The modu is especially nifty. It's roughly the size of an iPod nano (and it has 2gb for music). That said, I can't recommend them except as easy things to carry in case you get into a pinch. I only carry them when I don't intend to need them. Asus is right, there's lots of room for improvement. Shoving the modu into the netbook shouldn't be the priority though. The current modu doesn't even do 3G. The top 3 priorities should be:
Controls - the base modu phone has 7 keys vs the 12 on a basic push button phone. They didn't even do a good job with the 7. They should've compromised their design a bit and at least put 12 on or switched to something like a trackball or touchscreen/strip/pad.
Consistency - Unify their interfaces, and provide consistent metaphors and controls
Convenience - Most of the people I can think of that would buy this combo just expect basic features. It should be easier to make a call or read a web page with this system than others. People get *small and simple.*
The 7 keys suck even worse than I'd thought because I hadn't considered all the touch-tone menu systems. Their response is surely that I should put a jacket on it that has more buttons, but that's stupid because:
Even though its transformable, everything it transforms into sucks more than a basic Nokia candybar.
They have a real feature that people want: it's small and light. Adding jackets breaks that.
Putting the 7 buttons there tells me you wanted it to be usable on its own. The device is technically usable, but practically almost unusable.
The netbook's controls are busted too, but not as bad.. and I don't need a manufacturers help to fix that.
Modu: I'd happily volunteer my time, coding skills, and even rudimentary amateur electronics to help. I want less phone. You can't compete with the big boys on the low-end, so fill a niche they miss: small, light, simple. Think of a woman with a tiny little clutch. Make the phone work for her, and you'll discover the other thing in that clutch: an inordinate amount of disposable money.
P.S. Make the headset jack match the standard: 3.5mm & compatible with ones with mics and controls for an iphone. Micro-usb headsets will only cost you sales.
I think/. users benefited from the rise of digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. The quality on/. had been going way downhill before they became popular. Those sites drew away most of the idiots, and/. learned what it's good at. After/. stopped trying to compete head-to-head in the more-news-faster-and-crazier game, they appear to have reached an impressive equilibrium.
Admittedly, I rarely read/. anymore. It seems to have grown more focused, which is good for the site.. but I'm not as interested in the topics it's focused on. OTOH, I absolutely never read digg or the main reddit anymore -- even though they theoretically cover my interests better.
Bring back JonKatz. Actually, hell.. I miss USENET.
I wouldn't be surprised at all. That's precisely what I was doing in class at 12 years old. We monitored our heart-rates by hand in fitness class for years specifically to optimize our own workout. We were taught about aerobic vs anaerobic exercise, maximum heart rates, how muscle grows, etc. I think we probably recorded them too - I know we recorded some info, although it was with pencil and paper.
If your concern with this is privacy, starting running around a track. Don't stop until you realize your folly.
I don't see why this'd be much more of a privacy concern than recording perfectly normal things like lap times, vertical jump height, or grip strength.. things that are routinely recorded to assess the students' progress and that could be used at least as well to adjust insurance premiums.
Also, I don't see why one needs the machines and straps and junk. So long as it's for the student's benefit, might as show them how to measure it them self by feeling their pulse, counting, and looking at a wall clock. I'm sure even my 4 year old could do it if I showed him how.
Nic.ru seems to be the main site. nic.tld is often the place to go at least for info on a TLD.
Their service agreement form allows you to specify you're a US citizen as well as to choose to pay in US Dollars. They're charging 600 rubles/year for a domain, which is currently US$25.51.
The mainframe is many years old and they only managed to beat it by up to 70% with 120 machines? Either that thing is awesome or they suck with their grid.
I've thought for quite a while that a reasonable spreadsheet could be done from a web browser, and I'd often prefer it to others currently available just for the convenience of accessing it and sharing it.
I tried EditGrid as you recommended, and I think you may've made a bad architecture decision. As you say, you're using the core library of Gnumeric as your backend, which matches with experience with the front-end. When I type in formulas and change values that affect formulas, it takes a good while for the cell to show the updated results - even on a ridiculously fast internet connection.
I assume you're moving data from the front-end to the back-end, doing the calculations on the back-end, and pushing the data back out to the front-end. I don't see how that could ever result in a seamless user experience (<1/10th of a second responses) over the internet through an HTTP setup.
I'd much rather use a javascript based calculation engine that used the server merely for saving data, rather than an AJAX face on a server-side spreadsheet. Admittedly, javascript is going to be much slower to do large calculations, but even at 50x slower than the backend, it's got a huge headstart due to latency, and if the result is a large number of changed cells, it's going to start making back some more of the speed advantage. There's the scalability issue also - one has to assume that using the client's own CPU is going to be more scalable than having everyone run on your servers' CPU.
Don't get me wrong - I understand why you did it on the server-side. You got to reuse Gnumeric's tested code, and minimize the annoying multi-browser javascript testing. Unfortunately, that results in performance far worse than I'd be willing to put up with to ditch a local spreadsheet app.
I listen to a lot of streaming audio on the net, but unlike many posters' assertions, a lot of what I listen to is locally available via broadcast. Listening to it on the net means less static, and often more importantly, it's possible to listen in a high-rise office complex.
That said, I do listen to some stuff that's not available via broadcast (at least locally) as well, but the point was I normally prefer to listen via the computer either way. In fact, I don't listen to a couple of shows just because they're not available via the net.
Also interesting to me is that I'm increasingly listening to recordings of radio broadcasts (that weren't originally intended as "podcasts"). That's a big deal for me since I'm frequently interrupted in my listening, but I like to hear a complete program.
Buying other companies is a way good way to sell your overvalued stock without notifying everyone that you think that the current price is a great sale.
They have a Trailing P/E of 225. That means their stock is trading for way way more than they're making. Compare it to someone like Amazon with ~1/5th of that, or GE with ~1/10th of that. Even their forward P/E (what they think they'll make in the future vs what their presently worth) is double Amazon's and triple GE's.
The articles themselves seem excessively alarmist, and the slashdot summary is of course much worse.
The plausible stats I saw were:
A 4.5% decline in the IT labor force since the peak in 2001. (IW article)
IT unemployment currently around 5.5%, down from 6% recently, and up from 3% in 2000-2001. (IW article)
"The overall number of people employed in computer-related occupations in the U.S. dropped by about 9,000 people from the first to second quarter." (IT article)
A lot of the other stats are based on random labelling of people (e.g. "computer programmer" vs "computer analyst" vs "software engineer".. the IW articles cites an 8% increase in the latter), and a relatively small sample. If nothing else, the reported 60% increase in IT managers should tell you something about these surveys.
If we're just going for shock-the-readers headlines based on these stats, try this one:
InformationWeek reports that according to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there's now one manager to every 1.85 computer programmers. At current rates, managers will outnumber programmers in a few years.
(InformationWeek reports 341k managers vs 632k computer programmers.. but that report based upon those numbers is obviously misleading.)
I clearly remember GEOS being widely available for download when it first came out. Sure modems were slower back then, but I'm pretty sure everyone that wanted it got it already.
I've seen a fair chunk of the NT kernel code, legally, under NDA. The NDA bars me from revealing any details, but it doesn't prevent me from saying that, if I were MS, I wouldn't worry about anything aside from sheer embarassment.. However, I have to admit that getting something of that hulking size operating solidly is pretty respectable.
On the plus side, some of the comments are fairly humorous, especially when you note who wrote them and look up where they are today.
The 5-year trend is looking up and up despite the recent poor economy
Uh. The chart you pulled doesn't match your description. YHOO is down ~45% from where it stood 5 years ago, and has underperformed all the common U.S. stock indices in that timeframe. Take a a look for yourself. The chart you pulled was for the max timeframe, not 5 years, and had logarithmic prices (distortion.. money isn't logarithmic).
I got that part. The part that threw me is why the original poster thinks a girl's nipples are covered by her skirt? I suppose if one had been looking at too much kitty porn...
Studies have shown [...] programmers are capable of writing approximately the same number of lines of code per unit of time in whatever language they program in.
I don't think you fully read what you were arguing against.
The studies you referred to showed the LOC/day is the same independent of language, not the quality of a program. Although you argued that Java requires fewer LOC to do the same task, that's certainly not always the case. Even if it were the case, you didn't establish that fewer LOC in Java equates to higher "quality".
I believe the gist of what the original poster said is true: A good programmer could probaly write the same quality program in C or Java. How long it takes them, the performance of the program, and the maintainability of the program are different matters altogether.
I'm thinking of getting myself a copy of one of the C++ specs to help me answer the really obscure questions. Does someone recommend a particular spec (e.g., ANSI, ISO)?
Actually, this pretty much solved all my obscure or arcane C++ questions. In fact, while referring to that I haven't once had trouble figuring out if I was implicitly causing a conversion which caused a deep copy which in turn caused a memory leak since.
Of course, "Why did my program just pause for a 1/10th of a second, and how can I avoid that?" comes up more often now.
Does this mean that SCO will be able to nuke anyone's machine that is downloading anything with a linux kernel or AIX patch?
What if I email SCO part of the AIX kernel, and they open it.. does that give IBM the right to nuke their machine?
What if Osama Bin Laden writes a message on the internet, copyrights it, and explicitly states that nobody from the U.S. Government may read it. If the NSA downloads it, does that give Osama the right to zzzzap their computers?
What if I place an auction on eBay with a title that contains copywritten lyrics by Metallica, and pay for it to get on their front page? Does that give Metallica the right to take out all eBay user's boxes?
Whatever the legalities, I hope that when they implement this feature that the computers actually smoke when they get fried. If they're going to destroy one's property, they'd better at least make it entertaining.
Let's say you get a donation of 20 Macs - that's great. These machines are going can be expected to have a 10 year life time. There are still Apple II'c in use on my son's campus!
So?
I was taught to touch-type on Apple II's and typewriters (many non-electric). The Apple II's and their software was great. IIRC, you put the disk in the drive, turned it on and some number of seconds later it told you what to do.. if you could operate a microwave, you could operate those things.
If they're having trouble with them, I could see replacing them. Otherwise, touch typing hasn't changed since then, so why bother replacing them?
From the outside, these guys just seem to be screwing off all day long. It all sounds rather fun, but why does AOL need to employ them to do this?
Do they want this publicity?
Did the NullSoft buyout contract specify that they had to keep them on for a decade?
What is it?
Java is pragmatism over principals
on
Preview of Java 1.5
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So many of the posters here are missing the best reasons to use Java today. Java is highly pragmatic. It's a good, broad set of tools that's widely understood and supported, and often improved.
Java rarely wins in any particular niche. Relatively simple GUIs and COM objects are owned by VB (and Delphi). C++, C, and assembly rule in performance. Perl rules text processing. Python rules in ease of reading. ANSI C, Perl, Python may be more portable. Smalltalk, Eiffel, Lisp, Ruby, ML, Haskel, Forth, and a variety of others are a lot more true to a pure language concept. However, Java does an adequate job in most cases, and when you start crossing boundaries, it'll often be easier to do so in Java-land.
Java isn't innovative. However, it's constantly being improved. Sure, things like JDBC, Collections, SWING, NIO (async I/O), generics, threads, and concurrent garbage collection were available in some form elsewhere previously. They're all packaged into nice, free, portable, well documented, easy to use parts of Java though, and I'm happy to have them.
Java isn't as free as Emacs. However, it's mostly free as in beer, and it doesn't force it's freedom on you. It's certainly a whole lot freer than most things from Redmond. I admit, I don't care if a language is handled by a standards body, unless the company in question holds other monopolies it can abuse. I seriously don't think Sun is going to do anything so wacky as polluting the language to make COM (*cough* MS) or Object Pascal integration (*cough* Borland) easier.
Java's support base and (free) developer tools are just plain great. I love Eclipse, and IDEA and recent JBuilders are pretty nice too. VS.NET is good stuff as well, but contenders like Python are sorely lacking in this arena.
I still write plenty in other languages, but every year the percentage I write in Java goes up.. They keep filling holes (soft references, regexes, async I/O,.1s GC pauses) that were keeping me out of Java. I'm happy to see some more syntatic sugar in Java.. The things they're addressing will make a whole lot of code more readable.
Uh.. yeah. That's a great idea.. I'm sure penalizing the beneficiary won't have any unintended consequences.
From:someone_who_hates_leabre@evilspamcorp.net To:students@nyu.edu, employees@ibm.com, president@whitehouse.gov, 18_zillion_users@hotmail.com Subject:Hey hot stuff!
Hi. My name is Leabre, I'm a mega handsome guy, and I'm super smart too (you can tell because I regularly post to Slashdot). I got your name from a friend of mine, and I was hoping we could meet up, have drinks, and maybe hook up sometime. You can call me at (555)555-1234, or email me at leabre@slashdot.org.
If you feel this message has reached you in
error, or if you no longer wish to hear
about future offers from us, click below:
http://200.216.233.124/freeht/remv.htmlyueqpwwncph v nq
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Slashdot Mirror
The modu is especially nifty. It's roughly the size of an iPod nano (and it has 2gb for music). That said, I can't recommend them except as easy things to carry in case you get into a pinch. I only carry them when I don't intend to need them. Asus is right, there's lots of room for improvement. Shoving the modu into the netbook shouldn't be the priority though. The current modu doesn't even do 3G. The top 3 priorities should be:
The 7 keys suck even worse than I'd thought because I hadn't considered all the touch-tone menu systems. Their response is surely that I should put a jacket on it that has more buttons, but that's stupid because:
The netbook's controls are busted too, but not as bad.. and I don't need a manufacturers help to fix that.
Modu: I'd happily volunteer my time, coding skills, and even rudimentary amateur electronics to help. I want less phone. You can't compete with the big boys on the low-end, so fill a niche they miss: small, light, simple. Think of a woman with a tiny little clutch. Make the phone work for her, and you'll discover the other thing in that clutch: an inordinate amount of disposable money.
P.S. Make the headset jack match the standard: 3.5mm & compatible with ones with mics and controls for an iphone. Micro-usb headsets will only cost you sales.
I think /. users benefited from the rise of digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. The quality on /. had been going way downhill before they became popular. Those sites drew away most of the idiots, and /. learned what it's good at. After /. stopped trying to compete head-to-head in the more-news-faster-and-crazier game, they appear to have reached an impressive equilibrium.
Admittedly, I rarely read /. anymore. It seems to have grown more focused, which is good for the site.. but I'm not as interested in the topics it's focused on. OTOH, I absolutely never read digg or the main reddit anymore -- even though they theoretically cover my interests better.
Bring back JonKatz. Actually, hell.. I miss USENET.
I wouldn't be surprised at all. That's precisely what I was doing in class at 12 years old. We monitored our heart-rates by hand in fitness class for years specifically to optimize our own workout. We were taught about aerobic vs anaerobic exercise, maximum heart rates, how muscle grows, etc. I think we probably recorded them too - I know we recorded some info, although it was with pencil and paper.
If your concern with this is privacy, starting running around a track. Don't stop until you realize your folly.
I don't see why this'd be much more of a privacy concern than recording perfectly normal things like lap times, vertical jump height, or grip strength.. things that are routinely recorded to assess the students' progress and that could be used at least as well to adjust insurance premiums.
Also, I don't see why one needs the machines and straps and junk. So long as it's for the student's benefit, might as show them how to measure it them self by feeling their pulse, counting, and looking at a wall clock. I'm sure even my 4 year old could do it if I showed him how.
Nic.ru seems to be the main site. nic.tld is often the place to go at least for info on a TLD.
Their service agreement form allows you to specify you're a US citizen as well as to choose to pay in US Dollars. They're charging 600 rubles/year for a domain, which is currently US$25.51.
The mainframe is many years old and they only managed to beat it by up to 70% with 120 machines? Either that thing is awesome or they suck with their grid.
Thanks for taking the time to post that excellent history of the profession. It's folks like you that keep me reading here.
I've thought for quite a while that a reasonable spreadsheet could be done from a web browser, and I'd often prefer it to others currently available just for the convenience of accessing it and sharing it.
I tried EditGrid as you recommended, and I think you may've made a bad architecture decision. As you say, you're using the core library of Gnumeric as your backend, which matches with experience with the front-end. When I type in formulas and change values that affect formulas, it takes a good while for the cell to show the updated results - even on a ridiculously fast internet connection.
I assume you're moving data from the front-end to the back-end, doing the calculations on the back-end, and pushing the data back out to the front-end. I don't see how that could ever result in a seamless user experience (<1/10th of a second responses) over the internet through an HTTP setup.
I'd much rather use a javascript based calculation engine that used the server merely for saving data, rather than an AJAX face on a server-side spreadsheet. Admittedly, javascript is going to be much slower to do large calculations, but even at 50x slower than the backend, it's got a huge headstart due to latency, and if the result is a large number of changed cells, it's going to start making back some more of the speed advantage. There's the scalability issue also - one has to assume that using the client's own CPU is going to be more scalable than having everyone run on your servers' CPU.
Don't get me wrong - I understand why you did it on the server-side. You got to reuse Gnumeric's tested code, and minimize the annoying multi-browser javascript testing. Unfortunately, that results in performance far worse than I'd be willing to put up with to ditch a local spreadsheet app.
DAH-1500 dimensions: 24mm h x 24mm w x 24mm d = 13,284mm^3
Joybee 102R approx dimensions: 41mm diameter x 8mm depth = 10,562mm^3
Of course the Joybee 102R lacks a screen and radio, and they haven't upgraded to larger capacities.. but it's clearly smaller.
That said, I do listen to some stuff that's not available via broadcast (at least locally) as well, but the point was I normally prefer to listen via the computer either way. In fact, I don't listen to a couple of shows just because they're not available via the net.
Also interesting to me is that I'm increasingly listening to recordings of radio broadcasts (that weren't originally intended as "podcasts"). That's a big deal for me since I'm frequently interrupted in my listening, but I like to hear a complete program.
No more weather.
Buying other companies is a way good way to sell your overvalued stock without notifying everyone that you think that the current price is a great sale.
They have a Trailing P/E of 225. That means their stock is trading for way way more than they're making. Compare it to someone like Amazon with ~1/5th of that, or GE with ~1/10th of that. Even their forward P/E (what they think they'll make in the future vs what their presently worth) is double Amazon's and triple GE's.
The plausible stats I saw were:
- A 4.5% decline in the IT labor force since the peak in 2001. (IW article)
- IT unemployment currently around 5.5%, down from 6% recently, and up from 3% in 2000-2001. (IW article)
- "The overall number of people employed in computer-related occupations in the U.S. dropped by about 9,000 people from the first to second quarter." (IT article)
A lot of the other stats are based on random labelling of people (e.g. "computer programmer" vs "computer analyst" vs "software engineer".. the IW articles cites an 8% increase in the latter), and a relatively small sample. If nothing else, the reported 60% increase in IT managers should tell you something about these surveys.If we're just going for shock-the-readers headlines based on these stats, try this one:
InformationWeek reports that according to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there's now one manager to every 1.85 computer programmers. At current rates, managers will outnumber programmers in a few years.
(InformationWeek reports 341k managers vs 632k computer programmers.. but that report based upon those numbers is obviously misleading.)
Let me guess. Adam has a bizarre congenital defect that makes him incapable of creating percentage breakdowns that add up to more than 99.1%?
You must know this Adam guy really well... That type of thing doesn't normally come up in everyday conversation.
I clearly remember GEOS being widely available for download when it first came out. Sure modems were slower back then, but I'm pretty sure everyone that wanted it got it already.
On the plus side, some of the comments are fairly humorous, especially when you note who wrote them and look up where they are today.
Uh. The chart you pulled doesn't match your description. YHOO is down ~45% from where it stood 5 years ago, and has underperformed all the common U.S. stock indices in that timeframe. Take a a look for yourself. The chart you pulled was for the max timeframe, not 5 years, and had logarithmic prices (distortion.. money isn't logarithmic).
I got that part. The part that threw me is why the original poster thinks a girl's nipples are covered by her skirt? I suppose if one had been looking at too much kitty porn...
I don't think you fully read what you were arguing against.
The studies you referred to showed the LOC/day is the same independent of language, not the quality of a program. Although you argued that Java requires fewer LOC to do the same task, that's certainly not always the case. Even if it were the case, you didn't establish that fewer LOC in Java equates to higher "quality".
I believe the gist of what the original poster said is true: A good programmer could probaly write the same quality program in C or Java. How long it takes them, the performance of the program, and the maintainability of the program are different matters altogether.
Actually, this pretty much solved all my obscure or arcane C++ questions. In fact, while referring to that I haven't once had trouble figuring out if I was implicitly causing a conversion which caused a deep copy which in turn caused a memory leak since.
Of course, "Why did my program just pause for a 1/10th of a second, and how can I avoid that?" comes up more often now.
Does this mean that SCO will be able to nuke anyone's machine that is downloading anything with a linux kernel or AIX patch?
What if I email SCO part of the AIX kernel, and they open it.. does that give IBM the right to nuke their machine?
What if Osama Bin Laden writes a message on the internet, copyrights it, and explicitly states that nobody from the U.S. Government may read it. If the NSA downloads it, does that give Osama the right to zzzzap their computers?
What if I place an auction on eBay with a title that contains copywritten lyrics by Metallica, and pay for it to get on their front page? Does that give Metallica the right to take out all eBay user's boxes?
Whatever the legalities, I hope that when they implement this feature that the computers actually smoke when they get fried. If they're going to destroy one's property, they'd better at least make it entertaining.
So?
I was taught to touch-type on Apple II's and typewriters (many non-electric). The Apple II's and their software was great. IIRC, you put the disk in the drive, turned it on and some number of seconds later it told you what to do.. if you could operate a microwave, you could operate those things.
If they're having trouble with them, I could see replacing them. Otherwise, touch typing hasn't changed since then, so why bother replacing them?
This is nothing compared to the article on a "Cross-Platform Browser Bug: Java+JavaScript" I'm sure we'll see tomorrow.
Do they want this publicity?
Did the NullSoft buyout contract specify that they had to keep them on for a decade?
What is it?
Java rarely wins in any particular niche. Relatively simple GUIs and COM objects are owned by VB (and Delphi). C++, C, and assembly rule in performance. Perl rules text processing. Python rules in ease of reading. ANSI C, Perl, Python may be more portable. Smalltalk, Eiffel, Lisp, Ruby, ML, Haskel, Forth, and a variety of others are a lot more true to a pure language concept. However, Java does an adequate job in most cases, and when you start crossing boundaries, it'll often be easier to do so in Java-land.
Java isn't innovative. However, it's constantly being improved. Sure, things like JDBC, Collections, SWING, NIO (async I/O), generics, threads, and concurrent garbage collection were available in some form elsewhere previously. They're all packaged into nice, free, portable, well documented, easy to use parts of Java though, and I'm happy to have them.
Java isn't as free as Emacs. However, it's mostly free as in beer, and it doesn't force it's freedom on you. It's certainly a whole lot freer than most things from Redmond. I admit, I don't care if a language is handled by a standards body, unless the company in question holds other monopolies it can abuse. I seriously don't think Sun is going to do anything so wacky as polluting the language to make COM (*cough* MS) or Object Pascal integration (*cough* Borland) easier.
Java's support base and (free) developer tools are just plain great. I love Eclipse, and IDEA and recent JBuilders are pretty nice too. VS.NET is good stuff as well, but contenders like Python are sorely lacking in this arena.
I still write plenty in other languages, but every year the percentage I write in Java goes up.. They keep filling holes (soft references, regexes, async I/O, .1s GC pauses) that were keeping me out of Java. I'm happy to see some more syntatic sugar in Java.. The things they're addressing will make a whole lot of code more readable.
From: someone_who_hates_leabre@evilspamcorp.net
To: students@nyu.edu, employees@ibm.com, president@whitehouse.gov, 18_zillion_users@hotmail.com
Subject: Hey hot stuff!
Hi. My name is Leabre, I'm a mega handsome guy, and I'm super smart too (you can tell because I regularly post to Slashdot). I got your name from a friend of mine, and I was hoping we could meet up, have drinks, and maybe hook up sometime. You can call me at (555)555-1234, or email me at leabre@slashdot.org.
If you feel this message has reached you in error, or if you no longer wish to hear about future offers from us, click below: http://200.216.233.124/freeht/remv.htmlyueqpwwncph v nq
rvhenjmgcjt pqnmjqrcd utonw v bhdexqyacci obmbnqwpakprjow zbw js