every IDE uses a from of Makefile, only they are typically referred to as projects. I focus on Makefiles specifically because they cause the student to understand what goes on behind the scenes with IDE project files.
IMHO, the format war is far from over, anyhow. HD DVD players are half the price of the Bluray players, and that means a -lot-
Half price for a player that only works with a format most major movie studio's don't support? Actually, it means nothing at all. Half price for a device you can't get new films for is 100% too much money. The way things are going, no film studio will suppoort it soon, I was expecting Warner Brothers would be only the first of many, and here we are with Paramount following.
Where I live there are no HD-DVD discs on sale at all. Its all Blu Ray, and has been for a while. It's all people want to buy.
Last year I was in the decidedly odd position of having to teach third year CS students (who had primarily used Java), what pointers were, how memory allocation worked, and how to use C.
That they didn't know C wasn't too surprising. That they didn't have more than a basic grasp of memory management was shocking. They were also completely baffled when it came to not using an IDE to develop software. Makefiles had to be explained several times.
I've grumbled many times about this concentration on Java, and the resultant lack of detailed understanding about programing, but each time I did so at my university I was disregarded, and someone always trotted out that age old nonsense "not re-inventing the wheel".
I mean, sure, I see the point, but surely you should have a basic idea of how wheels are made?
The various media in my house, shared among four PC's comes to well over 600Gb. It would be more, but I don't have the room to rip all my DvDs yet, and it grows, thanks to my various subscriptions, by several Gb a month. Having all that on one fast access solid state device would be serious bonus.
What percentage of voters are affected by Social Networking sites? What percentage of the MySpace, Facebook and YouTube audience are old enough to actually vote? My guess is the answer to both these questions are relatively low numbers.
Aside from my 13 year old son, every facebook user in my friends list is old enough to vote.
In my experience, very young kids are more interested in the 'rapid high' aspects of the net. That being flash games, MSN, and mmorgs. Things like facebook and such, social networking sites, usually take some work by the user in order to generate that all important network. On MSN the same is true, but since the only content is chat, its a simpler, faster process.
The time needed to to be spend on presentation of a 250 page LaTeX document (and yes, I have written a handful such documents) is around 10 seconds, if you are willing to live with the (somewhat boring) default layout, plus some sloppy spacing.
That would be a no. And ten seconds? Surely you jest, I mean, there has never, in the history of computing been a system that could let you format a large doc so fast, even if you include hitting the return key twice to seperate paragraphs while writing.
And yes I have used latex.
No doubt I will use it again for other documents, but without many months of practice, it is not fast. Speed was never a consideration in its design, final appearance was. The only people I know who can use it quickly and well have been doing so for years, and usually have a raft of scripts to assist.
Lyx is nice. I did my undergrad dissertation with it.
However, at the time I listened to the tex hype and didn't realise that actually, even with lyx making things easier, you have to micromanage your document extensively to get to those potentially beautiful results. I spent weeks on that task alone, time that would have been better spent just concentrating on content. And yes, presentation was important, so I couldn't neglect it.
For my doctoral thesis I used MSword, with an excellent template from the University of Waterloo (Ontario). It doesn't look as 'pretty' as a tex doc would, but I've spent only a very small amount of time concerned with layout and formatting. That's translated to a few very important weeks extra of content editing, not layout editing (Anyone who thinks a tex doc of >250 pages can be formatted correctly in just two weeks is fooling themselves).
I'm not bashing tex. I wish wholeheartedly that I'd had the time to use it. But I'm not alone in not having the sort of time it takes to get the best out of tex. If we all did, there would be no market for MS word, or Openoffice for that matter.
The "business plan" might have been terrible, but it was a success, the Xbox was never intended to make a profit.
And you think this is a good thing? Oh dear...
Lastly, the Xbox 360 *is* outselling the PS3.
It was released earlier, so that's not too surprising, and it's only just holding on against Wii sales at the moment. Once again it's being sold at a loss. I am amazed that this is considered to be a good thing. The 360 is not a good machine though. I've seen it, the difference in quality between it and the PS3 is rather marked. I think the PS3 is overpowered, but even before I saw it, I was unimpressed by the graphical quality of the 360.
If microsoft can pull it together, they might be able to make some money on their next console. Right now though their games division is a big hole in the ground that has swallowed billions of dollars. If they spun it off into a seperate company it'd fold within weeks.
Me too. Copying from my vista machine to the other machines I own was horrificly slow. I'm somewhat concerned that they got a 45% improvement in copying to a non vista machine with the first service pack though. It doesn't speak well for their quality control if a flagship product gets released with that level of error.
I wonder if they've just quietly disabled some of that stupid drm stuff.
The Playstation, and their attempt to supplant it with the Xbox that failed.
I've got to say though, I actually thought the Xbox was a nice piece of kit, I think myself that it was microsofts terrible business plan that stopped it doing well. By this I refer to it never making a profit.
This thing of thinking one agreement will stop conflict has been done before.
There is one player left who will likely fight on, that being microsoft. They absolutely don't want blu ray to succeed, because that means they lose another round to Sony.
there are already drugs that will nullify any cocaine or heroin in your system on admission to hospital. They are very specifically targetted, and if used, there are alternative painkillers that are administered
Taking away coke addiction won't do a darn thing for 99.9999% of all coke users. If they don't want off it? then either they refuse to take it, or are given it without consent and can legitimately claim abuse and sue. Either way it won't stop the problem that caused them to want it in the first place.
There are a few who want off it, there always are, but again, you can't just remove the drug. Its usually associated with a social environment that consents to and promotes the taking of drugs.
A nicotine vaccine might be nice though, I can see a great many people using that, since it is becoming less socially acceptable to smoke, and many smoke because they have tried,m and failed to quit. Being legal, smoking doesn't have the same social issues that illegal drugs tend to.
I don't think you really understand why companies using open source software.
Perhaps not. My open source software is of interest only to nbody modellers (no link, my free hosting is fed up with being slashdotted by single instance visitors), so I don't have much practical experience of open source in the business world. I'd still like to see google play the game and open a few of their more significant projects. If nothing else, it would enable open source bods to have some fun.
The biggest threat to M$ is Steve Ballmer and a continuing string of poor management decisions.
Look. It's a pain in the ass problem that has no reason for existing, aside from lazy coding on the part of MS programmers.
It's more likely they want to stop having to write the supporting code in for formats that are being used less and less.
Its a problem that only exists because the idea of standard file formats was resisted for so long, and also partly due to the huge amount of changes in file formats of late.
I'm not excusing it, the multitude of file formats was stupid, in retrospect, but they emerged because of a desire to keep people with a particuler product, and maximise earnings. The unix wars all over again, you might say.
It strengthens my own resolve to only use open formats from now on.
That would be pretty tough for a Ph. D. candidate to grasp....
AHA! I can legitimately do the whole 'you insensitive clod' thing here, because I am one:-) For a few more weeks at least.
I lost many months of carefully made notes many years ago (as in windows 3.1 days) because the company who made the app I used went under, and I couldn't find the app again when I needed it, a couple of years later. That taught me to always keep a copy of whatever program I used to create a file that I intended to keep.
Nowadays, knowing more, I could have recovered all my 'lost' data, so it annoys me that I didn't keep my unopenable notes.
The recording industry and other media giants would stand to lose so much they'd plough million after million into preventing it from happening until it went away, or was held in appeal so long that it had to be neutered to ever get passed.
15 yeears would be long enough for copyright I think, as it used to be.
Just admit it, you won't be satisfied with Google's contributions until they have opened up everything and go bankrupt.
You seem to be taking an extreme view here.
Note, google have not open sourced any of their services, not one. I'd be happy if there were just one available as full open source. I don't care how much they donate to open source projects, that's not the issue here, its their lack of google generated open source projects.
Google could actually open a great deal of their product line and be just fine. After all, adwords is their main money maker.
Playing devil's advocate here, but there are a lot of career students. Some might even need to take a look at their first year notes on eigenvectors because they need to deal with it in the last year of their Ph.D, and they remember really liking the prof that year.
So they re-install office without this patch, and open their files.
They give back source code for many different projects but it would be completely stupid to give away the source code to Gmail because they would loose more then they gain.
Not if they followed the spirit of open source.
You need to stop looking at the advantages to yourself and look at what they get out of releasing code. It's their code they can do what they want with it.
A more complete description of the rational for closed source I would find difficulty finding.
This boggles me. Yes it's the service that makes cash so why would they risk creating more companies offering the same service they are?
um, what? Ok, I guess linux should give up and let windows have the OS world, after all, what good is competition?
They sell services not software. That doesn't mean they're so retarded to put themselves out of business by giving away source code that competitors could use to setup their own Gmail service and not use Google's.
The whole idea of a service over software model is that the source code can be given away, it's the service that makes the cash.
And no-one would bother setting up another gmail using the gmail source. They'd have to differentiate themselves significantly to appeal to the massed gmail users, or current non gmail users. That wouldn't be trivial.
The point of opening the source is that while others can take it for use in their own things, they can also add to it and google could have those additions back.
Google, aside from its use of linux (which it could do without supporting FOSS in any other way incidentally, if it wanted to), has no choice but to pally up with FOSS if they want to keep profits up.
FOSS would pose just as big a danger to them as it does to microsoft if they did otherwise.
A tad cynical perhaps, but you can bet if they thought there was more money in closed source than open, they'd go that way.
One more thing, where is the source for gmail? Or google maps (not the API), or many other google projects. If they're so into the foss, why are so many of their 'free' offerings all but proprietary in nature?
I would have thought anyone buying one of those monster size TV's might want the HD player to go with it, whichever version.
Mind you, being a non telly owning wierdo, I don't actually know how usual it is to have a large TV, if it's very common to own one of those monster HD sets, and people still aren't buying HD players, then I imagine there might be a problem getting them to upgrade. For me, a dvd on my 19" wide screen monitor is more than enough, quality wise.
Personally I think this is all happening because people either remember (yup, I'm that old), or know of, the VHS/Betamax spat, and believe, no matter how marketing gurus try to spin it, that one format will lose and disappear, making any purchase a waste of money.
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every IDE uses a from of Makefile, only they are typically referred to as projects. I focus on Makefiles specifically because they cause the student to understand what goes on behind the scenes with IDE project files.
IMHO, the format war is far from over, anyhow. HD DVD players are half the price of the Bluray players, and that means a -lot-
Half price for a player that only works with a format most major movie studio's don't support? Actually, it means nothing at all. Half price for a device you can't get new films for is 100% too much money. The way things are going, no film studio will suppoort it soon, I was expecting Warner Brothers would be only the first of many, and here we are with Paramount following.
Where I live there are no HD-DVD discs on sale at all. Its all Blu Ray, and has been for a while. It's all people want to buy.
Last year I was in the decidedly odd position of having to teach third year CS students (who had primarily used Java), what pointers were, how memory allocation worked, and how to use C.
That they didn't know C wasn't too surprising. That they didn't have more than a basic grasp of memory management was shocking. They were also completely baffled when it came to not using an IDE to develop software. Makefiles had to be explained several times.
I've grumbled many times about this concentration on Java, and the resultant lack of detailed understanding about programing, but each time I did so at my university I was disregarded, and someone always trotted out that age old nonsense "not re-inventing the wheel".
I mean, sure, I see the point, but surely you should have a basic idea of how wheels are made?
Hassle free household media server?
The various media in my house, shared among four PC's comes to well over 600Gb. It would be more, but I don't have the room to rip all my DvDs yet, and it grows, thanks to my various subscriptions, by several Gb a month. Having all that on one fast access solid state device would be serious bonus.
What percentage of voters are affected by Social Networking sites? What percentage of the MySpace, Facebook and YouTube audience are old enough to actually vote? My guess is the answer to both these questions are relatively low numbers.
Aside from my 13 year old son, every facebook user in my friends list is old enough to vote.
In my experience, very young kids are more interested in the 'rapid high' aspects of the net. That being flash games, MSN, and mmorgs. Things like facebook and such, social networking sites, usually take some work by the user in order to generate that all important network. On MSN the same is true, but since the only content is chat, its a simpler, faster process.
The time needed to to be spend on presentation of a 250 page LaTeX document (and yes, I have written a handful such documents) is around 10 seconds, if you are willing to live with the (somewhat boring) default layout, plus some sloppy spacing.
That would be a no. And ten seconds? Surely you jest, I mean, there has never, in the history of computing been a system that could let you format a large doc so fast, even if you include hitting the return key twice to seperate paragraphs while writing.
And yes I have used latex.
No doubt I will use it again for other documents, but without many months of practice, it is not fast. Speed was never a consideration in its design, final appearance was. The only people I know who can use it quickly and well have been doing so for years, and usually have a raft of scripts to assist.
Lyx is nice. I did my undergrad dissertation with it.
However, at the time I listened to the tex hype and didn't realise that actually, even with lyx making things easier, you have to micromanage your document extensively to get to those potentially beautiful results. I spent weeks on that task alone, time that would have been better spent just concentrating on content. And yes, presentation was important, so I couldn't neglect it.
For my doctoral thesis I used MSword, with an excellent template from the University of Waterloo (Ontario). It doesn't look as 'pretty' as a tex doc would, but I've spent only a very small amount of time concerned with layout and formatting. That's translated to a few very important weeks extra of content editing, not layout editing (Anyone who thinks a tex doc of >250 pages can be formatted correctly in just two weeks is fooling themselves).
I'm not bashing tex. I wish wholeheartedly that I'd had the time to use it. But I'm not alone in not having the sort of time it takes to get the best out of tex. If we all did, there would be no market for MS word, or Openoffice for that matter.
The "business plan" might have been terrible, but it was a success, the Xbox was never intended to make a profit.
And you think this is a good thing? Oh dear...
Lastly, the Xbox 360 *is* outselling the PS3.
It was released earlier, so that's not too surprising, and it's only just holding on against Wii sales at the moment. Once again it's being sold at a loss. I am amazed that this is considered to be a good thing. The 360 is not a good machine though. I've seen it, the difference in quality between it and the PS3 is rather marked. I think the PS3 is overpowered, but even before I saw it, I was unimpressed by the graphical quality of the 360.
If microsoft can pull it together, they might be able to make some money on their next console. Right now though their games division is a big hole in the ground that has swallowed billions of dollars. If they spun it off into a seperate company it'd fold within weeks.
Me too. Copying from my vista machine to the other machines I own was horrificly slow. I'm somewhat concerned that they got a 45% improvement in copying to a non vista machine with the first service pack though. It doesn't speak well for their quality control if a flagship product gets released with that level of error.
I wonder if they've just quietly disabled some of that stupid drm stuff.
What was the first round?
The Playstation, and their attempt to supplant it with the Xbox that failed.
I've got to say though, I actually thought the Xbox was a nice piece of kit, I think myself that it was microsofts terrible business plan that stopped it doing well. By this I refer to it never making a profit.
This thing of thinking one agreement will stop conflict has been done before.
There is one player left who will likely fight on, that being microsoft. They absolutely don't want blu ray to succeed, because that means they lose another round to Sony.
Should be fun seeing how they react.
there are already drugs that will nullify any cocaine or heroin in your system on admission to hospital. They are very specifically targetted, and if used, there are alternative painkillers that are administered
Taking away coke addiction won't do a darn thing for 99.9999% of all coke users. If they don't want off it? then either they refuse to take it, or are given it without consent and can legitimately claim abuse and sue. Either way it won't stop the problem that caused them to want it in the first place.
There are a few who want off it, there always are, but again, you can't just remove the drug. Its usually associated with a social environment that consents to and promotes the taking of drugs.
A nicotine vaccine might be nice though, I can see a great many people using that, since it is becoming less socially acceptable to smoke, and many smoke because they have tried,m and failed to quit. Being legal, smoking doesn't have the same social issues that illegal drugs tend to.
I don't think you really understand why companies using open source software.
Perhaps not. My open source software is of interest only to nbody modellers (no link, my free hosting is fed up with being slashdotted by single instance visitors), so I don't have much practical experience of open source in the business world. I'd still like to see google play the game and open a few of their more significant projects. If nothing else, it would enable open source bods to have some fun.
The biggest threat to M$ is Steve Ballmer and a continuing string of poor management decisions.
On this we are in total agreement.
Look. It's a pain in the ass problem that has no reason for existing, aside from lazy coding on the part of MS programmers.
It's more likely they want to stop having to write the supporting code in for formats that are being used less and less.
Its a problem that only exists because the idea of standard file formats was resisted for so long, and also partly due to the huge amount of changes in file formats of late.
I'm not excusing it, the multitude of file formats was stupid, in retrospect, but they emerged because of a desire to keep people with a particuler product, and maximise earnings. The unix wars all over again, you might say.
It strengthens my own resolve to only use open formats from now on.
That would be pretty tough for a Ph. D. candidate to grasp....
:-) For a few more weeks at least.
AHA! I can legitimately do the whole 'you insensitive clod' thing here, because I am one
I lost many months of carefully made notes many years ago (as in windows 3.1 days) because the company who made the app I used went under, and I couldn't find the app again when I needed it, a couple of years later. That taught me to always keep a copy of whatever program I used to create a file that I intended to keep.
Nowadays, knowing more, I could have recovered all my 'lost' data, so it annoys me that I didn't keep my unopenable notes.
brillient it may be, but it wouldn't happen.
The recording industry and other media giants would stand to lose so much they'd plough million after million into preventing it from happening until it went away, or was held in appeal so long that it had to be neutered to ever get passed.
15 yeears would be long enough for copyright I think, as it used to be.
Just admit it, you won't be satisfied with Google's contributions until they have opened up everything and go bankrupt.
You seem to be taking an extreme view here.
Note, google have not open sourced any of their services, not one. I'd be happy if there were just one available as full open source. I don't care how much they donate to open source projects, that's not the issue here, its their lack of google generated open source projects.
Google could actually open a great deal of their product line and be just fine. After all, adwords is their main money maker.
Playing devil's advocate here, but there are a lot of career students. Some might even need to take a look at their first year notes on eigenvectors because they need to deal with it in the last year of their Ph.D, and they remember really liking the prof that year.
So they re-install office without this patch, and open their files.
It's not hard....
They give back source code for many different projects but it would be completely stupid to give away the source code to Gmail because they would loose more then they gain.
Not if they followed the spirit of open source.
You need to stop looking at the advantages to yourself and look at what they get out of releasing code. It's their code they can do what they want with it.
A more complete description of the rational for closed source I would find difficulty finding.
This boggles me. Yes it's the service that makes cash so why would they risk creating more companies offering the same service they are?
um, what? Ok, I guess linux should give up and let windows have the OS world, after all, what good is competition?
They sell services not software. That doesn't mean they're so retarded to put themselves out of business by giving away source code that competitors could use to setup their own Gmail service and not use Google's.
The whole idea of a service over software model is that the source code can be given away, it's the service that makes the cash.
And no-one would bother setting up another gmail using the gmail source. They'd have to differentiate themselves significantly to appeal to the massed gmail users, or current non gmail users. That wouldn't be trivial.
The point of opening the source is that while others can take it for use in their own things, they can also add to it and google could have those additions back.
Google, aside from its use of linux (which it could do without supporting FOSS in any other way incidentally, if it wanted to), has no choice but to pally up with FOSS if they want to keep profits up.
FOSS would pose just as big a danger to them as it does to microsoft if they did otherwise.
A tad cynical perhaps, but you can bet if they thought there was more money in closed source than open, they'd go that way.
One more thing, where is the source for gmail? Or google maps (not the API), or many other google projects. If they're so into the foss, why are so many of their 'free' offerings all but proprietary in nature?
People still use XMMS? I thought most people moved on to Amarok/Rhythmbox years ago
:-)
Aha, you must be one of those Gentoo people
That's what I'd like, a version of bash implemented in opengl, so I can make the console apps I write look funky.
Not perhaps the highest priority of the FOSS world, but sometimes you just gotta go with 'it`d be fun'.
I would have thought anyone buying one of those monster size TV's might want the HD player to go with it, whichever version.
Mind you, being a non telly owning wierdo, I don't actually know how usual it is to have a large TV, if it's very common to own one of those monster HD sets, and people still aren't buying HD players, then I imagine there might be a problem getting them to upgrade. For me, a dvd on my 19" wide screen monitor is more than enough, quality wise.
Personally I think this is all happening because people either remember (yup, I'm that old), or know of, the VHS/Betamax spat, and believe, no matter how marketing gurus try to spin it, that one format will lose and disappear, making any purchase a waste of money.