I think the day is close where you could buy TV/Monitors that have docking facilities for smart phones. With dual/quad processor phones coming on stream that are capable of most day to day computer activities, the days of the old desk top are numbered. The new desktop is the phone docking station (aka TV/Monitor) + wireless mouse/keyboard. Tablets are too big to be pocket portable, not big enough to do get stuff done.
I got it right. The mirror was precisely inaccurate - by one inch. It was manufactured to a very tight tolerance ( high precision ) but to the wrong shape - accuracy. In this case the 'truthfulness' of the mirror is the shape. The wrong shape won't work.
OK, don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good old fashioned bashing against the almighty iSteve with my Ballmer signature series chair thrower, but c'mon, seriously? Do we have to consider every damn application that runs XP a bad thing?
Seems the "damned" OS has managed to survive in the corporate world years past Vista (we're STILL ordering brand-new systems with XP), and Netbooks have seen their own resurgence of support for the aging yet stable and predictable OS.
I run a Macbook for school. What do I have loaded on Fusion? Yup, you guessed it. XP, for when I MUST run a Windows app. Every student comes marching in every year with a new Vista or OSX-loaded laptop, yet my entire computer lab is still running...yup, right again. Good ol' XP. Old, yet functional.
And rounding out this volley back to the subject at hand, some simple applications (like a microscope) I would rather NOT have to worry about the bullshit bloat of some other OS, especially when you consider your target audience is USED to seeing XP.
Ok. I'll bite. I am a Scientific Instrument Engineer. I have worked in government and Universersity labs. When you have an expensive instrument like a NMR or mass spec with a price in excess of $100K then you would expect a long service life. And in fact the more you use and instrument the more valuable it becomes as you gain 'trust' in the instrument capabilities through multiple calibrations. When the instrument is controlled through a OS like XP then you limit the life time of the instrument. Also you have manufactures unwilling to provide support on untested variations of the OS (installing service packs etc). A solution I have seen is to put instruments with ancient ( i have seen win98 and SunOS 4.0 in current use ) on a subnet that is nated and firewalled off from the rest of the network.
As someone who works for a startup, I cannot empathize how WRONG you are. Almost every aspect of what we do to bring our particular product to market is new and needs to be thoughtfully researched and developed. It isn't easy but the potential rewards make it worthwhile. We spend a lot of time 'proving' our ideas with prototypes to provide proof that we know what we are doing and that the risk for investors is reduced.
A world without patents would look a lot like the FOSS world. Hardware/drugs/machinery would be ripped apart with immunity played with, improved, and refactored for different needs and roles. Hardware would rapidly evolve to niche markets, new hardware service companies and R&D houses would cater for not only maintenance and service contracts but for R&D and specialization tasks. The pace of development seen in the computing/software/FOSS world would transfer to the bulk of manufactured goods. Survival for manufacturers in this world means being the fastest and fittest. This also plays into the development of rapid prototyping tools into small scale manufacturing plants. Power/profit would go to the people who could innovate best/fastest.
So the question is how do we go from this stupid situation ( of inane patents and patent trolling ) to my dream world?
Having done my BSc in CS at Otago I was exposed to (roughly in order) pascal, ada, assembly, C, lisp, C++, Java, smalltalk, Haskel, prolog, SQL, python and programmed on OS7, DEC alphas, x86 Linux, HP Unix, Sun solaris. They took care to expose the students to as many different OS and languages as possible. Oddly enough can't remember doing any Win32 programming there. Anyways I agree about the lack of hardware knowledge taught during my CS course. I had finished an NZCE in electronics a couple of years earlier and was looking forward to some easy hardware credits. Didn't happen. I have ended up doing mostly embedded programming in C and wished that more embedded systems design was included in the course.
I have a BSc comp sci and a degree in electronics. Why? Because I wanted to do more cool stuff. I wasn't interested in any future career opportunities. If you want to do another degree don't do for someone else's benefit - do it to pursue your own interests and passions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the day is close where you could buy TV/Monitors that have docking facilities for smart phones. With dual/quad processor phones coming on stream that are capable of most day to day computer activities, the days of the old desk top are numbered. The new desktop is the phone docking station (aka TV/Monitor) + wireless mouse/keyboard. Tablets are too big to be pocket portable, not big enough to do get stuff done.
http://www.roam3.com/ are developing a system to give early warning of earthquakes to USAR here in Christchurch.
Use a guillotine. A big foot operated version has no problems going thru pcb's.
Based on past experience then the 3.0 release will be faster but buggier than the 2.6.40 release would have been.
I got it right. The mirror was precisely inaccurate - by one inch. It was manufactured to a very tight tolerance ( high precision ) but to the wrong shape - accuracy. In this case the 'truthfulness' of the mirror is the shape. The wrong shape won't work.
Accuracy and precision are different see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision. In this case you should have said "...was incredibly precise one inch out of position."
"...The only bad news? It runs XP."
OK, don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good old fashioned bashing against the almighty iSteve with my Ballmer signature series chair thrower, but c'mon, seriously? Do we have to consider every damn application that runs XP a bad thing?
Seems the "damned" OS has managed to survive in the corporate world years past Vista (we're STILL ordering brand-new systems with XP), and Netbooks have seen their own resurgence of support for the aging yet stable and predictable OS.
I run a Macbook for school. What do I have loaded on Fusion? Yup, you guessed it. XP, for when I MUST run a Windows app. Every student comes marching in every year with a new Vista or OSX-loaded laptop, yet my entire computer lab is still running...yup, right again. Good ol' XP. Old, yet functional.
And rounding out this volley back to the subject at hand, some simple applications (like a microscope) I would rather NOT have to worry about the bullshit bloat of some other OS, especially when you consider your target audience is USED to seeing XP.
Ok. I'll bite. I am a Scientific Instrument Engineer. I have worked in government and Universersity labs. When you have an expensive instrument like a NMR or mass spec with a price in excess of $100K then you would expect a long service life. And in fact the more you use and instrument the more valuable it becomes as you gain 'trust' in the instrument capabilities through multiple calibrations. When the instrument is controlled through a OS like XP then you limit the life time of the instrument. Also you have manufactures unwilling to provide support on untested variations of the OS (installing service packs etc). A solution I have seen is to put instruments with ancient ( i have seen win98 and SunOS 4.0 in current use ) on a subnet that is nated and firewalled off from the rest of the network.
As someone who works for a startup, I cannot empathize how WRONG you are. Almost every aspect of what we do to bring our particular product to market is new and needs to be thoughtfully researched and developed. It isn't easy but the potential rewards make it worthwhile. We spend a lot of time 'proving' our ideas with prototypes to provide proof that we know what we are doing and that the risk for investors is reduced.
A world without patents would look a lot like the FOSS world. Hardware/drugs/machinery would be ripped apart with immunity played with, improved, and refactored for different needs and roles. Hardware would rapidly evolve to niche markets, new hardware service companies and R&D houses would cater for not only maintenance and service contracts but for R&D and specialization tasks. The pace of development seen in the computing/software/FOSS world would transfer to the bulk of manufactured goods. Survival for manufacturers in this world means being the fastest and fittest. This also plays into the development of rapid prototyping tools into small scale manufacturing plants. Power/profit would go to the people who could innovate best/fastest. So the question is how do we go from this stupid situation ( of inane patents and patent trolling ) to my dream world?
Having done my BSc in CS at Otago I was exposed to (roughly in order) pascal, ada, assembly, C, lisp, C++, Java, smalltalk, Haskel, prolog, SQL, python and programmed on OS7, DEC alphas, x86 Linux, HP Unix, Sun solaris. They took care to expose the students to as many different OS and languages as possible. Oddly enough can't remember doing any Win32 programming there. Anyways I agree about the lack of hardware knowledge taught during my CS course. I had finished an NZCE in electronics a couple of years earlier and was looking forward to some easy hardware credits. Didn't happen. I have ended up doing mostly embedded programming in C and wished that more embedded systems design was included in the course.
Can't go past a gumstix (http://gumstix.com/) for a open embedded linux platform.
I have a BSc comp sci and a degree in electronics. Why? Because I wanted to do more cool stuff. I wasn't interested in any future career opportunities. If you want to do another degree don't do for someone else's benefit - do it to pursue your own interests and passions.