I don't think any touchscreen device is going to suit your needs. The first poster is quite right. All tablets are designed as internet devices and they don't have much functionality offline.
I'd suggest a cheap laptop running Ubuntu. I've set very elderly senior citizens up with this before and they immediately understood it - far better than the alternatives. The selection of casual games is probably the best mix for what you need as well.
I thought this was a joke at first. In 22 years in IT, outside of use in the film industry, I have never heard of any business that used Mac servers. Linux is far more accepted in the server room. At most, the corporate world accepts a few Mac workstations lurking in creative departments ripe for downsizing.
Given that attitude, why would Apple invest effort in this area?
Don't forget the Google 13+ age limit thing - its actually some obscure FCC rule. I don't entirely why Americans are oblivious to the rest of the world, but Google sometimes applies this outside of the U.S. My kids and all their friends have been using gmail for years and let me tell you that while could probably weather a loss of mail I'd get a lot of grief from them.
Google needs to mature a bit if they are going to be the world's IT server.
Ubuntu with classic desktop (not Unity). It have two 90 year old+ friends that use it just fine - it is that easy.
DON'T DUAL BOOT just wipe that Microsoft crap off your drive.
I could make an article about my new power system that produces power out of Rainbows and Moonbeams. Would the Slashdot editors publish a story on that? This article has no basis in fact. There is not the slightest possibility that renewables are even within an order of magnitude of nuclear. Really, is the state of science education in the United States really that bad that stuff like this gets credibility?
The decision to phase out nuclear power is essentially a decision to burn coal. Wind is not a realistic alternative, solar will never be viable. Both of these "green" technologies have crept into the territory of public-policy fraud. Natural gas is plentiful at the moment but is a short-term solution. Nuclear is the only environmentally-sound solution.
The problem is that the U.S. nuclear industry is largely based on simplistic reactor designs originating from military research. While the industry has done a great job at improving operational safety, the design basis of the plants has advanced very little because of lack of research. Fukushima clearly indicates that the design basis for BWRs was inadequate despite improvements. If this were an airplane, all airplanes of that model would be grounded. It is somewhat reasonable to demand that plants like Browns Ferry and Vermont Yankee should be "grounded" until their defense in depth is dramatically improved. It should be emphasized that electrical production, especially nuclear, is immensely profitable. Few investments are guaranteed to show return over 50 or 60 years. It is fair to demand that the design basis be top-notch. While the industry looks at things like SOERs (significant industry operating events) they don't do much to challenge the original design basis. The culture of "conservative decision making" discourages improvements thus hurting safety in the long run.
Some of these upgrades are obvious:
Other than shuffling your core, storing spent fuel beside your reactor is stupid.
Backup power is cheap so install extra. In some configurations you can also use it for peaking sales.
Water tanks are cheap so have lots of extra water for the unit. This buys you emergency response time.
However, nuclear power is the only solution. There are types of reactors such as the thorium cycle and the CANDU design that are dramatically safer than all current U.S. plants. It is only the vested interest of big companies that is keeping us from moving forward.
Buy a few Arduino boards. Get the robot vehicle version. Add a sound synthesizer shield. Make stuff. Hours of fun and will give you a sound foundation in the basics that you can't get through a higher level language.
You don't actually save any cash because the Software Quality Assurance standards are ridiculous. Darlington shutdown computers ran into 100M$+. However, what you gain is a huge amount of safety as the computer is always more reliable than a mess of relays with iffy corroding contacts with engineering change control by personnel of uneven quality.
This is even more important in reactor controls where reactivity manipulations really really shouldn't be done by a human being. On a physically small BWR or PWR core you only get away with it because of the short neutron life.
Canadian nuclear stations have been using digital computers for reactor and overall unit controls since the 1960s. I, for one, would like to welcome the United States to the 20th century.
Shortly before the chain self-destructed in Canada I attempted to purchase an radio antenna there. The teenaged sales staff looked at me like I was speaking another language. I said, this is RADIO shack right? You do know what an antenna is for?
After the strange purchase of the Canadian Radio Shack chain by Circuit City (which promptly went bankrupt), the original Radio Shack opened up new stores to compete with the stores that it had already off sold years before. This didn't go well and after a poor attempt at reentering the Canadian retail space they were gone. What's left is still a large chain (now called The Source) is now purchased by Bell Canada and has a very poor stock of electronics indeed.
If you are going into CS and you haven't done high school computer classes and hobbied in the field you shouldn't be there. Its a low barrier to entry profession. Do the prep work or You Deserve To Fail.
But let me say that based on years of hiring experience, Computer Science faculties have lost their way. Sure you get some guy who can whip up a really fancy structured program using indecipherable container thingies. But the code you get is unreadable. The design you get is unmaintainable. The person you get can't communicate with other team members. I'm tired of arguments about what object factories have to have what member functions. It's garbage. The results of Computer Science grads tend to be crap.
I'll always hire an engineer (software, electrical, whatever...) to design computer code. Sometimes physicists do a fine job too. The result you get you can live with. Often it even has documentation. And you get a team member who sometimes can actually get along.
Maybe my luck has just been bad, but this has been my experience in two decades of hiring talent.
Sorry, I know you meant well, but you screwed up big time. You'd be facing discipline at most companies. In a health-care situation with the privacy concerns, doubly so. I'd be pulling the plug on this and be grateful that you still have a job. The fact that you may have the support of some doctors may not protect you. You are definitely in the wrong.
Remind yourself: You may be technical but you don't work in IT. You job responsibility is not IT.
ATI really needs to fix its drivers. This has been a problem for over a decade. Ridiculous performances is NOT important. Reliable drivers will always be.
The difference in my case was 10fps with flakey bombouts (ATI) vs. 45 fps completely solid performance (nVidia).
Facebook archiving does nothing. It just gives you a message that says something like "this may take a while...we'll send you an email when it is ready".... which never comes.
Except multi-card support is broken in the X server at the moment for all major distros, so having many outputs on a single cards is actually quite useful. You'll be very lucky to get two identical cards working on Ubuntu or SUSE right now no matter what drivers you use.
Many applications need numerous displays off of a single computer where remote X usage will not suffice. Think control rooms, large installations, classrooms, etc.
A light water reactor isn't capable of producing much tritium since hydrogen has to absorb two neutrons to become it. Since it doesn't exist in nature any amount, no matter how small, is detectable. Not really a concern. You would most likely get more radiation exposure from coal.
FORTRAN is still commonly used for scientific applications such as aircraft and nuclear simulation. The simple reason is having a COMPLEX data type built into the language: it is essential for doing physics. Shared memory also works much more nicely with COMMON blocks rather than as C data structures (remember that a physicist or engineer wants to worry about the physics, not the coding).
We have a couple million lines of physics implemented in FORTRAN. It is an exaggeration to actually describe this as "software" in the modern sense - it is physics equations. FORTRAN has never been a well standardized language (e.g. F77, vs. many vendor extensions) and legacy techniques like "byte-parallel" coding were once commonly used but cause platform dependencies (I'm told by friends in the database realm that COBOL has analogous problems). gcc/f77 support for FORTRAN is also fading and gcc/f77 has always compiled FORTRAN at a snail's pace.
I would welcome a new option if the porting is easy. Because of the computer horsepower today, even for real-time usage, an interpreted language would work fine if callable from a C wrapper.
The problem is that Nokia is a cell phone company, and the 770 seems to be a side project that gets little support. Nokia needs to back the product line for it to be successful. The Nokia 800 will likely be another dud simply because Nokia defines itself as a cell phone manufacturer.
I have a Nokia 770 sitting here that I bought as a project for work as we are a Linux-based shop. The wifi simply does not work with many routers and the reception seems to be poor when it does work. The Maemo operating system is an interesting variation of Debian but the tablet simply is not fast enough to make it very useful. Finally, the handwriting recognition is a complete joke.
On the plus side, it has a beautiful screen. It has a nice set of software inside it. Too bad it simply does not work.
I should mention that the first Nokia 770 I received was a brick. The Nokia 770 I have is #2. Luckily the vendor took the product back with no hassles. There was not much support from Nokia Canada.
I deal with Novell. Novell is not big. Novell is not smart. Novell is a bunch of marketing guys having "conversations" with each other selling a bunch of old crap and half-integrated products purchased from other people.
Novell is gonna get obliterated. They just don't have a clue.
Oracle, Redhat, Ubuntu, Sun, and IBM should pool their resources and take on Microsoft cause that's about how big an army it is going to take.
Contrary to the reply above, the answer is yes - multimedia is one application of a usage of real time signals (a timer signal). Basically, what it boils down to is the POSIX.4 standard. In MS Windows, the multimedia timers an alternative example (I believe). On most hardware, a clock resolution of about 970us is available. So you can get scheduling with an average error of half this (so your error is half a millisecond on average).
Real time has several aspects besides just scheduling:
-real time signaling queues (e.g. timers and other interprocess signals) and other inter-process communications
-the ability to lock pages into memory
-the ability to set real time priority (pri 33-43) above the kernel (20-32) and users (0-19). To say that another way - a real time process is the king of the system.
-the ability to choose a kernel scheduling method (e.g. FIFO, round robin)
-the granularity with which the kernel can be interrupted
-the latency in switching tasks
Real time has been traditionally a concern in control system applications where predictable scheduling is important or response to a hardware interrupt must be rapid. Multimedia and many gaming applications also fit this requirement.
Real time is undermined where things like underlying hardware can disrupt predictable execution (e.g. I've seen this caused by some file system drivers). Ideally, real time applications must be designed to assume they are in complete control of the system and should not rely on the timing of any I/O activity during their execution. A real time process must sleep for anything else on the system to run. Bugs in real time applications can be very subtle to detect and may occur at low frequency.
Adding full real time support for Linux is pretty important for both usefulness and credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
...and it would be nice if someone listened to the hate coming their way for a change.
I don't think any touchscreen device is going to suit your needs. The first poster is quite right. All tablets are designed as internet devices and they don't have much functionality offline. I'd suggest a cheap laptop running Ubuntu. I've set very elderly senior citizens up with this before and they immediately understood it - far better than the alternatives. The selection of casual games is probably the best mix for what you need as well.
I thought this was a joke at first. In 22 years in IT, outside of use in the film industry, I have never heard of any business that used Mac servers. Linux is far more accepted in the server room. At most, the corporate world accepts a few Mac workstations lurking in creative departments ripe for downsizing.
Given that attitude, why would Apple invest effort in this area?
Google needs to mature a bit if they are going to be the world's IT server.
This comment is logical regardless of the fact that I think the Stack Overflow types are jackasses.
Google+ is going to be a lot less cool if Brazil and India get invites before me.
Ubuntu with classic desktop (not Unity). It have two 90 year old+ friends that use it just fine - it is that easy. DON'T DUAL BOOT just wipe that Microsoft crap off your drive.
I could make an article about my new power system that produces power out of Rainbows and Moonbeams. Would the Slashdot editors publish a story on that? This article has no basis in fact. There is not the slightest possibility that renewables are even within an order of magnitude of nuclear. Really, is the state of science education in the United States really that bad that stuff like this gets credibility?
The decision to phase out nuclear power is essentially a decision to burn coal. Wind is not a realistic alternative, solar will never be viable. Both of these "green" technologies have crept into the territory of public-policy fraud. Natural gas is plentiful at the moment but is a short-term solution. Nuclear is the only environmentally-sound solution.
The problem is that the U.S. nuclear industry is largely based on simplistic reactor designs originating from military research. While the industry has done a great job at improving operational safety, the design basis of the plants has advanced very little because of lack of research. Fukushima clearly indicates that the design basis for BWRs was inadequate despite improvements. If this were an airplane, all airplanes of that model would be grounded. It is somewhat reasonable to demand that plants like Browns Ferry and Vermont Yankee should be "grounded" until their defense in depth is dramatically improved. It should be emphasized that electrical production, especially nuclear, is immensely profitable. Few investments are guaranteed to show return over 50 or 60 years. It is fair to demand that the design basis be top-notch. While the industry looks at things like SOERs (significant industry operating events) they don't do much to challenge the original design basis. The culture of "conservative decision making" discourages improvements thus hurting safety in the long run.
Some of these upgrades are obvious:
Other than shuffling your core, storing spent fuel beside your reactor is stupid.
Backup power is cheap so install extra. In some configurations you can also use it for peaking sales.
Water tanks are cheap so have lots of extra water for the unit. This buys you emergency response time.
However, nuclear power is the only solution. There are types of reactors such as the thorium cycle and the CANDU design that are dramatically safer than all current U.S. plants. It is only the vested interest of big companies that is keeping us from moving forward.
Buy a few Arduino boards. Get the robot vehicle version. Add a sound synthesizer shield. Make stuff. Hours of fun and will give you a sound foundation in the basics that you can't get through a higher level language.
This is even more important in reactor controls where reactivity manipulations really really shouldn't be done by a human being. On a physically small BWR or PWR core you only get away with it because of the short neutron life.
Canadian nuclear stations have been using digital computers for reactor and overall unit controls since the 1960s. I, for one, would like to welcome the United States to the 20th century.
After the strange purchase of the Canadian Radio Shack chain by Circuit City (which promptly went bankrupt), the original Radio Shack opened up new stores to compete with the stores that it had already off sold years before. This didn't go well and after a poor attempt at reentering the Canadian retail space they were gone. What's left is still a large chain (now called The Source) is now purchased by Bell Canada and has a very poor stock of electronics indeed.
But let me say that based on years of hiring experience, Computer Science faculties have lost their way. Sure you get some guy who can whip up a really fancy structured program using indecipherable container thingies. But the code you get is unreadable. The design you get is unmaintainable. The person you get can't communicate with other team members. I'm tired of arguments about what object factories have to have what member functions. It's garbage. The results of Computer Science grads tend to be crap.
I'll always hire an engineer (software, electrical, whatever...) to design computer code. Sometimes physicists do a fine job too. The result you get you can live with. Often it even has documentation. And you get a team member who sometimes can actually get along.
Maybe my luck has just been bad, but this has been my experience in two decades of hiring talent.
Remind yourself: You may be technical but you don't work in IT. You job responsibility is not IT.
You check for Ubuntu compatibility because the first thing you do will be to get rid of that Windows garbage.
Next we're going back for the Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee years... the classics.
It is a show that has maintained its charm.
ATI really needs to fix its drivers. This has been a problem for over a decade. Ridiculous performances is NOT important. Reliable drivers will always be. The difference in my case was 10fps with flakey bombouts (ATI) vs. 45 fps completely solid performance (nVidia).
Facebook archiving does nothing. It just gives you a message that says something like "this may take a while...we'll send you an email when it is ready".... which never comes.
Many applications need numerous displays off of a single computer where remote X usage will not suffice. Think control rooms, large installations, classrooms, etc.
A light water reactor isn't capable of producing much tritium since hydrogen has to absorb two neutrons to become it. Since it doesn't exist in nature any amount, no matter how small, is detectable. Not really a concern. You would most likely get more radiation exposure from coal.
We have a couple million lines of physics implemented in FORTRAN. It is an exaggeration to actually describe this as "software" in the modern sense - it is physics equations. FORTRAN has never been a well standardized language (e.g. F77, vs. many vendor extensions) and legacy techniques like "byte-parallel" coding were once commonly used but cause platform dependencies (I'm told by friends in the database realm that COBOL has analogous problems). gcc/f77 support for FORTRAN is also fading and gcc/f77 has always compiled FORTRAN at a snail's pace.
I would welcome a new option if the porting is easy. Because of the computer horsepower today, even for real-time usage, an interpreted language would work fine if callable from a C wrapper.
The problem is that Nokia is a cell phone company, and the 770 seems to be a side project that gets little support. Nokia needs to back the product line for it to be successful. The Nokia 800 will likely be another dud simply because Nokia defines itself as a cell phone manufacturer.
I have a Nokia 770 sitting here that I bought as a project for work as we are a Linux-based shop. The wifi simply does not work with many routers and the reception seems to be poor when it does work. The Maemo operating system is an interesting variation of Debian but the tablet simply is not fast enough to make it very useful. Finally, the handwriting recognition is a complete joke.
On the plus side, it has a beautiful screen. It has a nice set of software inside it. Too bad it simply does not work.
I should mention that the first Nokia 770 I received was a brick. The Nokia 770 I have is #2. Luckily the vendor took the product back with no hassles. There was not much support from Nokia Canada.
I deal with Novell. Novell is not big. Novell is not smart. Novell is a bunch of marketing guys having "conversations" with each other selling a bunch of old crap and half-integrated products purchased from other people.
Novell is gonna get obliterated. They just don't have a clue.
Oracle, Redhat, Ubuntu, Sun, and IBM should pool their resources and take on Microsoft cause that's about how big an army it is going to take.
Contrary to the reply above, the answer is yes - multimedia is one application of a usage of real time signals (a timer signal). Basically, what it boils down to is the POSIX.4 standard. In MS Windows, the multimedia timers an alternative example (I believe). On most hardware, a clock resolution of about 970us is available. So you can get scheduling with an average error of half this (so your error is half a millisecond on average).
Real time has several aspects besides just scheduling:
-real time signaling queues (e.g. timers and other interprocess signals) and other inter-process communications
-the ability to lock pages into memory
-the ability to set real time priority (pri 33-43) above the kernel (20-32) and users (0-19). To say that another way - a real time process is the king of the system.
-the ability to choose a kernel scheduling method (e.g. FIFO, round robin)
-the granularity with which the kernel can be interrupted
-the latency in switching tasks
Real time has been traditionally a concern in control system applications where predictable scheduling is important or response to a hardware interrupt must be rapid. Multimedia and many gaming applications also fit this requirement.
Real time is undermined where things like underlying hardware can disrupt predictable execution (e.g. I've seen this caused by some file system drivers). Ideally, real time applications must be designed to assume they are in complete control of the system and should not rely on the timing of any I/O activity during their execution. A real time process must sleep for anything else on the system to run. Bugs in real time applications can be very subtle to detect and may occur at low frequency.
Adding full real time support for Linux is pretty important for both usefulness and credibility.