Compact Flash drives just got large enough to hold your basic operating system, web-surfing, IM'ing, productivity tool set and office suite, cheap enough to actually go for it (4G Ultras recently dropped below the $150 mark.) Granted, four gigs isn't enough for leet warez/mp3z/gamez monkeys, but it is enough to keep someone productive if they want to be productive on the go. At 9MB/s read/write they aren't as fast as the fastest drives out there, but... I wonder what kind of current they draw under use - I know that under no use they draw no current, but I wonder what kind of difference they would make by using one in a laptop instead of a regular drive.
Yes, there is the issue of the drive getting bad spots over use - but if you could get twice the battery life out of a laptop and knew you had to replace the media once a year or so, maybe it would be worth it. Not to mention you don't have to worry about a head crash or losing your data if you drop it (might break your laptop, but your data will be ok.)
Throughput. Actually I occasionally chart the growth in CPU speed vs the size of hard drives and there is an amazing difference (with drive space growing a LOT faster than CPU speed) - but on a purely bandwidth based observation, narrowing it down to laptop hard drives only : drives haven't really kept up.
Six years ago most laptop drives were 3600 rpm. Now most laptop drives are 4200 rpm (yes there are plenty of 5400 and 7200 rpm drives out there, but I'd wager to say that most people don't have them.) That's a 17% (1.1667x) boost over six years. Compare that to the PII-300MHz in use six years ago vs the P4-3GHz we can get today and there is a 1,000% increase (10x). Even if you drop in a Toshiba 7200rpm drive, you are still only looking at a 2x improvement in speed over six (or more) years.
I have always thought that mercury would be the ideal liquid for this sort of closed loop system - it has a thermal conductivity / capacity of somewhere around 14x that of water (and thus would be 14x more efficient.) Granted there is that whole 'highly conductive and highly corrosive' aspect of mercury, plus the nasty side effect of being toxic - but if the system was properly engineered to take those into account, why not go for broke?
If only there was a way to store all that electric power. Maybe massive plates of lead and zinc in a acid solution, in big heavy square things with little plugs on top to add distilled water from time to time (I have no idea why, but I envision that there would be a good reason to do so on my mythical device.) Give it a catchy name like 'Deep Cycle Truck Battery' and sell them at Wal*Mart for ~$50 apiece, letting us fill an entire room with them for under a thousand dollars.
Actually, that's how software maintenance happens in the real world.
Real code is complex, and generally written as a massive matrix of inter-related side-effects causing things to happen*. When it gets written, the entire matrix is designed, intended, documented, and understood. Two years later the guys working on the code have no clue about the matrix of side-effect driven code, no clue about the complex set of business factors driving the technical aspects of the code (and by business factors, in a MMORPG I mean things like class X has bad faction with everybody making it more difficult for him to start out, but in return for overcoming that challenge has more powerful magic later in life - stuff like that) and when they are making a change they go in, find the one line of code that looks like what needs to be fixed and just change it without knowing all the places that change will ripple back to, invisibly, via the side-effect matrix.
A technical phrase to understand here is 'globally scoped variables' - and another one is 'design intent' - and as the current set of hacks don't understand the ramifications or scope of either, this is what happens.
Footnotes * I didn't say it was a good idea. I just said it happens.
Better yet, set up some sort of clearing house where old game licenses go to die, and let us buy a legit license (and download the program to play) for a nominal fee (five bucks maybe?) This would solve a few things - legitimatize the "grey" area redistribution of 'abandonware', and let those that pirated the game when they were poor college kids living on less than $400 a month (to cover rent, food, clothing, bills, etc) buy a license to clear their consience. A few years ago I bought a new in the box copy of Gunship for the C=64. Not to actually play the game, but simply to put to rest a karma inbalance for the many, many hours I spent playing that game on a friend's computer using disks (5.25" floppys) that had the word 'Gunship' written on them in black magic marker.
Search for QQP's Battles of Destiny. It isn't the same, but once you can see past the slightly boxy graphics to embrace the game underneath - it is pretty good. And it was released as freeware also.
Online games could also be played on fast dial-up connections, at least until a few years ago (see also : Everquest, Tanarus, etc.) According to the FAQ, even EQ2 was designed to be playable on a 56k dial-up connection. Quake III, CounterStrike::Source, etc - can also function in a dial-up environment (with sucky pings, but still works.)
What that means is : it is a low-bandwidth consumer that makes the customer happy when he has low-latency connections. You don't move a lot of data, but you want it to get there and back really fast. Plus, when you are doing this you don't do anything to intentionally make your connection slower so you aren't slogging your pipe with massive downloads.
There you go. Am I a) Happy, b) Upset, c) Mad, d) Indifferent, e) Horny, or f) all of the above? You can't tell. Even if you thought you knew, you you would be wrong - and that's worse than not knowing because you will assume a stance that defends against (or rallys with) however you perceive I am being, which would make the conversation go downhill from there.
Didn't we recently read here that 50% of people think they can accurately read the 'tone' of an email, when in reality they only get it right about 20% of the time?
(Answer to my question : f) all of the above, but not at you.)
Programming languages have become much easier to write lame-ass code and then pretend to debug in. There, fixed it for you.
Given that about 90% of all new code where I work is getting written in SQL (stored procedures) or Java, both languages which are over a decade old (plus or minus) - no, it isn't getting any easier to write corporate grade code. What is happening is that lame coder wanna-bes can slap together code using whatever they can learn in their six week jump-start (for the love of whatever Hindu God you guys pray to - please add switch / case statements to that six week course) and send us back broken code that takes forever to fix and costs 4x as much to maintain over the life of the app. You can write ugly code in any language, even the new 'easy to use' languagess (I know because I have seen it.)
The problem is that people THINK it is getting easier to code, so they accept all of the above as normal. There is going to be hell to pay once all this code hits critical mass, and those that can survive between now and then may come out pretty good. For now, not so fun.
With the ability to manage / monitor more than one GMail account at the same time, I use GMail Manager instead of GMail Notifer.
That said, changing the network.http.pipelining to true and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 100 made an AMAZING difference in page render speeds. Thanks.
I know I'm not the only one has has never heard of 180 Solutions. From Wikipedia: Those fuckers are evil - even the Wikipedia page on 180 Solutions tried to install spyware on my computer.
If only there was another operating system out there, one that would let them continue to use their machine in the same fashion they have been using it since they bought it... like maybe a way to continue using WinXP after Vista comes out.
Naw, that won't work - you are right, all those people are screwed. The day Vista comes out and their machines up and die because WinXP ceases to exist, I bet they are all going to run out and buy new computers.
Just curious, do you know even a single person that had a machine running Windows 2000 (or Win98, or WinME) go out and buy a boxed version of WinXP at CompUSA (paying $200 of their own money, not warez edition,) take it home and install it on their fully operational computer? Not leet haxors (or anybody that reads/.) - just regular ol' dudes, they kind that would buy a Dell 3000 series desktop in the first place. No? Me either.
A funny twist on that perspective : being a software developer without a strong background in math (dare I say a 'love' of math) often boils down to being a superficial and sycophantic copier and paster of source code. I have had projects handed to me with massive chunks copied and pasted from source found in Google (including spelling mistakes in the comments - no joke) without so much as a single reference giving credit to the original source.
If someone is mid-way through college on the way to a degree in software engineering and doesn't already love math, it's probably too late for them to change perspectives. It's not too late for them to change majors, however, and pursue something more in line with their natural (and long term ingrained) aptitude. Enjoying Quake III or Myst, and being really good at IM - this isn't a strong indication of an aptitude for software engineering. Opening the.wad files from Doom in a hex editor and recognizing patterns, reverse engineering the file structure in order to extract the nature of the file, then creating a new.wad file from scratch - that's a much better indicator.
Granted these are just rantings from someone that is entirely undercaffeinated - my position this may change after a few cups of tea.
A BS in Computer Science should be easy to get with only average math talent. Can you get a B in Cal I? You can handle the math in CS.
Ummm... yea... those of us that took differential equations (DifEQ) are going to have to disagree with you on this one.
All I can remember about DifEQ was that it was like the Star Trek of wild ass math - you have a seriously nasty equation that you need to take the derivative of, but nobody on this planet can do it so you get Scotty to beam you to a planet in a parallel time space continua, and in the process the nature of the equation transforms slightly into something you can calculate. You do your math there, get an answer, have Scotty beam you back to Earth and the answer changes form into the Earth form. I believe there were drugs involved in the process, but it was college so we may be talking correlation, not causation.
If the OP sucks at math, he can still do 'computers and tech' but perhaps a bachelors degree in 'software engineering' isn't how he is going to get there. It doesn't take a BS/CS from the Dept of Engineering to program Java or design a network, current HR requirements not withstanding.
After that comment I had to go look. Here it was I thought they were producing something, or selling something (hence the terms 'customers' and 'revenue'). Nope. Just a big-ass referral site, sucking down affiliate fees for driving real customers to real sites that sell real stuff.
If only there was a way to pay Google to put a link to your web page at the top when people searched on certain terms. Good luck on that one, though - because that would be against all that Google represents.
Are most of those kids going to be interested in that? Hell no.
Exactly - and possibly the best reason to do it that way.
I would love to fly. I'm guessing you would love to fly. Most of us would love nothing more than to find a Cessna 172 parked on the runway lined up for departure, gassed up and already running - climb in and start flying. Finally do in real life what we have been doing in MS FlightSim 2004 (etc) for the past two decades. I'm sure most of us could do it, too - depart Meigs Field, avoid the buildings downtown, fly over the water for a bit, buzz the game field on the far side of Chicago, the hang a left, fly for 10 minutes on a heading 200, find another big airport, completely ignore the other air traffic and buzz in for a touch and go on the runway, fly out over the water to get my bearings again, fly North for 10 minutes, line up on Meigs, put it down safely, roll to a stop at the end of the runway, get out (leave the engine running) and abandon it right there on the runway.
And it would be a complete waste of resources. I would be nowhere closer to being able to apply myself in commercial aviation than if it never happened. What I described is to real flying what plopping a kid in front of a WinXP box and letting him surf the web, IM, and play games is to computing. Entertaining, but other than that - nothing.
There are kids out there that have a natural aptitude for computers. These are the ones that would sit at a C=64 with a manual, thrilled at the prospect of changing the color of the screen using PEEK and POKE commands. These are the ones that would find enough joy in using old GWBASIC commands to create boxes and circles on the screen, quickly observing the problem that a 4:3 aspect ratio on a VGA monitor does to their circles and adjusting their approach (putting an oval on the screen with a 3:4 ratio so it comes out perfectly round on the screen) to 'win'. These are the ones that will marvel at getting two computers to 'talk' to each other over a CCITT v.22bis telephone connection (that's 2400 baud, also known as 240 characters per second, also known as incredibly slow) or 10BaseT. These are the ones that will sit for hours playing Rocky's Boots on an Apple ][+, absorbing the concepts of Boolean algebra and AND/OR/XOR/NOT gates. These are the ones that will love you for helping them understand the bubble sort so they can implement it from memory, and then love you more for showing them another faster sort - staying away at nights trying to understand how the radix sort works because they are just on the cusp of wrapping their newbie software engineer heads around recursion.
And these are the ones for whom you will be able to make a real difference, even on crap old hardware.
Personally I would turn up my nose at a weak old Cessna 152, say that unless I get to fly current hardware (MiG-29 comes to mind, I love those) I'm not interested. That's a pretty good indication that I'm not commercial pilot material. The guy that is hanging around the airport, offering to hand-wash your old yellow Piper Cub (and your car, and mow your lawn) for free just hoping you will let him be on the runway to watch you take off and land - THAT's the guy with potential.
That guy exists in the computer world too. Twenty five years ago it was me. Figure out which one(s) it is in your 'underprivileged' group of kids and all of the above will fall into place, and will make sense. And you will get out of your community service project exactly what you were hoping to get (but probably didn't know it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Compact Flash drives just got large enough to hold your basic operating system, web-surfing, IM'ing, productivity tool set and office suite, cheap enough to actually go for it (4G Ultras recently dropped below the $150 mark.) Granted, four gigs isn't enough for leet warez/mp3z/gamez monkeys, but it is enough to keep someone productive if they want to be productive on the go. At 9MB/s read/write they aren't as fast as the fastest drives out there, but ... I wonder what kind of current they draw under use - I know that under no use they draw no current, but I wonder what kind of difference they would make by using one in a laptop instead of a regular drive.
Yes, there is the issue of the drive getting bad spots over use - but if you could get twice the battery life out of a laptop and knew you had to replace the media once a year or so, maybe it would be worth it. Not to mention you don't have to worry about a head crash or losing your data if you drop it (might break your laptop, but your data will be ok.)
Throughput. Actually I occasionally chart the growth in CPU speed vs the size of hard drives and there is an amazing difference (with drive space growing a LOT faster than CPU speed) - but on a purely bandwidth based observation, narrowing it down to laptop hard drives only : drives haven't really kept up.
Six years ago most laptop drives were 3600 rpm. Now most laptop drives are 4200 rpm (yes there are plenty of 5400 and 7200 rpm drives out there, but I'd wager to say that most people don't have them.) That's a 17% (1.1667x) boost over six years. Compare that to the PII-300MHz in use six years ago vs the P4-3GHz we can get today and there is a 1,000% increase (10x). Even if you drop in a Toshiba 7200rpm drive, you are still only looking at a 2x improvement in speed over six (or more) years.
I have always thought that mercury would be the ideal liquid for this sort of closed loop system - it has a thermal conductivity / capacity of somewhere around 14x that of water (and thus would be 14x more efficient.) Granted there is that whole 'highly conductive and highly corrosive' aspect of mercury, plus the nasty side effect of being toxic - but if the system was properly engineered to take those into account, why not go for broke?
Just curious - does anybody know what language the JRE, Java compiler, etc .. are written in?
If only there was a way to store all that electric power. Maybe massive plates of lead and zinc in a acid solution, in big heavy square things with little plugs on top to add distilled water from time to time (I have no idea why, but I envision that there would be a good reason to do so on my mythical device.) Give it a catchy name like 'Deep Cycle Truck Battery' and sell them at Wal*Mart for ~$50 apiece, letting us fill an entire room with them for under a thousand dollars.
Someone should invent that.
Sounds like we agree. Let me know if you guys need me (see .sig for details.)
Actually, that's how software maintenance happens in the real world.
Real code is complex, and generally written as a massive matrix of inter-related side-effects causing things to happen*. When it gets written, the entire matrix is designed, intended, documented, and understood. Two years later the guys working on the code have no clue about the matrix of side-effect driven code, no clue about the complex set of business factors driving the technical aspects of the code (and by business factors, in a MMORPG I mean things like class X has bad faction with everybody making it more difficult for him to start out, but in return for overcoming that challenge has more powerful magic later in life - stuff like that) and when they are making a change they go in, find the one line of code that looks like what needs to be fixed and just change it without knowing all the places that change will ripple back to, invisibly, via the side-effect matrix.
A technical phrase to understand here is 'globally scoped variables' - and another one is 'design intent' - and as the current set of hacks don't understand the ramifications or scope of either, this is what happens.
Footnotes
* I didn't say it was a good idea. I just said it happens.
Yea, this guy's in for a brutal wakeup call the first time he takes a woman out for dinner at a nice resturant.
64GB ought to be enough for anybody.
~Glonoinha, April 23, 2006
Better yet, set up some sort of clearing house where old game licenses go to die, and let us buy a legit license (and download the program to play) for a nominal fee (five bucks maybe?)
This would solve a few things - legitimatize the "grey" area redistribution of 'abandonware', and let those that pirated the game when they were poor college kids living on less than $400 a month (to cover rent, food, clothing, bills, etc) buy a license to clear their consience. A few years ago I bought a new in the box copy of Gunship for the C=64. Not to actually play the game, but simply to put to rest a karma inbalance for the many, many hours I spent playing that game on a friend's computer using disks (5.25" floppys) that had the word 'Gunship' written on them in black magic marker.
Search for QQP's Battles of Destiny. It isn't the same, but once you can see past the slightly boxy graphics to embrace the game underneath - it is pretty good. And it was released as freeware also.
This guy doesn't agree with you.
Google nosepilot.
Online games could also be played on fast dial-up connections, at least until a few years ago (see also : Everquest, Tanarus, etc.) According to the FAQ, even EQ2 was designed to be playable on a 56k dial-up connection. Quake III, CounterStrike::Source, etc - can also function in a dial-up environment (with sucky pings, but still works.)
What that means is : it is a low-bandwidth consumer that makes the customer happy when he has low-latency connections. You don't move a lot of data, but you want it to get there and back really fast. Plus, when you are doing this you don't do anything to intentionally make your connection slower so you aren't slogging your pipe with massive downloads.
I envision that the ISPs love online gamers.
Simple - take this phrase :
"LaCosaNostradamus, I'ma bitchslap you."
There you go. Am I a) Happy, b) Upset, c) Mad, d) Indifferent, e) Horny, or f) all of the above?
You can't tell. Even if you thought you knew, you you would be wrong - and that's worse than not knowing because you will assume a stance that defends against (or rallys with) however you perceive I am being, which would make the conversation go downhill from there.
Didn't we recently read here that 50% of people think they can accurately read the 'tone' of an email, when in reality they only get it right about 20% of the time?
(Answer to my question : f) all of the above, but not at you.)
Programming languages have become much easier to write lame-ass code and then pretend to debug in.
There, fixed it for you.
Given that about 90% of all new code where I work is getting written in SQL (stored procedures) or Java, both languages which are over a decade old (plus or minus) - no, it isn't getting any easier to write corporate grade code. What is happening is that lame coder wanna-bes can slap together code using whatever they can learn in their six week jump-start (for the love of whatever Hindu God you guys pray to - please add switch / case statements to that six week course) and send us back broken code that takes forever to fix and costs 4x as much to maintain over the life of the app. You can write ugly code in any language, even the new 'easy to use' languagess (I know because I have seen it.)
The problem is that people THINK it is getting easier to code, so they accept all of the above as normal. There is going to be hell to pay once all this code hits critical mass, and those that can survive between now and then may come out pretty good. For now, not so fun.
With the ability to manage / monitor more than one GMail account at the same time, I use GMail Manager instead of GMail Notifer.
That said, changing the network.http.pipelining to true and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 100 made an AMAZING difference in page render speeds.
Thanks.
I know I'm not the only one has has never heard of 180 Solutions. From Wikipedia:
Those fuckers are evil - even the Wikipedia page on 180 Solutions tried to install spyware on my computer.
If only there was another operating system out there, one that would let them continue to use their machine in the same fashion they have been using it since they bought it ... like maybe a way to continue using WinXP after Vista comes out.
/.) - just regular ol' dudes, they kind that would buy a Dell 3000 series desktop in the first place. No? Me either.
Naw, that won't work - you are right, all those people are screwed.
The day Vista comes out and their machines up and die because WinXP ceases to exist, I bet they are all going to run out and buy new computers.
Just curious, do you know even a single person that had a machine running Windows 2000 (or Win98, or WinME) go out and buy a boxed version of WinXP at CompUSA (paying $200 of their own money, not warez edition,) take it home and install it on their fully operational computer? Not leet haxors (or anybody that reads
A funny twist on that perspective : being a software developer without a strong background in math (dare I say a 'love' of math) often boils down to being a superficial and sycophantic copier and paster of source code. I have had projects handed to me with massive chunks copied and pasted from source found in Google (including spelling mistakes in the comments - no joke) without so much as a single reference giving credit to the original source.
.wad files from Doom in a hex editor and recognizing patterns, reverse engineering the file structure in order to extract the nature of the file, then creating a new .wad file from scratch - that's a much better indicator.
If someone is mid-way through college on the way to a degree in software engineering and doesn't already love math, it's probably too late for them to change perspectives. It's not too late for them to change majors, however, and pursue something more in line with their natural (and long term ingrained) aptitude. Enjoying Quake III or Myst, and being really good at IM - this isn't a strong indication of an aptitude for software engineering. Opening the
Granted these are just rantings from someone that is entirely undercaffeinated - my position this may change after a few cups of tea.
A BS in Computer Science should be easy to get with only average math talent. Can you get a B in Cal I? You can handle the math in CS.
... yea ... those of us that took differential equations (DifEQ) are going to have to disagree with you on this one.
Ummm
All I can remember about DifEQ was that it was like the Star Trek of wild ass math - you have a seriously nasty equation that you need to take the derivative of, but nobody on this planet can do it so you get Scotty to beam you to a planet in a parallel time space continua, and in the process the nature of the equation transforms slightly into something you can calculate. You do your math there, get an answer, have Scotty beam you back to Earth and the answer changes form into the Earth form. I believe there were drugs involved in the process, but it was college so we may be talking correlation, not causation.
If the OP sucks at math, he can still do 'computers and tech' but perhaps a bachelors degree in 'software engineering' isn't how he is going to get there. It doesn't take a BS/CS from the Dept of Engineering to program Java or design a network, current HR requirements not withstanding.
Dell PowerEdge 6800 $101,000 fully loaded. :) )
Oh yea, and Dell has fanboys (like me
If you are unemployed (or job hunting) right now and you think the cost of getting the certs is high, consider the cost of NOT getting the certs.
After that comment I had to go look.
Here it was I thought they were producing something, or selling something (hence the terms 'customers' and 'revenue').
Nope. Just a big-ass referral site, sucking down affiliate fees for driving real customers to real sites that sell real stuff.
Now I understand why Google k-lined them.
If only there was a way to pay Google to put a link to your web page at the top when people searched on certain terms.
Good luck on that one, though - because that would be against all that Google represents.
Are most of those kids going to be interested in that? Hell no.
Exactly - and possibly the best reason to do it that way.
I would love to fly. I'm guessing you would love to fly. Most of us would love nothing more than to find a Cessna 172 parked on the runway lined up for departure, gassed up and already running - climb in and start flying. Finally do in real life what we have been doing in MS FlightSim 2004 (etc) for the past two decades. I'm sure most of us could do it, too - depart Meigs Field, avoid the buildings downtown, fly over the water for a bit, buzz the game field on the far side of Chicago, the hang a left, fly for 10 minutes on a heading 200, find another big airport, completely ignore the other air traffic and buzz in for a touch and go on the runway, fly out over the water to get my bearings again, fly North for 10 minutes, line up on Meigs, put it down safely, roll to a stop at the end of the runway, get out (leave the engine running) and abandon it right there on the runway.
And it would be a complete waste of resources. I would be nowhere closer to being able to apply myself in commercial aviation than if it never happened.
What I described is to real flying what plopping a kid in front of a WinXP box and letting him surf the web, IM, and play games is to computing. Entertaining, but other than that - nothing.
There are kids out there that have a natural aptitude for computers. These are the ones that would sit at a C=64 with a manual, thrilled at the prospect of changing the color of the screen using PEEK and POKE commands. These are the ones that would find enough joy in using old GWBASIC commands to create boxes and circles on the screen, quickly observing the problem that a 4:3 aspect ratio on a VGA monitor does to their circles and adjusting their approach (putting an oval on the screen with a 3:4 ratio so it comes out perfectly round on the screen) to 'win'. These are the ones that will marvel at getting two computers to 'talk' to each other over a CCITT v.22bis telephone connection (that's 2400 baud, also known as 240 characters per second, also known as incredibly slow) or 10BaseT. These are the ones that will sit for hours playing Rocky's Boots on an Apple ][+, absorbing the concepts of Boolean algebra and AND/OR/XOR/NOT gates. These are the ones that will love you for helping them understand the bubble sort so they can implement it from memory, and then love you more for showing them another faster sort - staying away at nights trying to understand how the radix sort works because they are just on the cusp of wrapping their newbie software engineer heads around recursion.
And these are the ones for whom you will be able to make a real difference, even on crap old hardware.
Personally I would turn up my nose at a weak old Cessna 152, say that unless I get to fly current hardware (MiG-29 comes to mind, I love those) I'm not interested. That's a pretty good indication that I'm not commercial pilot material. The guy that is hanging around the airport, offering to hand-wash your old yellow Piper Cub (and your car, and mow your lawn) for free just hoping you will let him be on the runway to watch you take off and land - THAT's the guy with potential.
That guy exists in the computer world too. Twenty five years ago it was me. Figure out which one(s) it is in your 'underprivileged' group of kids and all of the above will fall into place, and will make sense. And you will get out of your community service project exactly what you were hoping to get (but probably didn't know it.)