Microsoft did finally contribute something positive to the web community. I think XMLHttpRequest almost makes up for Interdev... the MS Paint of web development tools.
Most SQL dialects include some sort of exclusion operator.
SELECT * FROM A INTERSECT SELECT * FROM A LIMIT 99;
or
SELECT * FROM A EXCEPT SELECT "B" FROM A;
Other engines do it differently. I think one of the best things about SQL is that it's a loose standard. You can easily choose the engine that works best for you... unless you are from the Cult of Microsoft (SQL Server). DB/2, Oracle, and even Sybase have very cool features that make queries much more powerful.
While SQL is hard to use at times (remembering double outer joins), it's that way for a reason. You don't want to be as easy to use as VB, for instance. Being forced to think in terms of lists and cartesean products forces you to think about speed and abstraction.
SQL is as easy as it should be, IMO. Specializing the access modifiers will only add to the complexity and make query optimization an impossibility. If you don't care about speed, then your needs probably aren't serious enough for a full blown SQL RDBMS. Text, XML, or even MS Access could be better suited.
Complaining about SQL is like complaining about Linear Algebra. These systems exist for exceptionally good reason. They are constrained to reduce or eliminate unsolvable situations.
Even when Apple has gotten things right, reporters have wrongly criticized their actions, likely creating a negative sales impact. A little praise is long overdue and certainly won't sway the religious PC user. And yes, it's deserved. Apple represents the high-end computer market, a niche no one else wants. And no, an Alienware box does not compare, as sexy as their cases can be.
Apple has been jabbed at by just about every magazine and news service over the years. I even remember an episode of Computer Chronicles where the hosts vocally criticized Apple's decision to offer CDROM drives... "People don't need that much storage! Apple seems to be lacking the business sense IBM has with their PC." Apple was criticized for ending the floppy drive and even criticized about dropping legacy serial ports to embrace USB, a standard they helped create. See a trend?
Since a vulnerability exists that lets you run remote code, why not make use of that vulnerability to patch itself? It's almost elegant if you think about it... a problem that becomes the solution to end itself. Under the right circumstances, this isn't an impossible thing to do.
When I'm up against a serious bug, remote code execution for instance, I write a test case to consistently reproduce it. I do a full analysis on the affected code and any dependencies. Before I fix the problem, I know everything about it. I might be wrong, but I think that Cisco probably does this too.
I'm trying to say is that Cisco probably builds usable exploits before firmware updates. You need some form of an exploit to test if the fix actually worked. The professional software companies that I've come across all require test cases for bug fixes. I can't imagine that Cisco is any different.
Even if I'm wrong about their software development processes, they could still do it if they wanted to. It is very possible with the right vulnerability. I could see a company run by software engineers pulling it off.
Wait, never mind. This is a horrible idea. You'd be giving script kiddies code to attack the holes of slow adopters. Eek. Scratch this one. At least the idea sounds cool.
Someone put Linux on these things
on
Video Tombstones
·
· Score: 1
How long before/. has an article about someone putting Slackware on one of these? It's a more noble act than say... playing commercials.
I own an older 9GB IBM Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive. The drive boasts an access time below 5ms. As anyone serious about performance knows, a hard drive's access time is an enormous factor. Read and write performance tends to increase exponentially with lower access times (non-sequential operations). The difference between 9ms and 5ms is deceptively large. I haven't come across any hard drive as fast as my IBM for nearly a decade. To witness it in person, specs aside, is a miracle to behold. I shit you not.
When I sometimes come across articles about SATA or SATA peripherals, I keep reading about the "performance" that SATA brings to the table. Not much can be said about the differences between IDE and SATA regarding bandwidth, they are nearly the same. I still don't know what all the hype is about. Modern hard drives don't even come close to saturating an ATA-133 bus. Burst (cache) speeds don't count. Without RAID, you'll never hit the upper limits anyway. Modern hard drives don't even have access times to justify a lower latency. Sure SATA scales better, but who cares? For the time being, SATA is ATA with new clothes.
My love of SCSI aside, IDE is almost always faster in terms of raw performance. SCSI shines in RAID configurations or with multiple devices (five or more). If all you need is one drive on a Linux server, IDE wins hands down. IDE is also free from the nightmares of SCSI termination and ninety+ connector types. My attraction to SCSI comes from the availability of high performance hard drives. No self respecting manufacturer would release a high-speed drive to the budget market. In the 90's, the best drives were exclusively SCSI and they still are.
When SATA was announced, I hoped that it would offer the advantages of SCSI with the simplicity and cost of IDE... a replacement to both. How wrong I was. Sure, the bandwidth is higher and the connectors are much more sexy. I hate ribbon cables and 68-pin connectors just like anyone else. Even the technology behind the interface is sound, but the manufacturers haven't taken it seriously. The best drives are still exclusive to SCSI. The best servers don't have SATA. SATA is neither the absolute replacement to IDE nor the successor to SCSI. It's been positioned as some bastard to fill the gap between the two.
Now that digital photography, music, and video have finally become commonplace, the focus has been placed on increased storage capacity. Performance has taken a back seat and will for some time. There has always been a trade-off between the two, they are mutually exclusive. SATA solves this in no way. Low-end consumer hard drives that would normally be released with an ATA interface are simply offering SATA if they want to be seen as "high performance." Even the new Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB drive, is offered in a comparable ATA-133 model. Hitachi sells a drive that offers SATA-300, not because it can physically transfer data that fast, but because it sounds good.
We had this problem in the SCSI world too. There was SCSI, Fast SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra Wide SCSI, Ultra2 SCSI, Ultra2 Wide SCSI, Ultra3 SCSI / 160, Ultra-320 SCSI, and Ultra-640 / Fast-320. The thing is, they are backward and forward compatible. The oldest drives work with the newest controllers and the oldest controllers work with the newest drives. The bus speed is very useful if you use RAID, made more feasible since the wide variations of SCSI support up to 15 devices per controller. SCSI advances have been more about performance and less about marketing (UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100, UDMA-133).
Admirers of SATA should shut up already. It's only a nominal increase over IDE in performance. The hard drives you can buy are exactly the same as one would expect of the low-end / IDE market. Even though SATA may be technologically superior in every way to IDE, what's happening is no better than putting a SCSI interface on a slow IDE drive. I've learned that you can use SATA drives on SCSI controllers. Why? That's exactly the same stupidity I'm referring to... the combination of the extremely budget conscience with the high-end.
SATA will never be "high performance" unless SATA drives become "high performance."
Okay, I must admit. This device looks and seems cool. I even informed my wife that I might break down and buy one. I just have absolutely no idea what I'd use it for.
Having my development environment wherever I'm at would be great, but that's only a tarball away in any case. Being Oliver Stone paranoid is a nice bonus. I guess I just wouldn't want to work this way exclusively.
Ethernet would have made this an instant sale for me. I could develop and demo network appliance products on the road without virtual machines. Without Ethernet, this is just a really portable terminal to me.
One of the questions online backup providers don't like to answer concerns recovery times. 100gb over a 5mbit line still takes longer than next day UPS, which many offer.
A couple providers that I looked at ship both DVD-R's and harddrives in times of emergency. One day for total disaster recovery isn't that bad, IMO. Otherwise, you can do partial restores over the Internet.
The two providers I contacted, both encrypted data with AES. One used an enhanced (CBC?) cipher. Both lose your data permanently if you lose your key. They don't save a copy anywhere (liability & marketing reasons, I'm sure).
If performance isn't a factor, I'd say online backups are worth looking at. Expect prices to be around $50 / GB per month. For myself, I would do this in ADDITION to a pre-existing backup plan.
CS is useless. The course work is trivial, at best, and antequated even at the time you are a freshman. When you've paid your $10,000's and get your piece of paper, you suddenly discover that your skills aren't in demand and your are woefully inexperienced.
Academia moves at a snail's pace. It simply cannot keep up with a progressive industry. College is, at best, three years behind the curve. Why, please tell me, would you pay for old & irrelevant courses on a topic that your professors often know little about (application, not theory).
I'm more interested in CS employment figures than schooling or training. We (my team) laugh at most applicants that have a masters degree in CS... not because of the degree, but lack of usable experience. Great, a degree... but can you solve a real-world problem? No? Next applicant.
In all fairness, CalTech has an exceptional CS department... but they are still behind the times. Too much theorizing on ideal programming practices than actual use. Linked lists... do something productive with them dammit. STL? Stop evangelizing. Java? Again, this is school, not church. Offer Java classes, but don't force the curriculum in that direction. If it were about "proper" object orientation then schools should at least offer a class in Python, but it's not. It's almost like there's an agenda to endorse topics without significant reason.
College needs dramatic alteration. Courses that actually make you think and involve you... not a lecture on 1980's technology dictated by an old & antequated professor. I'd take a C++ class by DJ Bernstein over a professor any day... and I'd learn so much more.
I too have contemplated this. Why can't every operation be cached for booting? A boot should be a single load of a memory dump, exactly like resuming from a hard drive.
Operating systems have become bloated. BeOS r5, which I still have, boots in under 10 seconds on a P133 with 16MB of RAM. It was as modern as any copy of Windows today. Apple even considered using it at one time.
It's possible to have fast boot times, but I have to believe that we don't for marketing reasons. Exclude Linux and Unix, and there's really very little reason for long boot times. You have some I/O polling, but nothing that's particularly time bound.
I honestly don't think people care as much as they do about their framerates.
I would love a computer that I can turn on & off like my T.V.
A Pentium 3.6ghz (brand new) is almost twice the clock speed of a single G5 2.0ghz (rather old). On top of the G5's age, multiprocessing isn't a linear performance increase. Two 2.0ghz CPUs are slower than a single CPU at 4ghz. Yes, I know they don't match clock for clock, but Intel keeps optimizing (HT, for example).
What *IS* surprising is the PowerPC emulation. 70% native speed, even 50% is astonishing.
After Apple races out the Intel boxes, they'll be even faster. Remember, Apple is the ultimate modder. The lengths they went in CASE DESIGN and WATER COOLING just to get the G5 to run as fast as it does.
They're going to make some unreal boxes. Yeah, they'll be PC's, but Dell will have nothing on them.
This is encouraging. I wonder how native Photoshop compares. That's all I really care about... Photoshop and vim.
I'm all warm and fuzzy inside. If only they'd use Itanium2 chips also.
What students need is to be tought "how to learn", rather than the common "shove as much as you can into the student" method. Independent thought is not cherished in primary schools. Why must we promote "right" and "wrong" ways of thinking?
I think a return to older methods is in order. Teaching language by phonics, well known to be superior to the repitition method, is imperitive. We need to stop changing methods that work for the sake of change alone.
Getting parents to be more active in their child's education is either overlooked or misinterpreted today. Colonial schools REQUIRED basic arithmatic and reading skills before admission. I don't consider that too harsh.
When the school is left responsible to teach morality, sex ed, and life lessons with the methods that they use, you get what you deserve and SHOULD expect.
There were 10 patent violations alleged in the FTC filings by DEC... all of which, Intel settled on and were already implemented in the Alpha. This was no Rambus lawsuit. It had merit.
Yes, Intel developed the Pentium. There was still a lot of work on their end, but without DEC's technology, the chip would have been very different. Intel made the perfect hybrid, in many ways, with the Pentium Pro// II.
It wasn't just a money grab by Digital. There is merit to many of the claims, each of which we could discuss in mind numbing detail.
If companies didn't play like Intel, then we wouldn't have the laws to protect us against people like them. You can't have competition without anti-competitive people drawing the line.
I think of it similar to computer viruses, which I wholly support. Without them, computer security would remain an after thought. Viruses expose the holes that would-be attackers could exploit in secrecy otherwise... for much worse intentions.
Here's the settlement for patent infringement, as DEC was going out of business:
http://www.techlawjournal.com/atr/80427intc.htm
There was a heap of pending litigation over theft of technology before and up to this time.
Keep in mind, that by 1998, it was already over. Intel had crushed DEC.
Espionage is the ultimate way to discover what your competitors are up to. It's risky. It takes careful planning. You need flawless execution. There's a certain art to it.
Too many companies see a competitor and then lower prices or try to outperform them. Tossing morals aside, propaganda and sabotage are much more efficient.
It takes balls. Big ones. Intel has proven that they will do what it takes to maintain market dominance. When someone has a better idea, they will buy it or steal it. Either way, the consumer benefits.
Some may argue that the consumer is hurt by anti-competitive behavior. That's true, but the opposite can be true as well.
"Anti" competitive behavior is actually the most competitive kind there is.
Let us not forget where the Pentium actually came from... stolen designs from the DEC Alpha. Cyrix, VIA,...???
This is a huge company and they play hard. On one hand, I have to admire a company willing to implement espionage and sabotage to competitors. On the other, they're so large, they don't NEED to.
The end is certainly not near for Intel. Consumer confidence will probably remain the same. AMD *MAY* be compensated in a decade or two. All of this aside, at the end of the day, nothing has or will change. This is history repeating itself and it tends to do that.
Smart business move? Yes. Consequence free actions are generally good ones. Until a slap on the wrist becomes substantial, they can do whatever they want.
The Itanium, had it been an x86, would have been the next logical step from the Pentium. Microsoft's weak support and developer reluctance to switch instruction sets, have killed all hopes of application support. Only a select few are adventurous enough to support Itanium running on esoteric UNIX distributions.
I've been *HOPING* that Apple would use Itanium on their high-end Power Macintosh. This would have given a second wind to the chip's lack luster success. Apple really is the only company that can give Itanium application support. If they decided to support IA64 *AND* x86, they could offer a high performance option along with their budget Macs.
I'm saddened by the end of the G5 line, but I'd shut up entirely if it were replaced by the Itanium. That chip is just fast... and elegantly redesigned. As I see it, it's the best chip out there.
Apple is great at supporting odd architectures. Their O/S already supports multi-platform binaries... c'mon... somebody petition Apple to add an Itanium build option in X-Code... PPC, IA64, and x86 all at once. I'd be so happy.
You really need to bury yourself in Dvorak. Switching while you're learning the layout is counter productive.
Once you become proficient in Dvorak, you then need to relearn Qwerty. Almost everyone I know who's made the switch feels the same way.
You can't simply "switch back" without learning how. You have to forget qwerty, in a way.
The lesser finger travel and more conventient key locations for programming have made me a happy convert. Bad carpal tunnel is hardly noticable. YMMV. A word of warning:
If you are accustomed to cursor movement keys in say... vi or vim... then you may hate yourself for making the switch. Myself: I just learned the new key locations. No worries.
Corporate logging requirements: I'd have to save every log for every conversation between employees if we allowed it. F@#* that.
No one is more than a 10 second walk away, a phone call, an email, a fax, a note on a paper airplane, a yell, a scream, or even an SMS.
Why do *I* have to be burdoned because users want to instant message each other?
With BitTorrent: Why do I have to explain why our ungodly fat pipe is slow to the CEO? Users DO NOT need to use BitTorrent to retrieve files. Hell, they shouldn't even be downloading ANYTHING at work.
IT Support is a constant headache because users can't separate office equipment from home equipment. I have a policy. First spyware infection = total system lockdown. It makes my users more cautious and saves me headaches.
Protocols can be filtered, especially ones that operate within a specific TCP port range. For instance:
My broadband provider blocks all SMTP outbound traffic. They also block all inbound HTTP and telnet.
*I* block all AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and Jabber traffic at my office, because I hate the stupid sounds they make (volume controls are beyond my users). I do this with packet filtering, NOT based on the host. I don't care what network they connect to.
---
I have even blocked Bittorrent for the bandwidth hog it is. It's much harder for others to do that if it means potentially breaking basic download functionality in a browser.
This move legitimizes BitTorrent far better that being available as a separate download. It's no longer a "hacker" tool, but something that even Grandma can use.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me, you don't need to get *THAT* hardcore with imaging flaws to take over a Windows machine.
My bad. I round numbers liberally.
Microsoft did finally contribute something positive to the web community. I think XMLHttpRequest almost makes up for Interdev... the MS Paint of web development tools.
Most SQL dialects include some sort of exclusion operator.
SELECT * FROM A INTERSECT SELECT * FROM A LIMIT 99;
or
SELECT * FROM A EXCEPT SELECT "B" FROM A;
Other engines do it differently. I think one of the best things about SQL is that it's a loose standard. You can easily choose the engine that works best for you... unless you are from the Cult of Microsoft (SQL Server). DB/2, Oracle, and even Sybase have very cool features that make queries much more powerful.
While SQL is hard to use at times (remembering double outer joins), it's that way for a reason. You don't want to be as easy to use as VB, for instance. Being forced to think in terms of lists and cartesean products forces you to think about speed and abstraction.
SQL is as easy as it should be, IMO. Specializing the access modifiers will only add to the complexity and make query optimization an impossibility. If you don't care about speed, then your needs probably aren't serious enough for a full blown SQL RDBMS. Text, XML, or even MS Access could be better suited.
Complaining about SQL is like complaining about Linear Algebra. These systems exist for exceptionally good reason. They are constrained to reduce or eliminate unsolvable situations.
I've been doing AJAX for three years... before that we called it "remote scripting."
This is nothing new. Calling AJAX "new" is like calling email "new", when it's over 25 years old... AJAX-like techniques being about eight years old.
I'd have written more cool "AJAX" interfaces if only my damn managers knew what in the hell I was talking about back then.
Even when Apple has gotten things right, reporters have wrongly criticized their actions, likely creating a negative sales impact. A little praise is long overdue and certainly won't sway the religious PC user. And yes, it's deserved. Apple represents the high-end computer market, a niche no one else wants. And no, an Alienware box does not compare, as sexy as their cases can be. Apple has been jabbed at by just about every magazine and news service over the years. I even remember an episode of Computer Chronicles where the hosts vocally criticized Apple's decision to offer CDROM drives... "People don't need that much storage! Apple seems to be lacking the business sense IBM has with their PC." Apple was criticized for ending the floppy drive and even criticized about dropping legacy serial ports to embrace USB, a standard they helped create. See a trend?
Since a vulnerability exists that lets you run remote code, why not make use of that vulnerability to patch itself? It's almost elegant if you think about it... a problem that becomes the solution to end itself. Under the right circumstances, this isn't an impossible thing to do.
When I'm up against a serious bug, remote code execution for instance, I write a test case to consistently reproduce it. I do a full analysis on the affected code and any dependencies. Before I fix the problem, I know everything about it. I might be wrong, but I think that Cisco probably does this too.
I'm trying to say is that Cisco probably builds usable exploits before firmware updates. You need some form of an exploit to test if the fix actually worked. The professional software companies that I've come across all require test cases for bug fixes. I can't imagine that Cisco is any different.
Even if I'm wrong about their software development processes, they could still do it if they wanted to. It is very possible with the right vulnerability. I could see a company run by software engineers pulling it off.
Wait, never mind. This is a horrible idea. You'd be giving script kiddies code to attack the holes of slow adopters. Eek. Scratch this one. At least the idea sounds cool.
How long before /. has an article about someone putting Slackware on one of these? It's a more noble act than say... playing commercials.
I own an older 9GB IBM Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive. The drive boasts an access time below 5ms. As anyone serious about performance knows, a hard drive's access time is an enormous factor. Read and write performance tends to increase exponentially with lower access times (non-sequential operations). The difference between 9ms and 5ms is deceptively large. I haven't come across any hard drive as fast as my IBM for nearly a decade. To witness it in person, specs aside, is a miracle to behold. I shit you not.
When I sometimes come across articles about SATA or SATA peripherals, I keep reading about the "performance" that SATA brings to the table. Not much can be said about the differences between IDE and SATA regarding bandwidth, they are nearly the same. I still don't know what all the hype is about. Modern hard drives don't even come close to saturating an ATA-133 bus. Burst (cache) speeds don't count. Without RAID, you'll never hit the upper limits anyway. Modern hard drives don't even have access times to justify a lower latency. Sure SATA scales better, but who cares? For the time being, SATA is ATA with new clothes.
My love of SCSI aside, IDE is almost always faster in terms of raw performance. SCSI shines in RAID configurations or with multiple devices (five or more). If all you need is one drive on a Linux server, IDE wins hands down. IDE is also free from the nightmares of SCSI termination and ninety+ connector types. My attraction to SCSI comes from the availability of high performance hard drives. No self respecting manufacturer would release a high-speed drive to the budget market. In the 90's, the best drives were exclusively SCSI and they still are.
When SATA was announced, I hoped that it would offer the advantages of SCSI with the simplicity and cost of IDE... a replacement to both. How wrong I was. Sure, the bandwidth is higher and the connectors are much more sexy. I hate ribbon cables and 68-pin connectors just like anyone else. Even the technology behind the interface is sound, but the manufacturers haven't taken it seriously. The best drives are still exclusive to SCSI. The best servers don't have SATA. SATA is neither the absolute replacement to IDE nor the successor to SCSI. It's been positioned as some bastard to fill the gap between the two.
Now that digital photography, music, and video have finally become commonplace, the focus has been placed on increased storage capacity. Performance has taken a back seat and will for some time. There has always been a trade-off between the two, they are mutually exclusive. SATA solves this in no way. Low-end consumer hard drives that would normally be released with an ATA interface are simply offering SATA if they want to be seen as "high performance." Even the new Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB drive, is offered in a comparable ATA-133 model. Hitachi sells a drive that offers SATA-300, not because it can physically transfer data that fast, but because it sounds good.
We had this problem in the SCSI world too. There was SCSI, Fast SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra Wide SCSI, Ultra2 SCSI, Ultra2 Wide SCSI, Ultra3 SCSI / 160, Ultra-320 SCSI, and Ultra-640 / Fast-320. The thing is, they are backward and forward compatible. The oldest drives work with the newest controllers and the oldest controllers work with the newest drives. The bus speed is very useful if you use RAID, made more feasible since the wide variations of SCSI support up to 15 devices per controller. SCSI advances have been more about performance and less about marketing (UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100, UDMA-133).
Admirers of SATA should shut up already. It's only a nominal increase over IDE in performance. The hard drives you can buy are exactly the same as one would expect of the low-end / IDE market. Even though SATA may be technologically superior in every way to IDE, what's happening is no better than putting a SCSI interface on a slow IDE drive. I've learned that you can use SATA drives on SCSI controllers. Why? That's exactly the same stupidity I'm referring to... the combination of the extremely budget conscience with the high-end.
SATA will never be "high performance" unless SATA drives become "high performance."
Okay, I must admit. This device looks and seems cool. I even informed my wife that I might break down and buy one. I just have absolutely no idea what I'd use it for.
Having my development environment wherever I'm at would be great, but that's only a tarball away in any case. Being Oliver Stone paranoid is a nice bonus. I guess I just wouldn't want to work this way exclusively.
Ethernet would have made this an instant sale for me. I could develop and demo network appliance products on the road without virtual machines. Without Ethernet, this is just a really portable terminal to me.
First, I suffered the Anti Compete clause.
Then, the "if you invent anything while you are an employee, then we own it."
Now, my basic speech can be limited?
Fuck this. Seriously. Fuck everyone who passed this as law.
One of the questions online backup providers don't like to answer concerns recovery times. 100gb over a 5mbit line still takes longer than next day UPS, which many offer.
A couple providers that I looked at ship both DVD-R's and harddrives in times of emergency. One day for total disaster recovery isn't that bad, IMO. Otherwise, you can do partial restores over the Internet.
The two providers I contacted, both encrypted data with AES. One used an enhanced (CBC?) cipher. Both lose your data permanently if you lose your key. They don't save a copy anywhere (liability & marketing reasons, I'm sure).
If performance isn't a factor, I'd say online backups are worth looking at. Expect prices to be around $50 / GB per month. For myself, I would do this in ADDITION to a pre-existing backup plan.
CS is useless. The course work is trivial, at best, and antequated even at the time you are a freshman. When you've paid your $10,000's and get your piece of paper, you suddenly discover that your skills aren't in demand and your are woefully inexperienced.
Academia moves at a snail's pace. It simply cannot keep up with a progressive industry. College is, at best, three years behind the curve. Why, please tell me, would you pay for old & irrelevant courses on a topic that your professors often know little about (application, not theory).
I'm more interested in CS employment figures than schooling or training. We (my team) laugh at most applicants that have a masters degree in CS... not because of the degree, but lack of usable experience. Great, a degree... but can you solve a real-world problem? No? Next applicant.
In all fairness, CalTech has an exceptional CS department... but they are still behind the times. Too much theorizing on ideal programming practices than actual use. Linked lists... do something productive with them dammit. STL? Stop evangelizing. Java? Again, this is school, not church. Offer Java classes, but don't force the curriculum in that direction. If it were about "proper" object orientation then schools should at least offer a class in Python, but it's not. It's almost like there's an agenda to endorse topics without significant reason.
College needs dramatic alteration. Courses that actually make you think and involve you... not a lecture on 1980's technology dictated by an old & antequated professor. I'd take a C++ class by DJ Bernstein over a professor any day... and I'd learn so much more.
I too have contemplated this. Why can't every operation be cached for booting? A boot should be a single load of a memory dump, exactly like resuming from a hard drive.
Operating systems have become bloated. BeOS r5, which I still have, boots in under 10 seconds on a P133 with 16MB of RAM. It was as modern as any copy of Windows today. Apple even considered using it at one time.
It's possible to have fast boot times, but I have to believe that we don't for marketing reasons. Exclude Linux and Unix, and there's really very little reason for long boot times. You have some I/O polling, but nothing that's particularly time bound.
I honestly don't think people care as much as they do about their framerates.
I would love a computer that I can turn on & off like my T.V.
This alone isn't that surprising...
A Pentium 3.6ghz (brand new) is almost twice the clock speed of a single G5 2.0ghz (rather old). On top of the G5's age, multiprocessing isn't a linear performance increase. Two 2.0ghz CPUs are slower than a single CPU at 4ghz. Yes, I know they don't match clock for clock, but Intel keeps optimizing (HT, for example).
What *IS* surprising is the PowerPC emulation. 70% native speed, even 50% is astonishing.
After Apple races out the Intel boxes, they'll be even faster. Remember, Apple is the ultimate modder. The lengths they went in CASE DESIGN and WATER COOLING just to get the G5 to run as fast as it does.
They're going to make some unreal boxes. Yeah, they'll be PC's, but Dell will have nothing on them.
This is encouraging. I wonder how native Photoshop compares. That's all I really care about... Photoshop and vim.
I'm all warm and fuzzy inside. If only they'd use Itanium2 chips also.
What students need is to be tought "how to learn", rather than the common "shove as much as you can into the student" method. Independent thought is not cherished in primary schools. Why must we promote "right" and "wrong" ways of thinking?
I think a return to older methods is in order. Teaching language by phonics, well known to be superior to the repitition method, is imperitive. We need to stop changing methods that work for the sake of change alone.
Getting parents to be more active in their child's education is either overlooked or misinterpreted today. Colonial schools REQUIRED basic arithmatic and reading skills before admission. I don't consider that too harsh.
When the school is left responsible to teach morality, sex ed, and life lessons with the methods that they use, you get what you deserve and SHOULD expect.
There were 10 patent violations alleged in the FTC filings by DEC... all of which, Intel settled on and were already implemented in the Alpha. This was no Rambus lawsuit. It had merit.
// II.
Yes, Intel developed the Pentium. There was still a lot of work on their end, but without DEC's technology, the chip would have been very different. Intel made the perfect hybrid, in many ways, with the Pentium Pro
It wasn't just a money grab by Digital. There is merit to many of the claims, each of which we could discuss in mind numbing detail.
lol.
If companies didn't play like Intel, then we wouldn't have the laws to protect us against people like them. You can't have competition without anti-competitive people drawing the line.
I think of it similar to computer viruses, which I wholly support. Without them, computer security would remain an after thought. Viruses expose the holes that would-be attackers could exploit in secrecy otherwise... for much worse intentions.
Here's the settlement for patent infringement, as DEC was going out of business: http://www.techlawjournal.com/atr/80427intc.htm There was a heap of pending litigation over theft of technology before and up to this time. Keep in mind, that by 1998, it was already over. Intel had crushed DEC.
Espionage is the ultimate way to discover what your competitors are up to. It's risky. It takes careful planning. You need flawless execution. There's a certain art to it.
Too many companies see a competitor and then lower prices or try to outperform them. Tossing morals aside, propaganda and sabotage are much more efficient.
It takes balls. Big ones. Intel has proven that they will do what it takes to maintain market dominance. When someone has a better idea, they will buy it or steal it. Either way, the consumer benefits.
Some may argue that the consumer is hurt by anti-competitive behavior. That's true, but the opposite can be true as well.
"Anti" competitive behavior is actually the most competitive kind there is.
Intel has done dirty things for years...
...???
Let us not forget where the Pentium actually came from... stolen designs from the DEC Alpha. Cyrix, VIA,
This is a huge company and they play hard. On one hand, I have to admire a company willing to implement espionage and sabotage to competitors. On the other, they're so large, they don't NEED to.
The end is certainly not near for Intel. Consumer confidence will probably remain the same. AMD *MAY* be compensated in a decade or two. All of this aside, at the end of the day, nothing has or will change. This is history repeating itself and it tends to do that.
Smart business move? Yes. Consequence free actions are generally good ones. Until a slap on the wrist becomes substantial, they can do whatever they want.
The Itanium, had it been an x86, would have been the next logical step from the Pentium. Microsoft's weak support and developer reluctance to switch instruction sets, have killed all hopes of application support. Only a select few are adventurous enough to support Itanium running on esoteric UNIX distributions.
I've been *HOPING* that Apple would use Itanium on their high-end Power Macintosh. This would have given a second wind to the chip's lack luster success. Apple really is the only company that can give Itanium application support. If they decided to support IA64 *AND* x86, they could offer a high performance option along with their budget Macs.
I'm saddened by the end of the G5 line, but I'd shut up entirely if it were replaced by the Itanium. That chip is just fast... and elegantly redesigned. As I see it, it's the best chip out there.
Apple is great at supporting odd architectures. Their O/S already supports multi-platform binaries... c'mon... somebody petition Apple to add an Itanium build option in X-Code... PPC, IA64, and x86 all at once. I'd be so happy.
You really need to bury yourself in Dvorak. Switching while you're learning the layout is counter productive.
Once you become proficient in Dvorak, you then need to relearn Qwerty. Almost everyone I know who's made the switch feels the same way.
You can't simply "switch back" without learning how. You have to forget qwerty, in a way.
The lesser finger travel and more conventient key locations for programming have made me a happy convert. Bad carpal tunnel is hardly noticable. YMMV. A word of warning:
If you are accustomed to cursor movement keys in say... vi or vim... then you may hate yourself for making the switch. Myself: I just learned the new key locations. No worries.
Corporate logging requirements: I'd have to save every log for every conversation between employees if we allowed it. F@#* that.
No one is more than a 10 second walk away, a phone call, an email, a fax, a note on a paper airplane, a yell, a scream, or even an SMS.
Why do *I* have to be burdoned because users want to instant message each other?
With BitTorrent: Why do I have to explain why our ungodly fat pipe is slow to the CEO? Users DO NOT need to use BitTorrent to retrieve files. Hell, they shouldn't even be downloading ANYTHING at work.
IT Support is a constant headache because users can't separate office equipment from home equipment. I have a policy. First spyware infection = total system lockdown. It makes my users more cautious and saves me headaches.
Protocols can be filtered, especially ones that operate within a specific TCP port range. For instance:
My broadband provider blocks all SMTP outbound traffic. They also block all inbound HTTP and telnet.
*I* block all AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and Jabber traffic at my office, because I hate the stupid sounds they make (volume controls are beyond my users). I do this with packet filtering, NOT based on the host. I don't care what network they connect to.
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I have even blocked Bittorrent for the bandwidth hog it is. It's much harder for others to do that if it means potentially breaking basic download functionality in a browser.
True, but Napster was a "protocol" too.
This move legitimizes BitTorrent far better that being available as a separate download. It's no longer a "hacker" tool, but something that even Grandma can use.