It's not so silly when your laptop is your only machine.
Re:What about CPU upgrades on the Inspiron 8x00 ?
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Laptop Video Upgrade
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· Score: 1
I sucessfully upgraded the CPU on my 8000 from 700MHz to 1GHz. It uses the Micro-PGA2 form factor, for which I'm pretty sure 1GHz is the fastest speed available. I know the 8100 uses a different form factor (one of the flip-chips, I think) and the 8200 may or may not use yet another one, so it'll be a different story with those models, but in general I would say yes, it's absolutely doable.
Actually, you can upgrade the LCDs as well. My Inspiron 8000 was "born" with the older ATI Rage Mobility M4 and a 15" SXGA+ display; it now has the Radeon 7500 Mobility and a 15" UXGA display. (Incidentally, it's also been upgraded from its original 700MHz CPU to a 1GHz, the original hard drive has been replaced, and the memory has been upgraded.) Given that the LCDs were the same form factor, the replacement fit right in.
ever heard of polymorphism? i bet you haven't if java is what you consider to be OO.
Java has polymorphism. Who told you otherwise?
the other big reason java is toy-OO and not real-OO is that base types are not objects.
If by this you mean that it still has primitive types, then you are correct (although there are wrapper classes for each of the primitives types if one needs to use them in an object-compatible way). In this sense Java is still clinging to its roots in the hybrid-OO language C++, although it's for what I think is a sound reason (doing arithmetic on, for example, lots of primitive numeric types should be faster than doing arithmetic on lots of numeric objects).
What you describe is interesting, but I'm not sure I share your sentiment that this is what most "Linux users" need. While I'm certain some of us would like the ultraportable, somewhat rugged machines you describe, many of us do need the "desktop replacement" machines that you so readily dismiss. Not everyone who develops software uses vi or emacs--I do hard core J2EE development using design/development tools (Together or JBuilder), an entire J2EE container stack (Web server, EJB, container, etc. such as Weblogic or JBoss), and database (Oracle or Postgresql), all at once. A bigger display is better (I have a "mere" 1400x1050 display only because I couldn't wait for the 1600x1200 displays) and the more RAM, the better (I have 512MB). And as long as you have all this horsepower anyway, why not include decent 3D performance so you can play as hard as you work? Oh, and of course it all has to be somewhat luggable so it can all be packed up and taken to client sites day after day.
So, in short, not all Linux users' needs are created equal. Your needs might be well served by one of the subnotebooks out there which place a priority on compact size, light weight and battery life. But for many of us developer/consultants who have to run an entire universe on one machine, we'll take as much machine as we can fit into a briefcase, thank you.:-)
Two favorites: Together and JBuilder
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Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
As IDEs go, my two favorites are Together (Control Center being the pricey but feature-laden version) and JBuilder. Both have different strengths; I evaluate them from the perspective of an architect/developer doing all sides of J2EE development (from JSP to session EJB to entity EJB).
One thing immediately noticeable about Together is that it includes a modeling tool, which is why it is often compared to Rational Rose. But while Rose (as far as I understand) is ONLY a modeling tool, Together is also a development/deployment environment, including a code editor, debugger, and--perhaps most useful--the brains to do J2EE application assembly and deployment, i.e. WAR and EAR files. This means that you can describe your EJBs--for example, using various dialogs to map entity beans to tables--and Together will write the deployment descriptors for you. This is especially useful for CMP entity beans, the deployment descriptors for which can get pretty hairy! Support is included for a number of applications servers, from JBoss to WebLogic 6.1. Another nice thing about Together is that it has a source code formatter built in: press a hotkey combination and it will format your source according to rules which you define. Yes, there are standalone tools that do this, but having it built in is pretty slick.
Together does have a few drawbacks: it doesn't support graphical Swing layout like a tool such as JBuilder, but if you're doing server-side development anyway, this isn't such a big deal. I also don't believe it helps out with JSP development either, although again for my purposes I don't see this as a big deal.
Borland JBuilder Enterprise
My other favorite--perhaps because I worked for Borland for two years--is JBuilder Enterprise. While it doesn't include the design tools of Together, it's a good all-around IDE nonetheless. One of its strong points is its Swing layout tool, which is the best I've seen (although lately I haven't kept up very well with the capabilities of other products). There's also a JSP editor/debugger, which I haven't used extensively. JBuilder 5 adds EAR assembly and deployment, although I believe it has support only for Borland AppServer and WebLogic (they may have added a couple more application servers).
An Alternative: IntelliJ IDEA
Both Together Control Center and JBuilder Enterprise are full-featured IDEs (Together is actually a design tool/IDE). If you don't need all the J2EE bells and whistles, or the Swing layout tools, and are just looking for a solid programmer's editor, I've heard great things about IntelliJ IDEA. In particular, Martin Fowler (of Refactoring fame, among other things) swears by it. It does have a number of good refactoring tools in it.
Conclusion
All of these are good tools with various strengths, weaknesses, and price tags. I believe all of them offer an evaluation version, and I believe Borland and TogetherSoft still offer basic versions for free (as in beer). Any one is worth a look.
No, really, it's a lot better. My GPA as a CS student in college was sub-lackluster, owing partly to my desire to get out of the academic world and start doing something productive. And once I got to "the real world," I've never enjoyed software development more. An actual software project consists of so much more than the academic process of churning out code that solves academic problems. The concepts are important, to be sure, but the challenge of solving real-world problems is much more highly motivating.
It's been over seven years ago now since I graduated, and not once have I found myself wishing--even for a fleeting moment--that I had gone into something else. I really believe that once you make it through, get into that first job, and start doing some real work, the passion will return.
when you push the button with a digital you're not really taking one picture.... you're taking three pics. one in red, one in green, and one in blue.
I wouldn't say there is no digital camera that takes pictures this way, but most of them do not. In many cameras, the CCD has separate sensors for red, green, and blue, all active at the same time. When a picture is taken, the CCD is exposed and then read once. Color artifacts and chromatic aberrations have many causes, but I'm willing to bet that it's not because the CCD in the camera is actually taking three pictures instead of one.
Without delving into the merits of digital vs. 35mm photography, I recognize that there are benefits to both. I'm by no means a professional photographer, so for a lot of situations, the benefits to digital are starting to outweigh the disadvantages. There are a lot of great cameras out there now, even for under $1000, that are likely to well serve the needs of non-professionals (and, in some cases, professionals as well).
After doing a fair amount of research (reading every review I could find on certain models of cameras) and changing my mind several times about which one would best suit my needs, I've decided on a Sony CyberShot DSC-D770. I selected this camera because the 35mm I use most often is an SLR, and after much deliberation I decided to stick with the SLR style. The Sony's resolution (1.5 megapixel) is a bit on the low side by today's standards, but that's the only real shortcoming of this camera. Still, I think 1344x1024 output will be sufficient for my purposes. What I particularly liked about this camera is the wealth of manual controls, especially the zoom and focusing rings.
Other cameras (less than $1000 street price) worth considering:
SLR: Olympus C-2500L and Canon PowerShot Pro 70. Although the Sony was my favorite of the SLRs, for someone else's needs one of these might be a better bet.
Versatility: Hands down, one of the Nikon Coolpix cameras. There's a wealth of lens attachments and other accessories available for these things. And while not the most compact, they're certainly less bulky than an SLR. And the new 990 is a 3.3 megapixel powerhouse.
Bang for the buck: Casio QV-3000EX. For a little more than $900 you can get one of these 3.3 megapixel beasts in combination with IBM's 340MB MicroDrive. Unfortunately there's no external flash attachment, and the lens is not threaded to accept attachments, but someone will find a way around this limitation.
Portability: Take your pick of Canon's PowerShot A5, A50, S10, or S20 (increasing in capability from sub-megapixel to 3.3 megapixel). These little jewels are about the size of Canon's Elph APS film cameras, which is hard to beat for a go-anywhere camera.
There are plenty of other cameras out there, but these were the most appealing to me (at one time I was torn between the Nikon Coolpix 990, the Casio QV-3000EX and the Sony DSC-D770). There are a number of Web site with loads of reviews out there; some of them are the Imaging Resource, the Digital Photography Review, and Steve's Digicams. Happy searching!
Regards, Jeremy
(And if anyone's interested in how that Sony works out, I'll be receiving the camera this week. I'll be happy to share my own impressions of it once I've had a chance to play with it.)
I no longer shop at amazon.com for the same reason. I even sent them an e-mail detailing the reasons why, though I'm sure they don't care. In the meantime I'm encouraging everyone else I know to avoid purchasing from them as well, although it's still perfectly acceptable to take advantage of their on-line book reviews and stuff like that.:-)
Since one of my sites at least has commercial aspirations, and I use the GIMP for all my image editing needs, I figure it's better to be safe. I don't really need transparency or animation at this point anyway. Given that most of my pages don't use many GIFs anyway, it won't be a whole lot of hassle either.
I'm not sure just what to make of this yet. At least from one point of view, this is a good thing, because I think it gives investors a little more confidence in us (our stock price is up 30-odd % just today!) On the other hand, it does sort of have the ring to it of "selling out to the Evil Empire" or something to that effect. But then, so far it seems to be business as usual. I haven't heard any talk of putting the Solaris/Linux development tools on a back burner. We have a number of people within the company (myself included) who are very excited about Linux, so I don't think this would be permitted to happen.:-)
You might take what I say with a grain of salt--I work for a different division of the company, and I don't see very much of what's happening over in the Borland.com division (which appears to be the part of the company most affected by this deal). I guess we'll all have to stay tuned.
For what it's worth (as I post this over a week later) Inprise is still Inprise. Recently, though, we've "created" the Borland.com business unit to, among other things, produce software development tools. Inprise concentrates more on the "enterprise" side of things, notably with our CORBA-based VisiBroker product.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so silly when your laptop is your only machine.
I sucessfully upgraded the CPU on my 8000 from 700MHz to 1GHz. It uses the Micro-PGA2 form factor, for which I'm pretty sure 1GHz is the fastest speed available. I know the 8100 uses a different form factor (one of the flip-chips, I think) and the 8200 may or may not use yet another one, so it'll be a different story with those models, but in general I would say yes, it's absolutely doable.
Actually, you can upgrade the LCDs as well. My Inspiron 8000 was "born" with the older ATI Rage Mobility M4 and a 15" SXGA+ display; it now has the Radeon 7500 Mobility and a 15" UXGA display. (Incidentally, it's also been upgraded from its original 700MHz CPU to a 1GHz, the original hard drive has been replaced, and the memory has been upgraded.) Given that the LCDs were the same form factor, the replacement fit right in.
The sad thing is that this idea probably is patentable, if you just phrase the patent application in terms of a software algorithm.
Java has polymorphism. Who told you otherwise?
the other big reason java is toy-OO and not real-OO is that base types are not objects.
If by this you mean that it still has primitive types, then you are correct (although there are wrapper classes for each of the primitives types if one needs to use them in an object-compatible way). In this sense Java is still clinging to its roots in the hybrid-OO language C++, although it's for what I think is a sound reason (doing arithmetic on, for example, lots of primitive numeric types should be faster than doing arithmetic on lots of numeric objects).
Cheers,
Jeremy
So, in short, not all Linux users' needs are created equal. Your needs might be well served by one of the subnotebooks out there which place a priority on compact size, light weight and battery life. But for many of us developer/consultants who have to run an entire universe on one machine, we'll take as much machine as we can fit into a briefcase, thank you. :-)
TogetherSoft Together Control Center
One thing immediately noticeable about Together is that it includes a modeling tool, which is why it is often compared to Rational Rose. But while Rose (as far as I understand) is ONLY a modeling tool, Together is also a development/deployment environment, including a code editor, debugger, and--perhaps most useful--the brains to do J2EE application assembly and deployment, i.e. WAR and EAR files. This means that you can describe your EJBs--for example, using various dialogs to map entity beans to tables--and Together will write the deployment descriptors for you. This is especially useful for CMP entity beans, the deployment descriptors for which can get pretty hairy! Support is included for a number of applications servers, from JBoss to WebLogic 6.1. Another nice thing about Together is that it has a source code formatter built in: press a hotkey combination and it will format your source according to rules which you define. Yes, there are standalone tools that do this, but having it built in is pretty slick.
Together does have a few drawbacks: it doesn't support graphical Swing layout like a tool such as JBuilder, but if you're doing server-side development anyway, this isn't such a big deal. I also don't believe it helps out with JSP development either, although again for my purposes I don't see this as a big deal.
Borland JBuilder Enterprise
My other favorite--perhaps because I worked for Borland for two years--is JBuilder Enterprise. While it doesn't include the design tools of Together, it's a good all-around IDE nonetheless. One of its strong points is its Swing layout tool, which is the best I've seen (although lately I haven't kept up very well with the capabilities of other products). There's also a JSP editor/debugger, which I haven't used extensively. JBuilder 5 adds EAR assembly and deployment, although I believe it has support only for Borland AppServer and WebLogic (they may have added a couple more application servers).
An Alternative: IntelliJ IDEA
Both Together Control Center and JBuilder Enterprise are full-featured IDEs (Together is actually a design tool/IDE). If you don't need all the J2EE bells and whistles, or the Swing layout tools, and are just looking for a solid programmer's editor, I've heard great things about IntelliJ IDEA. In particular, Martin Fowler (of Refactoring fame, among other things) swears by it. It does have a number of good refactoring tools in it.
Conclusion
All of these are good tools with various strengths, weaknesses, and price tags. I believe all of them offer an evaluation version, and I believe Borland and TogetherSoft still offer basic versions for free (as in beer). Any one is worth a look.
Cheers,
Jeremy
...you make it out into the real world.
No, really, it's a lot better. My GPA as a CS student in college was sub-lackluster, owing partly to my desire to get out of the academic world and start doing something productive. And once I got to "the real world," I've never enjoyed software development more. An actual software project consists of so much more than the academic process of churning out code that solves academic problems. The concepts are important, to be sure, but the challenge of solving real-world problems is much more highly motivating.
It's been over seven years ago now since I graduated, and not once have I found myself wishing--even for a fleeting moment--that I had gone into something else. I really believe that once you make it through, get into that first job, and start doing some real work, the passion will return.
Cheers,
Jeremy
I wouldn't say there is no digital camera that takes pictures this way, but most of them do not. In many cameras, the CCD has separate sensors for red, green, and blue, all active at the same time. When a picture is taken, the CCD is exposed and then read once. Color artifacts and chromatic aberrations have many causes, but I'm willing to bet that it's not because the CCD in the camera is actually taking three pictures instead of one.
Regards,
Jeremy
After doing a fair amount of research (reading every review I could find on certain models of cameras) and changing my mind several times about which one would best suit my needs, I've decided on a Sony CyberShot DSC-D770. I selected this camera because the 35mm I use most often is an SLR, and after much deliberation I decided to stick with the SLR style. The Sony's resolution (1.5 megapixel) is a bit on the low side by today's standards, but that's the only real shortcoming of this camera. Still, I think 1344x1024 output will be sufficient for my purposes. What I particularly liked about this camera is the wealth of manual controls, especially the zoom and focusing rings.
Other cameras (less than $1000 street price) worth considering:
- SLR: Olympus C-2500L and Canon PowerShot Pro 70. Although the Sony was my favorite of the SLRs, for someone else's needs one of these might be a better bet.
- Versatility: Hands down, one of the Nikon Coolpix cameras. There's a wealth of lens attachments and other accessories available for these things. And while not the most compact, they're certainly less bulky than an SLR. And the new 990 is a 3.3 megapixel powerhouse.
- Bang for the buck: Casio QV-3000EX. For a little more than $900 you can get one of these 3.3 megapixel beasts in combination with IBM's 340MB MicroDrive. Unfortunately there's no external flash attachment, and the lens is not threaded to accept attachments, but someone will find a way around this limitation.
- Portability: Take your pick of Canon's PowerShot A5, A50, S10, or S20 (increasing in capability from sub-megapixel to 3.3 megapixel). These little jewels are about the size of Canon's Elph APS film cameras, which is hard to beat for a go-anywhere camera.
There are plenty of other cameras out there, but these were the most appealing to me (at one time I was torn between the Nikon Coolpix 990, the Casio QV-3000EX and the Sony DSC-D770). There are a number of Web site with loads of reviews out there; some of them are the Imaging Resource, the Digital Photography Review, and Steve's Digicams. Happy searching!Regards,
Jeremy
(And if anyone's interested in how that Sony works out, I'll be receiving the camera this week. I'll be happy to share my own impressions of it once I've had a chance to play with it.)
I no longer shop at amazon.com for the same reason. I even sent them an e-mail detailing the reasons why, though I'm sure they don't care. In the meantime I'm encouraging everyone else I know to avoid purchasing from them as well, although it's still perfectly acceptable to take advantage of their on-line book reviews and stuff like that. :-)
Since one of my sites at least has commercial aspirations, and I use the GIMP for all my image editing needs, I figure it's better to be safe. I don't really need transparency or animation at this point anyway. Given that most of my pages don't use many GIFs anyway, it won't be a whole lot of hassle either.
You might take what I say with a grain of salt--I work for a different division of the company, and I don't see very much of what's happening over in the Borland.com division (which appears to be the part of the company most affected by this deal). I guess we'll all have to stay tuned.
Just thought I'd clear that up.
Regards,
Jeremy