I recently updated the Xandros software of my EEE, it now comes with a "Messenger" program that does everything from msn to irc. Video skype is standard for a long time already, and youtube works fine, albeit sometimes sluggish due to the cpu/gpu,
The update did break the pdf plugin of firefox, which required the good old nerdy messing around to get the plugin at the right spot. However, that is a problem also known to Windows.
By the time someone comes with a linux as sturdy and preconfigured with media codecs (I am even willing to pay for that if out of the box functionality is guaranteed), as this Xandros for the EEE, I'll put it on my PC at home, in the mean time I really won't bother.
This is the main problem with the reliance of technology today. Using engineering progress for cost optimization before using it for build quality.
Just look at the Ford/Volvo roof strength issue: Volvo builds their cars since the beginning to be stronger than the rest, whereas Ford builds it to fit the lowest possible standard needed to get the thing to be sold in the US. I do think people are not partial to this, though, and a high amount of costumers WILL buy the premium product if it is known to be built several degrees above the standard, even if it comes at a price.
Germany used to excel in overengineering, and in some cases still do: Miele washing machines or vacuum cleaners are still twice as expensive as the rest, but will still last for 10 years or more. Some of their designs are actually still the same as they were 10 years ago. Just go to a store and inspect a miele vacuum cleaner, then look at different brands. Miele uses way more plastic for all their connecting parts, and if something will break, the rest will still work because of the redundancy in the design. Of course, it is harder to sell new stuff that way, and unfortunately manufacturers like Braun (now part of proctor and gamble) started emphasizing the cost optimization part of engineering, and will eventually be completely indistinguishable from the competition and end up struggling getting money from low-marning products.
Yes but unless you start using new libraries and learning its quirks, you'd also have to write _every_ little function yourself, include all the error handling etc. Recently I needed to speed up my Perl program (I do numerics with perl:p) and it was such a pain to get C to read in my input files and be able to handle erroneous input, reallocate the arrays without leaking memory, etc.
Also, I was recently at the DIY store to buy a hammer, guess what, there is no hammer that is really good for everything,
Ok, since you apparently have faith in them keeping you employed for a while, do you think the revenue of Sun still has the possiblity to grow? I really like the very open way Sun is going at the moment, but I do fear that it might not bring any revenue. Dell can now install Solaris on their servers, for example, but how will that help Sun? Do they have anything left except good but pricy hardware?
There were a bit late with their bibliography site ScienceDirect, though. Apart from that, it is actually quite scary that the bibliographic access (which is de facto the only access, the high stream of output makes it impossible to check by journal only) is in the hands of a few private companies (e.g. Thomson's Web of Knowledge). At some point there was a German initiative to do the same, but the effort needed was just too high. Now Thomson can more or less do what they want with their database, and scientists (and their librarians) can just hope that Thomson will stay reasonable, or else every single scientist in the whole world is in pretty deep shit. It should never have come to this depency:(
As for design improvements: Imagine they do a makeover in flash. Now you can wish they'll just stay with the old clunky design that at least works.
Luckily some chap posted the link to the old dilbert layout here, because I couldn't find a "past strips" button on the fully interactive flash interface. Bah.
Elsevier has been a publisher of scientific journals for a long long time, so you can hardly say that they arose in the Web. More likely, they were the first to notice any danger to their publication empire and took quick action.
My 10 year old IBM P200 Trinitron workstation monitor has a 3-layer coating to prevent gloss. For people that need to do work on their computing screens, glossy apparently has always been something to avoid.
Consider legal insurance. I pay about 6 euros per month for it, and with that I can access a hotline which gives immediate access to one of the insurance's lawyers specialized in the covered area. They will first help you solve the matter the cheapest way, without going to court (e.g. by writing a letter or giving advice like the parent poster had). This already saves you a lot of time and money and stress. And if it would go to court, the insurance fee will pay itself back in no time.
Sorry, I have difficulty understanding this "wife" concept, can you please rewrite it as a car analogy?
BTW The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Asus installed linux to _force_ MS to make the lightweight XP system. Do you think MS would have spent any money on this project if Asus had asked beforehand? Now they had to! Interestingly though, it seems that XP might end up surviving Vista this way, or does anybody of you expect a new lightweight MS OS coming out soon?
If you're going towards purely number crunching applications, perl will actually end up being a lot slower, think of a factor 100. I noticed this with some programs that run for at least a day, so the startup won't be much of a difference there. Searching the net for benchmarks, I found similar ratios for simple addition calculations. More important than the algorithm optimization: Perl takes the memory allocation out of your hands, which is extremely good for stable programs, but the peformance price is immense. If I remember well, Perl 6 will have the ability to have variables of predefined size, exactly for that reason. Still I'm not sure if I would want that, the dynamic allocation was there for a reason!
Still I use perl for my numerical calculations. There is a nice data language for matrix operations: PDL, which might be able to compete with matlab speeds. And my main reason to use perl: the short time needed to get a perl program that can reformat your input data in a nice way is without comparison. The same counts for adapting your program to a changed data format, added variables, etc. String handling and memory handling in C is a big big pain. Currently, I try to solve my problems with perl first, and for anything that is likely to frequently require runtimes longer than a day I rewrite my perl program into C.
For this reason several European airplane companies (e.g. Lufthansa) won't start with it. They did costumer surveys and found out that their clients were overall not interested.
A $400-$500 laptop is a small PC for at home, that doesn't take much place and can be moved from one room to another easily. It is not meant to be moved around outside your house/car though. You can have perfectly good use for a pc like this, especially when you are a student and need a pc that can do everything a little bit, but if you really want a "portable" pc in the meaning of "taking it with you every day, everywhere", a $400-500 full-options laptop is not what you are looking for.
I bought one of the first EEEs that came to Germany. The device is pretty underpowered (but good enough to watch movies on BTW), and your performance per dollar price is worse than other low budget PCs. But just spend ONE DAY walking around with your $400 laptop with DVD burner etc etc, and one day with your EEE. You will see why there are people that want one, even for 350 euro (yes, euro). Today I had to carry the company "laptop" around and my back still hurts. When I take my EEE to work it's like taking a small bottle of water extra with me, I don't even notice it. The weight of the power adapter is also a lot less, that adds up too.
If you ever are planning to buy a laptop to commute or carry, you should not only look at price per performance, but also price per gram.
Another reason for me to pay a relatively high price for the EEE was that there was a well-thought-true debian-based linux preinstalled on it. I know Xandros is known for doing some pretty anti-open-source things in the past, but man, they got this xandros for eee just right. The default layout does it for me 80% of the time, for the rest I open a terminal and use vi or whatever I installed with apt-get.
Because of the delivery problems, Amazon offered some linux-preinstalled Acer to all germans that preordered an EEE. With 15 inch screen, more RAM, DVD burner etc etc. For about the same price. I and many others just ignored it and thought "they don't get it", and waited further for the eee to come. Never regretted it, I use my EEE daily and as a main pc even, damn it's fine:p
But really, you could decrease bombings, high-school shootings, and all of that shit, by not actively trying to destroy governments of foreign countries, and by instead spending that amount of money on fighting poverty and uneducation. People being too little educated as they are, they are easily convinced to believe the "let's invade and stop terrorism" stuff they are told.
As for "how cultures survived", I am not sure if you can give me the name of a culture that traded freedom for oppression that survived in a healthy way.
As a scientist, I have wondered myself why this doesn't seem to happen very often, and I think I found an explanation: the salary of a scientist is mostly not sufficient to ensure a frequent intake of stimulating drugs. Nor for a visit to a good detox/rehab clinic.
Try bankers instead. I live close to Switzerland and it has quite the name of being a drugs paradise. I would also like to know what the people where taking that thought trading "subprimes" was a good idea, that certainly wasn't beer but must have been some very strong hallucinogenic stuff.
A lot of scientists might actually act like they're on drugs, but that is just because they are crazy!
Thank you for pointing this out, I at least missed it. I think coupled opt-out installs are bad enough, but as you say, to mess up with the updater is outright evil. When I think of it, only Zonealarm's updater was worse. It used to send you to a website that had mostly links to install the full, paid, version. Inexperienced users would click that stuff, end up having to fill in account data and just stop the update there, or end up with a 30-day trial version which would then eventually stop working because they never wanted the paid version? For a computer security update, how bad is that? In the end people that didn't find the tiny 'free version update' and end up with a broken firewall will think the product is flaky, stop using the free version and fall back to the windows firewall, so it is just bad self-advertizing.
While typing, I just checked the zonealarm update (I have put it off for a while so I needed to update anyway), and the update page is still horribly bad looking, but the free version update link is at least very clearly visible. And actually it downloads the normal software installer, I guess it removes the old one, leaves or converts the registry data, and installs the new version. So there goes your point that installers and updaters are a different thing:(
As a user, I agree. A coworker has a windows CE PDA, the menu is based on a menu-bar with start menu. This works perfectly on a Desktop PC, but now try moving your touch-pen along the tiny startmenu through all the startmenus. Try doing this while standing in the subway. As soon as you are a few pixels out, you can start again. That is a very frustrating experience. The EEE, even without touchscreen, has a few simple tabs, and big big icons on each of them. Can't go wrong, even when you are balancing the thing on your knee while sitting on a park bench.
Be aware: The eee is close to useless as a PDA though. It should at least have a rotatable touchscreen with stylus, and the interfaces of common pda-programs should be adjusted to the PDA handling. It is not per se a bad thing that the EEE misses PDA qualities, since it also doesn't come with the premium price that comes with an advanced PDA. Instead, the EEE is the perfect companion for train or airplane commuters, it fits on the small table from the chair in front of you, and because of the small screen you can put it quite a bit to the back for relaxed typing, without disturbing your neighbours. The small adapter is also a plus: On German high speed ICE trains even the "standard" class has access to a power outlet per every two seats, and often you see people with standard desktops needing a lot of space on the floor for their huge power adapters.
I spend my working hours starting (or more: preparing) heavy calculations, high memory load, high cpu load. This often requires the full 2-8 GB there is on both desk workstations and dedicated nodes (opterons or xeons). I know microsoft is trying to get into the high-performance computing market, but how the hell can they think they can get there if the normal OS operation already requires at least 2 GB. Yes, RAM is cheap, but high-quality RAM for 200+ nodes starts to count....
Another point of concern: the stuff in RAM is probably loaded to pass on to the Cache at some point, and if you are not careful programming efficiently, most time will be spent moving stuff from the ram over the cache. This for all stuff that needs to be loaded in the RAM. As someone already said in this topic, this is not only a Microsoft problem, but it sure is a serious problem! Think about it, with such an inefficient way of programming single-threaded applications already, how will we ever get faster programs if they need smart multi-threading to take full use of a many-core cpu. At the current state, clockspeeds are not increasing so fast anymore and EFFICIENT parallelisation is needed. Writing an efficient program is difficult, writing an efficient multi-threaded program is multiply difficult. I have bad hopes for the desktop software speeds in the near future.
They just announced that they will deliver it on the new model EEE pcs. I figure Asus is a "System builder", but they sure as hell need to have a lightweight stable OS ready by january 2009 then, or the EEE and its competitors need to switch to Linux 100%. Not that I'd mind....
I think you mix up the difference between the fact that you can download the full source code and read it (open source), with the different ways of distribution and licensing available. Say, if you use a piece of (scientific) software, you will need to know what it does, and maybe change it for yourself, or recompile it if you want to run it on special hardware, so just having the source available is a necessity.
Being able (or being forced!) to redistribute that changed source is a whole different issue, and complicated by different licensing schemes.
Aside all politics, and just from a completely practical point of view: I am from Europe and, despite the low registrar prices in the US, I thought it to be smarter to register in the country I live in, just because it will be easier to resolve any problems in the case they might occur. Then I just thought about technical issues, but I could've guessed the implications concerning my personal freedom and rights are there and are real. Then again, with the current "copy-america's paranoid politics" way of thinking here in German politics, it might not help me much in that respect.
I am also wondering, how much time to these people have on their hands that they track a company, operating in another country and happening to do 'business' with Cuba, just because it bought a domain name? There a bazillion registered domain names and you only need to give the name of the company and address for that. Do they check all of these? That really is a lot of work!
Another thing: I just checked the product page for my IBM P200, and they mention the specially designed 7-layer anti-reflective layer as the good thing that it is. I really wonder what went wrong in evolution that shiny, reflective, LCDs became a thing to have. For a good view of your screen with low stress of your eyes, you need it to NOT reflect lights behind you! I hope this shiny-LCD trend will pass.
Slashdot Mirror
The update did break the pdf plugin of firefox, which required the good old nerdy messing around to get the plugin at the right spot. However, that is a problem also known to Windows.
By the time someone comes with a linux as sturdy and preconfigured with media codecs (I am even willing to pay for that if out of the box functionality is guaranteed), as this Xandros for the EEE, I'll put it on my PC at home, in the mean time I really won't bother.
This is the main problem with the reliance of technology today. Using engineering progress for cost optimization before using it for build quality.
Just look at the Ford/Volvo roof strength issue: Volvo builds their cars since the beginning to be stronger than the rest, whereas Ford builds it to fit the lowest possible standard needed to get the thing to be sold in the US. I do think people are not partial to this, though, and a high amount of costumers WILL buy the premium product if it is known to be built several degrees above the standard, even if it comes at a price.
Germany used to excel in overengineering, and in some cases still do: Miele washing machines or vacuum cleaners are still twice as expensive as the rest, but will still last for 10 years or more. Some of their designs are actually still the same as they were 10 years ago. Just go to a store and inspect a miele vacuum cleaner, then look at different brands. Miele uses way more plastic for all their connecting parts, and if something will break, the rest will still work because of the redundancy in the design. Of course, it is harder to sell new stuff that way, and unfortunately manufacturers like Braun (now part of proctor and gamble) started emphasizing the cost optimization part of engineering, and will eventually be completely indistinguishable from the competition and end up struggling getting money from low-marning products.
Also, I was recently at the DIY store to buy a hammer, guess what, there is no hammer that is really good for everything,
Ok, since you apparently have faith in them keeping you employed for a while, do you think the revenue of Sun still has the possiblity to grow? I really like the very open way Sun is going at the moment, but I do fear that it might not bring any revenue. Dell can now install Solaris on their servers, for example, but how will that help Sun? Do they have anything left except good but pricy hardware?
There were a bit late with their bibliography site ScienceDirect, though. Apart from that, it is actually quite scary that the bibliographic access (which is de facto the only access, the high stream of output makes it impossible to check by journal only) is in the hands of a few private companies (e.g. Thomson's Web of Knowledge). At some point there was a German initiative to do the same, but the effort needed was just too high. Now Thomson can more or less do what they want with their database, and scientists (and their librarians) can just hope that Thomson will stay reasonable, or else every single scientist in the whole world is in pretty deep shit. It should never have come to this depency :(
Luckily some chap posted the link to the old dilbert layout here, because I couldn't find a "past strips" button on the fully interactive flash interface. Bah.
Elsevier has been a publisher of scientific journals for a long long time, so you can hardly say that they arose in the Web. More likely, they were the first to notice any danger to their publication empire and took quick action.
Indeed, just thought the same thing.
My 10 year old IBM P200 Trinitron workstation monitor has a 3-layer coating to prevent gloss. For people that need to do work on their computing screens, glossy apparently has always been something to avoid.
No, that was just a backronym, made up by the PR department of Alan Turing's publisher.
Consider legal insurance. I pay about 6 euros per month for it, and with that I can access a hotline which gives immediate access to one of the insurance's lawyers specialized in the covered area. They will first help you solve the matter the cheapest way, without going to court (e.g. by writing a letter or giving advice like the parent poster had). This already saves you a lot of time and money and stress. And if it would go to court, the insurance fee will pay itself back in no time.
BTW The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Asus installed linux to _force_ MS to make the lightweight XP system. Do you think MS would have spent any money on this project if Asus had asked beforehand? Now they had to! Interestingly though, it seems that XP might end up surviving Vista this way, or does anybody of you expect a new lightweight MS OS coming out soon?
Still I use perl for my numerical calculations. There is a nice data language for matrix operations: PDL, which might be able to compete with matlab speeds. And my main reason to use perl: the short time needed to get a perl program that can reformat your input data in a nice way is without comparison. The same counts for adapting your program to a changed data format, added variables, etc. String handling and memory handling in C is a big big pain. Currently, I try to solve my problems with perl first, and for anything that is likely to frequently require runtimes longer than a day I rewrite my perl program into C.
For this reason several European airplane companies (e.g. Lufthansa) won't start with it. They did costumer surveys and found out that their clients were overall not interested.
I bought one of the first EEEs that came to Germany. The device is pretty underpowered (but good enough to watch movies on BTW), and your performance per dollar price is worse than other low budget PCs. But just spend ONE DAY walking around with your $400 laptop with DVD burner etc etc, and one day with your EEE. You will see why there are people that want one, even for 350 euro (yes, euro). Today I had to carry the company "laptop" around and my back still hurts. When I take my EEE to work it's like taking a small bottle of water extra with me, I don't even notice it. The weight of the power adapter is also a lot less, that adds up too.
If you ever are planning to buy a laptop to commute or carry, you should not only look at price per performance, but also price per gram.
Another reason for me to pay a relatively high price for the EEE was that there was a well-thought-true debian-based linux preinstalled on it. I know Xandros is known for doing some pretty anti-open-source things in the past, but man, they got this xandros for eee just right. The default layout does it for me 80% of the time, for the rest I open a terminal and use vi or whatever I installed with apt-get. Because of the delivery problems, Amazon offered some linux-preinstalled Acer to all germans that preordered an EEE. With 15 inch screen, more RAM, DVD burner etc etc. For about the same price. I and many others just ignored it and thought "they don't get it", and waited further for the eee to come. Never regretted it, I use my EEE daily and as a main pc even, damn it's fine :p
It's a good point: If everywhere were you type is the home row, then how do you type anything else than f and j.
you only want what they tell you to want
But really, you could decrease bombings, high-school shootings, and all of that shit, by not actively trying to destroy governments of foreign countries, and by instead spending that amount of money on fighting poverty and uneducation. People being too little educated as they are, they are easily convinced to believe the "let's invade and stop terrorism" stuff they are told.
As for "how cultures survived", I am not sure if you can give me the name of a culture that traded freedom for oppression that survived in a healthy way.
Try bankers instead. I live close to Switzerland and it has quite the name of being a drugs paradise. I would also like to know what the people where taking that thought trading "subprimes" was a good idea, that certainly wasn't beer but must have been some very strong hallucinogenic stuff.
A lot of scientists might actually act like they're on drugs, but that is just because they are crazy!
While typing, I just checked the zonealarm update (I have put it off for a while so I needed to update anyway), and the update page is still horribly bad looking, but the free version update link is at least very clearly visible. And actually it downloads the normal software installer, I guess it removes the old one, leaves or converts the registry data, and installs the new version. So there goes your point that installers and updaters are a different thing :(
Be aware: The eee is close to useless as a PDA though. It should at least have a rotatable touchscreen with stylus, and the interfaces of common pda-programs should be adjusted to the PDA handling. It is not per se a bad thing that the EEE misses PDA qualities, since it also doesn't come with the premium price that comes with an advanced PDA. Instead, the EEE is the perfect companion for train or airplane commuters, it fits on the small table from the chair in front of you, and because of the small screen you can put it quite a bit to the back for relaxed typing, without disturbing your neighbours. The small adapter is also a plus: On German high speed ICE trains even the "standard" class has access to a power outlet per every two seats, and often you see people with standard desktops needing a lot of space on the floor for their huge power adapters.
I spend my working hours starting (or more: preparing) heavy calculations, high memory load, high cpu load. This often requires the full 2-8 GB there is on both desk workstations and dedicated nodes (opterons or xeons). I know microsoft is trying to get into the high-performance computing market, but how the hell can they think they can get there if the normal OS operation already requires at least 2 GB. Yes, RAM is cheap, but high-quality RAM for 200+ nodes starts to count....
Another point of concern: the stuff in RAM is probably loaded to pass on to the Cache at some point, and if you are not careful programming efficiently, most time will be spent moving stuff from the ram over the cache. This for all stuff that needs to be loaded in the RAM. As someone already said in this topic, this is not only a Microsoft problem, but it sure is a serious problem! Think about it, with such an inefficient way of programming single-threaded applications already, how will we ever get faster programs if they need smart multi-threading to take full use of a many-core cpu. At the current state, clockspeeds are not increasing so fast anymore and EFFICIENT parallelisation is needed. Writing an efficient program is difficult, writing an efficient multi-threaded program is multiply difficult. I have bad hopes for the desktop software speeds in the near future.
They just announced that they will deliver it on the new model EEE pcs. I figure Asus is a "System builder", but they sure as hell need to have a lightweight stable OS ready by january 2009 then, or the EEE and its competitors need to switch to Linux 100%. Not that I'd mind....
Being able (or being forced!) to redistribute that changed source is a whole different issue, and complicated by different licensing schemes.
I am also wondering, how much time to these people have on their hands that they track a company, operating in another country and happening to do 'business' with Cuba, just because it bought a domain name? There a bazillion registered domain names and you only need to give the name of the company and address for that. Do they check all of these? That really is a lot of work!
Another thing: I just checked the product page for my IBM P200, and they mention the specially designed 7-layer anti-reflective layer as the good thing that it is. I really wonder what went wrong in evolution that shiny, reflective, LCDs became a thing to have. For a good view of your screen with low stress of your eyes, you need it to NOT reflect lights behind you! I hope this shiny-LCD trend will pass.