All three in our family love ebooks on our Kindles, mainly for reading fiction. We also love our "real books" especially when the smaller format of the Kindle doesn't work or when the book has a lot of pictures. We gave our daughter her Kindle first when she was 7 and her reading habit has really taken off. She's now nearly 10 and still considers her Kindle one of the best gifts she ever had.
The convenience of taking a whole library with you wherever you go and the front lit option for reading in your bed make a huge difference for all of us. Some how book lights never worked very well for me.
ebook pricing is definitely a disaster, in India I often find physical books cheaper than ebooks, so I end up buying whatever version is cheaper. So I can understand why ebook sales can drop but that doesn't necessarily mean ebook reading is dropping. We subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and plenty of free (and legal) or cheap ebooks are available if you know where to look (Bookbub for example).
As to digital detox, what do you the idiot box is? If the Kindle keeps my daughter away from the TV (and it did), I'm all for it!
+1. I don't know if the majority of Slashdot readers really understand the scale of this effort. Indian administration is generally poor at a lot of things - but the Pulse Polio Programme (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_Polio) has been a true success. Most middle and upper class population rely on private practitioners for their medical needs because of overcrowding, poor serviced and rampant corruption at Govt hospitals. However, participation in this particular programme was close to 100%. My daughter was administered the vaccine in a booth at the corner of our street for every Pulse Polio drive and I continue to be surprised how efficiently this is done. The only comparable exercise is the way elections are run in the country.
Is not a strategy unique to Microsoft. Cisco proves that it can also play the game. Cisco is likely the biggest loser if SDN takes off in a big way. This is Cisco's way of making sure they're in the play with their proprietary extensions.
Just ask him to check it out of the source code repository? You have one don't you:-)? If your boss can figure out how to do that, make the changes, do UT and commit the code in, I'd say go for it.
> hmm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
You know "the guy", happens to be Rob Pike, _the_ Rob Pike, co-author of the "Unix Programming Environment" classic? Also the "Practice of Programming" book and the co-creator of UTF-8. He also wrote one of the first C style guides: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html. I'd say he knows a thing or two about programming languages; especially C.
There's also a rumor that that the date was a typo (2350 vs 2035). Granted, even 2350 is worrying and we should be certainly doing something about it. But this kind of hyperbole, doesn't do much to the credibility of climate "scientists".
I have the B202 Linux version running Ubuntu as my media PC. Newegg has this for $299 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220012&cm_re=eee_box-_-83-220-012-_-Product). I am pretty happy with it as a media device. Super quite and under 20W average power usage (http://event.asus.com/eeepc/microsites/eeebox/en/features-green.html). It doesn't do 1080p but (there's a new EB1006 that does). It's not useful as a home server (only 160GB of built-in hard disk). It does have 4 USB ports, so external USB disks is an option (but that will add to the power usage).
I guess I am one of the unlucky folks out there. I have Vista on a Thinkpad X61. No crashes really, but a really peculiar problem. Every few days it will apply patches and reboot. A long, long time to apply the patches and reboot. I login, then a black screen (no BSOD) with a cursor for hours. Tired of waiting, I come back later to see my screen locked. Login again, same black screen. Reboot the box, boot in safe mode, login. Shutdown and restart in normal mode and everything is fine. I've googled for this for hours without any solution. This happens every few days, why Vista has to reboot for every other patch it applies I have no clue - Vista is slow but almost bearable without the reboots.
Nice try. I have Vista running on two laptops - one with 1.5G of RAM and the other with 2G of RAM. I've had a miserable experience on both. Vista is slow to boot, slow to copy files, slower to connect to a wireless network - you name it it's performance is poor. Luckily, I have bought personal copies of WinXP before MS stopped selling it in retail for both laptops. One of these days frustration will reach a level when I'll wipe out the miserable Vista "experience" and replace it with WinXP.
Perl Stagnated (aka Duke Nukem Perl 6 Forever)
on
Why Corporates Hate Perl
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Perl blew it by the inordinate amount of time Perl 6 is taking. I am surprised nobody mentions this. Pythona and Ruby on the other hand have good roadmaps (especially Python). They make releases like clockwork, they're always in the news about new frameworks and some cool stuff. Perl usually is in the news for the wrong reasons, mainly about why Perl 6 is so delayed. Perl has simply lost mindshare. Oh, I know Perl has not really stagnated. Perl 5.x series has been making steady progress but that only appeals to people who're already using Perl. For newer people taking up a scripting language, Perl seems like it's past it's prime. Besides, let's admit it - the language is arcane; especially the OO stuff in Perl 5. I even find OO interfaces in perl modules unintuitive. If someone likes Perl and wants something more "clean", modern and shiny, I'd recommend Ruby though I personally prefer Python.
Don't mistake me. I was (and still am) a big fan of Perl - mainly Perl 4 though. It's one of the most powerful languages that I've used. Even today, I usually start writing something in shell (because I am throwing together a bunch of programs to get my job done). Then I hit the limitations in shell and usually port the program to perl. That said, I have mostly switched to Python, especially when I am starting to write something from scratch.
LG scarlet line of LCD HDTVs already do it (google for "lg scarlet" - I am too lazy to type in the URL:-). It needs a FAT filesystem on a USB HDD. Samsung Series 6 and Series 5 LCD TVs do it - though it's doesn't do divx movies (LG model does). This is clearly a slashvertisement.
Really? I have a Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition mobile phone (Nokia E51). I can install open source unsigned application as long as I disable key signing check. You can self-sign your app, you don't need Symbian Signed certification (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/getting_started/application_signing.html). The phone has WiFi and I have full access to everything. The phone's browser is a port of Webkit (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/index.html). Putty is supported. VoIP is supported.
Series 60 SDK (C++) is a free download (http://developer.symbian.com/main/tools/sdks/s60/). You have option of Java (J2ME), Python for S60 (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/) as well as Open C (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/index.html) which by the way includes libraries like OpenSSL, GLIB etc to make porting of open source applications easier.
I must admit I am not sure why people are so hung about about the need for parallel programs to take advantage of multiple cores on desktop systems. Clearly there are already parallel programs today - most server applications are multi-threaded and can certainly use multi-cores.
On desktop systems, 2 or 4 cores can be effectively used, may be not as well as a single high powered single core but definitely much more effectively than people seem to be believe. You don't need all multi-threaded apps, you just need several CPU intensive apps running at the same time. Video encoding, tabbed web browsing, email and compiling at the same time for example. While it's difficult to parallelize compile/optimize/link of a single source file, multi-core makes total sense when you think "make -j8".
Okay, your multiple cores are underutilized most of the time and are used only in bursts. But so what? What do you think happens with single core CPUs? Surprise, the CPU is grossly under utilized! It's usually memory and I/O that's a bottle neck even in desktop systems (except for some CPU intensive applications like encoding video for example). If power management is done well and cores can be enabled (and clock speed increased) on demand, I am fine with multi-cores.
Anecdotal Story: I bought a new laptop last September (Cheap HP celeron with half a gig of RAM running Vista Home, cost me ~$400) to gift my dad. And that ran like a dog. Really pathetic performance. I immediately added another gig of RAM and performance was much better. Not as snappy as WinXP but not bad. I still don't like it but my Dad is happy with it.
Your wife is happy with Vista Home on a 6 year old laptop with half a gig a RAM? Now I know you're BSing us. You're seriously nuts if you upgraded a 6 year old laptop to Vista. I am a debian developer. I run Linux on all my laptops and desktops. But I don't try to force it on my family and friends if they don't like it. I support Windows 2000 and Windows XP for home usage at my parents and in-laws houses. Both Win2K and WinXP are pretty decent microsoft OSs compared to Win98 or WinME.
Comparing Vista to Windows XP may not sound fair, but the fact is Vista does not bring too much to the table for the such a massive increase in resource usage. On that benchmark, Windows XP to Windows 2000 was a fair comparison too. XP was not compellingly better than Windows 2000, at least it didn't suck badly on existing hardware that ran Windows 2000.
Same here (about the used to be the perl guy part, but not about ruby). I was a perl guy for about 10 years before switching to python. It's not perl 6 that turned me towards python. Strangely, it was perl 5. I loved perl 4, I still think Perl 4 edition of Programming Perl is one of the best programming books I've read. I was a big, big perl fan. I used to be subscribed to the perl-dev list and the perl5-porters list (have I got the list names right?). I used to read what Tim Christiansen wrote like religion. I used to download and follow cpan modules like crazy and keep them updated with the cpan module every day.
But then at some point of time, I was getting unhappy with Perl 5. Perl 5 sprouted branches in random directions. May be it was it's clunky OO, may be it was the pain it took to a make a simple module (especially an OO interface), maybe it's the huge size of Programming Perl 5 book (and the fact that they removed the introductory chapter on the language), I don't really know. Python's original whitespace significant syntax gagged me first (my first programming language was "start at 7th column" fortran) but once I got past that, python was executable pseudo code for me. But this post is not about python.
For some one who likes the terseness of perl, especially the syntactic sugar, ruby seems to be the new perl. I've looked at ruby and except for it's performance issues (which is being addressed by Ruby 1.9), I think I might have switched from perl to ruby if I had come across it earlier. Now that I am used to python, I don't think ruby gives me enough of an incentive to switch back to my perl roots.
Slashdot Mirror
All three in our family love ebooks on our Kindles, mainly for reading fiction. We also love our "real books" especially when the smaller format of the Kindle doesn't work or when the book has a lot of pictures. We gave our daughter her Kindle first when she was 7 and her reading habit has really taken off. She's now nearly 10 and still considers her Kindle one of the best gifts she ever had.
The convenience of taking a whole library with you wherever you go and the front lit option for reading in your bed make a huge difference for all of us. Some how book lights never worked very well for me.
ebook pricing is definitely a disaster, in India I often find physical books cheaper than ebooks, so I end up buying whatever version is cheaper. So I can understand why ebook sales can drop but that doesn't necessarily mean ebook reading is dropping. We subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and plenty of free (and legal) or cheap ebooks are available if you know where to look (Bookbub for example).
As to digital detox, what do you the idiot box is? If the Kindle keeps my daughter away from the TV (and it did), I'm all for it!
That certainly puts things in perspective since a rocket launch is no different from a flight taking off.
+1. I don't know if the majority of Slashdot readers really understand the scale of this effort. Indian administration is generally poor at a lot of things - but the Pulse Polio Programme (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_Polio) has been a true success. Most middle and upper class population rely on private practitioners for their medical needs because of overcrowding, poor serviced and rampant corruption at Govt hospitals. However, participation in this particular programme was close to 100%. My daughter was administered the vaccine in a booth at the corner of our street for every Pulse Polio drive and I continue to be surprised how efficiently this is done. The only comparable exercise is the way elections are run in the country.
But, this does turn water into a _whine_ when expelling it but it's just that you can't hear it in space :-).
An article that expresses the same skepticism:
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5A2C0BF6-9626-6CF9-119A812483E44613
Is not a strategy unique to Microsoft. Cisco proves that it can also play the game. Cisco is likely the biggest loser if SDN takes off in a big way. This is Cisco's way of making sure they're in the play with their proprietary extensions.
Been there done that too. I am 40 and don't plan on getting back to management.
I wish I had mod points, not that it would've made a difference since you're already at score 5. You made my day :-).
Just ask him to check it out of the source code repository? You have one don't you :-)? If your boss can figure out how to do that, make the changes, do UT and commit the code in, I'd say go for it.
> hmm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
You know "the guy", happens to be Rob Pike, _the_ Rob Pike, co-author of the "Unix Programming Environment" classic? Also the "Practice of Programming" book and the co-creator of UTF-8. He also wrote one of the first C style guides: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html. I'd say he knows a thing or two about programming languages; especially C.
This is what I could find after a few minutes of googling.
http://www.widexindia.com/Products/Widex%20hearing%20aids/Price%20lists.aspx
For US$ conversion, divide by 50. So approx $200 for the cheapest one but only two channels. The most expensive ones run to $3000.
Ganesan
OMiGo might've been a better name :-).
Which scientist has admitted that it was speculation and not supported by formal research.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Himalayan-melting-by-2035-Scientists-just-assumed-so/articleshow/5459848.cms
There's also a rumor that that the date was a typo (2350 vs 2035). Granted, even 2350 is worrying and we should be certainly doing something about it. But this kind of hyperbole, doesn't do much to the credibility of climate "scientists".
If you're using a tool, you're no longer "remembering" :-)
I have the B202 Linux version running Ubuntu as my media PC. Newegg has this for $299 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220012&cm_re=eee_box-_-83-220-012-_-Product). I am pretty happy with it as a media device. Super quite and under 20W average power usage (http://event.asus.com/eeepc/microsites/eeebox/en/features-green.html). It doesn't do 1080p but (there's a new EB1006 that does). It's not useful as a home server (only 160GB of built-in hard disk). It does have 4 USB ports, so external USB disks is an option (but that will add to the power usage).
I guess I am one of the unlucky folks out there. I have Vista on a Thinkpad X61. No crashes really, but a really peculiar problem. Every few days it will apply patches and reboot. A long, long time to apply the patches and reboot. I login, then a black screen (no BSOD) with a cursor for hours. Tired of waiting, I come back later to see my screen locked. Login again, same black screen. Reboot the box, boot in safe mode, login. Shutdown and restart in normal mode and everything is fine. I've googled for this for hours without any solution. This happens every few days, why Vista has to reboot for every other patch it applies I have no clue - Vista is slow but almost bearable without the reboots.
"Ready for the desktop" my ass:
Hope the rest of your gets ready too :-).
Nice try. I have Vista running on two laptops - one with 1.5G of RAM and the other with 2G of RAM. I've had a miserable experience on both. Vista is slow to boot, slow to copy files, slower to connect to a wireless network - you name it it's performance is poor. Luckily, I have bought personal copies of WinXP before MS stopped selling it in retail for both laptops. One of these days frustration will reach a level when I'll wipe out the miserable Vista "experience" and replace it with WinXP.
I think Perl blew it by the inordinate amount of time Perl 6 is taking. I am surprised nobody mentions this. Pythona and Ruby on the other hand have good roadmaps (especially Python). They make releases like clockwork, they're always in the news about new frameworks and some cool stuff. Perl usually is in the news for the wrong reasons, mainly about why Perl 6 is so delayed. Perl has simply lost mindshare. Oh, I know Perl has not really stagnated. Perl 5.x series has been making steady progress but that only appeals to people who're already using Perl. For newer people taking up a scripting language, Perl seems like it's past it's prime. Besides, let's admit it - the language is arcane; especially the OO stuff in Perl 5. I even find OO interfaces in perl modules unintuitive. If someone likes Perl and wants something more "clean", modern and shiny, I'd recommend Ruby though I personally prefer Python.
Don't mistake me. I was (and still am) a big fan of Perl - mainly Perl 4 though. It's one of the most powerful languages that I've used. Even today, I usually start writing something in shell (because I am throwing together a bunch of programs to get my job done). Then I hit the limitations in shell and usually port the program to perl. That said, I have mostly switched to Python, especially when I am starting to write something from scratch.
LG scarlet line of LCD HDTVs already do it (google for "lg scarlet" - I am too lazy to type in the URL :-). It needs a FAT filesystem on a USB HDD. Samsung Series 6 and Series 5 LCD TVs do it - though it's doesn't do divx movies (LG model does). This is clearly a slashvertisement.
Really? I have a Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition mobile phone (Nokia E51). I can install open source unsigned application as long as I disable key signing check. You can self-sign your app, you don't need Symbian Signed certification (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/getting_started/application_signing.html). The phone has WiFi and I have full access to everything. The phone's browser is a port of Webkit (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/index.html). Putty is supported. VoIP is supported.
Series 60 SDK (C++) is a free download (http://developer.symbian.com/main/tools/sdks/s60/). You have option of Java (J2ME), Python for S60 (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/) as well as Open C (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/index.html) which by the way includes libraries like OpenSSL, GLIB etc to make porting of open source applications easier.
I must admit I am not sure why people are so hung about about the need for parallel programs to take advantage of multiple cores on desktop systems. Clearly there are already parallel programs today - most server applications are multi-threaded and can certainly use multi-cores.
On desktop systems, 2 or 4 cores can be effectively used, may be not as well as a single high powered single core but definitely much more effectively than people seem to be believe. You don't need all multi-threaded apps, you just need several CPU intensive apps running at the same time. Video encoding, tabbed web browsing, email and compiling at the same time for example. While it's difficult to parallelize compile/optimize/link of a single source file, multi-core makes total sense when you think "make -j8".
Okay, your multiple cores are underutilized most of the time and are used only in bursts. But so what? What do you think happens with single core CPUs? Surprise, the CPU is grossly under utilized! It's usually memory and I/O that's a bottle neck even in desktop systems (except for some CPU intensive applications like encoding video for example). If power management is done well and cores can be enabled (and clock speed increased) on demand, I am fine with multi-cores.
Ganesan
Have you tried Nexenta (http://www.nexenta.org/)
Ganesan
Your wife is happy with Vista Home on a 6 year old laptop with half a gig a RAM? Now I know you're BSing us. You're seriously nuts if you upgraded a 6 year old laptop to Vista. I am a debian developer. I run Linux on all my laptops and desktops. But I don't try to force it on my family and friends if they don't like it. I support Windows 2000 and Windows XP for home usage at my parents and in-laws houses. Both Win2K and WinXP are pretty decent microsoft OSs compared to Win98 or WinME.
Comparing Vista to Windows XP may not sound fair, but the fact is Vista does not bring too much to the table for the such a massive increase in resource usage. On that benchmark, Windows XP to Windows 2000 was a fair comparison too. XP was not compellingly better than Windows 2000, at least it didn't suck badly on existing hardware that ran Windows 2000.
Same here (about the used to be the perl guy part, but not about ruby). I was a perl guy for about 10 years before switching to python. It's not perl 6 that turned me towards python. Strangely, it was perl 5. I loved perl 4, I still think Perl 4 edition of Programming Perl is one of the best programming books I've read. I was a big, big perl fan. I used to be subscribed to the perl-dev list and the perl5-porters list (have I got the list names right?). I used to read what Tim Christiansen wrote like religion. I used to download and follow cpan modules like crazy and keep them updated with the cpan module every day.
But then at some point of time, I was getting unhappy with Perl 5. Perl 5 sprouted branches in random directions. May be it was it's clunky OO, may be it was the pain it took to a make a simple module (especially an OO interface), maybe it's the huge size of Programming Perl 5 book (and the fact that they removed the introductory chapter on the language), I don't really know. Python's original whitespace significant syntax gagged me first (my first programming language was "start at 7th column" fortran) but once I got past that, python was executable pseudo code for me. But this post is not about python.
For some one who likes the terseness of perl, especially the syntactic sugar, ruby seems to be the new perl. I've looked at ruby and except for it's performance issues (which is being addressed by Ruby 1.9), I think I might have switched from perl to ruby if I had come across it earlier. Now that I am used to python, I don't think ruby gives me enough of an incentive to switch back to my perl roots.