Luckily, we have satellites for detecting ICBM launches work in the IR spectrum (well I assume we use lots of techniques). I believe infrared radiation is a lot harder to hide than visible light.
I have a four-year-old TiBook that says you're wrong.
That said, the level of discoloration is minor enough to not be immediately obvious, could probably be scrubbed off if I cared enough about it (I assume it's just collected oil and dirt), and certainly is not the ugly yellow that shows up on the MacBooks.
The worst part about this is that it seems to be standard practise for government contracting. The same is often done for (non-huge-hole-in-the-ground) road construction, and it's no big surprise for me when I find out that I'm responsible for inspecting my own work on a contract job.
Over the years, a few US states and many individual school districts have experimented with one-student-one-computer, to general positive results. It's not without its detractors, of course, and I suspect that lately these programs have to a degree fallen under the wheels of the "teach toward the test" canflagration now sweeping the nation.
As a former student of a school with a one-student-one-computer program, I'd like to point out that I'm not convinced by the positive results people are reporting. When you spend God-only-knows-how-much-money and muck around with kids' educations with a program like this, admitting you screwed up is just about the dumbest thing a person could possibly do. I can't speak for anyone else, but my high school really screwed up with that idea. That didn't stop the administrators from bragging and bragging and bragging as if these laptops had turned everyone into a genius child. (Rather than just being one more distraction.)
The part of this whole computers-in-the-classroom thing that nobody seems to be getting is that a computer is not a solution. A computer is a tool. I place people who wave the computers in the class banner all the time in the same mental category as people who are convinced that $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE is a gift from God and perfect for every situation.
If we want to fix up our schools, we should start by reviewing our crufty old educational plan that hasn't been revised for decades and basically ignores all major research on how people learn. Once we have a new plan, we can go about figuring out how to implement it. I'm sure that computers will be the best way to implement some details of the plan, but they should be used only for those things, and if it turns out that there's a better way to do something else (lectures, for example, are almost guaranteed to suck if PowerPoint is involved), then they should be avoided.
But stuff like the OLPC program seem to work from the assumption that computers are this magic bullet that will instantly improve education - through some hand-wavy magic computron field, maybe?
I agree, these people need a leg-up. I just worry that exporting this educational cargo cult we've been constructing for the past few years to countries that already have even more problems with education than us has more to do with tripping them into the mud than giving them a leg up.
I mean for me to drive home to my folks place is equivalent to [roughly] driving entirely from one end of England to the other. And I don't even leave the province I'm in to do my trip!!! Talk to me when you live in a country that is 3000Km wide about the price of gas.
You seem to be operating under the belief that burning a lot of gas entitles you to cheaper gas. It doesn't. Gasoline is a commodity, not a right. It'd be wise to come to grips with that fact ASAP, because North American gas prices are going to continue to rise out of their artificially low state, and will probably continue to rise as oil becomes more scarce. If you want to talk to anybody about the price of gas, I'd suggest starting with the mindless machinations of the world economy.
I can't believe that the article didn't recommend Eclipse.
They did. FTFA:
Eclipse (Free - Intel/PPC) This is probably the best integrated development environment for Java. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows based systems
Y'see, this is what I'm talking about. If I'm talking about the performance of the JVM, of course I'm talking about situations where the task is processor-bound. Do you really think I'm so clueless that I'd believe that my choice of development platform has an effect on, say, network latency?
Forth is a bit of a weird case. On one hand, it generally lacks things like types that you'd normally assume are a necessary part of a programming language, and, like you mentioned, it puts the programmer in charge of taking care of the stack, to the extent that function parameters don't exist in Forth.
On the other hand, it has compiling words, which are somewhat similar to LISP macros and are a [i]very[/i] high-level kind of thing.
In the words of some unnamed character in a famous Monty Python sketch, "This isn't an argument, this is just contradiction!"
That's one definition of low/high level. It's pretty much the older one that I was talking about in my original post. The existence of that definition doesn't invalidate the new set of definitions.
It's kind of annoying that the meanings of the words keep changing, but if you worry too much about that in a field that's as sloppy with its jargon as computer science, you'll go insane. At least the two different definitions of low/high level have more to do with each other than, say, the million different definitions of Model-View-Controller.
.NET really isn't quite as bad, from what I can tell. I'm not a Windows user, so I don't have nearly as much experience with.NET apps as I do with Java ones, but from what my not-entirely-informed brain can tell, what hurts Java most is that its virtual machine is designed for really small apps. As I understand it, Java was originally designed for embedded applications (JINI being an example of a great idea for how to use Java.), and then Sun figured out it would also be great for making Web applets. I agree; Java is great for those purposes..NET, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for desktop applications, so I would hope that Microsoft managed to come out with a product that works reasonably well in that domain. There's a lot of leeway for designing bytecode virtual machines, and I'm sure some design decisions can have a huge impact on performance. For example, I'm not sure the stack-based nature of the JVM is all that great of an asset when it's being used to run a word processor.
I had the sneaking suspicion from the first page of this article that Java was going to be trotted out.
I think possibly the most boring tech article genre ever is "Person who likes Java writing yet another essay about how great Java is." To be quite honest, I'm not interested. I agree, high-level languages are great. That's actually a lot of why I don't like Java-the-language. Sure, it's got a garbage collector, but its syntax and semantics are those of C. C syntax is like the QWERTY of programming languages - it may not have been explicitly designed to slow you down when it was first created, but bugger if that isn't the main thing it's good for nowadays.
I'm also rather tired of the Java-isn't-really-slower thing. Folks make the argument, they trot out all sorts of benchmarks that are great at proving that Java is wonderful for running benchmarks. At least this article admitted what everyone already knows from experience - that Java bytecode running on the virutal machine produces apps that are slower and eat more memory than equivalent apps that run native. GCJ evades that problem, but otherwise, why should I care about it? If I'm compiling to native code rather than to the JVM, I'm suddenly presented with the option of using a whole host of other programming languages that blow Java out of the water in the ease-of-programming department.
And I think this is more important, really. Sure, there are many benefits to knowing the low level details of the system you're programming on; but its not essential to know, whilst it is essential to understand how to approach a programming problem. I'm not saying that an understanding of low level computational operations isn't important, merely that it is more important to know the abstract generalities.
Amen. If the classes some people I've programmed with took spent half as much time teaching computer science as they did about teaching random minutia of specific platforms (registers, API calls, whatever - none of that is computer science, it's stuff some would-be textbook author cut-and-pasted from a tech manual), I wouldn't have to spend nearly as much time each day wondering if today is the day that I finally post something to TheDailyWTF. And they wouldn't have to spent quite so much time staring blankly at me every time I say things like "finite state machine."
I'm pretty sure that over my C programming career I've managed (sometimes by accident, sometimes by misguided designs at creating a "clever hack") to cram data of every type into a bin that was reserved for every other type without the use of a cast. C is statically typed, but I wouldn't say it's strongly-typed at all.
The article addressed this point by mentioning that the definitions of high and low level language are a moving target. Nowadays I think most people consider assembly language to be its own thing, and the low-level classification has now been shifted into a domain that was once described completely by the term high-level. The term "high-level language" has been replaced by the term "programming language."
If you're going to go with the jargon as it's most often used nowadays (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), then C would certainly be about as low as you can get without manipulating individual registers - i.e., without being assembly language.
Adobe has a range of customers. We use Photoshop CS here in my office, and it's used on iMacs. I'm going to guess that customers on that scale probably make up a larger portion of Adobe's market than serious graphic arts shops. It seems like every third office owns a copy of Photoshop, and I doubt most people in that portion of the market do enough photoshopping to get overly loyal to any one product.
I'd also like to see Wikipedia implement a feature where any text that has changed recently is somehow highlighted. That way any schmoe who browses through is at least being made aware that the content he's reading may currently be the subject of vandalism or an argument or something.
My desktop at home is a 700MHz P3. The graphics card (Voodoo3) rather sucks, but otherwise I've never seen a thing that makes me feel that my computer is outdated. It does everything it did when I bought it sometime last millenium that it does now, and it does it all just as fast - that is to say, almost instantaneously as long as I'm not compiling a kernel or something.
My laptop is a TiBook G4, 867MHz. Similar situation. My computer at work is a 2GHz G5, and the biggest difference I notice between the two is that at work I get about 2.36 seconds less time to read Slashdot while I'm waiting for something to compile - and that's if I have predictive compilation turned off.
At this rate, my plans for my computers are about the same as my plans for my car - I'll get a new one when the old one disintegrates or explodes or something. In my mind, buying a new computer or car would be functionally equivalent to cashing out my checking account and throwing it all in the fireplace.
But then, I'm not a PC gamer. (Nor do I want to be - I can afford to go out and have a few drinks with real human beings more often than my PC gaming friends.)
You have it right. I used to go to a school which used RFID keycards to open doors. In that particular case, it wasn't even a matter of inches - the card had to be within about two centimeters of the reader.
It would take a heck of a lot more juice than what those readers put out to make something that's actually useful for reading these passport chips remotely. Assuming the effective range on the readers I've used was exactly 2cm, the inverse square law tells us that doubling the power my chip out (and keepin the reader's receiver at the same power) would increase the range to 2.83cm, quadrupling it would get us to 4cm, octupling it would get us up to 5.66cm. . . and by the time you get to the point where a potential passport snooper isn't making himself *really* suspicious by running around an airport waving his briefcase next to everyone's baggage, you've got yourself quite an RFID reader. And then you throw on the shielding that's being put into these RFID passports and it's back to square one.
Not saying it's impossible to make a device that effectively identifies Americans by their passports, just saying that everyone should probably put their tinfoil hats on now because a device like that would probably give you one heck of a headache.
Congress is a little late to the game on this one. It seems that energy efficiency is already becoming a major concern in IT; the subject comes up all the time and a lot of R&D money is going to meeting the demand for more energy-efficient servers.
Reminds me of my roommate's habit of telling me it's my turn to do the dishes just as I'm getting to the pots and pans.
This relates to a question that pops to my mind - what kind of trackball? I can think of three kinds, all of which involve/allow very different motion. There's the marble mouse style, which the parent just mentioned. There's also another Logitech trackball that you manipulate with your thumb. From my own personal experience (mousing gave me a minor case of tendonitis) this is the worst kind of trackball for people with RSI - it made mine worse instead of better in the long run.
The third kind is the classic - the nice Kensington models with the cueball-size trackball. I use one now and love it - the large ball is the key, it's big enough that you can use a variety of motions to manipulate it, anything from a thumb to moving from the elbow and keeping your fingers and wrist more or less stationary. It's pricey, but from my expeirence it's a far better buy than any of the $$$ ergo mice that are out there.
The grandparent was talking about VirtualPC being in deep trouble - it was expensive to begin with, and when VMWare (a much better product IMHO) some of their products for free, Microsoft had no choice but to come up with a free VirtualPC offering or be priced out of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily, we have satellites for detecting ICBM launches work in the IR spectrum (well I assume we use lots of techniques). I believe infrared radiation is a lot harder to hide than visible light.
I have a four-year-old TiBook that says you're wrong.
That said, the level of discoloration is minor enough to not be immediately obvious, could probably be scrubbed off if I cared enough about it (I assume it's just collected oil and dirt), and certainly is not the ugly yellow that shows up on the MacBooks.
The worst part about this is that it seems to be standard practise for government contracting. The same is often done for (non-huge-hole-in-the-ground) road construction, and it's no big surprise for me when I find out that I'm responsible for inspecting my own work on a contract job.
As a former student of a school with a one-student-one-computer program, I'd like to point out that I'm not convinced by the positive results people are reporting. When you spend God-only-knows-how-much-money and muck around with kids' educations with a program like this, admitting you screwed up is just about the dumbest thing a person could possibly do. I can't speak for anyone else, but my high school really screwed up with that idea. That didn't stop the administrators from bragging and bragging and bragging as if these laptops had turned everyone into a genius child. (Rather than just being one more distraction.)
The part of this whole computers-in-the-classroom thing that nobody seems to be getting is that a computer is not a solution. A computer is a tool. I place people who wave the computers in the class banner all the time in the same mental category as people who are convinced that $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE is a gift from God and perfect for every situation.
If we want to fix up our schools, we should start by reviewing our crufty old educational plan that hasn't been revised for decades and basically ignores all major research on how people learn. Once we have a new plan, we can go about figuring out how to implement it. I'm sure that computers will be the best way to implement some details of the plan, but they should be used only for those things, and if it turns out that there's a better way to do something else (lectures, for example, are almost guaranteed to suck if PowerPoint is involved), then they should be avoided.
But stuff like the OLPC program seem to work from the assumption that computers are this magic bullet that will instantly improve education - through some hand-wavy magic computron field, maybe?
I agree, these people need a leg-up. I just worry that exporting this educational cargo cult we've been constructing for the past few years to countries that already have even more problems with education than us has more to do with tripping them into the mud than giving them a leg up.
The original poster was referring to iPods, not iMacs.
You seem to be operating under the belief that burning a lot of gas entitles you to cheaper gas. It doesn't. Gasoline is a commodity, not a right. It'd be wise to come to grips with that fact ASAP, because North American gas prices are going to continue to rise out of their artificially low state, and will probably continue to rise as oil becomes more scarce. If you want to talk to anybody about the price of gas, I'd suggest starting with the mindless machinations of the world economy.
VI is dead. I mean, they've been stuck on that version for something like two decades. VII is the original Duke Nukem Forever.
They did. FTFA:
Y'see, this is what I'm talking about. If I'm talking about the performance of the JVM, of course I'm talking about situations where the task is processor-bound. Do you really think I'm so clueless that I'd believe that my choice of development platform has an effect on, say, network latency?
Forth is a bit of a weird case. On one hand, it generally lacks things like types that you'd normally assume are a necessary part of a programming language, and, like you mentioned, it puts the programmer in charge of taking care of the stack, to the extent that function parameters don't exist in Forth.
On the other hand, it has compiling words, which are somewhat similar to LISP macros and are a [i]very[/i] high-level kind of thing.
In the words of some unnamed character in a famous Monty Python sketch, "This isn't an argument, this is just contradiction!"
That's one definition of low/high level. It's pretty much the older one that I was talking about in my original post. The existence of that definition doesn't invalidate the new set of definitions.
It's kind of annoying that the meanings of the words keep changing, but if you worry too much about that in a field that's as sloppy with its jargon as computer science, you'll go insane. At least the two different definitions of low/high level have more to do with each other than, say, the million different definitions of Model-View-Controller.
.NET really isn't quite as bad, from what I can tell. I'm not a Windows user, so I don't have nearly as much experience with .NET apps as I do with Java ones, but from what my not-entirely-informed brain can tell, what hurts Java most is that its virtual machine is designed for really small apps. As I understand it, Java was originally designed for embedded applications (JINI being an example of a great idea for how to use Java.), and then Sun figured out it would also be great for making Web applets. I agree; Java is great for those purposes. .NET, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for desktop applications, so I would hope that Microsoft managed to come out with a product that works reasonably well in that domain. There's a lot of leeway for designing bytecode virtual machines, and I'm sure some design decisions can have a huge impact on performance. For example, I'm not sure the stack-based nature of the JVM is all that great of an asset when it's being used to run a word processor.
I had the sneaking suspicion from the first page of this article that Java was going to be trotted out.
I think possibly the most boring tech article genre ever is "Person who likes Java writing yet another essay about how great Java is." To be quite honest, I'm not interested. I agree, high-level languages are great. That's actually a lot of why I don't like Java-the-language. Sure, it's got a garbage collector, but its syntax and semantics are those of C. C syntax is like the QWERTY of programming languages - it may not have been explicitly designed to slow you down when it was first created, but bugger if that isn't the main thing it's good for nowadays.
I'm also rather tired of the Java-isn't-really-slower thing. Folks make the argument, they trot out all sorts of benchmarks that are great at proving that Java is wonderful for running benchmarks. At least this article admitted what everyone already knows from experience - that Java bytecode running on the virutal machine produces apps that are slower and eat more memory than equivalent apps that run native. GCJ evades that problem, but otherwise, why should I care about it? If I'm compiling to native code rather than to the JVM, I'm suddenly presented with the option of using a whole host of other programming languages that blow Java out of the water in the ease-of-programming department.
Amen. If the classes some people I've programmed with took spent half as much time teaching computer science as they did about teaching random minutia of specific platforms (registers, API calls, whatever - none of that is computer science, it's stuff some would-be textbook author cut-and-pasted from a tech manual), I wouldn't have to spend nearly as much time each day wondering if today is the day that I finally post something to TheDailyWTF. And they wouldn't have to spent quite so much time staring blankly at me every time I say things like "finite state machine."
I'm pretty sure that over my C programming career I've managed (sometimes by accident, sometimes by misguided designs at creating a "clever hack") to cram data of every type into a bin that was reserved for every other type without the use of a cast. C is statically typed, but I wouldn't say it's strongly-typed at all.
The article addressed this point by mentioning that the definitions of high and low level language are a moving target. Nowadays I think most people consider assembly language to be its own thing, and the low-level classification has now been shifted into a domain that was once described completely by the term high-level. The term "high-level language" has been replaced by the term "programming language."
If you're going to go with the jargon as it's most often used nowadays (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), then C would certainly be about as low as you can get without manipulating individual registers - i.e., without being assembly language.
Adobe has a range of customers. We use Photoshop CS here in my office, and it's used on iMacs. I'm going to guess that customers on that scale probably make up a larger portion of Adobe's market than serious graphic arts shops. It seems like every third office owns a copy of Photoshop, and I doubt most people in that portion of the market do enough photoshopping to get overly loyal to any one product.
OTOH, if Adobe waits around too long, they leave a gap that their competitors can use to sneak in and gobble up their market share.
Assuming, of course, that Adobe has any competitors.
I'd also like to see Wikipedia implement a feature where any text that has changed recently is somehow highlighted. That way any schmoe who browses through is at least being made aware that the content he's reading may currently be the subject of vandalism or an argument or something.
If you don't like reading random essays on technical issues, what the fuck are you doing reading Slashdot?
My desktop at home is a 700MHz P3. The graphics card (Voodoo3) rather sucks, but otherwise I've never seen a thing that makes me feel that my computer is outdated. It does everything it did when I bought it sometime last millenium that it does now, and it does it all just as fast - that is to say, almost instantaneously as long as I'm not compiling a kernel or something.
My laptop is a TiBook G4, 867MHz. Similar situation. My computer at work is a 2GHz G5, and the biggest difference I notice between the two is that at work I get about 2.36 seconds less time to read Slashdot while I'm waiting for something to compile - and that's if I have predictive compilation turned off.
At this rate, my plans for my computers are about the same as my plans for my car - I'll get a new one when the old one disintegrates or explodes or something. In my mind, buying a new computer or car would be functionally equivalent to cashing out my checking account and throwing it all in the fireplace.
But then, I'm not a PC gamer. (Nor do I want to be - I can afford to go out and have a few drinks with real human beings more often than my PC gaming friends.)
You have it right. I used to go to a school which used RFID keycards to open doors. In that particular case, it wasn't even a matter of inches - the card had to be within about two centimeters of the reader.
It would take a heck of a lot more juice than what those readers put out to make something that's actually useful for reading these passport chips remotely. Assuming the effective range on the readers I've used was exactly 2cm, the inverse square law tells us that doubling the power my chip out (and keepin the reader's receiver at the same power) would increase the range to 2.83cm, quadrupling it would get us to 4cm, octupling it would get us up to 5.66cm. . . and by the time you get to the point where a potential passport snooper isn't making himself *really* suspicious by running around an airport waving his briefcase next to everyone's baggage, you've got yourself quite an RFID reader. And then you throw on the shielding that's being put into these RFID passports and it's back to square one.
Not saying it's impossible to make a device that effectively identifies Americans by their passports, just saying that everyone should probably put their tinfoil hats on now because a device like that would probably give you one heck of a headache.
Congress is a little late to the game on this one. It seems that energy efficiency is already becoming a major concern in IT; the subject comes up all the time and a lot of R&D money is going to meeting the demand for more energy-efficient servers.
Reminds me of my roommate's habit of telling me it's my turn to do the dishes just as I'm getting to the pots and pans.
This relates to a question that pops to my mind - what kind of trackball? I can think of three kinds, all of which involve/allow very different motion. There's the marble mouse style, which the parent just mentioned. There's also another Logitech trackball that you manipulate with your thumb. From my own personal experience (mousing gave me a minor case of tendonitis) this is the worst kind of trackball for people with RSI - it made mine worse instead of better in the long run.
The third kind is the classic - the nice Kensington models with the cueball-size trackball. I use one now and love it - the large ball is the key, it's big enough that you can use a variety of motions to manipulate it, anything from a thumb to moving from the elbow and keeping your fingers and wrist more or less stationary. It's pricey, but from my expeirence it's a far better buy than any of the $$$ ergo mice that are out there.
business != company.
The grandparent was talking about VirtualPC being in deep trouble - it was expensive to begin with, and when VMWare (a much better product IMHO) some of their products for free, Microsoft had no choice but to come up with a free VirtualPC offering or be priced out of the market.