nVidia also supports FreeBSD! ATI does not. I had to buy an nvidia card recently because my AIW 9600xt would not work in freebsd and my older firegl card (radeon 8800 chipset) would crash with dri enabled.
Both companies could do more with open source, but I personally have more respect for nVidia at the moment.
If it were really 300 hundred dollars, I'd have one now. If you consider the fact you would be a fool to buy the low end model, plus the cost of games, its quite expensive just for gaming. A 2000 dollar pc might not be as good as this unit now, but in 3 years it will be. I can use the 2000 dollar pc for other activities like software development, word processing, and it even allows me to use competing technologies and games. My pc can run iTunes, firefox, and run enemy territory.
You are correcct that the targeted smp support is very impressive. That is the key feature of the xbox 360 to me. However, with dual core cpus ending up in gamer's systems, we will see a change in this area. Blizzard, id, valve, and any other developer will need to support SMP in future engines to compete. This xbox might get us there sooner.
I don't think the video card is as good as you claim though. Microsoft bought it, so it must use current or soon to be current technologies.
SATA controllers and more importantly the drivers for said controllers are the key. Most SATA controllers require slightly different drivers than others. Its like buying SCSI in that sense, the controller is more important than the drives you connect to it. A low quality scsi controller is just as bad, perhaps worse than a bad SATA controller.
SATA will be good in the enterprise when operating systems have drivers integrated in them. That is the only reason I look forward to windows vista. Every few years, we get a version of windows with current drivers for newer types of devices like SATA raid controllers and PCIe video cards. The open source community is almost there. FreeBSD 6 added full support for my onboard sata controller (nforce2 chipset w/ nforce 3 sata controller.. weird msi board). From my understanding, recent linux kernel releases have added support for several sata controllers including intel and nivida.
SATA is not a replacement for SCSI, but its not bad. I think they often have different performance characteristics and are good at different tasks. Even if the drives are identical, the controller and access to the drive is not.
I can't speak for standard business stuff, but I usually get indian techs who try to have an american accent using old slang and putting marbles under their tongue. I don't joke. I've met dell indian techs who later came to the university i work for/go to. I have to call in on dells all the time. We haven't had 1 machine make it out of the 3 year warrenty period without a hardware failure. Most commonly its power supply, floppy (i expect this), and hard drive. I've actually had 5 machines with the PROCESSOR CACHE FAIL. These were pentium 4 1.4 ghz based optiplex gx240's. I've had almost all gx260's have bad power supplies now. 280s often have sata controller problems. 270s randonly have power supply problems and are very picky with video drivers. Don't even get me started on laptops. We buy EVERY computer from dell except about 10 macs a year. They treat us like shit. We deployed 54 new machines this summer and 5 were bad in the first 3 days. We've had to call on 10 more. (all gx280 w/ mini case) They overheat of course and die. They have to gut the things.. new motherboard, processor, power supply. Dell's have bad air flow and often overheat.
I don't recommend dell's for business unless you're talking the Precision line. Thats a whole different story. Precisions are great gamer machines provided you replace the video card. A workstation card isn't designed for high frame rates and low quality open gl like we need to play today's fps. I've got a precision 650 workstation at home. Its great for et, wow, and even ok with doom 3. I dropped in an ati AIW 9600 xt card. In all serious though, if you're a true gamer you should BUILD a pc. A good gamer rig has a nice motherboard, sata raid 0 with 8-16mb cache disks, an awesome video card (pciE high end), and as expensive a cpu as you can afford. Most id software games require a lot of disk i/o to ensure fast level load times in multiplayer. UT can benefit that way to. I'm sure newer games like quake4 and farcry could benefit from faster disks as well. All OEM computers i've seen have shitty hard drives in them. Spend 80 bucks on newegg and get something with a little cache. It will do wonders reading those large map files and so forth.
If you are not bright enough or too lazy to build your own pc, i recommend looking hard at what games you play. If you can, buy a powermac. Why? Apple ships with gamer cards on those things.. nvidia and ati graphics.. not cheap ass intel. They are workstation grade machines like precisions and they are very upgradable. You can upgrade video, disks, memory, processors (overdrives!), etc. Apple actually has american tech support and i doubt you'll even need to call them.
Hallways are a problem too. Roomba has great difficulty with my hallway. If every room in the hallway is open and roomba cleans the whole area, it can hit about 95% of the hallway without setting it down special for a spot clean. If the rooms are mostly closed, roomba will not enter the hallway at new angles and therefore will not hit a good percentage of the hallway. It actually repeats over the same areas.
I haven't had problems with chairs, but now instead of cleaning the floor every week and moving around obsticles i find myself spending the same time picking up obsticles. When you have cats who drag toys under the bed, this can be a problem. More than once i've had roomba get a toy stuck in the brush or flip over because it bumped into a corner at a certain angle.
As for cleaning, it gets cat hair out great as long as you empty it often enough. I find the brush and compartment fill up quickly. I do have 3 cats though. I bought the lowend model (red) that does not have the charging station. I wasn't sure how it would work with my cats at the time and didn't want to risk 300 dollars on a vacuum that didn't work. When this one dies eventually, i'll buy a high end model.
The bigger the room, the better it does. If you live in an apartment like I do, sometimes it has trouble. If you live in a home with small hallways, it could be an issue. Good for a house, not as good for an apartment or "mobile home".
I had hoped to buy one for my grandmother as she has trouble vacuuming at 77 years old. I think it would be too much work for her to bend over to empty it and "child proof" her home.
One last thing, if you have a lot of electronics or pets you should watch the roomba while its running to some degree. Don't let it roam free. One time it knocked my surround speaker to the floor because it caught on the speaker wire behind the couch! Suprisingly it does much better in my computer room, although the cables are well hidden and only cat5 cable is running along the floorboards.
Yes, and although the parent is obviously smarter than I about video, Linux and BSD have kernel bits on older 3d cards (DRI/DRM) that load when x11 is run. Even my nvidia card with their driver runs a kernel module when i start X11 to run video. Now maybe one can argue that the seperation as a kernel module isolates the kernel better than whatever microsoft did in NT4. I don't know. I do know that SP3 NT4 had extremely buggy handling of agp ati cards at the time and intel based cards were even worse. AGP was new then similar to the pciE push now.
If freebsd has seperate user code, why did i have to hack kernel code to add my pci id for my agp ati radeon card a few years back? If mac os X has great video code, why does my ibook crash with apple or ati drivers on memory intensive games. It is a kernel panic after all.
I can tell you my experience. I first went to the university of michigan flint. They pushed cobol, pascal and basic and followed up with fortran. I dropped out of that program for similar reasons. It didn't seem practical and unlike a real cs program, they didn't focus on how to learn new languages either.
I worked for a few years, and then went to a community college. I did basic, visual basic and C there. Two of the three were quite useful, although I had learned a bit of both in my own time. I earned a degree there and then went on for a bachelors at western michigan university. The intro class is C++ currently. You use C++ for the first two classes, then learn a little C and sparc assembly. Then you take a systems programming class taught entirely with C and another class tailored to C++ on data/file structures. Most of the classes were taught with linux or solaris. I recently finished a gui programming coarse using Gtk+/Gnome 2.6.
The down side is that the program got "encouraged" by microsoft to switch to.NET 2.0 next fall for almost everything. All new classes will be C#, except for operating systems and system programming which will continue to use linux. They are still decideding on the sparc assembly class. Its a shame really as many students there learn C# on their own time and few get exposed to *nix like systems otherwise.
Until recent events, the program was very good about allowing for multiple platform use on laptops and things. It was ok to have a mac or a linux based laptop in class. They don't plan on using mono either.
There are two opinions one can take from the change. The good news is that its a more practical program which will appeal to people like myself that went to community college and the like. The bad news is that you won't learn how to learn and instead will be brainwashed into Microsoft is the only way rederic. I like.NET personally, but its not the solution to every programming problem. I had hoped the program would switch to java and then teach C/C++ later on.
The CS degree requirement will change. Around here people explicitly ask for CIS degrees already. The logic in the past was that a CS person was taught to learn and so they can pick up the new stuff. With changes like the ones at my university, that will no longer be the case. I suspect the diversity is to help justify outsourcing. Most people agree its hard to outsource CIS type jobs overseas aside from helpdesk techs.
Computer science has become quite specialized. Its good for companies and bad for us. If you pick the wrong thing to specialize in, you may find yourself out of a job.
Programming as a hobby is a great thing, but remember most professionals don't write games, web browsers or operating systems. They don't need to know how to tune for best graphics or network performance because they are several levels away from the hardware. Most programs written now are business centric apps. An accounting app for example doesn't need to be a speed demon on the internet nor does it render opengl graphics for accounting figures. Now if a computer scientist is doing research in an area, they will learn everything they can about that area. People who like to wear many hats like me and you aren't appreciated anymore. Recruiters and companies often don't know where to put me. We are valuable to small businesses who can't afford 10 people, but its hard to break into big business with diversity.
Many computer science programs do offer network security courses. My university, for example, offers a course on hacking windows and linux machines. The class starts by installing windows and linux desktops and servers. Then 4 teams work on cracking the others using known and unknown exploits. The rule is you can only patch up to a certain level so that its fair for all involved. After so many exploits, you pass the class.
My wife took the course and it certainly helped her a great deal. My friend stopped attempting to hack us after she demonstrated her knowledge on his server:)
As for wireless security, rule number 1 is to assume you'll never secure it 100%. I don't care what technology you use, its possible to crack it given enough time. Remember we are talking about a network everyone has "physical" access too. I can sniff my neighbors networks. I know of programs to figure out keys. Watch traffic to find valid mac addresses and spoof one to get past mac address protection. There are ways to get into wireless networks. When i added a wireless router to my network, i put up firewalls on each of my hard wired machines. I'm even considering making a seperate interface in my main router (a freebsd machine) for that traffic to lock it out of my main network using firewall rules there. I'm using WPA2 personal and i don't feel all warm and cozy. Just remember, anything you do on a wireless network should be encrypted if its important with another layer of security. For example, my imap and smtp servers use ssl/tls encryption for logins. My websites have SSL enabled so that i can access them securely while using wireless. I use sftp to transfer files to wireless machines, etc. I also realize that any IM conversation i have can be read by others either on my end or on my friends end. Think about it this way, I can do everything right here, but he could be at a cafe with no encryption on at the other end.
Finally, buy a copy of 2600 sometime and find out whats possible. It isn't the end all source, but most people with any computer background can get something out of those articles. Its a good read. Best Buy had a lot of wireless problems because they are idiots.:)
You were in the wrong degree program then. CS is NOT for people who want to do IS/IT work. If your goal is to be a sys admin, or get MCSE or some such crap, try a CIS degree from your local community college or a 4 year degree from a business college. They teach you how to run an IS department and a little about computers.. like what windows 2003 server does and how to get netware certified.
Computer science is not about administration, or technical details of hardware. Its about learning how to program, how to learn, and some theory behind software design, architectures and the like. If you think programming is visual basic or perl you are mistaken. There are a lot of algorithms, patterns and methods to solve problems that you can put together. I really wish people would learn. Computer Science is NOT an envelope degree for every computer job. If you want 8 bucks an hour to put pcs together at best buy, its not for you. If you want to run an ISP its not for you. If you want to design a new file system for Linux, rewrite windows, design a new search algorthm for google, or research a new way to make the internet protocols 10 times faster and more reliable then its for you.
The worst part is that CIS people often have to hire people into CS. You guys don't get our jobs or ideas. I started as an IS/IT person. I was a sys admin at an isp for several years before I went to college. Trust me, there is a big difference between using Windows NT4 to host websites for customers, writing a vbscript windows scripting host program and solving real problems with real programming languages.
The holdup is ISPs. Large ISPs must start using ipv6. To do that, linksys (cisco), dlink, and other home network manufacturers must ship routers with ipv6 built in. Until i bought an airport express, I never had seen a home router with ipv6 before. That isn't even my main router, as its behind a ipv6 friendly freebsd box. I successfully set up a tunnel to HE via ipv6 at home and was rather impressed.
In order to translate, we are looking at the following: 1. isps must be REGULATED to switch starting with large providers like SBC/ATT, Comcast, Charter, and Verizon. (dial up/dsl/cable) 2. upstreams will upgrade when dialups/dsl/cable are on ipv6. 3. This will force ecommerce sites to upgrade, at least provide tunnels. 4. Other sites will follow suite. Had my current hosting company offered ipv6 w/ an ipv4 tunnel i'd be using it now.
The other factor is that most of you on slashdot think about large companies and the government switching. The government still ran 286 machines until y2k hit. Heck i bet they still have some somewhere. Home users can't afford to re-buy everything. Its like the HDTV arguments only worse. I live in michigan so you can adjust for cost of living elsewhere, but i don't think people can afford the switch where i'm at unless them make at least $50,000 a year. $7/hr at Macdo isn't going to cut it. You're asking them to buy a new computer, figure out how to patch their xp install, and then get an ISP with ipv6. I don't see them doing this. Worse yet, its a force upgrade to vista when it comes out. Most home users won't buy linux (and thats what THEY need to do), or purchase a Mac with built in ipv6.
So real cost to home user: $300 dell or $500 mac mini + $50 new router + cable comapny redistributing modems (most likely) or a rebuy of modem for dsl/cable + replace any other computers in the house. Best case $350 presuming dell starts bundling the update or isps send it on cd/dvd.
The cost would be higher for small business because it must buy multiple pcs. Granted anyone with a mac or xp + patch is ok on the software end. You still have the cost of the router. You add this to buying new tvs and pvrs (vcr is good for what in hdtv land?) and you've made the consumer broke. I don't want to hear any comments from people who make above $30,000 a year because you don't understand.
Another factor is schools. I think cisco, dell, microsoft and the government should start donating ipv6 equipment to public schools soon if they want this to happen. Universities should all be on internet2 soon as well.
There is a reason the government is predicting a high number because they know they have to pay for their upgrades, help out state governments who help out local governements and schools. If you've been in a public school lately, many are high tech with 5-7 year old pcs or macs. I guarantee its running the original OS too.
One idea might be to have large companies like cisco and sun offer to upgrade one large backbone provider for free. That will force the others to upgrade when that large provider gives out ipv6 stuff. Sun and cisco get to say they made the big push for ipv6 too.
Yes, but what about NAT users. If my wife and I got to the same website at different times using the same ad, we are different people and different clicks. My home network has NAT setup and we each have our own computers. Small to mid sized companies often use NAT as well. Do you see the problem yet?
Also, did the company look at other information to verify they are the same hit? For example the browser in use, its version, the operating system and version, etc. There are other ways to identify unique hits. Granted someone could write a script to request a page 3 times with ie, firefox and opera but there isn't going to be a perfect system. This guy is asking google to LOOSE money on clicks that are valid from people behind NAT systems and the like.
Think about it this way. On my home network there are 7 computers. 3 run mac os x and contain 2-3 browsers each. (safari, firefox and maybe IE) Then i have 1 windows pc, 1 freebsd pc, 1 openbsd ibook, and a sparc. Further to complicate things i have linux on one of the osx boxes as well. Using the metrics i outlines above, i could hit the site with 6 different operating systems, at least 5 different browsers (counting firefox the same on each os), etc. Now that would cost the guy money. In the flip side, I could be throwing a party and letting my guests surf for some reason. Each hit would be unique in that case.
My solution for this problem is to use the metrics above and also give a discount (google's end) if the exact same request comes in. So if the useragent, os, etc come in around the same time (hour say) from the same ip, only count like 50 perecnt of the requests unique. This will make spiders and things count less, and if someone sends a link of an add around a small office with nat, it will cover that too.
Thats very true. My dad is still using a Pentium 166 w/ mmx based laptop with windows ME to use AOL. Sure he complains its slow and asked me for a new computer for christmas (asshole), but he can still get his email and look at porn.
The only thing you mentioned that would be very rough is the video encoding. You notice the speed difference on newer hardware when encoding video.
People think i'm crazy for hanging on to a 10 year old sparc too. Its still got its uses. Only thing I would caution you on is to keep good backups. You never know when an older hard drive will die on you.
Most people don't need current hardware. Now if you're a heavy gamer it matters. My mother's using a 733mhz celeron and its working great for her. My aunt has a 300mhz amd k6-2 still in use. Reading email and surfing don't require much power. They all use windows. Imagine what you can do with a linux or bsd box on that hardware?
People like yourself hold open and closed source OS vendors in check. They can't write software that won't run at all on a few year old hardware. I mention open source because i've used recent versions of gnome!
HDTV has its benefits. I don't think YOU understand that $1500 is a lot of money to most americans. I have a 5 year old magnovox tv that my wife bought in college. Its a 20 inch POS. I'd love to have an HDTV, but it aint' going to happen anytime soon. I can spend $300 dollars max on a tv. When I can afford a 20" or equivalent HDTV at that price i will buy one. Hell I don't even have an LCD monitor yet. Its not that I'm stupid about the benefits, its that i can't go to the money tree in my backyard to buy one!
I don't care about the discs used for movies so much as I do for BACKUPS. I need a cheap, large disk format to do backups of my hard drives at home and something cheap at work. My boss still makes me use a 5 year old tape drive and won't buy me more disks. If i had something cheap that help 50 gb, I could backup the whole server. Its a raid 1 array with 2 60gb disks:(
Maybe its time there was a version of BSD for everyone. OpenBSD is not as restrictive as people make it out to be. I'm not a big fan, but my wife has an old ibook with openbsd 3.5 on it. It seems decent and X11 works out of the box. You can download whatever you want. OpenBSD simply limits buffer overflows and basic security problems.
Better still pick your own favorite OS. The more diversity out there, the harder it is to create root kits for everything. No OS is perfect. Pick the one that feels right to you and stick with it. Regardless of your choice, keep the security patches current and avoid running software or playing cds/dvds from Sony.
I did not cut and paste it. I never used 10.0 in fact. I waited for 10.1 and have used every version since. My iBook G4 800 mhz crashed shutting down until the 10.4.3 patch. I've had random freezes and lockups since 10.4 was added to my machine. I've even tried initialzing the disk and doing a fresh install. I would consider it a hardware problem, provided it didn't happen at work on new G5 machines (minus the shutdown issue). Common ground among all the machines is that they all contain ati graphics adapters and have similar software settings. In one case at work it was the prosoft engineering netware client for OSX. That breaks with every os revision. (10.4.2 to 10.4.3 etc)
10.1 and 10.3 were pretty solid releases of OSX, but 10.4 was a windows style rush job. It took longer than previous versions and it contains more bugs.
I suspect you use a mac a lot different than I do. People I know that have good luck with them only use the graphical environment, often don't install developer tools or use the bsd subsystem.
Its most likely just problems with drivers and interactions with the kernel. Perhaps if apple did more sanity checks between driver code and other parts of the kernel? If i got errors in the console, I could narrow it down. Taking a guess, I think the ati video drivers and the sata controller drivers are not so good in 10.4. I know the logitech mouse driver causes problems with 10.4 and i've seen firewire hardware cause problems as well. I feel like i'm talking about windows 98 right now. Sad.
Thank you. Someone actually brought up user interface design. I think that is what woz was getting at. He was talking about the raskin's of the world that innovatived the desktop. HCI (human computer interaction) is a field of study that most people don't think about anymore. I recently took a class on gui design at my university. Prior to taking the course, i actually had a cs professor (my advisor) recommend I avoid the class. He didn't see a point to the class. I certainly did. I don't plan on devoting my life to HCI like my wife does, but I certainly think its beneficial to web designers and conventional application developers. Usability is quite important. To this day, whenever i write an app or design a website I test it with the mom test. If my mom can use it efficiently and understands what each feature/command does, I did well.
I like the OSX dock provided magnify is disabled. Resizing the icons makes it harder to move your mouse to the correct one. Its annoying.
I don't think I would agree that OSX is the worst operating system in terms of usability. Solaris comes to mind. CDE and the Java Desktop System are crap. There are so many things you can not do in the gui that require CLI interaction its not funny. I love CLI interfaces, but I can't ask my mom or even my boss (a novell guy) to use a unix terminal. They freak out. My favorite OS of all time is NEXTSTEP, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It seemed so consistant compared to its modern counterpart (OSX).
Skinning apps is stupid. Not only does it lead to inconsistancy, but it also eats up memory like crazy. People who love it are the same people that complain about their computers being slow or talk about buying an extreme edition p4 just to run winamp, IE, and a few games.
I think most people are bad at UI design. Very few people at my university seem to understand basics and even worse most don't even think about usability when they write software. I know I'm a bad offender, but I try to improve. I think thats all we can ask from Apple, Microsoft, and the rest.
As a roadmap for OSX, I recommend the following: 1. Fix kernel/stability problems. 2. Consider standardizing OS components on one UI or at least limit it to two. Pinstripes, shinny metal, and now the worst of all.. plastic. Why do I want to look at plastic? Mail.app drives me nuts. 3. Ignore adding 200 features and work on getting the system consistant, fast and usable. Thats a feature in itself. With the intel switch coming up, I know we are going to have major stability problems in intel and ppc based macs.
I suppose you are correct. I just wish more computer people would point out the distinction. Not just mac vs pc, but that pcs can run something besides windows (linux, bsd, solaris, etc). I think it would be a huge step forward for open source. My mother asked me recently what kind of computer can run linux. When i told her that her crappy hp might run it, she seemed very confused. I offered to install it, but when she learned that itunes wouldn't work she said forget it. I don't have enough exerpience with wine to make that kind of promise. Anything would be better than her unpatched, pirated copy of xp.
Yeah presuming you're running on ia32 architecture you can run the linux emulation port. OpenBSD on my wife's ibook won't work of course. As for the relevance of rhapsody vs itunes, I'm an itunes and rhapsody customer. iTunes is great for songs that I really want to keep. Rhapsody is nice for entertaining and casual listening when i'm at home. It takes up much less disk space. (streaming) My issue with rhapsody is that anything in your library is subject to random screw ups since licenses don't auto renew properly. I've only been using rhapsody for a few months and itunes since the first week it was out in the US. I'm just happy i can use rhapsody on the road now. (ibook laptop, pc desktop)
I don't think so. They may ask if its intel compatible or ia32 compatible. A PC does not imply intel based, just that its a PERSONAL COMPUTER. A Mac is a PC. Granted next year the distinction is gone. Besides sun makes workstations, not pcs.
Apple is shipping a dual dual core now. Its not 4 on one die, but its 4 processors on a computer the masses can buy. I think AMD is on the right track. I'd like to see a dual core in a laptop personally.
Sparcs are good processors for servers. You'd be suprised. Desktops are toys anyway. Sun's been shipping 64bit cpus for how many years now? AMD was playing catch up in the server realm. Even intel had the itanium pos out. It all depends on your perspective. If you wish to think on a desktop scale, Intel is the big dog and AMD has a better product (after years of lousy ones). The server world is a bit different. Companies are shifting back to buying larger servers and not just filling a room with pcs like they did 5 years ago. Intel can't deliver in this market. On the up side, AMD's 4 core chips will be nice additions to Sun's low end opteron lineup.
Sun bills you in 1 year increments PROVIDED your credit card has an experation date > 3 years in the future. Otherwise you get hit for it all at once.
Its $360 for the first year, and any additional hardware or upgrades are billed in the first installment beyond the base system price. This includes billing you for a keyboard if you order one!
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nVidia also supports FreeBSD! ATI does not. I had to buy an nvidia card recently because my AIW 9600xt would not work in freebsd and my older firegl card (radeon 8800 chipset) would crash with dri enabled.
Both companies could do more with open source, but I personally have more respect for nVidia at the moment.
If it were really 300 hundred dollars, I'd have one now. If you consider the fact you would be a fool to buy the low end model, plus the cost of games, its quite expensive just for gaming. A 2000 dollar pc might not be as good as this unit now, but in 3 years it will be. I can use the 2000 dollar pc for other activities like software development, word processing, and it even allows me to use competing technologies and games. My pc can run iTunes, firefox, and run enemy territory.
You are correcct that the targeted smp support is very impressive. That is the key feature of the xbox 360 to me. However, with dual core cpus ending up in gamer's systems, we will see a change in this area. Blizzard, id, valve, and any other developer will need to support SMP in future engines to compete. This xbox might get us there sooner.
I don't think the video card is as good as you claim though. Microsoft bought it, so it must use current or soon to be current technologies.
SATA controllers and more importantly the drivers for said controllers are the key. Most SATA controllers require slightly different drivers than others. Its like buying SCSI in that sense, the controller is more important than the drives you connect to it. A low quality scsi controller is just as bad, perhaps worse than a bad SATA controller.
SATA will be good in the enterprise when operating systems have drivers integrated in them. That is the only reason I look forward to windows vista. Every few years, we get a version of windows with current drivers for newer types of devices like SATA raid controllers and PCIe video cards. The open source community is almost there. FreeBSD 6 added full support for my onboard sata controller (nforce2 chipset w/ nforce 3 sata controller.. weird msi board). From my understanding, recent linux kernel releases have added support for several sata controllers including intel and nivida.
SATA is not a replacement for SCSI, but its not bad. I think they often have different performance characteristics and are good at different tasks. Even if the drives are identical, the controller and access to the drive is not.
I can't speak for standard business stuff, but I usually get indian techs who try to have an american accent using old slang and putting marbles under their tongue. I don't joke. I've met dell indian techs who later came to the university i work for/go to. I have to call in on dells all the time. We haven't had 1 machine make it out of the 3 year warrenty period without a hardware failure. Most commonly its power supply, floppy (i expect this), and hard drive. I've actually had 5 machines with the PROCESSOR CACHE FAIL. These were pentium 4 1.4 ghz based optiplex gx240's. I've had almost all gx260's have bad power supplies now. 280s often have sata controller problems. 270s randonly have power supply problems and are very picky with video drivers. Don't even get me started on laptops. We buy EVERY computer from dell except about 10 macs a year. They treat us like shit. We deployed 54 new machines this summer and 5 were bad in the first 3 days. We've had to call on 10 more. (all gx280 w/ mini case) They overheat of course and die. They have to gut the things.. new motherboard, processor, power supply. Dell's have bad air flow and often overheat.
I don't recommend dell's for business unless you're talking the Precision line. Thats a whole different story. Precisions are great gamer machines provided you replace the video card. A workstation card isn't designed for high frame rates and low quality open gl like we need to play today's fps. I've got a precision 650 workstation at home. Its great for et, wow, and even ok with doom 3. I dropped in an ati AIW 9600 xt card. In all serious though, if you're a true gamer you should BUILD a pc. A good gamer rig has a nice motherboard, sata raid 0 with 8-16mb cache disks, an awesome video card (pciE high end), and as expensive a cpu as you can afford. Most id software games require a lot of disk i/o to ensure fast level load times in multiplayer. UT can benefit that way to. I'm sure newer games like quake4 and farcry could benefit from faster disks as well. All OEM computers i've seen have shitty hard drives in them. Spend 80 bucks on newegg and get something with a little cache. It will do wonders reading those large map files and so forth.
If you are not bright enough or too lazy to build your own pc, i recommend looking hard at what games you play. If you can, buy a powermac. Why? Apple ships with gamer cards on those things.. nvidia and ati graphics.. not cheap ass intel. They are workstation grade machines like precisions and they are very upgradable. You can upgrade video, disks, memory, processors (overdrives!), etc. Apple actually has american tech support and i doubt you'll even need to call them.
Hallways are a problem too. Roomba has great difficulty with my hallway. If every room in the hallway is open and roomba cleans the whole area, it can hit about 95% of the hallway without setting it down special for a spot clean. If the rooms are mostly closed, roomba will not enter the hallway at new angles and therefore will not hit a good percentage of the hallway. It actually repeats over the same areas.
I haven't had problems with chairs, but now instead of cleaning the floor every week and moving around obsticles i find myself spending the same time picking up obsticles. When you have cats who drag toys under the bed, this can be a problem. More than once i've had roomba get a toy stuck in the brush or flip over because it bumped into a corner at a certain angle.
As for cleaning, it gets cat hair out great as long as you empty it often enough. I find the brush and compartment fill up quickly. I do have 3 cats though. I bought the lowend model (red) that does not have the charging station. I wasn't sure how it would work with my cats at the time and didn't want to risk 300 dollars on a vacuum that didn't work. When this one dies eventually, i'll buy a high end model.
The bigger the room, the better it does. If you live in an apartment like I do, sometimes it has trouble. If you live in a home with small hallways, it could be an issue. Good for a house, not as good for an apartment or "mobile home".
I had hoped to buy one for my grandmother as she has trouble vacuuming at 77 years old. I think it would be too much work for her to bend over to empty it and "child proof" her home.
One last thing, if you have a lot of electronics or pets you should watch the roomba while its running to some degree. Don't let it roam free. One time it knocked my surround speaker to the floor because it caught on the speaker wire behind the couch! Suprisingly it does much better in my computer room, although the cables are well hidden and only cat5 cable is running along the floorboards.
Maybe there's a self destruct near the central brain area...
I don't know about you, but as my roomba rolls by, I often find myself saying "We meet for the first time, for the last time."
Yes, and although the parent is obviously smarter than I about video, Linux and BSD have kernel bits on older 3d cards (DRI/DRM) that load when x11 is run. Even my nvidia card with their driver runs a kernel module when i start X11 to run video. Now maybe one can argue that the seperation as a kernel module isolates the kernel better than whatever microsoft did in NT4. I don't know. I do know that SP3 NT4 had extremely buggy handling of agp ati cards at the time and intel based cards were even worse. AGP was new then similar to the pciE push now.
If freebsd has seperate user code, why did i have to hack kernel code to add my pci id for my agp ati radeon card a few years back? If mac os X has great video code, why does my ibook crash with apple or ati drivers on memory intensive games. It is a kernel panic after all.
I can tell you my experience. I first went to the university of michigan flint. They pushed cobol, pascal and basic and followed up with fortran. I dropped out of that program for similar reasons. It didn't seem practical and unlike a real cs program, they didn't focus on how to learn new languages either.
.NET 2.0 next fall for almost everything. All new classes will be C#, except for operating systems and system programming which will continue to use linux. They are still decideding on the sparc assembly class. Its a shame really as many students there learn C# on their own time and few get exposed to *nix like systems otherwise.
.NET personally, but its not the solution to every programming problem. I had hoped the program would switch to java and then teach C/C++ later on.
I worked for a few years, and then went to a community college. I did basic, visual basic and C there. Two of the three were quite useful, although I had learned a bit of both in my own time. I earned a degree there and then went on for a bachelors at western michigan university. The intro class is C++ currently. You use C++ for the first two classes, then learn a little C and sparc assembly. Then you take a systems programming class taught entirely with C and another class tailored to C++ on data/file structures. Most of the classes were taught with linux or solaris. I recently finished a gui programming coarse using Gtk+/Gnome 2.6.
The down side is that the program got "encouraged" by microsoft to switch to
Until recent events, the program was very good about allowing for multiple platform use on laptops and things. It was ok to have a mac or a linux based laptop in class. They don't plan on using mono either.
There are two opinions one can take from the change. The good news is that its a more practical program which will appeal to people like myself that went to community college and the like. The bad news is that you won't learn how to learn and instead will be brainwashed into Microsoft is the only way rederic. I like
The CS degree requirement will change. Around here people explicitly ask for CIS degrees already. The logic in the past was that a CS person was taught to learn and so they can pick up the new stuff. With changes like the ones at my university, that will no longer be the case. I suspect the diversity is to help justify outsourcing. Most people agree its hard to outsource CIS type jobs overseas aside from helpdesk techs.
Computer science has become quite specialized. Its good for companies and bad for us. If you pick the wrong thing to specialize in, you may find yourself out of a job.
Programming as a hobby is a great thing, but remember most professionals don't write games, web browsers or operating systems. They don't need to know how to tune for best graphics or network performance because they are several levels away from the hardware. Most programs written now are business centric apps. An accounting app for example doesn't need to be a speed demon on the internet nor does it render opengl graphics for accounting figures. Now if a computer scientist is doing research in an area, they will learn everything they can about that area. People who like to wear many hats like me and you aren't appreciated anymore. Recruiters and companies often don't know where to put me. We are valuable to small businesses who can't afford 10 people, but its hard to break into big business with diversity.
Many computer science programs do offer network security courses. My university, for example, offers a course on hacking windows and linux machines. The class starts by installing windows and linux desktops and servers. Then 4 teams work on cracking the others using known and unknown exploits. The rule is you can only patch up to a certain level so that its fair for all involved. After so many exploits, you pass the class.
:)
:)
My wife took the course and it certainly helped her a great deal. My friend stopped attempting to hack us after she demonstrated her knowledge on his server
As for wireless security, rule number 1 is to assume you'll never secure it 100%. I don't care what technology you use, its possible to crack it given enough time. Remember we are talking about a network everyone has "physical" access too. I can sniff my neighbors networks. I know of programs to figure out keys. Watch traffic to find valid mac addresses and spoof one to get past mac address protection. There are ways to get into wireless networks. When i added a wireless router to my network, i put up firewalls on each of my hard wired machines. I'm even considering making a seperate interface in my main router (a freebsd machine) for that traffic to lock it out of my main network using firewall rules there. I'm using WPA2 personal and i don't feel all warm and cozy. Just remember, anything you do on a wireless network should be encrypted if its important with another layer of security. For example, my imap and smtp servers use ssl/tls encryption for logins. My websites have SSL enabled so that i can access them securely while using wireless. I use sftp to transfer files to wireless machines, etc. I also realize that any IM conversation i have can be read by others either on my end or on my friends end. Think about it this way, I can do everything right here, but he could be at a cafe with no encryption on at the other end.
Finally, buy a copy of 2600 sometime and find out whats possible. It isn't the end all source, but most people with any computer background can get something out of those articles. Its a good read. Best Buy had a lot of wireless problems because they are idiots.
You were in the wrong degree program then. CS is NOT for people who want to do IS/IT work. If your goal is to be a sys admin, or get MCSE or some such crap, try a CIS degree from your local community college or a 4 year degree from a business college. They teach you how to run an IS department and a little about computers.. like what windows 2003 server does and how to get netware certified.
Computer science is not about administration, or technical details of hardware. Its about learning how to program, how to learn, and some theory behind software design, architectures and the like. If you think programming is visual basic or perl you are mistaken. There are a lot of algorithms, patterns and methods to solve problems that you can put together. I really wish people would learn. Computer Science is NOT an envelope degree for every computer job. If you want 8 bucks an hour to put pcs together at best buy, its not for you. If you want to run an ISP its not for you. If you want to design a new file system for Linux, rewrite windows, design a new search algorthm for google, or research a new way to make the internet protocols 10 times faster and more reliable then its for you.
The worst part is that CIS people often have to hire people into CS. You guys don't get our jobs or ideas. I started as an IS/IT person. I was a sys admin at an isp for several years before I went to college. Trust me, there is a big difference between using Windows NT4 to host websites for customers, writing a vbscript windows scripting host program and solving real problems with real programming languages.
The holdup is ISPs. Large ISPs must start using ipv6. To do that, linksys (cisco), dlink, and other home network manufacturers must ship routers with ipv6 built in. Until i bought an airport express, I never had seen a home router with ipv6 before. That isn't even my main router, as its behind a ipv6 friendly freebsd box. I successfully set up a tunnel to HE via ipv6 at home and was rather impressed.
In order to translate, we are looking at the following:
1. isps must be REGULATED to switch starting with large providers like SBC/ATT, Comcast, Charter, and Verizon. (dial up/dsl/cable)
2. upstreams will upgrade when dialups/dsl/cable are on ipv6.
3. This will force ecommerce sites to upgrade, at least provide tunnels.
4. Other sites will follow suite. Had my current hosting company offered ipv6 w/ an ipv4 tunnel i'd be using it now.
The other factor is that most of you on slashdot think about large companies and the government switching. The government still ran 286 machines until y2k hit. Heck i bet they still have some somewhere. Home users can't afford to re-buy everything. Its like the HDTV arguments only worse. I live in michigan so you can adjust for cost of living elsewhere, but i don't think people can afford the switch where i'm at unless them make at least $50,000 a year. $7/hr at Macdo isn't going to cut it. You're asking them to buy a new computer, figure out how to patch their xp install, and then get an ISP with ipv6. I don't see them doing this. Worse yet, its a force upgrade to vista when it comes out. Most home users won't buy linux (and thats what THEY need to do), or purchase a Mac with built in ipv6.
So real cost to home user: $300 dell or $500 mac mini + $50 new router + cable comapny redistributing modems (most likely) or a rebuy of modem for dsl/cable + replace any other computers in the house. Best case $350 presuming dell starts bundling the update or isps send it on cd/dvd.
The cost would be higher for small business because it must buy multiple pcs. Granted anyone with a mac or xp + patch is ok on the software end. You still have the cost of the router. You add this to buying new tvs and pvrs (vcr is good for what in hdtv land?) and you've made the consumer broke. I don't want to hear any comments from people who make above $30,000 a year because you don't understand.
Another factor is schools. I think cisco, dell, microsoft and the government should start donating ipv6 equipment to public schools soon if they want this to happen. Universities should all be on internet2 soon as well.
There is a reason the government is predicting a high number because they know they have to pay for their upgrades, help out state governments who help out local governements and schools. If you've been in a public school lately, many are high tech with 5-7 year old pcs or macs. I guarantee its running the original OS too.
One idea might be to have large companies like cisco and sun offer to upgrade one large backbone provider for free. That will force the others to upgrade when that large provider gives out ipv6 stuff. Sun and cisco get to say they made the big push for ipv6 too.
Yes, but what about NAT users. If my wife and I got to the same website at different times using the same ad, we are different people and different clicks. My home network has NAT setup and we each have our own computers. Small to mid sized companies often use NAT as well. Do you see the problem yet?
Also, did the company look at other information to verify they are the same hit? For example the browser in use, its version, the operating system and version, etc. There are other ways to identify unique hits. Granted someone could write a script to request a page 3 times with ie, firefox and opera but there isn't going to be a perfect system. This guy is asking google to LOOSE money on clicks that are valid from people behind NAT systems and the like.
Think about it this way. On my home network there are 7 computers. 3 run mac os x and contain 2-3 browsers each. (safari, firefox and maybe IE) Then i have 1 windows pc, 1 freebsd pc, 1 openbsd ibook, and a sparc. Further to complicate things i have linux on one of the osx boxes as well. Using the metrics i outlines above, i could hit the site with 6 different operating systems, at least 5 different browsers (counting firefox the same on each os), etc. Now that would cost the guy money. In the flip side, I could be throwing a party and letting my guests surf for some reason. Each hit would be unique in that case.
My solution for this problem is to use the metrics above and also give a discount (google's end) if the exact same request comes in. So if the useragent, os, etc come in around the same time (hour say) from the same ip, only count like 50 perecnt of the requests unique. This will make spiders and things count less, and if someone sends a link of an add around a small office with nat, it will cover that too.
I see the humor, but I can actually see microsoft outsourcing in this way. Interns wrote notepad and wordpad didn't they? Oh dear..
Thats very true. My dad is still using a Pentium 166 w/ mmx based laptop with windows ME to use AOL. Sure he complains its slow and asked me for a new computer for christmas (asshole), but he can still get his email and look at porn.
The only thing you mentioned that would be very rough is the video encoding. You notice the speed difference on newer hardware when encoding video.
People think i'm crazy for hanging on to a 10 year old sparc too. Its still got its uses. Only thing I would caution you on is to keep good backups. You never know when an older hard drive will die on you.
Most people don't need current hardware. Now if you're a heavy gamer it matters. My mother's using a 733mhz celeron and its working great for her. My aunt has a 300mhz amd k6-2 still in use. Reading email and surfing don't require much power. They all use windows. Imagine what you can do with a linux or bsd box on that hardware?
People like yourself hold open and closed source OS vendors in check. They can't write software that won't run at all on a few year old hardware. I mention open source because i've used recent versions of gnome!
HDTV has its benefits. I don't think YOU understand that $1500 is a lot of money to most americans. I have a 5 year old magnovox tv that my wife bought in college. Its a 20 inch POS. I'd love to have an HDTV, but it aint' going to happen anytime soon. I can spend $300 dollars max on a tv. When I can afford a 20" or equivalent HDTV at that price i will buy one. Hell I don't even have an LCD monitor yet. Its not that I'm stupid about the benefits, its that i can't go to the money tree in my backyard to buy one!
I don't care about the discs used for movies so much as I do for BACKUPS. I need a cheap, large disk format to do backups of my hard drives at home and something cheap at work. My boss still makes me use a 5 year old tape drive and won't buy me more disks. If i had something cheap that help 50 gb, I could backup the whole server. Its a raid 1 array with 2 60gb disks :(
Maybe its time there was a version of BSD for everyone. OpenBSD is not as restrictive as people make it out to be. I'm not a big fan, but my wife has an old ibook with openbsd 3.5 on it. It seems decent and X11 works out of the box. You can download whatever you want. OpenBSD simply limits buffer overflows and basic security problems.
Better still pick your own favorite OS. The more diversity out there, the harder it is to create root kits for everything. No OS is perfect. Pick the one that feels right to you and stick with it. Regardless of your choice, keep the security patches current and avoid running software or playing cds/dvds from Sony.
I did not cut and paste it. I never used 10.0 in fact. I waited for 10.1 and have used every version since. My iBook G4 800 mhz crashed shutting down until the 10.4.3 patch. I've had random freezes and lockups since 10.4 was added to my machine. I've even tried initialzing the disk and doing a fresh install. I would consider it a hardware problem, provided it didn't happen at work on new G5 machines (minus the shutdown issue). Common ground among all the machines is that they all contain ati graphics adapters and have similar software settings. In one case at work it was the prosoft engineering netware client for OSX. That breaks with every os revision. (10.4.2 to 10.4.3 etc)
10.1 and 10.3 were pretty solid releases of OSX, but 10.4 was a windows style rush job. It took longer than previous versions and it contains more bugs.
I suspect you use a mac a lot different than I do. People I know that have good luck with them only use the graphical environment, often don't install developer tools or use the bsd subsystem.
Its most likely just problems with drivers and interactions with the kernel. Perhaps if apple did more sanity checks between driver code and other parts of the kernel? If i got errors in the console, I could narrow it down. Taking a guess, I think the ati video drivers and the sata controller drivers are not so good in 10.4. I know the logitech mouse driver causes problems with 10.4 and i've seen firewire hardware cause problems as well. I feel like i'm talking about windows 98 right now. Sad.
Thank you. Someone actually brought up user interface design. I think that is what woz was getting at. He was talking about the raskin's of the world that innovatived the desktop. HCI (human computer interaction) is a field of study that most people don't think about anymore. I recently took a class on gui design at my university. Prior to taking the course, i actually had a cs professor (my advisor) recommend I avoid the class. He didn't see a point to the class. I certainly did. I don't plan on devoting my life to HCI like my wife does, but I certainly think its beneficial to web designers and conventional application developers. Usability is quite important. To this day, whenever i write an app or design a website I test it with the mom test. If my mom can use it efficiently and understands what each feature/command does, I did well.
I like the OSX dock provided magnify is disabled. Resizing the icons makes it harder to move your mouse to the correct one. Its annoying.
I don't think I would agree that OSX is the worst operating system in terms of usability. Solaris comes to mind. CDE and the Java Desktop System are crap. There are so many things you can not do in the gui that require CLI interaction its not funny. I love CLI interfaces, but I can't ask my mom or even my boss (a novell guy) to use a unix terminal. They freak out. My favorite OS of all time is NEXTSTEP, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It seemed so consistant compared to its modern counterpart (OSX).
Skinning apps is stupid. Not only does it lead to inconsistancy, but it also eats up memory like crazy. People who love it are the same people that complain about their computers being slow or talk about buying an extreme edition p4 just to run winamp, IE, and a few games.
I think most people are bad at UI design. Very few people at my university seem to understand basics and even worse most don't even think about usability when they write software. I know I'm a bad offender, but I try to improve. I think thats all we can ask from Apple, Microsoft, and the rest.
As a roadmap for OSX, I recommend the following:
1. Fix kernel/stability problems.
2. Consider standardizing OS components on one UI or at least limit it to two. Pinstripes, shinny metal, and now the worst of all.. plastic. Why do I want to look at plastic? Mail.app drives me nuts.
3. Ignore adding 200 features and work on getting the system consistant, fast and usable. Thats a feature in itself. With the intel switch coming up, I know we are going to have major stability problems in intel and ppc based macs.
3 is certainly better than two.. one for each of Balmer's chins. :)
I suppose you are correct. I just wish more computer people would point out the distinction. Not just mac vs pc, but that pcs can run something besides windows (linux, bsd, solaris, etc). I think it would be a huge step forward for open source. My mother asked me recently what kind of computer can run linux. When i told her that her crappy hp might run it, she seemed very confused. I offered to install it, but when she learned that itunes wouldn't work she said forget it. I don't have enough exerpience with wine to make that kind of promise. Anything would be better than her unpatched, pirated copy of xp.
Yeah presuming you're running on ia32 architecture you can run the linux emulation port. OpenBSD on my wife's ibook won't work of course. As for the relevance of rhapsody vs itunes, I'm an itunes and rhapsody customer. iTunes is great for songs that I really want to keep. Rhapsody is nice for entertaining and casual listening when i'm at home. It takes up much less disk space. (streaming) My issue with rhapsody is that anything in your library is subject to random screw ups since licenses don't auto renew properly. I've only been using rhapsody for a few months and itunes since the first week it was out in the US. I'm just happy i can use rhapsody on the road now. (ibook laptop, pc desktop)
I don't think so. They may ask if its intel compatible or ia32 compatible. A PC does not imply intel based, just that its a PERSONAL COMPUTER. A Mac is a PC. Granted next year the distinction is gone. Besides sun makes workstations, not pcs.
Apple is shipping a dual dual core now. Its not 4 on one die, but its 4 processors on a computer the masses can buy. I think AMD is on the right track. I'd like to see a dual core in a laptop personally.
Sparcs are good processors for servers. You'd be suprised. Desktops are toys anyway. Sun's been shipping 64bit cpus for how many years now? AMD was playing catch up in the server realm. Even intel had the itanium pos out. It all depends on your perspective. If you wish to think on a desktop scale, Intel is the big dog and AMD has a better product (after years of lousy ones). The server world is a bit different. Companies are shifting back to buying larger servers and not just filling a room with pcs like they did 5 years ago. Intel can't deliver in this market. On the up side, AMD's 4 core chips will be nice additions to Sun's low end opteron lineup.
Sun bills you in 1 year increments PROVIDED your credit card has an experation date > 3 years in the future. Otherwise you get hit for it all at once.
Its $360 for the first year, and any additional hardware or upgrades are billed in the first installment beyond the base system price. This includes billing you for a keyboard if you order one!