number at their HQ, rather than
the direct dial number to the actual caller.
Spoofing it on a straight analogue line is a little
trickier, but sometimes possible.
Safari is an excellent web-browser. By default, though,
it downloads everything to the desktop. Not just files
you intentionally download, but also anything displayed with
an external application. That includes PDFs, tarballs, all
sorts of things.
A week of that and your desktop looks like a train wreck.
Create yourself a new folder on the desktop - either
ctrl-click on the desktop and select "New Folder" or from a shell
prompt (install the X server - it's worth it just for xterm, let
alone everything else) "mkdir ~/Desktop/Safari" and tell Safari
to use that folder for downloads: Safari -> Preferences -> General.
A few suggestion that aren't exactly free as in beer - as the
development environments are commercial. But they'll let you put
together a nice, freely redistributable interface to a good, solid
backend RDBMS such as
PostgreSQL and the effort you'll
likely save will be worth more than the sub-$1000 price tags
WebObjects will let you generate most of the view, edit, insert, delete functionality you need with minimal effort. It can be used to generate a standalone java application or a web-based interface. It'll talk to anything with JDBC - including PostgreSQL.
There are a few open-source workalikes of WebObjects too, that you may want to look at.
Another option is Qt. It has a fairly easy RAD environment
for developing cross-platform apps in C++, and pretty solid
SQL support, including database connected widgets for fairly
easy quick-and-dirty view, insert, edit, delete functionality. Free for GPL code on Mac, Linux etc. Commercial, but reasonably priced, for Windows.
Report generation sucks. If you don't want to write your
own, and can't live with the generally poor level of open source
reporting engines, look at Crystal Reports - which sucks too, but sorta works. I've looked at most
of the open source / free reporting engines. They may be usable if your standards are very low, but they're pretty nasty.
I heard a lot of complains about that one button is not enough for a mouse. All those complains were by PC users who have never ever used a Mac.
You should stop hanging out with so many Windows
users, then.
If you're running native Mac software then a one-button
mouse is quite adequate, though mapping splat-click to the
right mouse button is rather nice.
But... the Mac ships with a perfectly good X server, and is
probably the nicest X based system I've used. Apart from the
mouse. Every try using xterm with a single button mouse?
Emacs?
So I got myself the nicest reasonably priced
mouse I could find to replace the bundled mouse. Three
buttons. Scroll wheel. Optical tracking. Cordless. It even
has the same design scheme as the mac (shiny white and
translucent grey). Who's the manufacturer? Microsoft.
In this case it's more a case of, ooh, "DOS is better than BSD".
MySQL is the DOS of databases. Lightweight, runs reasonably quickly. Very, very feature-limited. When anything
goes wrong, you lose your data - but there's always Norton Utilities to help you recover some of it. Doesn't require much skill to
install or maintain. Acceptable if you need very little in the way of functionality in the OS/DB - either because you just don't
need it in your application, or because you're prepared to expend the effort to implement the functionality at the application level (badly).
PostgreSQL is the BSD of databases. Ridiculously full-featured. Rock-solid and stable. Based on a long history of development.
Requires a little more technical clue to install and maintain,
but the huge benefits make that investment more than worthwhile. And, while it takes a little longer to learn the
more sophisticated ("real SQL"(tm)) features, once you learn
to use them you can easily do things that would be incredibly
difficult, or even impossible, using DOS^WMySQL. Not heavily marketed, nor does it have a sizable fanboy base, relying rather on technical excellence to grow mindshare. Used by those who understand that the quality of the tool outweighs the lack of hype.
Oracle is the Solaris of databases. Long commercial history. Easy to find DBAs - but they're mostly expensive, and you need them to keep it running happily. Support is available, and needed. Wonderfully stable in production, as long as you don't mess with it too much. Extremely powerful, but few people actually like using it.
MS SQL used to be like NT 3.51 or NT4. Ugly, but stable. Now it's more like Windows 2000 - some significant, and very nice, technical engineering improvements under the covers, making it a pretty good workhorse, but nobody really notices them because they're distracted by all the updated chrome.
I'm less familiar with either DB2 or AIX - but what little I
do know suggests that they'd make a good pair.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't measured it (and wouldn't want to release any numbers if I had, as it's just not fair to benchmark a pre-release build of anything, let alone an OS). But it seems very responsive for everything I do with it (and it's running on a not terribly fast iLamp), but Panther was also pretty snappy on the same hardware.
I suspect there'll be some amount of performance improvement, as the pre-release of Tiger 'feels' as fast as the production release of Panther, yet is bound to have been built with a lot of debugging code.
Safari seems a fair bit faster to render, as does Mail.app, but I suspect that's improvements with those apps rather than anything OS related.
Pre-release versions for developers have been out for a while. I'm using the current one on my desktop machine and it seems stable and pretty much production-ready.
Spotlight and Dashboard are both very neat, but the biggest improvement (or at least the stuff I miss when I'm on my 10.3 laptop) is the new Safari build. Apart from the (really nice) integrated RSS reader the changes aren't that major, but it's a more pleasant app to use.
I don't understand how companies can sell printers that don't support Postscript.
Easy. It costs money to develop, license and ship a postscript based printer, and your typical home user doing nothing fancy and running windows doesn't need it - but they're very sensitive to up-front price.
The real question is why do people buy non-postscript printers when they know that their operating system will work trivially with a postscript printer, but will require a lot of effort to work (often badly) with a non-postscript printer?
The same line of reasoning explains the "demo" toner cartridges shipped with low-end printers. Your typical home user is very sensitive to up-front price (and probably never looks at the per-page cost). If the population of people buying printers wanted manufacturers to behave this way they just need to, en masse, be less stupid.
An advantage, yes, but not a huge one.
What you want as your manager is a good manager. If they're a good manager then whether they're good at $YOUR_JOB is almost irrelevant. If they're a bad manager then they're a bad manager regardless of their level of knowledge of $YOUR_JOB.
Good managers know which of their staff to trust the opinions of, and which not too. They ask their staff for recomendations, and take that into account in their decision making. They know enough of the field and the language to understand those recomendations, even if they don't have the specific skills to do the job themselves (for instance, as a software developer some of the best managers I've had could code circles around me, some of them hadn't programmed in years, some of them didn't have a background in development at all).
Good managers protect their staff from the crap going on in the rest of the company, but make sure they know what they need to about what all else is going on. They make sure that their staff get the resources and training they need. They know what all their staff, and ideally staff in related groups are doing on a general level, and do a lot of "Hey, you should talk to $OTHER_PERSON, as the stuff they're doing is similar to what you're looking for." - making sure that people actually get the benefits of working together.
Good managers are like gold. When you find one, do your best to keep them. Becoming one is tricky and takes a lot of work and experience. Strive for it. Meanwhile, don't call meetings for your whole group more than once a week, keep 'em short and bring donuts. Your staff will cut you a lot of slack for donuts.
Someone should definitely mod that +1 funny.
(What I actually do is anti-spam forensics, tools and legal consulting.)
Either the journalist drastically misunderstood and misinterpreted what they were told, or one of the people interviewed is launching some magic snake-oil product that'll "solve" this non-existant problem. (Yes, I know exactly what spammers do. That's my job. I know exactly what DNS does, that was my previous job. This article is fiction.)
ASA Computers. It's typically cheaper or only a few bucks more than building from components. It's built, burned-in and has an OS installed.
And it's not Dell. Baby Jesus cries any time you buy a server from Dell. (They look nice at first, but they're such badly architected pieces of crap...)
Ew.
Enders Game is an excellent book. Tight writing, compelling story, interesting concept. The second and third books in the series are... well... completely unrelated to the first one, seemingly written separately and just glued on to Enders Game with a few passages changed to fix, and otherwise are fairly mediocre-to-average generic s.f.. Not terrible bad, by any means, but not great.
All he did was sign up for a free ADC account and he got tiger?
No. A paying member of the ADC programme sent him a copy (well, actually sent him a key that allowed him to download it) in violation of that members ADC agreement.
Are paid ADC members allowed to give out a key to other ADC members?
ADC members are not allowed to give out download keys to anyone other than others in the same organization (which probably means "same employer" - I suspect that being a member of the "Apple Warez Kollektive" wouldn't apply...).
Two people violated contracts with Apple - the paid developer who shared the download key with someone they weren't authorized to and the idiot who used that key to download a pre-release of Tiger and then uploaded it to the world for all to enjoy.
I suspect Apple wouldn't have cared, even if they'd noticed, if he hadn't uploaded it to the world. But releasing warez copies of pre-release software? You have to stomp on that, even if it's just done by someone being stupid, or everyone will start doing it.
If it were open enough that anyone could write apps for it, I'd snatch it up right away.
Like this? http://sourceforge.net/projects/lsm/
The URL you're looking for is http://www.wilddivine.com/
Good game, been out for quite a while. Works well.
Actually it would be possible to become a self-taught chip designer, though not quite trivial. And it'd be cheaper and faster to do a quick college course (I learned enough about mask level design in one fifth of a one-year undergrad course to get a job in the industry...) to pick up the basics.
Anyone who knows some basic electronics can design complex gate-based circuits very easily (it's just 74xx design, which is so not rocket science). Gate level simulators are easily available (and not too hard to write from scratch if you're not concerned about the details of timing too much). At that point you can easily do FPGA design, especially if you learn some Verilog.
Want more? Static CMOS transistor level design is trivial (as long as you're not overly concerned about area or performance). Mask level design of those transistors is a little trickier, but given the mask level layout tool, a netlist extractor and a copy of spice anyone who's good at SimCity could pick it up with not much more than a copy of Weste and Eshragian
Fabbing them, now, that's much trickier.
So a consultant gate array designer is... not terribly exciting, and were she doing anything of the low level of complexity other than retrocomputing, noone would care.
Not that retrocomputing isn't cool, an' all, but there are hobbyists who have made new CPU designs for new architectures, got them fabbed, developed software for them and so on.
There are some very nice open-source schematic capture tools being developed out there (at least one of them in python - and it's more than competitive with the commercial tools already.). There are a bunch on sourceforge too. gEDA is one of the better known toolchains. There are still some backend tools for which there aren't good freely available equivalents but you can cobble together most of a toolchain already.
OS X just works. (Almost - I've seen occasional issues with the CUPS subsystem in older releases that needed either a reboot or a manual daemon restart to fix. But almost.)
Ease of connecting wifi is one example. To get this powerbook to connect to a netgear AP with WPA was trivial. It just worked. Trying the same connection from an XP laptop was a nightmare of driver upgrades and obscure hex strings.
The GUI isn't perfect, but it's better than Windows, KDE or Gnome, IMO. (Even if you prefer KDE or Gnome you'll probably still consider the GUI quite workable).
And it's a BSD box under the covers, with a decent X server, and lots of (good) development software bundled with the system.
The downside is that while the software that's available tends to be really good there isn't quite the vast range of software you'll see under windows (particularly games).
I've had two major hardware failures on my powerbook (both fairly normal laptoppy failures - HD started getting flaky and the smart charge circuit in the battery went bad). My laptop gets around 12x7 usage, so no big surprise. Under the AppleCare contract, though, they fixed 'em both (HD was out to be repaired for 4 or 5 days, battery was a no questions swap in the store). That's about the same failure rate I've seen with Dell and Sony laptops - but trying to get Dell or Sony to support them (or even sell spare parts) was an exercise in futility.
So, while it's not as Truly Perfect as the Apple True Believers will try and tell you, it is a damn fine system. I have a range of systems that I use (Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac) but both the laptop and my main desktop are Macs by choice.
Business competitors?
According to one analysis of the DDoS zombieware the primary target of it was Yahoo.
Actually, no. I'm fairly sure that current PowerPC chips don't have hardware dividers.
I'm very sure that x86 don't, as I looked very hard at the Intel FPUs while designing the Athlon FPU. They both consist of a large-ish register file, a microcode engine and three main execution units - an 87 bit bit adder, an 87 bit multiplier and a "store unit" which does some of the more tedious bit twiddling operations (normalisation - ick!).
All the rest of the x87 instruction set is implemented using those basic operations via microcode. There's a nice picture and summary of the Athlon here
It's much easier to do this for something like a graphics card, too. You don't need the accuracy that you need to implement the x87 80 bit spec, and more importantly you don't need to be exactly IEEE 754 compliant. That means you can get away with far less circuitry for multipliers, you can go fixed point rather than floating if you feel like it. Designing non 754 arithmetic units is a quite a lot easier and QA for them is much, much easier.
Odds are that your CPU doesn't have a divider on it either.
Google for Newton-Raphson.
Fast hardware dividers are big and expensive - somewhat more expensive than a multiplier. But if you have a multiplier and you're not too concerned about performance, or are happy to tradeoff precision for performance, then you can do division using your multiplier, a small seed ROM and a microcode engine.
You certainly can produce excellent icon-level art, even if you have no talent at drawing at all. You still need a decent sense of aesthetics, though.
As one example, I've generated several icons for the (commercial) application I develop using an almost perversely hackish approach.
I write a perl script that uses GD::Image to draw a large (512x512) version of the shape I want, using plain flat colours for each region. No drawing skill required, no need for pixel-accurate mouse movements. When I'm happy with the shape and colours of the icon I run it through aquatint to give it a glassy 3d look and a drop-shadow. Looks great.
(But for the toolbar icons and so on I licensed a generic iconset from IconExperience. An excellent investment in software that doesn't look like it sucks, for less than the price of a legal copy of PhotoShop.)
My first thought on reading the OP was "If they don't have the expertise to port a small build environment they built themselves, in-house to Windows then why do they think they have a hope in hell of porting their application?"
I have some trivial build scripts (bash) that check out a copy of the current source tree from the central CVS repository over ssh, setup a clean build environment, build the application (using a mix of qmake+make and cons) and run some basic regression tests.
I'm using the same scripts on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X and Windows. On Windows they run under Cygwin, elsewhere under bash. There's some conditional stuff in the qmake files and the Construct files that sets compilers and commandline flags correctly (using Forte on Solaris, cl.exe from Visual C++ on Windows and gcc everywhere else).
It all works fine under cygwin. It took a little tweaking with environment variables to make everything happy (Cygwin + VC++ needs some configuration), but took less than a day to get running cleanly.
Combined with a central bash script that spawns a build on each machine (via ssh), takes the built and packaged result and uploads it to the distribution server it means I can release a build of all five architectures I support from a single source tree with a single command. I'm not using multiple machines for each architectures build farm, but that could be plugged in using distcc on some architectures fairly easily.
Invest a little time in making your build environment platform agnostic and it'll all run nicely. Unless money is very tight use a commercial compiler on Windows - Visual C++, Intel, maybe Borland - the quality of code generated is somewhat better than cygwin/gcc or mingw, the compile times are vastly better, and the pain in getting it to work well in a production environment a lot lower - due to the better "impedance match" between the compiler and the win32 tools. You'll only get the full advantages if you also use a cross-platform development library too - I use Qt, but wxWindows is pretty good for the cheapskates.
My actual development environment is emacs, bash and make/nmake. It's identical on Windows and the unixen. The fastest build environment is VC++ on Windows (due to better pre-compiled header support and a native compiler). The best for debugging varies depending on what I'm doing (Linux has valgrind and friends. Solaris has the Forte debugger which integrates with emacs very nicely). The same environment is installed on my PowerBook, so I can take the code offsite too, as long as I have occasional ssh access to the CVS server. As I'm building from a single source tree I can do 98%+ of the work on whichever platform is more comfortable and only very rarely have to worry about building debugging on a specific platform. QA is another matter, of course, but again the vast majority of bugs are in the platform independent code.
For C/C++ coding... If I was doing windows-only coding I'd strongly consider using Visual Studio, with embedded Emacs and some CVS (or revisions control system-du-jour). If I were doing Linux+Solaris-only coding I'd almost certainly use Vesta and either emacs or, perhaps, eclipse. For Mac-only XCode or, perhaps, eclipse would be the way to go.
But I don't foresee myself ever working on a single platform application again. And if I'm using native code (as opposed to, say, tcl or perl or python or even something that compiles to a JVM) I'll use the best system that runs cleanly on all those platforms. Right now that's emacs, Qt, perl+cons and a commandline compiler, IMO. And it scales fairly nicely if you have a decent source control system - CVS isn't that decent, but it works for small teams. For bigger teams I think you need a dedicated build engineer to handle source control and release anyway, but that's a whole other story.
Well... Assuming that the laser was intentionally pointed at the cockpit...
Attempting to blind the pilots of an airliner, with the possible result of having the airliner crash is terrorism.
Of course it's as likely as not to be terrorism by stupid white american kids, but attempting to kill several hundred people at once is certainly an attempt at mass murder, and quite probably a terrorist act.
Just because the US government is trying to provoke fear of Arabs to get more control over the proletariat (and to get reelected) doesn't mean that terrorism doesn't exist.
Spoofing caller ID is trivial, no great hack at all, and fairly commonly done. I'm amazed anyone cares (and have a sneaky suspicion that the news coverage and the "death threats" might well have been a way to sell a company for considerably more than the $5,000 or so it would have taken to set it up).
If you have anything bigger than an analogue copper phone line you can configure your PBX to send any number you like as your outgoing CallerID. It's no cleverer a trick than configuring your fax machine to send the wrong originating number.
Companies of all sorts have done this for years. Not just debt collectors and PIs, either. If you get a 'phone call from anyone at the New York Times you'll likely see a CallerID of 000-000-0000. Other companies will often send the main switchboard number at their HQ, rather than the direct dial number to the actual caller.
Spoofing it on a straight analogue line is a little trickier, but sometimes possible.
Safari is an excellent web-browser. By default, though, it downloads everything to the desktop. Not just files you intentionally download, but also anything displayed with an external application. That includes PDFs, tarballs, all sorts of things.
A week of that and your desktop looks like a train wreck.
Create yourself a new folder on the desktop - either ctrl-click on the desktop and select "New Folder" or from a shell prompt (install the X server - it's worth it just for xterm, let alone everything else) "mkdir ~/Desktop/Safari" and tell Safari to use that folder for downloads: Safari -> Preferences -> General.
A few suggestion that aren't exactly free as in beer - as the development environments are commercial. But they'll let you put together a nice, freely redistributable interface to a good, solid backend RDBMS such as PostgreSQL and the effort you'll likely save will be worth more than the sub-$1000 price tags
WebObjects will let you generate most of the view, edit, insert, delete functionality you need with minimal effort. It can be used to generate a standalone java application or a web-based interface. It'll talk to anything with JDBC - including PostgreSQL.
There are a few open-source workalikes of WebObjects too, that you may want to look at.
Another option is Qt. It has a fairly easy RAD environment for developing cross-platform apps in C++, and pretty solid SQL support, including database connected widgets for fairly easy quick-and-dirty view, insert, edit, delete functionality. Free for GPL code on Mac, Linux etc. Commercial, but reasonably priced, for Windows.
Report generation sucks. If you don't want to write your own, and can't live with the generally poor level of open source reporting engines, look at Crystal Reports - which sucks too, but sorta works. I've looked at most of the open source / free reporting engines. They may be usable if your standards are very low, but they're pretty nasty.
I heard a lot of complains about that one button is not enough for a mouse. All those complains were by PC users who have never ever used a Mac.
You should stop hanging out with so many Windows users, then.
If you're running native Mac software then a one-button mouse is quite adequate, though mapping splat-click to the right mouse button is rather nice.
But... the Mac ships with a perfectly good X server, and is probably the nicest X based system I've used. Apart from the mouse. Every try using xterm with a single button mouse? Emacs?
So I got myself the nicest reasonably priced mouse I could find to replace the bundled mouse. Three buttons. Scroll wheel. Optical tracking. Cordless. It even has the same design scheme as the mac (shiny white and translucent grey). Who's the manufacturer? Microsoft.
In this case it's more a case of, ooh, "DOS is better than BSD".
MySQL is the DOS of databases. Lightweight, runs reasonably quickly. Very, very feature-limited. When anything goes wrong, you lose your data - but there's always Norton Utilities to help you recover some of it. Doesn't require much skill to install or maintain. Acceptable if you need very little in the way of functionality in the OS/DB - either because you just don't need it in your application, or because you're prepared to expend the effort to implement the functionality at the application level (badly).
PostgreSQL is the BSD of databases. Ridiculously full-featured. Rock-solid and stable. Based on a long history of development. Requires a little more technical clue to install and maintain, but the huge benefits make that investment more than worthwhile. And, while it takes a little longer to learn the more sophisticated ("real SQL"(tm)) features, once you learn to use them you can easily do things that would be incredibly difficult, or even impossible, using DOS^WMySQL. Not heavily marketed, nor does it have a sizable fanboy base, relying rather on technical excellence to grow mindshare. Used by those who understand that the quality of the tool outweighs the lack of hype.
Oracle is the Solaris of databases. Long commercial history. Easy to find DBAs - but they're mostly expensive, and you need them to keep it running happily. Support is available, and needed. Wonderfully stable in production, as long as you don't mess with it too much. Extremely powerful, but few people actually like using it.
MS SQL used to be like NT 3.51 or NT4. Ugly, but stable. Now it's more like Windows 2000 - some significant, and very nice, technical engineering improvements under the covers, making it a pretty good workhorse, but nobody really notices them because they're distracted by all the updated chrome.
I'm less familiar with either DB2 or AIX - but what little I do know suggests that they'd make a good pair.
Postgresql supports classic BLOBs perfectly well. It _also_ supports bytea (binary string) fields. Has done for a long time.