The entire catalog of Apple's software runs of 32 & 64 bit versions of OS X (PowerPC *AND* Intel), and sometimes on Win32 as well. Win64? Most of Microsoft's own software hardly works on that piece of shit. It's not even being promoted and for good reason: It's not ready.
Microsoft breaks compatibility when jumping to wider memory addressing. It's part of their marketing by force initiative. If you can make older applications work, but really poorly, you will encourage customers to purchase new versions. This is the very Microsoft definition of upgrade (everything).
Everyone that's used a 64-bit release of Windows will tell you that driver and software support is atrocious. If they don't, they didn't do much else than run Internet Explorer in 16-color VGA mode. Before Vista, 64-bit Windows was impossible to use on the majority of hardware and it only really ran Exchange and SQL Server (with many many many bugs).
Is Apple to blame for not supporting the under-promoted and known to be flawed 64-bit Windows releases? Not entirely. A disclaimer would have been nice. For that, they should be seriously reprimanded and offer concessions to the four people that have gotten Win64 to work.
If I could speculate, I believe they didn't want to cause confusion. All of those new Dell owners with 64-bit stickers on their computers have no clue they're actually running a 32-bit operating system. Who wants that support headache?... explaining to users why their machines advertised as 64-bit computers can't actually run Microsoft's 64-bit software.
I honestly believe that this problem affects so few people that EVERYONE it affects reads Slashdot regularly.
They surf porn. No joke. I worked at of those dot-com anonymizer companies that marketed in China. When we looked at our logs, we saw that most outbound traffic went to porn sites. That's what people do with their "voice" and unrestricted access to information... they use their new power to look at naked chics. Knowledge be damned.
The latest and greatest software is always tempting, but what are you really getting? I must admit, I rushed to buy CS3, but I use the tools professionally and needed the new stuff.
I strongly suggest buying older copies of Adobe products if you can. After years of use, I really haven't found the changes to be that drastic. A beginner would hardly notice any difference, and there are some serious benefits aside from the cost.
Old Adobe products run with excellent performance. Opening up Photoshop 7 side-by-side with CS3 makes me wonder why I'm even using CS3. Each upgrade gets slower. Unless you absolutely need the latest & greatest feature, not likely as a beginner, then prior versions will do just fine.
I don't doubt, those speeds are possible in an ideal environment. How much CPU are you pulling to make that happen? Does it scale across say, 12 drives?
No, really. It's all about cost. Even with hardware accelerated RAID, you can expect a steep performance hit. If you're going for a massive data repository I'd suggest several RAID 1+0 setups in hardware with a decent volume manager & file system (not NTFS).
2x500GB drives in a RAID 1 (for peace of mind). Then double that in a RAID 0 stripe (for speed). That's 4 drives per TB. Then use a decent file system, like ZFS, to chain your RAID 1+0 clusters into a single volume 1TB at a time.
Whatever you choose to aggregate your storage, I don't think you'll be able to get away from mirroring every drive... unless you go the budget RAID 5 route. I'd suggest no redundancy in that case.
"The treasurer said she is now determined to try to write legislation that could prevent this kind of computer piracy."
Yeah... more "rules" against this kind of behavior will fix it. It's not illegal enough... that's the reason it happens. Criminals care about consequences. Dumb ass.
This is a problem for such a small niche of coder... to pretend that it will affect everyone is just scare-mongering. It's difficult and it should remain that way. This isn't some defect in the language(s), but in the very problems themselves.
Parallel coding requires discipline. If you don't want to spend the time to do it properly, then don't write parallel code. This isn't a very big deal. The fat, bloated, and lazy scripters (I write some PHP & Ruby myself) will find parallelism in concurrent execution of the same sequential script(s). The guy who writes the webserver? He'll be writing actual parallel code. This is the way it is now.
Video game code? Ever more complex APIs are being introduced to shield coders from actual coding. I anticipate next gen consoles will provide their own complete game engine implementations. No problems there. Database (form) applications? No need to go parallel unless you're insane. Spreadsheets?... maybe if you're the one writing the actual spreadsheet software (Excel, OpenOffice, Lotus). Parallelizing formulas is just stupid.
The majority of applications run just fine sequentially. I once worked for a place that threaded everything. It was a mess. We had simple U.I.'s under serious lock contention, and sometimes deadlock, for tasks that would normally complete in milliseconds. Their love of threading creating a soiled heap of horrid code that ran so erratically, I quit. They applied it incorrectly and without discipline.
Only serious low-level or networking coders need to worry about such things. If your computation is so starved that it needs to run on multiple cores, then you could probably benefit from vectorization and assembler tweaks. Once you're in that realm, complexity is nothing new. If you're parallelizing fat code, then you're just being wasteful, perhaps unnecessarily.
Your average corporate drone writing accounting software, or form-based UI front ends to databases, or reporting,... will never ever need to worry about parallelism. Most coders will never need to worry about it, so I suggest everyone stop worrying about it. Everyone that needs to go parallel already knows it.
"Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run."
That's funny. Being that Vista took 5 years to get out the door, I don't see what all the fuss is about. So... your new Mac won't run the newest version of Windows when it's released in five years. What's the big deal? It's a Macintosh anyway. Had you purchased an early Dell model, the problem would be the same.
In any case, Microsoft has made bold declarations like this before. Remember when they said all future Windows releases would use the NT kernel?... back in 95? Then there was Windows 98, ME, and all the interim abominations. I wouldn't be surprised if they offer Vista "ME."
Trusting internally passed data too much can be a serious problem. On one hand, like you mentioned, excessive checking can slow things down. On the other, too much trust, and you can open your code to the effects of another team member's bug.
I believe strongly in building black box components with defensive coding around the public interface. There may be a small amount of redundancy. If there's a great deal, it might be a good idea to review the design. I've certainly found problems with my own designs in this respect. Are there performance costs? Absolutely, but they should be negligible. You never really know how much until you profile your code.
In my experience, profiling has never revealed error checking, or exception handling for that matter, to be the primary bottleneck in performance... despite my colleagues whining about my use of exceptions:). It's always, without failure, bad algorithm design and bad implementation. If you make it a rule to benchmark / profile first, and then optimize, you can make educated decisions about what error checking is expensive and what to refactor.
Tight loops are good candidates, but optimization before coding? I wouldn't suggest it if you enjoy your sanity.
The place I worked for was a security company. They had no automated unit testing and never analyzed for intrusions. You'd be shocked to find out how many holes exist on devices people depend on to keep them safe. The employees took it upon themselves (subverted authority) to patch our product. Security problems, even on security hardware, were not "priority" issues.
We too "trained" our coders in the art of secure programming. The problem, of course, is that we were also training them in basic things like what a C pointer is and how to not leak memory. Advanced security topics were over their head. This is the case in 9 out of 10 places I've worked. The weak links, once identified, can't be fired. No... these places move them to critical projects to "get their feet wet."
At the security giant, training only covered the absolute basics: shell escaping and preventing buffer overflows with range checking. The real problem is that only half of our bugs were caused by those problems. The overwhelming majority were caused by poor design often enabled by poor encapsulation (or complete lack of it).
There were so many use cases for our product that hadn't been modeled. Strange combinations of end-user interaction had the potential to execute code our appliance. Surprisingly, our QA team's manual regression testing (click around our U.I.) never caught these issues, but did catch many typos.
I don't believe security problems are inevitable. I've been writing code for years and mine never has these problems (arrogant, but mostly true). I can say, with certainty, than any given minor-version release has had 1,000's of high-quality tests performed and verified. I use the computer, not people... so there's hardly any "cost" to do so repeatedly.
I run my code through the paces. I'm cautious whenever I access RAM directly. My permissions engines are always centralized and the most thoroughly tested. I use malformed data to ensure that my code can always gracefully handle garbage. I model my use cases. I profile my memory usage. I write automated test suites to get as close to 100% code coverage as possible. I don't stop there. I test each decision branch for every bit of functionality that modifies state.
Aside from my debug-time assertions, I use exception handling quite liberally. It helps keep my code from doing exceptional things. Buffer overflows are never a problem, because I assume that all incoming data from ANY source should be treated as if it were pure Ebola virus. I assume nothing, even if the protocol / file header is of a certain type.
Security problems exist because bad coders exist. If you code and you know your art form well, you don't build code that works in unintended ways. Proper planning, good design, code reviews, and disciplined testing is all you need.
If HD movies came on discs the size of a LaserDisc, not only would they not fit in a PC case, completely new hardware would be needed to read & write them. I propose a new 8" - 12" disc standard. I highly doubt people would widen their cases just to fit an HD movie drive.
Right. Get documentation, emails, etc. If they fire you, or even threaten you, for refusing to break the law, call a lawyer and get paid. Don't feel bad for guys with golden parachutes. If the BSA comes to visit, will they come to your defense or let you take the fall?
Nothing pisses me off more than people being cheap to the point of stealing, especially when they have plenty of money. If your company cannot afford Microsoft software, then they do not get the luxury of having it. Period.
It's one thing to be fifteen and use a stolen copy of Photoshop at home. It's something else entirely to run a profitable business and continue to steal whatever you want. It's deplorable, unprofessional, and illegal.
The author's comment about how video games aren't proven to "cause" violence is true. That she dismisses that the lack of causality or even correlation is suspect. Essentially, what she's saying: If even the most creative manipulation of numbers doesn't give you the statistics data you want, then throw it all out because the issue is more complex.
Many other countries with violent video games do not have the high crime rates we do. As the number of violent games increases, violent crime decreases. This is a real statistical trend the author failed to address. In fact, it was only after the war in Iraq, that the 10-year decline in violent crime started to rise again in the United States. Surely war can't induce children to crime, so the cause must be video games.
Like all bogus supposed causes of violence, video games will eventually cease to be blamed. Once upon a time, books were banned for fear of inciting the youth. Dancing was also prominently feared. Holding hands, rock and roll music, and even dating were declared to be ultimate demoralizers of society. Time has shown all of this to be wrong.
Some people will always lie and cheat in order to impose their will on others. These people NEED prohibition of the things they don't like. They are the same people who want to burn books, censor speech, and only care about the freedoms they themselves enjoy. Anything is fair game in a witch hunt, so I propose blaming witchcraft for the decay of society. It's been done before, so it can happen again.
... really. It's not like this acquisition comes from anti-competitive practices or anything (search Microsoft's history). Let's complain when they (Google) actually does something wrong instead of being reactionary and speculating about things which have yet to happen.
Historically, Google has been pretty good about privacy issues, despite the NUMEROUS areas of concern like: - Scanning everyone's gmail - Google Desktop's indexing of everyone's machine content - Keeping search data indefinitely - etc, etc.
Somehow, DOUBLECLICK is the biggest concern? Not a chance. This is media hype perpetuated by the competition crying foul. I really wish people would concern themselves with actual privacy issues. It's just advertising data, people. Fear the Google Desktop, not tracking cookies.
Why do books, especially math books, have to match ever-changing curriculum? I'll never understand it. Jumping around and skipping chapters is surely within the capabilities of most students.
I agree that teachers probably don't understand Wikipedia, the Internet, or technology in general. Hell, in high school, I had a science teacher that didn't understand "ruler technology." Apparently, she never learned how to round to the nearest centimeter properly.
What computers did exist in the public schools I attended, were wasted on things like Oregon Trail and other pointless "educational" games that teach absolutely nothing and have nothing to do with learning. Whenever I'd launch BASIC and code 3D wire frames, I'd get scolded for not playing games, rather than praised for my understanding of 3D geometry.
An Atari 2600 would have been much less expensive, much more fun, and just as pointless in a classroom.
I disagree. Symbols are all in much more convenient locations, as far as I'm concerned. You could make the argument that the braces are too high up, but beside backspace isn't THAT far of a reach. I like that they're all above, rather than below, the home row (exception: semi-colon). That alone allows me to type for many more hours.
Das Keyboard is an excellent keyboard (different key resistance zones) and has the benefit of having no key markings. This helps you type faster as looking down won't help you at all. Blanking keys is highly recommended for learning new layouts, with masking tape, if nothing else.
It has the extra benefit of never needing key cap rearrangement between layouts. It's a good unit and I'm very picky when it comes to keyboards....and should you never make the switch, there's nothing stopping you from using it with QWERTY, Dvorak-Left, or Hungarian.
I switched in 2001 and it took about six months to relearn the vim key bindings. It's possible, but seriously funky w/ the arrow keys. Most everything else is easy to get used to. The "Z" key is conveniently located for the quick SHIFT+Z+Z escape.
For coding, I've found that I move my hands much less. HTML & XML junkies should appreciate it as well, as the greater-than & less-than keys are more conveniently located. Many programming keywords & function can be typed entirely with the home row.
I wouldn't ever suggest someone make the switch unless they're completely serious and accept that they'll type like an idiot for the next three months. I also wouldn't expect a 30% improvement in speed, although you do get an eventual increase.
The biggest advantage is a reduction in effort when typing. Good for my carpal. Next biggest advantage: When people sit at your computer, they can't type at all! If you're like me, and pick up a Das Keyboard, the absence of lettering combined with a different layout ensures that no one can type on your workstation when you step away.
Like all things, the truth lay somewhere beneath the words. It's not inaccuracies that schools fear. I can't tell you how many times I've found the answer keys in public schoolbooks to be wrong. Misinformation is nothing new.
If anyone still thinks that public "education" is about education, they're horribly mistaken. Calculus (and nearly all mathematics) hasn't changed in 100's of years, yet schools demand new math books each year. Why is that? History, as far as I know, doesn't (and shouldn't) change... yet new books are printed each year and sold for ridiculous prices. Many contain less actual content than the previous generations before them.
Public schooling is a business and the reasons to block Wikipedia are fiscal. Publishers and curriculum planners are directly threatened by Wikipedia.
Everyone knows our schooling is broken, and everyone has the wrong idea of how to fix it. More money is not the answer (some would argue that it's the problem) nor are laptops. The system needs to be rebuilt or abolished altogether, as do most long-lived government institutions (like social security, welfare, and minimum wage).
Umm. The Internet was created by our government. If people want Feds out of their lives, perhaps they shouldn't plug-in to a network created by our own military. Just a thought.
This is somewhat correct (video RAM has nothing to do with anything, unless you use one of those chips).
There are quite a few prerequisites if you want 32-bit Windows to address more than 2GB of RAM. Windows can perform paging for applications that use the respective API. Remember the good 'ol days of 16-bit memory segments? It's kind of like that. Some apps, like SQL server, sort-of support large memory, by paging large chunks of it around virtual memory space. It's not efficient at all and it's not as useful as having a flat memory space.
Even with paging, it's still very difficult to get a stock Windows install to address more than 3GB RAM without some tweaking. There's a segmentation between kernel and user RAM, that Windows expects to be divided in half. Even in a 4GB system, your largest contiguous block of heap is 2GB without tweaking. You're VERY lucky to get 3GB out of it. The same problem affects 8GB systems and so-on.
Windows 2003 Data Center supports 128GB RAM (in 32-bit mode), so it is *POSSIBLE*... but your apps have to be specially written and it'll generally perform badly. You're more likely to run out of kernel resources & memory before you are to run out of user-space RAM.
64-bit Windows might seem like the answer, but there are few applications, fewer drivers, and the O/S itself will take more RAM (due to the larger memory pointer sizes). Running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit host only works smoothly for every other operating system that offers it.
Honestly, I'd hold off and use XP w/ 2GB RAM. 64-bit Vista w/4GB RAM will perform exactly the same, but the hardware will just end up costing more and the 64-bit apps aren't here yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire catalog of Apple's software runs of 32 & 64 bit versions of OS X (PowerPC *AND* Intel), and sometimes on Win32 as well. Win64? Most of Microsoft's own software hardly works on that piece of shit. It's not even being promoted and for good reason: It's not ready.
... explaining to users why their machines advertised as 64-bit computers can't actually run Microsoft's 64-bit software.
Microsoft breaks compatibility when jumping to wider memory addressing. It's part of their marketing by force initiative. If you can make older applications work, but really poorly, you will encourage customers to purchase new versions. This is the very Microsoft definition of upgrade (everything).
Everyone that's used a 64-bit release of Windows will tell you that driver and software support is atrocious. If they don't, they didn't do much else than run Internet Explorer in 16-color VGA mode. Before Vista, 64-bit Windows was impossible to use on the majority of hardware and it only really ran Exchange and SQL Server (with many many many bugs).
Is Apple to blame for not supporting the under-promoted and known to be flawed 64-bit Windows releases? Not entirely. A disclaimer would have been nice. For that, they should be seriously reprimanded and offer concessions to the four people that have gotten Win64 to work.
If I could speculate, I believe they didn't want to cause confusion. All of those new Dell owners with 64-bit stickers on their computers have no clue they're actually running a 32-bit operating system. Who wants that support headache?
I honestly believe that this problem affects so few people that EVERYONE it affects reads Slashdot regularly.
Try the XDog project on the dog pound. I wrote it, so I know it works.
These guys have inherited the old BlackDog & K9 platforms. Rather than ARM, it uses a PowerPC core. New models coming soon:
http://echoidentity.com/
They surf porn. No joke. I worked at of those dot-com anonymizer companies that marketed in China. When we looked at our logs, we saw that most outbound traffic went to porn sites. That's what people do with their "voice" and unrestricted access to information... they use their new power to look at naked chics. Knowledge be damned.
The way this summary is written, you'd think that they're suggesting Tesla's coils need a direct line of sight. No. No they don't.
This isn't *LIKE* Tesla's work, it's a complete rip off of it. Magnetic field? Yep. That would be induction guys. Welcome to pinnacle of the 1920's.
They'll never be able to solve the power loss & drop off without something crazy... like Wardencliffe.
The latest and greatest software is always tempting, but what are you really getting? I must admit, I rushed to buy CS3, but I use the tools professionally and needed the new stuff.
I strongly suggest buying older copies of Adobe products if you can. After years of use, I really haven't found the changes to be that drastic. A beginner would hardly notice any difference, and there are some serious benefits aside from the cost.
Old Adobe products run with excellent performance. Opening up Photoshop 7 side-by-side with CS3 makes me wonder why I'm even using CS3. Each upgrade gets slower. Unless you absolutely need the latest & greatest feature, not likely as a beginner, then prior versions will do just fine.
I don't doubt, those speeds are possible in an ideal environment. How much CPU are you pulling to make that happen? Does it scale across say, 12 drives?
No, really. It's all about cost. Even with hardware accelerated RAID, you can expect a steep performance hit. If you're going for a massive data repository I'd suggest several RAID 1+0 setups in hardware with a decent volume manager & file system (not NTFS).
2x500GB drives in a RAID 1 (for peace of mind). Then double that in a RAID 0 stripe (for speed). That's 4 drives per TB. Then use a decent file system, like ZFS, to chain your RAID 1+0 clusters into a single volume 1TB at a time.
Whatever you choose to aggregate your storage, I don't think you'll be able to get away from mirroring every drive... unless you go the budget RAID 5 route. I'd suggest no redundancy in that case.
"The treasurer said she is now determined to try to write legislation that could prevent this kind of computer piracy."
Yeah... more "rules" against this kind of behavior will fix it. It's not illegal enough... that's the reason it happens. Criminals care about consequences. Dumb ass.
This is a problem for such a small niche of coder... to pretend that it will affect everyone is just scare-mongering. It's difficult and it should remain that way. This isn't some defect in the language(s), but in the very problems themselves.
... will never ever need to worry about parallelism. Most coders will never need to worry about it, so I suggest everyone stop worrying about it. Everyone that needs to go parallel already knows it.
Parallel coding requires discipline. If you don't want to spend the time to do it properly, then don't write parallel code. This isn't a very big deal. The fat, bloated, and lazy scripters (I write some PHP & Ruby myself) will find parallelism in concurrent execution of the same sequential script(s). The guy who writes the webserver? He'll be writing actual parallel code. This is the way it is now.
Video game code? Ever more complex APIs are being introduced to shield coders from actual coding. I anticipate next gen consoles will provide their own complete game engine implementations. No problems there. Database (form) applications? No need to go parallel unless you're insane. Spreadsheets?... maybe if you're the one writing the actual spreadsheet software (Excel, OpenOffice, Lotus). Parallelizing formulas is just stupid.
The majority of applications run just fine sequentially. I once worked for a place that threaded everything. It was a mess. We had simple U.I.'s under serious lock contention, and sometimes deadlock, for tasks that would normally complete in milliseconds. Their love of threading creating a soiled heap of horrid code that ran so erratically, I quit. They applied it incorrectly and without discipline.
Only serious low-level or networking coders need to worry about such things. If your computation is so starved that it needs to run on multiple cores, then you could probably benefit from vectorization and assembler tweaks. Once you're in that realm, complexity is nothing new. If you're parallelizing fat code, then you're just being wasteful, perhaps unnecessarily.
Your average corporate drone writing accounting software, or form-based UI front ends to databases, or reporting,
"Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run."
That's funny. Being that Vista took 5 years to get out the door, I don't see what all the fuss is about. So... your new Mac won't run the newest version of Windows when it's released in five years. What's the big deal? It's a Macintosh anyway. Had you purchased an early Dell model, the problem would be the same.
In any case, Microsoft has made bold declarations like this before. Remember when they said all future Windows releases would use the NT kernel?... back in 95? Then there was Windows 98, ME, and all the interim abominations. I wouldn't be surprised if they offer Vista "ME."
Trusting internally passed data too much can be a serious problem. On one hand, like you mentioned, excessive checking can slow things down. On the other, too much trust, and you can open your code to the effects of another team member's bug.
:). It's always, without failure, bad algorithm design and bad implementation. If you make it a rule to benchmark / profile first, and then optimize, you can make educated decisions about what error checking is expensive and what to refactor.
I believe strongly in building black box components with defensive coding around the public interface. There may be a small amount of redundancy. If there's a great deal, it might be a good idea to review the design. I've certainly found problems with my own designs in this respect. Are there performance costs? Absolutely, but they should be negligible. You never really know how much until you profile your code.
In my experience, profiling has never revealed error checking, or exception handling for that matter, to be the primary bottleneck in performance... despite my colleagues whining about my use of exceptions
Tight loops are good candidates, but optimization before coding? I wouldn't suggest it if you enjoy your sanity.
The place I worked for was a security company. They had no automated unit testing and never analyzed for intrusions. You'd be shocked to find out how many holes exist on devices people depend on to keep them safe. The employees took it upon themselves (subverted authority) to patch our product. Security problems, even on security hardware, were not "priority" issues.
We too "trained" our coders in the art of secure programming. The problem, of course, is that we were also training them in basic things like what a C pointer is and how to not leak memory. Advanced security topics were over their head. This is the case in 9 out of 10 places I've worked. The weak links, once identified, can't be fired. No... these places move them to critical projects to "get their feet wet."
At the security giant, training only covered the absolute basics: shell escaping and preventing buffer overflows with range checking. The real problem is that only half of our bugs were caused by those problems. The overwhelming majority were caused by poor design often enabled by poor encapsulation (or complete lack of it).
There were so many use cases for our product that hadn't been modeled. Strange combinations of end-user interaction had the potential to execute code our appliance. Surprisingly, our QA team's manual regression testing (click around our U.I.) never caught these issues, but did catch many typos.
I don't believe security problems are inevitable. I've been writing code for years and mine never has these problems (arrogant, but mostly true). I can say, with certainty, than any given minor-version release has had 1,000's of high-quality tests performed and verified. I use the computer, not people... so there's hardly any "cost" to do so repeatedly.
I run my code through the paces. I'm cautious whenever I access RAM directly. My permissions engines are always centralized and the most thoroughly tested. I use malformed data to ensure that my code can always gracefully handle garbage. I model my use cases. I profile my memory usage. I write automated test suites to get as close to 100% code coverage as possible. I don't stop there. I test each decision branch for every bit of functionality that modifies state.
Aside from my debug-time assertions, I use exception handling quite liberally. It helps keep my code from doing exceptional things. Buffer overflows are never a problem, because I assume that all incoming data from ANY source should be treated as if it were pure Ebola virus. I assume nothing, even if the protocol / file header is of a certain type.
Security problems exist because bad coders exist. If you code and you know your art form well, you don't build code that works in unintended ways. Proper planning, good design, code reviews, and disciplined testing is all you need.
If HD movies came on discs the size of a LaserDisc, not only would they not fit in a PC case, completely new hardware would be needed to read & write them. I propose a new 8" - 12" disc standard. I highly doubt people would widen their cases just to fit an HD movie drive.
Right. Get documentation, emails, etc. If they fire you, or even threaten you, for refusing to break the law, call a lawyer and get paid. Don't feel bad for guys with golden parachutes. If the BSA comes to visit, will they come to your defense or let you take the fall?
Nothing pisses me off more than people being cheap to the point of stealing, especially when they have plenty of money. If your company cannot afford Microsoft software, then they do not get the luxury of having it. Period.
It's one thing to be fifteen and use a stolen copy of Photoshop at home. It's something else entirely to run a profitable business and continue to steal whatever you want. It's deplorable, unprofessional, and illegal.
The author's comment about how video games aren't proven to "cause" violence is true. That she dismisses that the lack of causality or even correlation is suspect. Essentially, what she's saying: If even the most creative manipulation of numbers doesn't give you the statistics data you want, then throw it all out because the issue is more complex.
Many other countries with violent video games do not have the high crime rates we do. As the number of violent games increases, violent crime decreases. This is a real statistical trend the author failed to address. In fact, it was only after the war in Iraq, that the 10-year decline in violent crime started to rise again in the United States. Surely war can't induce children to crime, so the cause must be video games.
Like all bogus supposed causes of violence, video games will eventually cease to be blamed. Once upon a time, books were banned for fear of inciting the youth. Dancing was also prominently feared. Holding hands, rock and roll music, and even dating were declared to be ultimate demoralizers of society. Time has shown all of this to be wrong.
Some people will always lie and cheat in order to impose their will on others. These people NEED prohibition of the things they don't like. They are the same people who want to burn books, censor speech, and only care about the freedoms they themselves enjoy. Anything is fair game in a witch hunt, so I propose blaming witchcraft for the decay of society. It's been done before, so it can happen again.
... really. It's not like this acquisition comes from anti-competitive practices or anything (search Microsoft's history). Let's complain when they (Google) actually does something wrong instead of being reactionary and speculating about things which have yet to happen.
Historically, Google has been pretty good about privacy issues, despite the NUMEROUS areas of concern like:
- Scanning everyone's gmail
- Google Desktop's indexing of everyone's machine content
- Keeping search data indefinitely
- etc, etc.
Somehow, DOUBLECLICK is the biggest concern? Not a chance. This is media hype perpetuated by the competition crying foul. I really wish people would concern themselves with actual privacy issues. It's just advertising data, people. Fear the Google Desktop, not tracking cookies.
Why do books, especially math books, have to match ever-changing curriculum? I'll never understand it. Jumping around and skipping chapters is surely within the capabilities of most students.
I agree that teachers probably don't understand Wikipedia, the Internet, or technology in general. Hell, in high school, I had a science teacher that didn't understand "ruler technology." Apparently, she never learned how to round to the nearest centimeter properly.
What computers did exist in the public schools I attended, were wasted on things like Oregon Trail and other pointless "educational" games that teach absolutely nothing and have nothing to do with learning. Whenever I'd launch BASIC and code 3D wire frames, I'd get scolded for not playing games, rather than praised for my understanding of 3D geometry.
An Atari 2600 would have been much less expensive, much more fun, and just as pointless in a classroom.
I disagree. Symbols are all in much more convenient locations, as far as I'm concerned. You could make the argument that the braces are too high up, but beside backspace isn't THAT far of a reach. I like that they're all above, rather than below, the home row (exception: semi-colon). That alone allows me to type for many more hours.
Das Keyboard is an excellent keyboard (different key resistance zones) and has the benefit of having no key markings. This helps you type faster as looking down won't help you at all. Blanking keys is highly recommended for learning new layouts, with masking tape, if nothing else.
...and should you never make the switch, there's nothing stopping you from using it with QWERTY, Dvorak-Left, or Hungarian.
It has the extra benefit of never needing key cap rearrangement between layouts. It's a good unit and I'm very picky when it comes to keyboards.
I switched in 2001 and it took about six months to relearn the vim key bindings. It's possible, but seriously funky w/ the arrow keys. Most everything else is easy to get used to. The "Z" key is conveniently located for the quick SHIFT+Z+Z escape.
For coding, I've found that I move my hands much less. HTML & XML junkies should appreciate it as well, as the greater-than & less-than keys are more conveniently located. Many programming keywords & function can be typed entirely with the home row.
I wouldn't ever suggest someone make the switch unless they're completely serious and accept that they'll type like an idiot for the next three months. I also wouldn't expect a 30% improvement in speed, although you do get an eventual increase.
The biggest advantage is a reduction in effort when typing. Good for my carpal. Next biggest advantage: When people sit at your computer, they can't type at all! If you're like me, and pick up a Das Keyboard, the absence of lettering combined with a different layout ensures that no one can type on your workstation when you step away.
Like all things, the truth lay somewhere beneath the words. It's not inaccuracies that schools fear. I can't tell you how many times I've found the answer keys in public schoolbooks to be wrong. Misinformation is nothing new.
If anyone still thinks that public "education" is about education, they're horribly mistaken. Calculus (and nearly all mathematics) hasn't changed in 100's of years, yet schools demand new math books each year. Why is that? History, as far as I know, doesn't (and shouldn't) change... yet new books are printed each year and sold for ridiculous prices. Many contain less actual content than the previous generations before them.
Public schooling is a business and the reasons to block Wikipedia are fiscal. Publishers and curriculum planners are directly threatened by Wikipedia.
Everyone knows our schooling is broken, and everyone has the wrong idea of how to fix it. More money is not the answer (some would argue that it's the problem) nor are laptops. The system needs to be rebuilt or abolished altogether, as do most long-lived government institutions (like social security, welfare, and minimum wage).
Umm. The Internet was created by our government. If people want Feds out of their lives, perhaps they shouldn't plug-in to a network created by our own military. Just a thought.
Microsoft ASP... why slow down under high traffic when you can just crash instead?
This is somewhat correct (video RAM has nothing to do with anything, unless you use one of those chips).
There are quite a few prerequisites if you want 32-bit Windows to address more than 2GB of RAM. Windows can perform paging for applications that use the respective API. Remember the good 'ol days of 16-bit memory segments? It's kind of like that. Some apps, like SQL server, sort-of support large memory, by paging large chunks of it around virtual memory space. It's not efficient at all and it's not as useful as having a flat memory space.
Even with paging, it's still very difficult to get a stock Windows install to address more than 3GB RAM without some tweaking. There's a segmentation between kernel and user RAM, that Windows expects to be divided in half. Even in a 4GB system, your largest contiguous block of heap is 2GB without tweaking. You're VERY lucky to get 3GB out of it. The same problem affects 8GB systems and so-on.
Windows 2003 Data Center supports 128GB RAM (in 32-bit mode), so it is *POSSIBLE*... but your apps have to be specially written and it'll generally perform badly. You're more likely to run out of kernel resources & memory before you are to run out of user-space RAM.
64-bit Windows might seem like the answer, but there are few applications, fewer drivers, and the O/S itself will take more RAM (due to the larger memory pointer sizes). Running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit host only works smoothly for every other operating system that offers it.
Honestly, I'd hold off and use XP w/ 2GB RAM. 64-bit Vista w/4GB RAM will perform exactly the same, but the hardware will just end up costing more and the 64-bit apps aren't here yet.