I am not referring only to pure clock cycles. I actually think the trend towards multi-core is a good thing. First, in modern computer enviros where multiple threads are running, multi-core systems should prove to be very effective. Second, multi-core systems will use less power than a single core system with the same total processing power. This is simple EE - multi-core means power consumption goes up in a linear style instead of as a square function. It does not matter how it is technically getting done, system are still increasing in FLOPS at the rate I mentioned. I applaud faster machines via this new laser tech, but my point still stands. Computers are still increasing in processing power in the exponential terms I mentioned. I just compared the system I built earlier this year (in Feb), and I can almost get a chip 50% faster for the same price now.
What gets me is when one is not installed on a system. Why not install all of them? You can probably install the 3 you mention and have all of the bases covered with minimal disk space.
I actually ran into a sysadmin that would only allow vi to be on his systems. He would actually go in and remove the others. This lead me to learn vi since I had to use "his" systems. One will always find vi or vim, and most of the time one will find emacs installed. So I use vi. I have had a lot less luck with pico, my old fav from college. I have never understood the war over these. I think me geek cred is pretty good, but really, what is the deal?!
and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years
This sounds silly to me since desktop power (say a $500 system - discounting monitor and keyboard) is increasing exponentially, doubling every two years compared to the price. The machine I built this spring was twice as powerful than a system I built in 2003 for the same money, but 8 times as powerful as a machine I built just 6 years ago and is about 128 times as powerful as the machine I had when I went to college in 92. And I am only considering pure clock speed, not increases in the efficiency of chips, growth of RAM and disk for the price, etc. While Moore's law concerning silicon chips will start faltering as we approach 2020, I have been nothing but impressed with how desktop performance continues to improve.
These new laser improvements, and things like molecular computing, will help us continue on after the 2020 mark with our current exponential growth.
VLC is a great, cross platform media player. I run it on Windows and it works well - it actually performs better than WinDVD on my laptop. It will play a number of file formats as well. I think it is also open source.
If I do not count students from other nations, I cannot honestly remember anyone other than white guys (we prefer the term Cracker-American) in any of my CompSci or EE classes. Seriously, I can only think if a couple of girls as well. I did go to school in South Dakota...
1) Info on licensing and the GPL, etc, etc at some point. Perhaps an intro to FOSS licensing at the beginning, and more details at the end.
2) Coding Standards! I think that good coding standards and commenting are especially important in an OSS project.
3) Using OSS tools: If the student is going to become as OSS programmer, then they really need to know how to use CVS, Bugzilla, etc, etc. I am sure you can come up with a good list of the things a developer needs.
4) Walk the students through setting up Linux, and using its basic functions (grep, etc) and its programming tools (gcc, make, etc). Go over the very, very basic stuff. I programmed for a while in a Wintel inviro in college before getting into an AIX system. It was a shock, and the prof seemed to think that we (me and the other students) had been programming in Unix before. It took me some time to get used to using to tools for development in Unix. Today, you probably also need to go over some command line stuff. I remember it not being that big of a deal, since I was used to DOS. I bet a lot of student today have never used DOS, or it was a long time ago.
I am sorry that you have not taken the time to really look at.NET. Your statement that you would put it behind VB really shows your ignorance of the platform.
For Windows development, C# and.NET far exceeed anything I have experienced with Java or VB (I get around). I guess I really have a disrespect for Java as 1.0 really sucked hard. The eventing model was worthless, and AWT is just plain out stupid. Hate would be the word I would use to describe how I felt about Java's idiotic way of doing things circa 1998. I have writen stuff on 1.1 and 2.0 since then, but it just seems like it so sooooo friggen slow. We are not talking about a stereotype here. Java, in my experience, is ass slow. On Windows (if that is all you care about).NET is soooo much better. And nicer. You have to admit that Visual Studio, while it has its own variety of suck, is nominally better than just about any Java IDE out there. And I have tried a lot of them.
As far as running on Linux, we don't really care as we know that none of our clients give a crap about Linux on the desktop. Hell, they would have to port 20 other apps over to Linux first! And as far as server tasks go, all the server dlls I have right now run on Mono on Linux. The strugle for us has been getting the latest/greatest in Mono to compile on AIX.
So, I would be willing to listen to your argument if you were more informed with more experience in the subject.
I did not know that about the Salvation Army. Well, at least I know this money will be used for good purposes, but I need to find another charity. I hate the Red Cross with serious passion. There was a flood near where I grew up, and friends and family were in it. These people had their homes, all their belongings destroyed. And unlike NO, this was a flash flood. They had no time to make a decision to stay or go.
So here are these people, sitting around in their underwear (flood hit at night) with no money. The Red Cross shows up and has the balls to charge for supplies. They were really shiaty about the whole deal. A lot of people suffered longer because of the Red Cross.
When I travel back to that area of the country, I still see an anti-red cross bumper sticker every once in a while (usually on an old car, old sticker since this flood occured a while ago).
Having heard the horror stories about Red Cross, I will never, ever give those filthy jerks a cent of my money. When a tragedy hits, I seek out other charities to donate to instead. A coworker told me that the Salvation Army does a good job with disaster relief, so I donated to them. Since I am very pro-gay rights, it looks like I will have to find someone else.
Someone if going to tell you to go wireless, someone is going to say fiber. With more and more WEPs going up in my neighborhood, I am having problems with my setup now and really wish I had wall jacks everywhere. And fiber is just overkill, but this is Slashdot and someone will mention it.
I say make sure to run CAT6e, which will nicely handle Gigabit over Copper. You may want to stream some sort of HD video or other high bandwidth signal in the future over the network, so go with a cabling that will work. I would also run at least two RJ45 ports into each room, more in the large rooms. Don't worry about phone lines, you can always wire up from the patch panel a traditional line into one of your feeds, and RJ11 (phone) plugs into RJ45.
Power! People overlook this. Make sure to put in enough outlets. I don't even know how many extension cords and power strips I am running now. I wish my house had twice as many outlets, and it was built in 1999!
A friend had a similar problem. They were sure that the only available telco in the area was not providing the level of service to which they had agreed. They could not get the telco to help at all.
His solution? He got his board of directors to approve the purchase of some wifi radio equipment, which they mounted on nearby towers. I am not a hardware or radio guy, but this was not Linksys crap that I run in my home. He got some professional stuff. Each office had LOS to a local tower, and the towers to each other. Last I heard, they are running all of their voice and all of their data over their new links. Routers at both ends are configured for QoS, and thing are running very well. The cost of the equipment has already been paid for with the savings since what they pay for the towers is a fraction of the cost of the circuits they were running between offices. They maintain a few landlines that the phone systems on each end can use in the case of emergency to route voice traffic, and I believe he also has a couple of redundant DSL lines for data.
I am sure this is dead obvious to many here, but I am going to make the point anyway. Control of hardware makes a Mac as stable as it is. Look at the stability of Win95 v. Win98 v. Win2k. MS create more and more stringent rules on the "quality" of drivers for hardware. One of the reasons that Win2k does not have as many blue screens as 98 or NT4 is that 3rd party drivers are not f@cking up everything as much, since they must pass tougher tests to be certified.
Now imagine how much control Apple has, knowing exactly what hardware their OS will be running on. They can do any number of things to optimize their OS and software to the hardware, and still keep their high level of stability.
Porting OSX out to everything would have also gotten rid of the sexy mac machines vs. the ugly beige PCs. And I am sure the MBAs out there will tell me that there are all kinds of money reasons that Apple wants to control their own hardware.
A few audiobooks from Audible.com will last you a while (I do not work for them). I have the $20/month account which gets me 2 audio books to download and keep forever. You can pick up some long stuff. A couple of the Dark Tower books by King were well over 20 hours. They are downloaded as MP3, but it is a special DRM version. You must have a player that supports it. They also burn out to CD, but 27 hours of audio (one of the dark tower books) is a whole-lotta-cdrs.
And $10/audio book is dirt cheap compared to what you will find anywhere else. My wife just got the new Harry Potter at the store (JK Rowling is not on Audible) and paid about $50.
I thought this would be a great solution for a friend with dial-up that wants to use his laptop all over the house the way I do with my wireless. However, with 20' line of site connectivity, this will not do.
As far as a business traveller, I can tell you that I packed a 50' chunk of cat5 RJ45 and a 100' chunk of cat 3 (phone cable is cat 3, right?) RJ11 for some time in my computer pack. Neither took up a lot of room. Neither was very expensive, and both work great to this day.
This thing is going to have to do a hellavalot better than 20' to be of any value to me, and I imagine, a lot of other travelling (or stationary) geeks.
The only downside to my parents was that both their printer and their scanner were unsuppored under Mac OS X. Now, this is really more of an issue of old hardware and driver support from the vender, but a new PC would not have had these problems. What was cool is that both printer and scanner prices and tech have changed so much in 3 years that they got a great combo scanner/printer for $100, each part much better than the original. Since I bought them a mac compat. keyboard and new 17" LCD (vs their old 14" CRT) and a better mouse, they have a complete PC system and hardware that is going to waste (and probably to charity or garage sale).
My parents are also on dial-up. A lot can be said for the modem in the Mac, as it works well and connecting is very easy for them. Also, pages render much faster than their old 633mhz pc.
A big upside to my mother is that she is a Mac user as an art teacher, and did not go near the family computer much. Now she is using it, and it going to try to load some of her favorite software on it. As a software developer, I told her it is ok to pirate software if you are over 60, so I think she is just going to grab a bunch of stuff from school and check it out at home.
All in all, the experience has been great for my parents and for me, as it all Just Works (TM).
One last note, one of the first things I did when we got it running (which took all of 10 minutes) was to download firefox and adblock. I set my parents up with a nice adblock ruleset, which speeds up their dial-up connection since they do not have to download a bunch of ads. Plus, I can walk them through things on Firefox from my Windows or Linux boxes.
My brother and I just bought our parents a Mac Mini to replace their aging PC. They love it. I had been anti-Mac for a long time, for what I consider to be good reasons. My reasons for our decision of Mac over PC (Windows) in this case were:
1) My positive experience with my iPod,
2) The security and virus issues associated with Windows and the lack of said issues on Mac,
3) The Mac Mini is now in the range of price I am willing to pay for a desktop computer, especially one that will mainly be chacking email and surfing the web,
4) Positive reviews of Mac's OS X from programmers and IT geeks.
Mac has done a lot of things right lately to start winning over former Mac haters such as myself.
1) Setup-up Win95a with Personal Web Server and FP extensions
2) ????
3) Profit!
Seriously, I have quite a bit of experience in MS Web Dev land. Stay clear of the FP extensions. If you are on IIS, use ASP or ASP.NET. If you are running on Unix PHP will probably be available and is the most widely supported (read: you will be able to find examples of what you want to do online) web scripting language out there. Also, give Ruby on Rails a try.
Wired had an article this month about rooftop solar power that was kinda cool. I thought that the project they highlighted (no pun intended) could be DIY with a little money and time.
See subject line. The sun is just going down here in Austin, and I see their server is fried. Using the reasoning I have learned here at Slashdot, that means that their server must be solar powered!
Re:But does it...
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Aren't tablets expensive enough without them being macs? I will get modded down by the mac zealots, but this is serious. What market are they trying for here? I would love it if business ran Linux on cheap PC hardware, but the truth is that the vast majority of business runs on Windows. And I think that "business" will be the consumers of tablets in the near future. Apple is going to have a very small market here. If they try to sell to the PC based people they will most likely be offering a more expensive version of something (table PC) that has not been that well received.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not referring only to pure clock cycles. I actually think the trend towards multi-core is a good thing. First, in modern computer enviros where multiple threads are running, multi-core systems should prove to be very effective. Second, multi-core systems will use less power than a single core system with the same total processing power. This is simple EE - multi-core means power consumption goes up in a linear style instead of as a square function. It does not matter how it is technically getting done, system are still increasing in FLOPS at the rate I mentioned. I applaud faster machines via this new laser tech, but my point still stands. Computers are still increasing in processing power in the exponential terms I mentioned. I just compared the system I built earlier this year (in Feb), and I can almost get a chip 50% faster for the same price now.
What gets me is when one is not installed on a system. Why not install all of them? You can probably install the 3 you mention and have all of the bases covered with minimal disk space.
I actually ran into a sysadmin that would only allow vi to be on his systems. He would actually go in and remove the others. This lead me to learn vi since I had to use "his" systems. One will always find vi or vim, and most of the time one will find emacs installed. So I use vi. I have had a lot less luck with pico, my old fav from college. I have never understood the war over these. I think me geek cred is pretty good, but really, what is the deal?!
That is like comparing PPC to x86. How many FLOPS did that run compared to a high-end machine today?
This sounds silly to me since desktop power (say a $500 system - discounting monitor and keyboard) is increasing exponentially, doubling every two years compared to the price. The machine I built this spring was twice as powerful than a system I built in 2003 for the same money, but 8 times as powerful as a machine I built just 6 years ago and is about 128 times as powerful as the machine I had when I went to college in 92. And I am only considering pure clock speed, not increases in the efficiency of chips, growth of RAM and disk for the price, etc. While Moore's law concerning silicon chips will start faltering as we approach 2020, I have been nothing but impressed with how desktop performance continues to improve.
These new laser improvements, and things like molecular computing, will help us continue on after the 2020 mark with our current exponential growth.
Sorry to go off, I just got done reading The Sigularity Is Near
VLC is a great, cross platform media player. I run it on Windows and it works well - it actually performs better than WinDVD on my laptop. It will play a number of file formats as well. I think it is also open source.
If I do not count students from other nations, I cannot honestly remember anyone other than white guys (we prefer the term Cracker-American) in any of my CompSci or EE classes. Seriously, I can only think if a couple of girls as well. I did go to school in South Dakota...
2) Coding Standards! I think that good coding standards and commenting are especially important in an OSS project.
3) Using OSS tools: If the student is going to become as OSS programmer, then they really need to know how to use CVS, Bugzilla, etc, etc. I am sure you can come up with a good list of the things a developer needs.
4) Walk the students through setting up Linux, and using its basic functions (grep, etc) and its programming tools (gcc, make, etc). Go over the very, very basic stuff. I programmed for a while in a Wintel inviro in college before getting into an AIX system. It was a shock, and the prof seemed to think that we (me and the other students) had been programming in Unix before. It took me some time to get used to using to tools for development in Unix. Today, you probably also need to go over some command line stuff. I remember it not being that big of a deal, since I was used to DOS. I bet a lot of student today have never used DOS, or it was a long time ago.
For Windows development, C# and .NET far exceeed anything I have experienced with Java or VB (I get around). I guess I really have a disrespect for Java as 1.0 really sucked hard. The eventing model was worthless, and AWT is just plain out stupid. Hate would be the word I would use to describe how I felt about Java's idiotic way of doing things circa 1998. I have writen stuff on 1.1 and 2.0 since then, but it just seems like it so sooooo friggen slow. We are not talking about a stereotype here. Java, in my experience, is ass slow. On Windows (if that is all you care about) .NET is soooo much better. And nicer. You have to admit that Visual Studio, while it has its own variety of suck, is nominally better than just about any Java IDE out there. And I have tried a lot of them.
As far as running on Linux, we don't really care as we know that none of our clients give a crap about Linux on the desktop. Hell, they would have to port 20 other apps over to Linux first! And as far as server tasks go, all the server dlls I have right now run on Mono on Linux. The strugle for us has been getting the latest/greatest in Mono to compile on AIX.
So, I would be willing to listen to your argument if you were more informed with more experience in the subject.
Uh, no. That was kinda my point.
So here are these people, sitting around in their underwear (flood hit at night) with no money. The Red Cross shows up and has the balls to charge for supplies. They were really shiaty about the whole deal. A lot of people suffered longer because of the Red Cross.
When I travel back to that area of the country, I still see an anti-red cross bumper sticker every once in a while (usually on an old car, old sticker since this flood occured a while ago).
Having heard the horror stories about Red Cross, I will never, ever give those filthy jerks a cent of my money. When a tragedy hits, I seek out other charities to donate to instead. A coworker told me that the Salvation Army does a good job with disaster relief, so I donated to them. Since I am very pro-gay rights, it looks like I will have to find someone else.
Salvation Army Online Donation - Money goes directly to help with Katrina relief.
I say make sure to run CAT6e, which will nicely handle Gigabit over Copper. You may want to stream some sort of HD video or other high bandwidth signal in the future over the network, so go with a cabling that will work. I would also run at least two RJ45 ports into each room, more in the large rooms. Don't worry about phone lines, you can always wire up from the patch panel a traditional line into one of your feeds, and RJ11 (phone) plugs into RJ45.
Power! People overlook this. Make sure to put in enough outlets. I don't even know how many extension cords and power strips I am running now. I wish my house had twice as many outlets, and it was built in 1999!
His solution? He got his board of directors to approve the purchase of some wifi radio equipment, which they mounted on nearby towers. I am not a hardware or radio guy, but this was not Linksys crap that I run in my home. He got some professional stuff. Each office had LOS to a local tower, and the towers to each other. Last I heard, they are running all of their voice and all of their data over their new links. Routers at both ends are configured for QoS, and thing are running very well. The cost of the equipment has already been paid for with the savings since what they pay for the towers is a fraction of the cost of the circuits they were running between offices. They maintain a few landlines that the phone systems on each end can use in the case of emergency to route voice traffic, and I believe he also has a couple of redundant DSL lines for data.
Now imagine how much control Apple has, knowing exactly what hardware their OS will be running on. They can do any number of things to optimize their OS and software to the hardware, and still keep their high level of stability.
Porting OSX out to everything would have also gotten rid of the sexy mac machines vs. the ugly beige PCs. And I am sure the MBAs out there will tell me that there are all kinds of money reasons that Apple wants to control their own hardware.
And $10/audio book is dirt cheap compared to what you will find anywhere else. My wife just got the new Harry Potter at the store (JK Rowling is not on Audible) and paid about $50.
Hope my rambling helps!
As far as a business traveller, I can tell you that I packed a 50' chunk of cat5 RJ45 and a 100' chunk of cat 3 (phone cable is cat 3, right?) RJ11 for some time in my computer pack. Neither took up a lot of room. Neither was very expensive, and both work great to this day.
This thing is going to have to do a hellavalot better than 20' to be of any value to me, and I imagine, a lot of other travelling (or stationary) geeks.
My parents are also on dial-up. A lot can be said for the modem in the Mac, as it works well and connecting is very easy for them. Also, pages render much faster than their old 633mhz pc.
A big upside to my mother is that she is a Mac user as an art teacher, and did not go near the family computer much. Now she is using it, and it going to try to load some of her favorite software on it. As a software developer, I told her it is ok to pirate software if you are over 60, so I think she is just going to grab a bunch of stuff from school and check it out at home.
All in all, the experience has been great for my parents and for me, as it all Just Works (TM).
One last note, one of the first things I did when we got it running (which took all of 10 minutes) was to download firefox and adblock. I set my parents up with a nice adblock ruleset, which speeds up their dial-up connection since they do not have to download a bunch of ads. Plus, I can walk them through things on Firefox from my Windows or Linux boxes.
1) My positive experience with my iPod,
2) The security and virus issues associated with Windows and the lack of said issues on Mac,
3) The Mac Mini is now in the range of price I am willing to pay for a desktop computer, especially one that will mainly be chacking email and surfing the web,
4) Positive reviews of Mac's OS X from programmers and IT geeks.
Mac has done a lot of things right lately to start winning over former Mac haters such as myself.
2) ????
3) Profit!
Seriously, I have quite a bit of experience in MS Web Dev land. Stay clear of the FP extensions. If you are on IIS, use ASP or ASP.NET. If you are running on Unix PHP will probably be available and is the most widely supported (read: you will be able to find examples of what you want to do online) web scripting language out there. Also, give Ruby on Rails a try.
Wired had an article this month about rooftop solar power that was kinda cool. I thought that the project they highlighted (no pun intended) could be DIY with a little money and time.
See subject line. The sun is just going down here in Austin, and I see their server is fried. Using the reasoning I have learned here at Slashdot, that means that their server must be solar powered!
Yes and Yes
Seriously, the man has so much money, why doesn't he just do it?
The pr0n industry is successful because guys like tits.
Aren't tablets expensive enough without them being macs? I will get modded down by the mac zealots, but this is serious. What market are they trying for here? I would love it if business ran Linux on cheap PC hardware, but the truth is that the vast majority of business runs on Windows. And I think that "business" will be the consumers of tablets in the near future. Apple is going to have a very small market here. If they try to sell to the PC based people they will most likely be offering a more expensive version of something (table PC) that has not been that well received.