iTunes makes it pretty simple, especially if you have an iPod or other MP3 player (yes iTunes will work with other MP3 players, assuming you are just interested in playing mp3s)
I have an A630 and while it (like other Mot phones) requirs the USB sync cable to sync (available cheap on eBay), I believe that you can use it as a modem via bluetooth (certainly with the USB cable).
Well, the left-handed bit got a little more emphasized in the article than I want. Basically if you look at an Atari 2600 controller, you hold the control in your left hand, using your left thumb to hit the button, and move with your right hand.
I guess I got used to this, and in a lot of arcade games, there was a fire button on either side of the joystick, so I did it Atari style. Even Mortal Combat had this, if IIRC.
Now, there is no more fire button on the left side of the stick, and this is reflected in the various arcade controllers available.
The X-Arcade is almost right. Just needs buttons on the other side, so I can hold the stick with my left hand.
Anyway, it looks like making on for PC is not terribly difficult, and hacking a PS1 controller also is possible (PS2 controller is much more complicated due to analog buttons). So, I'm gonna see what that can do for me....
I totally agree with this sentiment. The only windows box I still have is used for digital audio. I have Cakewalk 9 and Soundforge 6 on Windows2K and I've had that set-up for quite sometime, and I have no plans to change it anytime soon (mostly becuase moving to Mac would cost me $4-5K).
Cakewalk has some quirks (and I don't know if Sonar works any of them out), but it's done me right and is a great sequencer/digital audio application, although you really do need SoundForge or equivalent to round it out.
I also agree that you should try out the Linux tools first, as they are free and may work well for you.
Why are we not seeing the Bill Gates Borg? Do we need another topic just for windows? If so, it should be a window through which we see the Gates-Borg.
I like how he is careful not to mention specific products or brands when he is making negative remarks, but with positive comments, he clearly indicates the application or OS. Does anyone have the balls to stand up to Microsoft?
This is the simplest and most effective thing to do. The help desk at my last company never had this (despite user's pleas) for four years and the only way to get any support was to go directly to the support person (physically), or to email the VP of the IS group.
If support just shows users that problems have been recorded and routed to an actual person, and that that person has an estimate as to when the problem will be looked at, that will go a long way towards peaceful relations and improved operation.
The reason it's so hard is that help desk/it support is essentailly a customer service role, not totally (or often) a techincal one. But, you need technical people to solve the problems. As you all know, those types of people don't always have good communication skills let alone customer service skills.
Having a ticketing system and using it can help alleviate that, because it fits in with the tech. person's workflow (recieve problem, provide estimate, fix, notify of fix), and provides instant and easy communication via the system to the user needing help.
I don't really count that, because TiVo knows it will take a while and tells you. What the article was talking about was the UI slowing down at times w/out warning. While both do suck, I'd rather know that I need to wait and do all the waiting at one time, rather than wait on a slow interface....
"Whenever AMD or Intel release a new CPU, everyone asks the question what we need faster processors for? The most common response for that is "to enable future applications" and a couple of years ago, there was enough processing power in a cheap enough form to finally give the VCR a brain - the idea of a set-top Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was born."
"Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.
The Tivo uses a 75Mhz PowerPC, which was available many years ago and is a joke of a processor right now. It's also what enables Tivo to not cost $1000. The fact that this windows media center slows down noticable with a 2.xx Ghz P4 is embarassing. Tivo rarely exhibits any slowdown, and it's not only using a alledgely more inferior PowerPC processor, but one from several years ago running at 3% of the speed of this thing.
At my last job (and at most with salaried workers), the employees are what is called "exempt", meaning that their salary is not for "40 hours a week" but for "whatever work needs to be done", so they are legally justified in making you work whatever amount is necessary to get the job done. It would be up to you if you were willing to work that much and to quit if you didn't like it.
For contract work, I would guess it would be a bit different. You probably should negotiate both the expected number of hours and the expected calendar time for the project, because otherwise, they will work you as much as they can, and will claim contract breach if you don't work what they want.
And, don't trust HR. They are not on your side. Get everything in writing, and assume any nonwritten verbal agreement to not go in your favor if it comes down to it.
Being educated is 1000 times better than being in a union. This is your livelihood, so you have to take control of it and not let yourself get jerked around. Most employers are not "evil" and aren't out to screw you, but the will operate to their advantage (and why shouldn't they?), so be smart, informed and careful.
Re:Not very well-explained nor convincing
on
Concept Programming
·
· Score: 2
Because taking a derivative is not a function. It's a metafunction; it is applied to a function and returns another function. For example: the derivative of sin(x) is cos(x), for all x. This can't be implemented as a method and so using method syntax would be nonsensical.
That's not exactly true. It just depends on how you model it. In any case, you either are creating a generalized derivation toolkit (which you could create in Java or any language), or you do some combination using lookup tables.
Methods in Java are objects, so you are free to pass them to other methods. Since everything is an object, including methods and classes and variables, you can pass a function to a function and have it return a function. This is also trivial in C.
The point is that the explanation doesn't really give much motivation for Concept Programming, other than as an academic exercise.
That transformation tool looks like a souped-up pre-processor (which C has had forever), and not only does it not seem terribly ground-breaking, but it seems like a generally bad idea if you are wanting to produce production-quality maintainable code, especially when the language in the example (Java) already has powerful facilities for you to model your solution without relying on some new syntax and translation step.
Not very well-explained nor convincing
on
Concept Programming
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The examples on the site of where Concept Programming results in a better solution, are quite contrived and not very convincing. They make Concept Programming out to be nothing more than a glorified bowl of syntax sugar (hold the types), and that's not always a good thing.
The first example discusses the concept of "Maximum", and shows how you would implement that concept in Java, followed by the allegedly superior XL way to do it. The Java "class" makes no sense, and really would not be the way to go about it. YOu would never want to model the concept of Maximum in that way, but if you did, you would use the already-existing Comparable interface and creating a static method called "Max" of some class that takes a list of comparable objects.
Furthermore, in C, you can model it exactly as they have, since C allows multiple arguments.
The next example was discussing takinga derivative and how you can translate some incorrect Java syntax that takes a derivative into the Java equivalent. Why not write a method to do this? What is to be gained by using a non-standard syntax? It makes it harder to write (you have to learn something in addition to Java), and harder to read (same reason).
As for the XL language, and the notion of Concept Programming, it just wasn't explained well at all, and left me saying "what's the big deal? What does this buy me? Where is a real example?" Not every program (dare I say not many programs) are based around mathematical equations and operations. Most involve executing some logic based on input and spitting out output. Modelling that as math seems really counterintuitive (and not in-line with the "concept" of your domain).
Ultimately, seems like some typical academic wank-fest that someone can use to get their Ph.D., but not very applicable in the real world.
Disclaimer: This isn't really good for programming, but for using a computer
Look at the Palm OS gui. The Palm was the first widely used PDA because it's interface is so intuitive and easy to use. Why?
There is no concept of a "running application", nor is there a real concept of files or a file system. You basically just switch between apps, and you never have to worry about exiting, saving, quitting, etc. Furthermore, you are very abstracted from files. Each app knows what bits of data were created with it, and which to let you open.
Now granted, the apps on a PDA are much simpler than those on a desktop machine, but the concept is still good.
Applications are always available and you don't worry about "runnig" or "quitting"
Modern OSes have virtual memory, so there is really no need to worry about apps running and not being used. With slight additions of features like app "sleeping" (disallowing it from using CPU cycles on demand), File->Quit is a thing of the past. Just leave apps running when your first start them (or start common ones at boot time). The Mac OS X Dock fakes this pretty well by combining an app launcher and task bar. It's great, because I always do the same thing to use a particular app, regardless of whether or not it's running.
Removing the "file" metaphor, and the concepts of "saving" a file
By having applications constantly save files, and additionally version them as well, the user really has no need to ever save. I mean, you don't "save" your memo-pad entries or contacts in the palm, because you don't need to. They are simple structures, so versioning isn't needed, but for larger documents, something similar to the VMS file versioning can be used. Furthermore, since you abstract the user from managing files, their task is greatly simplified; you just click on your app, and choose which thing to work on. Since it's always saved, you never need to worry about exiting, or crashing, or anything. Additionally, apps know what files they created and can open, so the user never has to wade through files that aren't relevant to the current application (Mac OS 9 faked this by using the Type/creator codes).
Files, folders/directories, running apps, are a construct the user shouldn't need to be exposed to. That is why the Palm is so simple to use, and browsing in Windows Explorer is such a pain (for the avg. user).
Yes, ant is really not much (and at times worse) than make for figuring out dependencies, and it seems unlikely to change, due to ant's structure. The XML is really an completely inappropriate use of it, and makes build files hard to work with and understand.
Ant is basically a cross-platform scripting language that is really really weak. Really weak. I'm much looking forward to AAP by the programming god Bram Moolenar. This system is the logical extension of make into the 21st century.
Is because the entire desktop has alpha transparency, and each screen pixel must be combined with the pixels drawn by all applications and blended before being displayed. This is not so bad on a G4, or with Jaguar's "QuartzExtreme" which uses the video card to do it, but on a G3 is pretty bad. Even on the dual 1Ghz G4s at CompUSA it is way slower than windows. Open up an application and resize it. Click on some menus. Do the same on Win2K. Windows is just way way faster. Linux used to be this slow, too, but it seems to have gotten quite a bit better, but just compare Mozilla menus and dialogs with a Windows app. Windows is much faster and zippier.
The funny thing is when you run an application on OS X that is "classic", it uses the OS 9 look and fell and is blazingly fast, so what's slow about Mac OS X is Aqua. It is slightly ahead of the hardware available. With a constantly patched video driver on a 3Ghz Intel box, I bet it would be just as fast as Windows. The world may never know.
Can't be done. If you're using a binary version of Editor X, then you're not integrated with it. At best, you're using system() calls to fire off an instance of the editor for each source file in the project, which is not the same thing at all.
Not true. Not sure about emacs, but vim can be run in client/server mode, and you can issue commands to a running instance to basically do anything in the editor you want. A rudimentary version of this is already possible in Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is passable, only because the editor is fairly configurable and it has decent integrated help. I've used Project Builder for WebObjects and on Mac OS X and it is horrible, IMO. It has a very counterintuitive interface, poorly configurable editor, it's slow as death (despite the fact that it's been in existence for many years), and the GUI builder's drag&drop/wiring thing is very difficult to use, compared to what else is out there. I feel sorry for anyone using it that doesn't have a Dual 1Ghz G4 and 1Gig of memory.
Slashdot Mirror
iTunes makes it pretty simple, especially if you have an iPod or other MP3 player (yes iTunes will work with other MP3 players, assuming you are just interested in playing mp3s)
I have an A630 and while it (like other Mot phones) requirs the USB sync cable to sync (available cheap on eBay), I believe that you can use it as a modem via bluetooth (certainly with the USB cable).
So do I. This is the most important posting on slashdot since the last version of the dev linux kernel was made.
Well, the left-handed bit got a little more emphasized in the article than I want. Basically if you look at an Atari 2600 controller, you hold the control in your left hand, using your left thumb to hit the button, and move with your right hand. I guess I got used to this, and in a lot of arcade games, there was a fire button on either side of the joystick, so I did it Atari style. Even Mortal Combat had this, if IIRC. Now, there is no more fire button on the left side of the stick, and this is reflected in the various arcade controllers available. The X-Arcade is almost right. Just needs buttons on the other side, so I can hold the stick with my left hand. Anyway, it looks like making on for PC is not terribly difficult, and hacking a PS1 controller also is possible (PS2 controller is much more complicated due to analog buttons). So, I'm gonna see what that can do for me....
It can read DTDs, at least the version that comes with RH8.0 can. I've used it to so. So useful....
and xmllint.
I totally agree with this sentiment. The only windows box I still have is used for digital audio. I have Cakewalk 9 and Soundforge 6 on Windows2K and I've had that set-up for quite sometime, and I have no plans to change it anytime soon (mostly becuase moving to Mac would cost me $4-5K). Cakewalk has some quirks (and I don't know if Sonar works any of them out), but it's done me right and is a great sequencer/digital audio application, although you really do need SoundForge or equivalent to round it out. I also agree that you should try out the Linux tools first, as they are free and may work well for you.
Why are we not seeing the Bill Gates Borg? Do we need another topic just for windows? If so, it should be a window through which we see the Gates-Borg.
I like how he is careful not to mention specific products or brands when he is making negative remarks, but with positive comments, he clearly indicates the application or OS. Does anyone have the balls to stand up to Microsoft?
Please explain what that is. Are we supposed to understand that somehow? This is not only NOT a book review, it's not even a very coherent synopsis.
two stories below this one on the main page is the exact same posting. Go slashdot!
If support just shows users that problems have been recorded and routed to an actual person, and that that person has an estimate as to when the problem will be looked at, that will go a long way towards peaceful relations and improved operation.
The reason it's so hard is that help desk/it support is essentailly a customer service role, not totally (or often) a techincal one. But, you need technical people to solve the problems. As you all know, those types of people don't always have good communication skills let alone customer service skills.
Having a ticketing system and using it can help alleviate that, because it fits in with the tech. person's workflow (recieve problem, provide estimate, fix, notify of fix), and provides instant and easy communication via the system to the user needing help.
I don't really count that, because TiVo knows it will take a while and tells you. What the article was talking about was the UI slowing down at times w/out warning. While both do suck, I'd rather know that I need to wait and do all the waiting at one time, rather than wait on a slow interface....
"Whenever AMD or Intel release a new CPU, everyone asks the question what we need faster processors for? The most common response for that is "to enable future applications" and a couple of years ago, there was enough processing power in a cheap enough form to finally give the VCR a brain - the idea of a set-top Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was born."
"Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.
The Tivo uses a 75Mhz PowerPC, which was available many years ago and is a joke of a processor right now. It's also what enables Tivo to not cost $1000. The fact that this windows media center slows down noticable with a 2.xx Ghz P4 is embarassing. Tivo rarely exhibits any slowdown, and it's not only using a alledgely more inferior PowerPC processor, but one from several years ago running at 3% of the speed of this thing.
didn't I say that, basically? Wouldn't that be implied in "how much effort it takes to get the job done"? How is that naive?
For contract work, I would guess it would be a bit different. You probably should negotiate both the expected number of hours and the expected calendar time for the project, because otherwise, they will work you as much as they can, and will claim contract breach if you don't work what they want.
And, don't trust HR. They are not on your side. Get everything in writing, and assume any nonwritten verbal agreement to not go in your favor if it comes down to it.
Being educated is 1000 times better than being in a union. This is your livelihood, so you have to take control of it and not let yourself get jerked around. Most employers are not "evil" and aren't out to screw you, but the will operate to their advantage (and why shouldn't they?), so be smart, informed and careful.
That's not exactly true. It just depends on how you model it. In any case, you either are creating a generalized derivation toolkit (which you could create in Java or any language), or you do some combination using lookup tables.
Methods in Java are objects, so you are free to pass them to other methods. Since everything is an object, including methods and classes and variables, you can pass a function to a function and have it return a function. This is also trivial in C.
The point is that the explanation doesn't really give much motivation for Concept Programming, other than as an academic exercise.
That transformation tool looks like a souped-up pre-processor (which C has had forever), and not only does it not seem terribly ground-breaking, but it seems like a generally bad idea if you are wanting to produce production-quality maintainable code, especially when the language in the example (Java) already has powerful facilities for you to model your solution without relying on some new syntax and translation step.
The first example discusses the concept of "Maximum", and shows how you would implement that concept in Java, followed by the allegedly superior XL way to do it. The Java "class" makes no sense, and really would not be the way to go about it. YOu would never want to model the concept of Maximum in that way, but if you did, you would use the already-existing Comparable interface and creating a static method called "Max" of some class that takes a list of comparable objects.
Furthermore, in C, you can model it exactly as they have, since C allows multiple arguments.
The next example was discussing takinga derivative and how you can translate some incorrect Java syntax that takes a derivative into the Java equivalent. Why not write a method to do this? What is to be gained by using a non-standard syntax? It makes it harder to write (you have to learn something in addition to Java), and harder to read (same reason).
As for the XL language, and the notion of Concept Programming, it just wasn't explained well at all, and left me saying "what's the big deal? What does this buy me? Where is a real example?" Not every program (dare I say not many programs) are based around mathematical equations and operations. Most involve executing some logic based on input and spitting out output. Modelling that as math seems really counterintuitive (and not in-line with the "concept" of your domain).
Ultimately, seems like some typical academic wank-fest that someone can use to get their Ph.D., but not very applicable in the real world.
Look at the Palm OS gui. The Palm was the first widely used PDA because it's interface is so intuitive and easy to use. Why?
There is no concept of a "running application", nor is there a real concept of files or a file system. You basically just switch between apps, and you never have to worry about exiting, saving, quitting, etc. Furthermore, you are very abstracted from files. Each app knows what bits of data were created with it, and which to let you open.
Now granted, the apps on a PDA are much simpler than those on a desktop machine, but the concept is still good.
Applications are always available and you don't worry about "runnig" or "quitting"
Modern OSes have virtual memory, so there is really no need to worry about apps running and not being used. With slight additions of features like app "sleeping" (disallowing it from using CPU cycles on demand), File->Quit is a thing of the past. Just leave apps running when your first start them (or start common ones at boot time). The Mac OS X Dock fakes this pretty well by combining an app launcher and task bar. It's great, because I always do the same thing to use a particular app, regardless of whether or not it's running.
Removing the "file" metaphor, and the concepts of "saving" a file
By having applications constantly save files, and additionally version them as well, the user really has no need to ever save. I mean, you don't "save" your memo-pad entries or contacts in the palm, because you don't need to. They are simple structures, so versioning isn't needed, but for larger documents, something similar to the VMS file versioning can be used. Furthermore, since you abstract the user from managing files, their task is greatly simplified; you just click on your app, and choose which thing to work on. Since it's always saved, you never need to worry about exiting, or crashing, or anything. Additionally, apps know what files they created and can open, so the user never has to wade through files that aren't relevant to the current application (Mac OS 9 faked this by using the Type/creator codes).
Files, folders/directories, running apps, are a construct the user shouldn't need to be exposed to. That is why the Palm is so simple to use, and browsing in Windows Explorer is such a pain (for the avg. user).
where the title is misspelled! Will slashcode v 8.9 come with spellcheck?
Oh, I wasn't saying use that instead of ant. Just pointing out that ant doesn't do the magic.
Ant is basically a cross-platform scripting language that is really really weak. Really weak. I'm much looking forward to AAP by the programming god Bram Moolenar. This system is the logical extension of make into the 21st century.
javac -d classes `find src \*.java -print`
The funny thing is when you run an application on OS X that is "classic", it uses the OS 9 look and fell and is blazingly fast, so what's slow about Mac OS X is Aqua. It is slightly ahead of the hardware available. With a constantly patched video driver on a 3Ghz Intel box, I bet it would be just as fast as Windows. The world may never know.
Not true. Not sure about emacs, but vim can be run in client/server mode, and you can issue commands to a running instance to basically do anything in the editor you want. A rudimentary version of this is already possible in Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is passable, only because the editor is fairly configurable and it has decent integrated help. I've used Project Builder for WebObjects and on Mac OS X and it is horrible, IMO. It has a very counterintuitive interface, poorly configurable editor, it's slow as death (despite the fact that it's been in existence for many years), and the GUI builder's drag&drop/wiring thing is very difficult to use, compared to what else is out there. I feel sorry for anyone using it that doesn't have a Dual 1Ghz G4 and 1Gig of memory.