If anyone could have done that, then they would have gotten an A for sure, but it was a pretty remedial course. The point was to give students and intro to *nix and force them to use the tools, not to create a challenge for them to work out so they can stay comfy with their windows tools. I was not one of the "bitchers", iirc the first assignment ended up being like 40-60 lines of perl at most (begginer perl which could be compressed down to a lot less), so it's not like you were being forced to do a huge project from the command line. The idea was to get students out of their comfort zone and get them using *nix tools and it worked. Ohh, it was also most people's first introduction to versioning systems (CVS back then, I have no idea what they are using now).
Great link. I recently used WikiMatrix in a project to decide what wiki would work best (it has a good amount of information on each wiki and links of course if you need more details). My opinion on MediaWiki is that it is overkill for most applications that would have a small community. If you need scalability MediaWiki has it, but most don't need it and would be better suited with something else.
Just because they have clean air doesn't make them Neanderthals.
I'm guessing you have never been to Santiago.
From this site: "The 5 million inhabitants of Santiago, Chile are exposed to high levels of air pollution during a significant portion of the year."
Beautiful country though, and I'm sure there are plenty of N/A cities with worse pollution than Santiago (heck, the air in Missoula MT was pretty bad when there was an inversion).
I agree completely. Why should you "teach" an IDE? Teach the concepts, give them the basics of a language and let them decide what they use to edit and compile it with. For courses where a binary will be tested in some way (either through scripts or a demo) my school specifies what computers the code is expected to compile on (well compile or be interpretted, depends on the language) so the students can verify their assignment works (either through ssh'ing in or running it in person), it doesn't matter what the student uses to create the code.
I used VI and gcc on linux for my OS class since everything would be run under linux anyhow, but that wasn't the case for everyone. I had a friend that would write the code in Visual Studio and would later sftp and test his code on the system it would be run on (I never got a clear answer on that one). Some people used pico, some people eclipse.. to each their own. Even for java not everyone would use an ide (first year courses they encouraged using textpad) however you were free to use anything (eclipse, netbeans, VI, Emacs, notepad etc).
There was one class that was basically an intro to perl and C that we were "forced" to ssh into a computer and do our coding there (3 choices of editor iirc: VI, Emacs and pico). There was no (s)ftp, no email, no x forwarding, nothing (CLI progs only). They also claimed that they would check that keystrokes were a realistic stroke rate (as to catch people copy and pasting from local). Man how people b*tched.. but I learned VI because of it and am thankfull to this day. And now that I remeber that I would say that at least one prof should do something like that. IDEs are great, but it seems that some people rely on them a little to heavily.
I assume you mean this dyson not the artist or the wide reciever. The last one was stretching it a bit but someone could refer to a picture by will dyson as a "dyson".
I think the universally accepted vacuum for analogies is the hoover.
Reminds me of the canadian gun registry. It is a registry of the legally owned guns in canada, which is great because crimes only happen with legally owned guns. I'm sure this will reduce crime in the UK as the gun registry has reduced crime in Canada.
On a serious note, if this does come to fruition I hope that the database is a lot more secure than the canadian gun registry (which became a shopping list for gun thieves with an interest in rare and expensive guns).
If you find the site funny I highly recomend the book.
The book is wet your pants hilarious and one could argue it has a deeper back story about a kid who want/needs acceptance. Well worth the read and the measely $14CAN (I assume it is cheaper in the 'states as the US dollar is still stronger than the looney).
I lived in Montana for a while and I don't understand why more people don't live there. Cheap property, beautiful land, enough ammenities in the bigger cities (helena, missoula etc), and oh did I mention cheap? Of course I have no idea about job situations there.
Might want to reconsider Canada if you want to avoid the property inflation. The city I live in (population of aproximately 300,000) has an avgerage housing price of about $400,000 CAN. Want a 4 bedroom 20 year old home? That'll be $500,000. How about a new home of that is 2,400sqft? That'll be more than $600,000 CAN. Of course that is in a city where is doesn't snow half the year. If you love snow and slush and don't need ammentities like a selection of shopping, then sure you can get some cheap property.
So the software failed, but in the end it didn't really fail, because it showed someone was doing their job as they were supposed to be.
So in your opinion it didn't fail, and it's a reasonable arguement but what about from the traveller's perspective? I have been on the recieving end of a mistaken item in my bags.
airportsecurity: "What do you have in your bag that is a metal coil?!" Me:"Nothing." airportsecurity:"Tell us what you have in your bag that is a metal coil before we check it or we will be forced to detain you!" Me:The only things that have any metal in that bag are a cd player and some cd's.. maybe the stack of cd's looks like a coil to you guys? airportsecurity:"The item is NOT CD's what is it?" airportsecurity2:"--glares-- You inisist there isn't something 12 to 14 inches long that is a metal coil in your bag? About 2 inches in diameter? Have you left your bag anywhere?" ME"No, I mean yes I insist there isn't anything like that and no I haven't left my bag anywhere.. it was on my back!" ...
To make a long story short they surrounded me in security only to find out that they mistook which bag the "item" was in. Oh the "item", it was a candle holder, pretty cool one at that in the short time I saw it (it was a coil so that the base could be spun to bring the candle height up to keep it consistent).
The security did not even chastise the guy for bringing a large metalic item on the flight, they didn't even make him check it. This was before 911 though, back when large heavy blunt objects were safe on a plane (It was Colonel Mustard in the 737 with the candle stick!).
I did not recieve and appology. Instead I recieved a reprimand for having a keychain which was a mini-supersoaker (which I thought nothing of since it had been there a year). Yes, it could shoot water (a thimble full reserve that would get you 3-4 shots of half a meter or so), but it really was not dangerous, not as dangerours as candle holder in my opinion. I guess I could have filled it with a thimble of bleach and threatened a stewardess to get me another beer, or I'd make her blind, if she would be kind enough to stand within 50 centimeters of me and hold very still as the aim is not very accurate on a TOY WATERGUN KEYCHAIN!
Security doesn't like reason, they took my keychain.
Moral of the story: I bet it sucked for the people with the "bomb" in their suitcase.
The progrect wasn't home automation, it was a controller that had to be wireless. A friend is currently using it for a wireless thumb reader that his company is implementing. I have no idea about available products (by your post obciously commercial items are not very available), just that it is easy enough to find boards to implement your own devices.
Why does he think a beta OS is going to be any more secure than 'legacy' OSes?
Easy, because he is an average user, not a power user or programmer etc. People think newer is better.
For example I have a friend who insisted I upgrade her computer to XP from win2k. Instead of just doing that I asked her why. The response: "It'll be faster." I querried some more and the general idea for her was, "It's newer so it should run better."
It took me half an hour to explain that it wouldn't be faster, and if there wasn't some feature in XP she desperately needed then she should not bother "upgrading" as it would most likely feel slower. (removing spyware etc would though:P)
You can't blame people for thinking that though, it's like people who turn the stove upto the top setting to heat it up "quicker", they don't understand the mechanics behind it and their assumptions are misguided (The book, "Design of everyday things" has some good examples of this. Excellent book btw.)
Not sure that is the right analogy.. it'd be more like if the olympics had one event: the 100 meter dash. That is exactly what this competition is, a single event race, it's only measure is speed of completion. Of course it is hard to evaluate less tangibles like maintainabilty and ease of reuse.
My proposal: make programming competitions more like figure skating, where you get points on different aspects from a variety of judges. Might make a interesting tv show even (probably not in all honesty).
Look what they did without him. 12 years of absolutely nothing.
The switch to power pc from the old motorola happened during that time, that's pretty major (they would have died w/o it). At that time slapping in a new proc and porting your os wasn't so trivial.. oh and the processor didn't exist yet, it was being co-developed with ibm. If I crack open a book I can find a nice list of things that were produced in that time.
There was plenty of developement that didn't see the light of day during that era though, the OS pink for one, based off the mach kernal iirc (they started playing with mach in '88) but some stuff did come out. They didn't produce "nothing", else they would not be here today. Although they did waste billions on many projects that didn't see the light of day or were not successful (newton anyone?).
I have to agree with you. I am nearly finished reading the book "Apple" by Jim Carlton. It's geared towards readers that are into business (ie very little low level tech is covered), but an interesting history indeed. From the references a LOT of the info in the book comes from interviews of various board members, engineers and other important people in Apple's history (including B. Gates). I had no idea how many projects apple had botched that could have been successful...
Anyhow, to get to the point, Spindler dropped the ball in his last few years there. Sales predictions were waay off, his last quater there was something like a 68 Million dollar loss when it should have been their strongest (sales are usually highest before christmas), I think Markoff had just been let go (right after he warned that they were over producing the lowend performa and it wouldn't sell), to "recover" Spindler laid off 12% of the staff IIRC, which cost greater than $120 million.
Oh and there was that time he hid under his desk and wouldn't come out...
So true. I've done this many times with both Windows and linux. Windows fairs ok if the hardware is similar, although I haven't had consistent results even with similar hardware. If I am changing something major on a system I will always re-install windows since I've seen issues pop up later. Linux on the other hand works amazingly well. Similar systems aren't an issue at all, and even big differences haven't choked it (well same arch at least). I've done a switch between a p3 system, with tnt vid, via chipset etc and chucked the hd in an old AMD 266Mhz with an ali chipset (iirc), s3 video and different periprials and it ran fine. It just booted up, detected the hardware and carried on.
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I read it as "20Hz" the first time and was thinking "All our bass belong to M2Z".
If anyone could have done that, then they would have gotten an A for sure, but it was a pretty remedial course. The point was to give students and intro to *nix and force them to use the tools, not to create a challenge for them to work out so they can stay comfy with their windows tools. I was not one of the "bitchers", iirc the first assignment ended up being like 40-60 lines of perl at most (begginer perl which could be compressed down to a lot less), so it's not like you were being forced to do a huge project from the command line. The idea was to get students out of their comfort zone and get them using *nix tools and it worked. Ohh, it was also most people's first introduction to versioning systems (CVS back then, I have no idea what they are using now).
Great link. I recently used WikiMatrix in a project to decide what wiki would work best (it has a good amount of information on each wiki and links of course if you need more details). My opinion on MediaWiki is that it is overkill for most applications that would have a small community. If you need scalability MediaWiki has it, but most don't need it and would be better suited with something else.
Just because they have clean air doesn't make them Neanderthals.
I'm guessing you have never been to Santiago.
From this site:
"The 5 million inhabitants of Santiago, Chile are exposed to high levels of air pollution during a significant portion of the year."
Beautiful country though, and I'm sure there are plenty of N/A cities with worse pollution than Santiago (heck, the air in Missoula MT was pretty bad when there was an inversion).
I agree completely. Why should you "teach" an IDE? Teach the concepts, give them the basics of a language and let them decide what they use to edit and compile it with. For courses where a binary will be tested in some way (either through scripts or a demo) my school specifies what computers the code is expected to compile on (well compile or be interpretted, depends on the language) so the students can verify their assignment works (either through ssh'ing in or running it in person), it doesn't matter what the student uses to create the code.
I used VI and gcc on linux for my OS class since everything would be run under linux anyhow, but that wasn't the case for everyone. I had a friend that would write the code in Visual Studio and would later sftp and test his code on the system it would be run on (I never got a clear answer on that one). Some people used pico, some people eclipse.. to each their own. Even for java not everyone would use an ide (first year courses they encouraged using textpad) however you were free to use anything (eclipse, netbeans, VI, Emacs, notepad etc).
There was one class that was basically an intro to perl and C that we were "forced" to ssh into a computer and do our coding there (3 choices of editor iirc: VI, Emacs and pico). There was no (s)ftp, no email, no x forwarding, nothing (CLI progs only). They also claimed that they would check that keystrokes were a realistic stroke rate (as to catch people copy and pasting from local). Man how people b*tched.. but I learned VI because of it and am thankfull to this day. And now that I remeber that I would say that at least one prof should do something like that. IDEs are great, but it seems that some people rely on them a little to heavily.
It sucks like a Dyson.
I assume you mean this dyson not the artist or the wide reciever. The last one was stretching it a bit but someone could refer to a picture by will dyson as a "dyson".
I think the universally accepted vacuum for analogies is the hoover.
Very well, but how much is it in Ladas ? ;)
Do you want that in Nivas, Rivas, Samaras, Okas or Kalinas?
Reminds me of the canadian gun registry. It is a registry of the legally owned guns in canada, which is great because crimes only happen with legally owned guns. I'm sure this will reduce crime in the UK as the gun registry has reduced crime in Canada.
On a serious note, if this does come to fruition I hope that the database is a lot more secure than the canadian gun registry (which became a shopping list for gun thieves with an interest in rare and expensive guns).
One man's plus 5 funny is another womans -1 troll.
If you find the site funny I highly recomend the book.
The book is wet your pants hilarious and one could argue it has a deeper back story about a kid who want/needs acceptance. Well worth the read and the measely $14CAN (I assume it is cheaper in the 'states as the US dollar is still stronger than the looney).
I lived in Montana for a while and I don't understand why more people don't live there. Cheap property, beautiful land, enough ammenities in the bigger cities (helena, missoula etc), and oh did I mention cheap? Of course I have no idea about job situations there.
Finally, a use for Arnold J. Rimmer.
If you didn't find that absolutely hilarious you really need to watch some Red Dwarf.
That, or move to Canada.
Might want to reconsider Canada if you want to avoid the property inflation. The city I live in (population of aproximately 300,000) has an avgerage housing price of about $400,000 CAN. Want a 4 bedroom 20 year old home? That'll be $500,000. How about a new home of that is 2,400sqft? That'll be more than $600,000 CAN. Of course that is in a city where is doesn't snow half the year. If you love snow and slush and don't need ammentities like a selection of shopping, then sure you can get some cheap property.
So the software failed, but in the end it didn't really fail, because it showed someone was doing their job as they were supposed to be.
...
So in your opinion it didn't fail, and it's a reasonable arguement but what about from the traveller's perspective? I have been on the recieving end of a mistaken item in my bags.
airportsecurity: "What do you have in your bag that is a metal coil?!"
Me:"Nothing."
airportsecurity:"Tell us what you have in your bag that is a metal coil before we check it or we will be forced to detain you!"
Me:The only things that have any metal in that bag are a cd player and some cd's.. maybe the stack of cd's looks like a coil to you guys?
airportsecurity:"The item is NOT CD's what is it?"
airportsecurity2:"--glares-- You inisist there isn't something 12 to 14 inches long that is a metal coil in your bag? About 2 inches in diameter? Have you left your bag anywhere?"
ME"No, I mean yes I insist there isn't anything like that and no I haven't left my bag anywhere.. it was on my back!"
To make a long story short they surrounded me in security only to find out that they mistook which bag the "item" was in. Oh the "item", it was a candle holder, pretty cool one at that in the short time I saw it (it was a coil so that the base could be spun to bring the candle height up to keep it consistent).
The security did not even chastise the guy for bringing a large metalic item on the flight, they didn't even make him check it. This was before 911 though, back when large heavy blunt objects were safe on a plane (It was Colonel Mustard in the 737 with the candle stick!).
I did not recieve and appology. Instead I recieved a reprimand for having a keychain which was a mini-supersoaker (which I thought nothing of since it had been there a year). Yes, it could shoot water (a thimble full reserve that would get you 3-4 shots of half a meter or so), but it really was not dangerous, not as dangerours as candle holder in my opinion. I guess I could have filled it with a thimble of bleach and threatened a stewardess to get me another beer, or I'd make her blind, if she would be kind enough to stand within 50 centimeters of me and hold very still as the aim is not very accurate on a TOY WATERGUN KEYCHAIN!
Security doesn't like reason, they took my keychain.
Moral of the story: I bet it sucked for the people with the "bomb" in their suitcase.
The progrect wasn't home automation, it was a controller that had to be wireless. A friend is currently using it for a wireless thumb reader that his company is implementing. I have no idea about available products (by your post obciously commercial items are not very available), just that it is easy enough to find boards to implement your own devices.
ZigBee isn't new, V1 of the standard was released in 2004. I investigated using it for a project a year ago.
Here's the ZigBee Aliance faq.
Why does he think a beta OS is going to be any more secure than 'legacy' OSes?
:P)
Easy, because he is an average user, not a power user or programmer etc. People think newer is better.
For example I have a friend who insisted I upgrade her computer to XP from win2k. Instead of just doing that I asked her why. The response: "It'll be faster." I querried some more and the general idea for her was, "It's newer so it should run better."
It took me half an hour to explain that it wouldn't be faster, and if there wasn't some feature in XP she desperately needed then she should not bother "upgrading" as it would most likely feel slower. (removing spyware etc would though
You can't blame people for thinking that though, it's like people who turn the stove upto the top setting to heat it up "quicker", they don't understand the mechanics behind it and their assumptions are misguided (The book, "Design of everyday things" has some good examples of this. Excellent book btw.)
Not sure that is the right analogy.. it'd be more like if the olympics had one event: the 100 meter dash. That is exactly what this competition is, a single event race, it's only measure is speed of completion. Of course it is hard to evaluate less tangibles like maintainabilty and ease of reuse.
My proposal: make programming competitions more like figure skating, where you get points on different aspects from a variety of judges. Might make a interesting tv show even (probably not in all honesty).
Look what they did without him. 12 years of absolutely nothing.
The switch to power pc from the old motorola happened during that time, that's pretty major (they would have died w/o it). At that time slapping in a new proc and porting your os wasn't so trivial.. oh and the processor didn't exist yet, it was being co-developed with ibm. If I crack open a book I can find a nice list of things that were produced in that time.
There was plenty of developement that didn't see the light of day during that era though, the OS pink for one, based off the mach kernal iirc (they started playing with mach in '88) but some stuff did come out. They didn't produce "nothing", else they would not be here today. Although they did waste billions on many projects that didn't see the light of day or were not successful (newton anyone?).
At least the batteries are included, sometimes they're not.
I have to agree with you. I am nearly finished reading the book "Apple" by Jim Carlton. It's geared towards readers that are into business (ie very little low level tech is covered), but an interesting history indeed. From the references a LOT of the info in the book comes from interviews of various board members, engineers and other important people in Apple's history (including B. Gates). I had no idea how many projects apple had botched that could have been successful...
Anyhow, to get to the point, Spindler dropped the ball in his last few years there. Sales predictions were waay off, his last quater there was something like a 68 Million dollar loss when it should have been their strongest (sales are usually highest before christmas), I think Markoff had just been let go (right after he warned that they were over producing the lowend performa and it wouldn't sell), to "recover" Spindler laid off 12% of the staff IIRC, which cost greater than $120 million.
Oh and there was that time he hid under his desk and wouldn't come out...
So is oracle's rich feature the one the one where you pay through the nose for their software and they get rich?
I just tried IE6 on win xp 64, the 32 bit version was vunerable the 64 bit version of IE was not.
I wonder if that means this guy will have to get recertified to get a MVP in Vista.
So true. I've done this many times with both Windows and linux. Windows fairs ok if the hardware is similar, although I haven't had consistent results even with similar hardware. If I am changing something major on a system I will always re-install windows since I've seen issues pop up later. Linux on the other hand works amazingly well. Similar systems aren't an issue at all, and even big differences haven't choked it (well same arch at least). I've done a switch between a p3 system, with tnt vid, via chipset etc and chucked the hd in an old AMD 266Mhz with an ali chipset (iirc), s3 video and different periprials and it ran fine. It just booted up, detected the hardware and carried on.