For the record there are two issues: 1. Changes are not persisted to the hard drive (in fact it doesn't even touch the hard drive) so your favorites, any documents you create in OO, etc are lost if you reboot (but you can save them to a USB thumbdrive if you pop it in after the GUI is running, works nice) 2. It defaults to like 85Hz for display which freaks out LCD's. There is a fix out there, involved hitting ALT F2 to get to the command line, entering runlevel 3, using sax2 to reconfigure the display manually, going back to runlevel 5 (which I did to run on my machine at home, and on a laptop.)
It takes a while to get used to being in the safe environment, I still find myself not clicking on random URLs due to ingrained fear of spyware, drive by installs of crap, etc...
You had programming languages? Damn - when I started out we had to flip to the back of C= magazine and poke long lists of numbers into memory one at a time. Took us days to put in a program and then you couldn't even save them to disk (or even tape!) If someone tripped over the power cord you had to power it back up and start all over.
you can't stockpile a ton of pay software into a bundle to give out to everyone.
Sure you can. It's called WAREZ.
How do you think India became a pseudo-power over the past 10 years, on retail copies with legit licenses? NOT!
Like the folks at AutoCAD or Microsoft could give a damn about a bunch of twelve year old impoverished school kids in the middle of Mexico using their software.
If you were going to run Linux 2.4 kernel on the cluster, what are your thoughts to the Mac Mini with Yellow Dog (or whatever distro you can get to work on it)?
Granted by itself it isn't the most powerful box on the hill, but since you can stack like 12 of them in the same space as a regular sized PC tower you could make up for it in massive quantities.
If he can get away with only 12G of memory he can run a significantly cheaper PowerEdge SC1425.
I say significantly cheaper, but not cheap as it isn't (figure $15k with the Win2003ServerEE license on the cheap one, loaded with memory, and easily twice that for the more expensive one.)
How big is your dataset, per machine? If you are talking 5G of data or less on a single box, realize that Sybase ASE 12.5 for Linux is free if you follow three rules (single CPU, 2G of RAM in the box (or less), 5G maximum for your database tables.)
It gets a little pricey (relatively speaking) if you want to exceed those - but it's a bad ass back-end for free if your data isn't likely to grow beyond 5G.
As for the computer - I want the ambitious, eager, agressive (in the field) guys on my team. If a guy tells me the last thing he wants to do when he gets home is turn on a computer... I have to wonder about how driven he will be (why get into the field in the first place, if you don't love it.)
On the cell - I'm not going to disagree with you much. Maybe I'm still euphoric with my new company - you know how during the interview there is the 'no way' dollar figure in your head, the 'yea, but with reservations' figure, and the 'hell yea - can I start tomorrow' dollar figure you keep back there in dream land? Well I let them go first during negotiations and they came across with $5,000 more than that last one, plus twice as much vacation as I was expecting. I'm just putting that $5k (more like $250 a month after taxes) towards semi-work related expenses (aka - cool tech toys, books, classes, maybe a new computer or two for the house) and calling it even. They can call me on my cell any time, to tell the truth.
Here's a thought - all the guys that already have personal cell phones just put those numbers on the list, and anybody that doesn't have a personal cell phone makes the unwritten 'gets a pissy performance review at the end of the year.'
A cell phone, like a home computer and a microwave oven - just part of the investment in yourself that a person makes in order to be a productive member of society.
Any 'programmer' that doesn't have a computer at home (or a shit box like a Pentium 233 running Windows 95) - not one of my peers. The same may be said for cell phones - although I offer up some leeway on that one.
I agree with you - carrying both a personal cell and a "on-call" cell from work would be ridiculous. Just give work your personal number and tell them cancel the cost of the work phone.
Amazing how fast those i386 processors were at doing absolutely nothing at all. Assign your Linux box a task or two and all of a sudden faster CPU's become appealing.
My C=64 was a bad motherfucker, right up until the point I wanted to do some serious number crunching on it (or play games.) The minute I decide that there's more to life than interacting with the operating system on an 80x25 character wide CUI... corporate grade relational databases serving up data to a few dozen concurrent users for example, or multivariant calculus and diff/equations - and I'm looking for all the horsepower I can get.
For those of you that missed it the other day, some guy was arrested because of his buying habits at the grocery store - tracked by his frequent flyer card (or whatever they call them - I don't use em) from the same store.
Evidently months ago he bought the same kind of lighter fluid that was used to light his own house on fire with his wife and kids inside. He was pretty much going to 'pound me in the ass prison' until someone else 'fessed up to lighting the fire (the family didn't get hurt in the fire, IIRC.)
If you think for 60 seconds you aren't being watched - ask that guy.
I just bought a Toshiba 512M SD card for $35 out the door (ok I had a $15 coupon, it was $50 to start) and I still haven't decided if I will send in the $20 Mail In Rebate... bringing the net cost for a 512M SD card down to about $15. How much cheaper can it get?
Oh yea, no fair quoting me on that last line a decade from now ala '640k ought to be enough for anybody'.
I'm always amazed at how much faith people put in '64 bit' security. You realize that 64bit is a whopping 8 bytes (characters) don't you?
If 64 bit is the 'stronger' version of the encryption I'm surprised that the regular version lasted as long as it did. Given a sufficent sample size and enough caffeine in my system I can occasionally crack 16 bit encryption in my head (using simple heuristic pattern matching; and it helps to know what I'm looking for.)
Were/are there no Indian equiv's of Rosa Parks, Malcom X, or Martin Luther King. Is there nobody in the lower caste that can say 'I have a dream'?
I mean don't get me wrong - racism is fun and all but DAMN! To tell a quarter of a billion people 'whoops, you were born in the wrong caste so you are forever fucked and can never, ever dig your way out - and you have to accept that and be happy with it'... that is pretty harsh.
I say let India go for broke with their space program. What's the worst thing that could happen, assuming they build spaceships as good as they write computer code? A space program today is an incredible money pit that will consume as much money as possible and give absolutely no return whatsoever - but it will give the news agencies all kinds of fun things to report over the next few years.
Thanks for a new favorite in my browser - I will give that one more thought when I get more time to tinker. Having the computer drive material components out side the computer is the first step in making computers more useful in the next evolution.
Any chance your code is out there for us wanna-be's to read in order to jumpstart our play with the Phidgets?
I forgot the best part - totally keyboard driven so you aren't swapping back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. 100% of your interaction is at the keyboard so no wasted effort or movement - I have peers at work that joke about it being the 'Matrix' UI because it is only marginally more graphical than the green screens in the movie, and because I can become one with the machine when I am using it.
OP: come up with a single piece of hardware to replace the discrete components 'keyboard' and 'mouse' or figure out a way to let us keep our hands on the keyboard and use something else to control the mouse (body movements, subtle head movements, eye tracking and using thumb buttons below the spacebar for mouse button entry, weight shifting in our chair, jaw-grinding / movements and teeth clicking - something) and we will get an extension on that.
In many applications on the PC you can use Enter to send data to the comptuer and Shift-Enter to throw a carriage return in there (ie, a Return key.)
You can also use CTRL S and CTRL Q to send the computer a 'please stop sending me data until further notice (transmit off / XOFF)' and 'resume sending me data (transmit on / XON)', respectively, when the computer is streaming data to you (like in communications software, telnet, terminal emulators, etc.)
That's the one you are looking for - character based user interface using Win32 API for file manipulation. It is a shareware release of XTreeGold from the early 90's with a cult following dating back to about 1986. It won just about every user interface award known to man until it got dropped in about 1995.
Basically it recursively reads your entire drive (or a subset) and all the directories, gets the file names, sizes, attributes (RASH), dates, and directory structure, presents it in a multi-box character based user interface, and allows you to slice and dice your fileset using filters to only see the files you are interested in, and either walk up and down the tree using the arrow keys, move in and around files in a single directory, or treat branches of the tree (or the entire drive) as if all the files were in a single directory. Originally the program was written as an easy way to copy, delete, view, edit, move files, create and delete directories in the DOS world, but it grew over time into what it is today. One of the best 'side effects' of how it works is heuristic searching for file(s) when you know absolutely nothing firm about what you are looking for, but you would recognise it when you saw it (ie, a file you last edited sometime around Christmas, either a.doc or a.txt file, and it contains the word 'fragment' in the body of the text, and it is somewhere on your hard drive or one of your network drives.
Original poster - if you want some honest insight into where we are headed (or should be headed) : look to fiction. I recommend the following works in order to give a good recommendation as to where the dollars could be best invested for a brighter tomorrow:
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It pays particular attention to the user interface of tomorrow, and the dangers of letting one entity own all the bandwidth (and the dangers of off-shoring.) Neuromancer by William Gibson. He invented the phrase 'Cyberspace' in this book. He offers up a strong vision of next generation user interface. Johnny Mnemonic, movie based on a story by William Gibson. Offers up a strong vision of next generation user interfaces including a fiber optic plug in the back of your skull. Some material shared with Neuromancer, a nice visual representation. The first Matrix movie. Watch it again. The Sixth Day, movie with Arnold, came out 5 years ago. In particular pay attention to the holographic woman generator (get me one of those.)
If you wonder if fiction really drives reality - it doesn't. It does a pretty good job of predicting the future reality, however, as we can see from Dick Tracy (watch / communicators), Asimov's writings about robots, and Batman (nerds with incredible computer rigs in their basement (decorated to look like a 'cave'), sitting at the computer in their underware.)
Bingo. I looked into data services on my GSM phone.
They wanted three cents per kilobtye. That's $30 a Meg - are those motherfuckers crazy?
Download one really good porn avi or mpg and you are talking about $20,000. For $20,000 you should have dozens of real live women delivered to wherever you happen to be using your cell phone, lubed up and ready for sex.
Re:I'll have to disagree ('Circle takes the square
on
Geeks in Management?
·
· Score: 1
The only problem with your approach is that the manager (or whoever is asking you to quote an estimate) doesn't have three columns in which to put numbers.
Ways for your estimates to get more accurate: 1. Keep track of projects or even parts of projects that you gave estimates for - and keep accurate records on how long it actually took. If you spent an hour on it Monday, two hours on it Tuesday and an hour on Wednesday, delivering it at noon on Thursday (the rest of the time you were waiting on someone else's SLA) how long did it really take you? Four hours? No. Four days. There is strong reason to believe that a similar project in the future will take you four days. Explain that it won't be 40 hours worth of work, only four hours worth of real work... but it is going to take you four days to accomplish.
2. You can probably give a good estimate of roughly how much code it will take to do a given task (plus or minus, order of magnitute.) Take a pretty big project and figure how long it really took (start to finish, concept to final delivery) and then look at the project - count function points and count lines of code. You will be amazed at how low the lines of code per hour actually is (4LOC sustained over the course of the project is pretty average. 6LOC sustained is pretty good. 10LOC per hour for every hour between the first concept meeting and final delivery is heavy hitter. Nobody I have ever met can do 15 LOC / hour sustained for the entire length of the project. That's not per hour you spend actually programming, but average total over the course of as many months as it took to actually do the entire thing. Cut and paste doesn't count, nor comments or blank lines. Ditto function points. You figure out how many function points or LOC / hour you can do sustained over the course of a big project - all you gotta do is guess how many lines of code or function points the project will be (often easier to guess than actual hours because you will generally be re-writing an existing application and can count the LOC or function points in the old app.)
3. Never quote time in less than half-day increments. Most developers can't get their caffeine up to operating levels in under two hours, much less get 'in the zone'.
4. Want your productivity to double? Put your IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, WSAD, whatever you are using) in your startup group in Windows so it is already open with some code in the editor when you turn your computer on. No joke. The sooner you can get a developer dialed in and thinking in 'code' the sooner he starts banging out the good stuff. If he opens even a single email before starting his editor - there goes an hour. I have no idea how to auto-start apps in Xwindows on Linux (KDE or Gnome) but if you can figure it out more power to you.
Slashdot Mirror
If only SuSE 9.2 came in a nifty boot Live CD version that booted directly into your choice of KDE or Gnome ...
:
:
Oh wait - it does, and I'm on it right now.
Get yours here
FTP site with SuSE 9.2 Live CD/DVD iso files
For the record there are two issues
1. Changes are not persisted to the hard drive (in fact it doesn't even touch the hard drive) so your favorites, any documents you create in OO, etc are lost if you reboot (but you can save them to a USB thumbdrive if you pop it in after the GUI is running, works nice)
2. It defaults to like 85Hz for display which freaks out LCD's. There is a fix out there, involved hitting ALT F2 to get to the command line, entering runlevel 3, using sax2 to reconfigure the display manually, going back to runlevel 5 (which I did to run on my machine at home, and on a laptop.)
It takes a while to get used to being in the safe environment, I still find myself not clicking on random URLs due to ingrained fear of spyware, drive by installs of crap, etc...
You had programming languages?
Damn - when I started out we had to flip to the back of C= magazine and poke long lists of numbers into memory one at a time. Took us days to put in a program and then you couldn't even save them to disk (or even tape!) If someone tripped over the power cord you had to power it back up and start all over.
True story, for what it's worth.
you can't stockpile a ton of pay software into a bundle to give out to everyone.
Sure you can.
It's called WAREZ.
How do you think India became a pseudo-power over the past 10 years, on retail copies with legit licenses? NOT!
Like the folks at AutoCAD or Microsoft could give a damn about a bunch of twelve year old impoverished school kids in the middle of Mexico using their software.
Running a lot of virtual machines a'la VMware.
If you were going to run Linux 2.4 kernel on the cluster, what are your thoughts to the Mac Mini with Yellow Dog (or whatever distro you can get to work on it)?
Granted by itself it isn't the most powerful box on the hill, but since you can stack like 12 of them in the same space as a regular sized PC tower you could make up for it in massive quantities.
Dell will sell you a nice PowerEdge 6600 with 32G (or less) with Windows 2003 Server EE which happily and eagerly runs on and will take advantage of up to 8 CPUs and 32G of memory.
If he can get away with only 12G of memory he can run a significantly cheaper PowerEdge SC1425.
I say significantly cheaper, but not cheap as it isn't (figure $15k with the Win2003ServerEE license on the cheap one, loaded with memory, and easily twice that for the more expensive one.)
Jesus man, 1,500 watts?
I cook dinner with less than that.
How big is your dataset, per machine?
If you are talking 5G of data or less on a single box, realize that Sybase ASE 12.5 for Linux is free if you follow three rules (single CPU, 2G of RAM in the box (or less), 5G maximum for your database tables.)
It gets a little pricey (relatively speaking) if you want to exceed those - but it's a bad ass back-end for free if your data isn't likely to grow beyond 5G.
Sybase on Linux
As for the computer - I want the ambitious, eager, agressive (in the field) guys on my team. If a guy tells me the last thing he wants to do when he gets home is turn on a computer ... I have to wonder about how driven he will be (why get into the field in the first place, if you don't love it.)
On the cell - I'm not going to disagree with you much. Maybe I'm still euphoric with my new company - you know how during the interview there is the 'no way' dollar figure in your head, the 'yea, but with reservations' figure, and the 'hell yea - can I start tomorrow' dollar figure you keep back there in dream land? Well I let them go first during negotiations and they came across with $5,000 more than that last one, plus twice as much vacation as I was expecting. I'm just putting that $5k (more like $250 a month after taxes) towards semi-work related expenses (aka - cool tech toys, books, classes, maybe a new computer or two for the house) and calling it even. They can call me on my cell any time, to tell the truth.
Here's a thought - all the guys that already have personal cell phones just put those numbers on the list, and anybody that doesn't have a personal cell phone makes the unwritten 'gets a pissy performance review at the end of the year.'
A cell phone, like a home computer and a microwave oven - just part of the investment in yourself that a person makes in order to be a productive member of society.
Any 'programmer' that doesn't have a computer at home (or a shit box like a Pentium 233 running Windows 95) - not one of my peers. The same may be said for cell phones - although I offer up some leeway on that one.
I agree with you - carrying both a personal cell and a "on-call" cell from work would be ridiculous. Just give work your personal number and tell them cancel the cost of the work phone.
Sure, it doesn't serve up a site or anything
... corporate grade relational databases serving up data to a few dozen concurrent users for example, or multivariant calculus and diff/equations - and I'm looking for all the horsepower I can get.
Amazing how fast those i386 processors were at doing absolutely nothing at all.
Assign your Linux box a task or two and all of a sudden faster CPU's become appealing.
My C=64 was a bad motherfucker, right up until the point I wanted to do some serious number crunching on it (or play games.) The minute I decide that there's more to life than interacting with the operating system on an 80x25 character wide CUI
Plus I bet it plays a mean game of Doom III.
How about either doing it as a HUD (like on jet fighters) or even better as an optic overlay (like on the AH-64).
... dream big.
I mean the Corvette had digital readouts back in 1985 - if you are going to dream
Something like this
Original /. story.
For those of you that missed it the other day, some guy was arrested because of his buying habits at the grocery store - tracked by his frequent flyer card (or whatever they call them - I don't use em) from the same store.
Evidently months ago he bought the same kind of lighter fluid that was used to light his own house on fire with his wife and kids inside. He was pretty much going to 'pound me in the ass prison' until someone else 'fessed up to lighting the fire (the family didn't get hurt in the fire, IIRC.)
If you think for 60 seconds you aren't being watched - ask that guy.
I just bought a Toshiba 512M SD card for $35 out the door (ok I had a $15 coupon, it was $50 to start) and I still haven't decided if I will send in the $20 Mail In Rebate ... bringing the net cost for a 512M SD card down to about $15. How much cheaper can it get?
Oh yea, no fair quoting me on that last line a decade from now ala '640k ought to be enough for anybody'.
I'm always amazed at how much faith people put in '64 bit' security. You realize that 64bit is a whopping 8 bytes (characters) don't you?
If 64 bit is the 'stronger' version of the encryption I'm surprised that the regular version lasted as long as it did. Given a sufficent sample size and enough caffeine in my system I can occasionally crack 16 bit encryption in my head (using simple heuristic pattern matching; and it helps to know what I'm looking for.)
WTF? Are you for real?
... that is pretty harsh.
Were/are there no Indian equiv's of Rosa Parks, Malcom X, or Martin Luther King. Is there nobody in the lower caste that can say 'I have a dream'?
I mean don't get me wrong - racism is fun and all but DAMN! To tell a quarter of a billion people 'whoops, you were born in the wrong caste so you are forever fucked and can never, ever dig your way out - and you have to accept that and be happy with it'
I say let India go for broke with their space program. What's the worst thing that could happen, assuming they build spaceships as good as they write computer code? A space program today is an incredible money pit that will consume as much money as possible and give absolutely no return whatsoever - but it will give the news agencies all kinds of fun things to report over the next few years.
Thanks for a new favorite in my browser - I will give that one more thought when I get more time to tinker. Having the computer drive material components out side the computer is the first step in making computers more useful in the next evolution.
Any chance your code is out there for us wanna-be's to read in order to jumpstart our play with the Phidgets?
I forgot the best part - totally keyboard driven so you aren't swapping back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. 100% of your interaction is at the keyboard so no wasted effort or movement - I have peers at work that joke about it being the 'Matrix' UI because it is only marginally more graphical than the green screens in the movie, and because I can become one with the machine when I am using it.
OP: come up with a single piece of hardware to replace the discrete components 'keyboard' and 'mouse' or figure out a way to let us keep our hands on the keyboard and use something else to control the mouse (body movements, subtle head movements, eye tracking and using thumb buttons below the spacebar for mouse button entry, weight shifting in our chair, jaw-grinding / movements and teeth clicking - something) and we will get an extension on that.
In many applications on the PC you can use Enter to send data to the comptuer and Shift-Enter to throw a carriage return in there (ie, a Return key.)
You can also use CTRL S and CTRL Q to send the computer a 'please stop sending me data until further notice (transmit off / XOFF)' and 'resume sending me data (transmit on / XON)', respectively, when the computer is streaming data to you (like in communications software, telnet, terminal emulators, etc.)
ZTree
.doc or a .txt file, and it contains the word 'fragment' in the body of the text, and it is somewhere on your hard drive or one of your network drives.
That's the one you are looking for - character based user interface using Win32 API for file manipulation. It is a shareware release of XTreeGold from the early 90's with a cult following dating back to about 1986. It won just about every user interface award known to man until it got dropped in about 1995.
Basically it recursively reads your entire drive (or a subset) and all the directories, gets the file names, sizes, attributes (RASH), dates, and directory structure, presents it in a multi-box character based user interface, and allows you to slice and dice your fileset using filters to only see the files you are interested in, and either walk up and down the tree using the arrow keys, move in and around files in a single directory, or treat branches of the tree (or the entire drive) as if all the files were in a single directory. Originally the program was written as an easy way to copy, delete, view, edit, move files, create and delete directories in the DOS world, but it grew over time into what it is today. One of the best 'side effects' of how it works is heuristic searching for file(s) when you know absolutely nothing firm about what you are looking for, but you would recognise it when you saw it (ie, a file you last edited sometime around Christmas, either a
Original poster - if you want some honest insight into where we are headed (or should be headed) : look to fiction. I recommend the following works in order to give a good recommendation as to where the dollars could be best invested for a brighter tomorrow :
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It pays particular attention to the user interface of tomorrow, and the dangers of letting one entity own all the bandwidth (and the dangers of off-shoring.)
Neuromancer by William Gibson. He invented the phrase 'Cyberspace' in this book. He offers up a strong vision of next generation user interface.
Johnny Mnemonic, movie based on a story by William Gibson. Offers up a strong vision of next generation user interfaces including a fiber optic plug in the back of your skull. Some material shared with Neuromancer, a nice visual representation.
The first Matrix movie. Watch it again.
The Sixth Day, movie with Arnold, came out 5 years ago. In particular pay attention to the holographic woman generator (get me one of those.)
If you wonder if fiction really drives reality - it doesn't. It does a pretty good job of predicting the future reality, however, as we can see from Dick Tracy (watch / communicators), Asimov's writings about robots, and Batman (nerds with incredible computer rigs in their basement (decorated to look like a 'cave'), sitting at the computer in their underware.)
Bingo. I looked into data services on my GSM phone.
They wanted three cents per kilobtye.
That's $30 a Meg - are those motherfuckers crazy?
Download one really good porn avi or mpg and you are talking about $20,000. For $20,000 you should have dozens of real live women delivered to wherever you happen to be using your cell phone, lubed up and ready for sex.
The only problem with your approach is that the manager (or whoever is asking you to quote an estimate) doesn't have three columns in which to put numbers.
: ... but it is going to take you four days to accomplish.
Ways for your estimates to get more accurate
1. Keep track of projects or even parts of projects that you gave estimates for - and keep accurate records on how long it actually took. If you spent an hour on it Monday, two hours on it Tuesday and an hour on Wednesday, delivering it at noon on Thursday (the rest of the time you were waiting on someone else's SLA) how long did it really take you? Four hours? No. Four days.
There is strong reason to believe that a similar project in the future will take you four days. Explain that it won't be 40 hours worth of work, only four hours worth of real work
2. You can probably give a good estimate of roughly how much code it will take to do a given task (plus or minus, order of magnitute.) Take a pretty big project and figure how long it really took (start to finish, concept to final delivery) and then look at the project - count function points and count lines of code. You will be amazed at how low the lines of code per hour actually is (4LOC sustained over the course of the project is pretty average. 6LOC sustained is pretty good. 10LOC per hour for every hour between the first concept meeting and final delivery is heavy hitter. Nobody I have ever met can do 15 LOC / hour sustained for the entire length of the project. That's not per hour you spend actually programming, but average total over the course of as many months as it took to actually do the entire thing.
Cut and paste doesn't count, nor comments or blank lines.
Ditto function points.
You figure out how many function points or LOC / hour you can do sustained over the course of a big project - all you gotta do is guess how many lines of code or function points the project will be (often easier to guess than actual hours because you will generally be re-writing an existing application and can count the LOC or function points in the old app.)
3. Never quote time in less than half-day increments. Most developers can't get their caffeine up to operating levels in under two hours, much less get 'in the zone'.
4. Want your productivity to double? Put your IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, WSAD, whatever you are using) in your startup group in Windows so it is already open with some code in the editor when you turn your computer on. No joke. The sooner you can get a developer dialed in and thinking in 'code' the sooner he starts banging out the good stuff. If he opens even a single email before starting his editor - there goes an hour.
I have no idea how to auto-start apps in Xwindows on Linux (KDE or Gnome) but if you can figure it out more power to you.
The bank I work at is absolutely, crack-ho, addicted to IE as a platform.
This seems to be the biggest recurring issue.
How about we just port IE to Linux and be fucking done with it.