I have worked for school systems as a techie, and I can tell you that these schools are not contracting with Microsoft for support. At best, they have support for the Dells they're buying, and having that run out is not a huge issue. When the computer breaks, take it out of commission and use it for spare parts. When you run out of spare parts, that's when you finally go buy new machines. The machines that were in the lab go to secondary purposes (i.e. go replace older machines in classrooms).
Microsoft: It just works. Of course, I'm using definition 3 from Dictionary.com: just(adv): By a narrow margin; barely: just missed being hit; just caught the bus before it pulled away.
Windows seems to have no problems with detecting a printer... I feel like there has to be a documented call/answer that would make the model/revision known to Windows. Could CUPS be altered to do the same thing in its installer? Could it have an online driver repository for the printer?
Makes me wish I had time to actually work on these things, even if I find out that this can't be done.;)
"Alrighty, Johnson. I've got a group of judges that are travelling, and they have to go to different places. They will not be going to the same place. They want to rent cars, and they can share cars through certain legs of their journies and get their own for others. We want to minimize cost of rental cars for their trips, and we need a general program so we can do this for several groups of judges."
"Oh, and Johnson: I'm going to need a 100% correct solution on my desk within forty-five minutes. It needs to have a small memory footprint and execute for any case I want to throw at it in less than 10 seconds."
This isn't really a contest that exercises overall coding prowess. Very specific skills are being exercised, and these aren't seen in day-to-day programming.
College students who are preparing full time (and, no joke, they are really preparing all the time) will beat almost any group of individuals that are not practicing.
This is very much an effort based on the teams themselves. The cream of the crop is picked from the school's department, and they train/practice for months. If you were to lift any other student and send them off to competition, the lack of preparation would make them noncompetitors.
These competitions exercise one very specific programming skill: Dash off a program that can do this impressive thing (with not much real-world applicability) as fast as possible, as a team. Real-world situations never call for this sort of programming, so these people are truly drilling for this type of event.
The programming competition is actually a very abstract view of how good the CS department is. My university has a fairly good department, but we sent teams that did not practice... They fared poorly.
However, other schools (that aren't as good) have courses that teach nothing but how to do these things. They practice this for 10-15 hours a week, giving them a significant edge. These problems are available, so it's not like you can't prepare for them in a huge way.
The issue with AOL wasn't that they were reading things. The issue was that if I wrote a poem, sent it to a friend, my poem could be published by AOL without my explicit permission.
Think of all of the musicians who send their songs to their buds. AOL could make a compilation album out of the really good ones, if they somehow could get copies of Direct IMs.
I had a professor who still swears by the P3-based Xeon for his work and that it will always smoke anything that the P4 has to offer. Why? Strong integer performance.
The professor I speak of is Bob Hyatt, and his research is on computer chess (specifically Crafty, the chess engine we all know and love). The reason the P3-family of chips does such a good job with it is because of the strength of integer calculations. Dr. Hyatt has repeatedly stated that there is not a single floating point instruction to be had in Crafty.
However, the FP unit in the P3 sucks big time. Intel made a processor with a much longer pipeline in order to improve floating point performance--FP is now world class, but the integer stuff won't be as good as it was with the P3 family. (The shorter pipeline is what makes the Athlon a superior performer in some aspects to this day.) This is why we slashdotters are always screaming that raw clock speed will never indicate the supreme chip.
The respect of your coworkers is a big factor in how good your IT job is. I'm sure all IT workers (or former IT workers like me) would agree that the actual types of hardware or difficulty of the work isn't the biggest issue. As an integral part of the organization, sometimes IT workers don't get treated as well as they should.
(I had it pretty good... Only one or two people I didn't enjoy.)
is feature scaling for different browsers. Sometimes you need to see whether you have new mail or look at an old message while at a computer that can't/won't support more feature-laden browsers (i.e. University machines that cannot be upgraded, dumb terminals, lynx).
I wouldn't mind a less-slick interface in those situations... I just want to read email!
I currently live in a large Southern city with roads that are barely suitable for cars... Sidewalks are in bad shape, and you're likely to get killed if you try to share the road.
What cities are going to be more bike-friendly? Is there a portion of the country that encourages this type of transportation?
There is actually a lot of evidence that CTSS stole a lot of code from SCO in the compiled executables themselves. Once disassembled, you see a lot of repitition... Here is one line of offending code:
MOV AX BX
We expect a check of $599 by Friday from each of you who downloaded the code.
Love,
SCO's Legal Team
The choice between Beowulf and Big Iron...
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...can be simple. The more complex a problem gets, the more likely you need one supercomputer as opposed to a cluster. It's not elitism, it's just that the problem will probably require a lot of communication between processors.
Any kind of networking solution between computers will never be as fast as a hard-wired bus can be. If a lot of communication between nodes is required, you will spend more time waiting than computing, which shoots efficiency to hell.
A tough issue, of course, but this can be somewhat equated to the situation with p2p. Would we have the networks be responsible for copyright infringment, or the users themselves? Shouldn't we be policing the users instead of the ISPs?
Doesn't this lead to a new type of DOS attack? Granted, this wouldn't be used in a corporate setting, but it could seriously much around with the enduser experience if all sorts of high priority packets shut off other traffic.
I am an unprivileged user on a Windows XP box at my university. I was basically given an account so that I could demo some software I'm developing.
Let me tell you how it went...
First, I tried to install an extension for Visual Studio. It asked whether I would like to install it for everyone or just me... Of course, I clicked just me, because I'm a non-privileged user, and others may not want it either.
ACCESS DENIED. YOU HAVE INSUFFICIENT PRIVILEGES.
Great. Anyway, I eventually got the sysadmin to install it for me. So I go to do some developing in Visual Studio. I load up a bit of code and start to run it.
ACCESS DENIED. YOU MUST BE PART OF THE DEBUGGER GROUP TO RUN THIS PROGRAM.
Debugger group?!?? wtf?!?! Anywho, hurdle after hurdle kept popping up, with me sending emails to the helpdesk daily. It never was fixed, I just started hauling in the laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
I have worked for school systems as a techie, and I can tell you that these schools are not contracting with Microsoft for support. At best, they have support for the Dells they're buying, and having that run out is not a huge issue. When the computer breaks, take it out of commission and use it for spare parts. When you run out of spare parts, that's when you finally go buy new machines. The machines that were in the lab go to secondary purposes (i.e. go replace older machines in classrooms).
Oooh, ooh! I have one!
Microsoft: It just works. Of course, I'm using definition 3 from Dictionary.com: just(adv): By a narrow margin; barely: just missed being hit; just caught the bus before it pulled away.
Windows seems to have no problems with detecting a printer... I feel like there has to be a documented call/answer that would make the model/revision known to Windows. Could CUPS be altered to do the same thing in its installer? Could it have an online driver repository for the printer?
;)
Makes me wish I had time to actually work on these things, even if I find out that this can't be done.
I believe the operative words that he used were "could not be placed into a product that had a [sic] open source license". You know, past tense. =)
As a recipient of said document, you're free to redistribute it to whomever you please.
"Alrighty, Johnson. I've got a group of judges that are travelling, and they have to go to different places. They will not be going to the same place. They want to rent cars, and they can share cars through certain legs of their journies and get their own for others. We want to minimize cost of rental cars for their trips, and we need a general program so we can do this for several groups of judges." "Oh, and Johnson: I'm going to need a 100% correct solution on my desk within forty-five minutes. It needs to have a small memory footprint and execute for any case I want to throw at it in less than 10 seconds."
This isn't really a contest that exercises overall coding prowess. Very specific skills are being exercised, and these aren't seen in day-to-day programming. College students who are preparing full time (and, no joke, they are really preparing all the time) will beat almost any group of individuals that are not practicing.
This is very much an effort based on the teams themselves. The cream of the crop is picked from the school's department, and they train/practice for months. If you were to lift any other student and send them off to competition, the lack of preparation would make them noncompetitors. These competitions exercise one very specific programming skill: Dash off a program that can do this impressive thing (with not much real-world applicability) as fast as possible, as a team. Real-world situations never call for this sort of programming, so these people are truly drilling for this type of event.
The programming competition is actually a very abstract view of how good the CS department is. My university has a fairly good department, but we sent teams that did not practice... They fared poorly.
However, other schools (that aren't as good) have courses that teach nothing but how to do these things. They practice this for 10-15 hours a week, giving them a significant edge. These problems are available, so it's not like you can't prepare for them in a huge way.
Burning karma, but I'm gonna make it a point that I know math, too. =)
;)
A: If your x is between 0 and pi, it's always positive.
B: If you want to know whether sin(x) is going to be positive or negative, it ranges from 0 to one from 0 to pi. Therefore, positive again.SIN(x)
Trig is your friend!
The issue with AOL wasn't that they were reading things. The issue was that if I wrote a poem, sent it to a friend, my poem could be published by AOL without my explicit permission.
Think of all of the musicians who send their songs to their buds. AOL could make a compilation album out of the really good ones, if they somehow could get copies of Direct IMs.
Indeed,there is no such thing as free ice cream. Ya's gots ta register with Baskin Robins, w/ email, address, etc.
My bad. =-X He actually said something very similar to what you said.
I had a professor who still swears by the P3-based Xeon for his work and that it will always smoke anything that the P4 has to offer. Why? Strong integer performance.
The professor I speak of is Bob Hyatt, and his research is on computer chess (specifically Crafty, the chess engine we all know and love). The reason the P3-family of chips does such a good job with it is because of the strength of integer calculations. Dr. Hyatt has repeatedly stated that there is not a single floating point instruction to be had in Crafty.
However, the FP unit in the P3 sucks big time. Intel made a processor with a much longer pipeline in order to improve floating point performance--FP is now world class, but the integer stuff won't be as good as it was with the P3 family. (The shorter pipeline is what makes the Athlon a superior performer in some aspects to this day.) This is why we slashdotters are always screaming that raw clock speed will never indicate the supreme chip.
It's like the Klingons always say...
Good software isn't released... Good software escapes, leaving a wake of death and destruction.
I worked IT in a lower-income county school system over the summer. I helped upkeep/build the network, repair computers, and install software.
The air conditioning was never on, and having forty computers running in a room in the deep South is not fun.
Oh, and my manager was right beside me. She was an excellent boss.
The respect of your coworkers is a big factor in how good your IT job is. I'm sure all IT workers (or former IT workers like me) would agree that the actual types of hardware or difficulty of the work isn't the biggest issue. As an integral part of the organization, sometimes IT workers don't get treated as well as they should.
(I had it pretty good... Only one or two people I didn't enjoy.)
is feature scaling for different browsers. Sometimes you need to see whether you have new mail or look at an old message while at a computer that can't/won't support more feature-laden browsers (i.e. University machines that cannot be upgraded, dumb terminals, lynx).
I wouldn't mind a less-slick interface in those situations... I just want to read email!
I currently live in a large Southern city with roads that are barely suitable for cars... Sidewalks are in bad shape, and you're likely to get killed if you try to share the road.
What cities are going to be more bike-friendly? Is there a portion of the country that encourages this type of transportation?
There is actually a lot of evidence that CTSS stole a lot of code from SCO in the compiled executables themselves. Once disassembled, you see a lot of repitition... Here is one line of offending code:
MOV AX BX
We expect a check of $599 by Friday from each of you who downloaded the code.
Love,
SCO's Legal Team
...can be simple. The more complex a problem gets, the more likely you need one supercomputer as opposed to a cluster. It's not elitism, it's just that the problem will probably require a lot of communication between processors.
Any kind of networking solution between computers will never be as fast as a hard-wired bus can be. If a lot of communication between nodes is required, you will spend more time waiting than computing, which shoots efficiency to hell.
A tough issue, of course, but this can be somewhat equated to the situation with p2p. Would we have the networks be responsible for copyright infringment, or the users themselves? Shouldn't we be policing the users instead of the ISPs?
Doesn't this lead to a new type of DOS attack? Granted, this wouldn't be used in a corporate setting, but it could seriously much around with the enduser experience if all sorts of high priority packets shut off other traffic.
Actually, NC-17s are strictly enforced. R and PG/PG-13 are with parental escort.
I am an unprivileged user on a Windows XP box at my university. I was basically given an account so that I could demo some software I'm developing.
Let me tell you how it went...
First, I tried to install an extension for Visual Studio. It asked whether I would like to install it for everyone or just me... Of course, I clicked just me, because I'm a non-privileged user, and others may not want it either.
ACCESS DENIED. YOU HAVE INSUFFICIENT PRIVILEGES.
Great. Anyway, I eventually got the sysadmin to install it for me. So I go to do some developing in Visual Studio. I load up a bit of code and start to run it.
ACCESS DENIED. YOU MUST BE PART OF THE DEBUGGER GROUP TO RUN THIS PROGRAM.
Debugger group?!?? wtf?!?! Anywho, hurdle after hurdle kept popping up, with me sending emails to the helpdesk daily. It never was fixed, I just started hauling in the laptop.
Matthew