Well here in the UK there seem to be 3 models of mini 9, two with ubuntu and one with XP home.
Afaict hardware wise the XP model pretty much the same* as the higher of the two ubuntu models. None of them seem to offer much in the way of BTO options (you can change the color on all of them, on the ubuntu models you can also upgrade the ram to 2GB and change some webcam related options).
* the higher ubuntu model seems to have two webcam options at the same price, one of which is the same as the one in the XP model, the other of which is lower spec, the lower spec one seems to be the default......
Could you run Photoshop or do your.NET development on a netbook anyway? You almost certainly can at least on the netbooks with hard drives. Whether you would want to is another matter;).
They are certainly NOT for running Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Visual Studio or playing games. Not so long ago we used to do all theese things on machines far lower spec than the netbooks of today.
Fact is XP plus office 2000 runs just fine on a netbook (tested on an EEE 900 with 1GB of ram and NO SWAP). Based on my experiances on older desktops I strongly suspect XP plus office 2K3 will too. Regarding games it's true you can't play recent 3D games but there is a huge range of games that you can play.
I've never tried visual studio or photoshop on a netbook. I'd imagine that in both cases the biggest issue would be the low screen resoloution (though HP now offers a netbook with a better screen resoloution)
As with all optimisation problems before you can optimise you have to decide what you are optimising for.
In a batch-processing system you should optimise for throughput (aka average performance).
In a real-time system you should optimise your system to respond in predictable times that fit with your deadlines.
Desktops are somewhere between the two. They don't have the hard deadlines of a real-time system but they DO have users who get pissed off (and a pissed off user is probablly not a productive user) when an operation takes far longer than normal.
The trouble is afaict on most operating systems there is no way for the OS to say to an app that "ram is tight, can you free unimportant stuff" (or at least if there is few apps use it).
It can swap pages out (assuming there is a place to swap them out too, a problem for the smaller/cheaper netbooks that have small slow to write SSDs) but that means when I switch back to firefox I get a load of grinding (presumablly it traverses datastructures that are fragemented across many swapped out pages or something)
The thing with ram is there is usually a hard limit as to what you can put in your PC. What that limit is varies from machine to machine and is often hard to definitively find out.
4GB modules still don't seem to be universally supported. So that means in many cases you are likely to be limited to 2GB in netbooks and 4GB in regular laptops. And thats just for newish machines, older ones will be worse.
Furthermore many of us are still stuck on 32 bit windows. In most cases that means 3. (with the something varying from machine to machine) gigabytes of usable ram. High end graphics cards can push this figure much lower.
The biggest issue with GC is it needs tuning, and some novice programmers make stupid mistakes such as creating objects in a loop rather than reusing them - the kind of thing that means 10,000 transient objects suddenly leap into and out of existence giving the GC a hernia. The bigger issue is that in java (in many ways the poster-boy language for gc) you have to go out of your way to avoid creating lots of garbage.
Consider method a contains a loop which calls method b which in turn calls method c.
Now method c wants to return more than one double/long to method b. What are the options? In a conventional language b would just declare variables and pass them as pointers or references to c but that isn't an option in java.
1: create an object in c and return it, this is the most obvious thing to do but will create a storm of objects. 2: create an object in b and pass it to c, this would be a fine idea if b contained the loop but in this case it has no advantage over the first option. 3: create an object in a and pass it to b and then onto c. This avoids the object storm but exposes a to implementation details of b. 4: use some existing object or even a static field to carry the return values. This avoids the problems of the previous options but introduces a whole load of it's own (thread safety for example).
While you can't completely avoid transactions in a country I imagine you could take a lot of steps to move as many of your transactions as possible out of the country with a transactional tax.
The key word I have trouble with here is "implement". Nowadays, with all the library routines available, if you can pseudo-code the algorithm, you have the "understanding of your craft" necessary at that level Seems like a pretty minor distinction to me. If you can correctly psudo-code something but can't implement it that means you can't program.
Such stuff happens precisely to people who don't understand the underlying machine, virtual or not. True, otoh as you post shows misunderstanding the underlying machine can be worse than not understanding it at all.
And how many people really have the time and inclination to properly study something like the pentium 4 or a modern JIT? And the machines (whether virtual or physical) don't sit still either. So the knowlage has a short shelf life.
IMO that all depends what downgrade rights 7 comes with.
If OEM vista buisness comes with downgrade rights to XP and OEM 7 buisness doesn't ( afaict both XP pro and vista buisness came with downgrade rights for one version back only ) then I can imagine there being quite a few orders.
Sure if you just want a basic pdf printer driver acrobat is indeed overkill.
Acrobat comes with other stuff though like a word plugin (which has significant advantages over using a printer driver like the ability to preserve links and generate pdf bookmarks) and the acrobat application itself (which allows you to split and splice pdfs far more easilly than any other tool I have tried)
BTW does anyone know of any good free (as in beer) software for making good* pdfs from office 2003?
* By good I mean able to preserve things like hyperlinks and produce the pdf "bookmarks" from the documents table of contents. Not just a pdf printer driver.
Yeah, there are ways of getting arround the copy/paste restrictions, and you don't often see that particular restriction enabled anyway (I think i've only ever spotted it twice).
A bigger problem is that pdf doesn't store document structure. This means copy and paste breaks horriblly when there are multiple columns of text next to each other.
Copying anything other than text out of a pdf without ending up with a low res bitmap is also a PITA (so far the only tool i've found that does a decent job is inkscape and that only got support for pdf import very recently).
Lying to security guards seems like a bad idea to me. You may get away with it the vast majority of the time but if one does happen to catch you I could see it ending very badly.
Someone determined and knowlagable enough can almost certainly poke there nose where it doesn't belong. In java for example you can use reflection with access control turned off.
but an idiot with a debugger can do so far more easilly than an idiot without a debugger.
IIRC a value of 5 in the version field was used for some special purpose protocol (I can't remember the details right now and I CBA looking them up, if you really care look it up yourself). So ordinary IP went straight from v4 to v6
Not responding to ping (or even responding negatively to ping) does not nessacerally imply not in use.
Many home routers and machines with firewall software will not respond to ping dispite actively participating in the network. I strongly suspect many companies also have machines on public IPs but with either no access to the internet, access via statefull packet inspection firewalls or even access via NAT.
What will almost certainly change is that home users will be forced to go behind ISP level NAT (ISP level NAT is much worse than a NAT you control because you are unlikely to be able to port forward through it) or pay extra (perhaps a lot extra).
This will then free up address space for more lucrative customers.
Dell went through a phase of making you burn the CDs yourself (and my parents own a couple of dells from that era) but they seem to have gone back to shipping them now (and unlike some vendors it's a proper windows CD/DVD that they ship).
I think every other PC new PC i've seen came with some form of reinstall CD/DVDs. Sometimes it's only a "wipe everything and restore to factory stage" CD/DVD though:( (and one downgraded optiplex I ordered through uni for a project there only seemed to come with the vista CD not the XP CD, OTOH the downgraded vostro my brother bought more recently came with both CDs)
my pet peeve with that reader is it's handling of pdf "bookmarks". In large pdf datasheets (think say a pic datasheet) the "bookmarks" in the pdf are the main method of navigation,
Most such datasheets have a flag set that makes acrobat display the bookmarks panel as soon as the pdf is opened. If they don't have the flag set it's just one menu entry away and if I really want I can set the flag myself with jpdftweak.
OTOH in the gnome viewer I have to manually open the panel and then switch it to showing bookmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well here in the UK there seem to be 3 models of mini 9, two with ubuntu and one with XP home.
Afaict hardware wise the XP model pretty much the same* as the higher of the two ubuntu models. None of them seem to offer much in the way of BTO options (you can change the color on all of them, on the ubuntu models you can also upgrade the ram to 2GB and change some webcam related options).
* the higher ubuntu model seems to have two webcam options at the same price, one of which is the same as the one in the XP model, the other of which is lower spec, the lower spec one seems to be the default......
Could you run Photoshop or do your .NET development on a netbook anyway? ;).
You almost certainly can at least on the netbooks with hard drives. Whether you would want to is another matter
They are certainly NOT for running Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Visual Studio or playing games.
Not so long ago we used to do all theese things on machines far lower spec than the netbooks of today.
Fact is XP plus office 2000 runs just fine on a netbook (tested on an EEE 900 with 1GB of ram and NO SWAP). Based on my experiances on older desktops I strongly suspect XP plus office 2K3 will too. Regarding games it's true you can't play recent 3D games but there is a huge range of games that you can play.
I've never tried visual studio or photoshop on a netbook. I'd imagine that in both cases the biggest issue would be the low screen resoloution (though HP now offers a netbook with a better screen resoloution)
As with all optimisation problems before you can optimise you have to decide what you are optimising for.
In a batch-processing system you should optimise for throughput (aka average performance).
In a real-time system you should optimise your system to respond in predictable times that fit with your deadlines.
Desktops are somewhere between the two. They don't have the hard deadlines of a real-time system but they DO have users who get pissed off (and a pissed off user is probablly not a productive user) when an operation takes far longer than normal.
The trouble is afaict on most operating systems there is no way for the OS to say to an app that "ram is tight, can you free unimportant stuff" (or at least if there is few apps use it).
It can swap pages out (assuming there is a place to swap them out too, a problem for the smaller/cheaper netbooks that have small slow to write SSDs) but that means when I switch back to firefox I get a load of grinding (presumablly it traverses datastructures that are fragemented across many swapped out pages or something)
The thing with ram is there is usually a hard limit as to what you can put in your PC. What that limit is varies from machine to machine and is often hard to definitively find out.
4GB modules still don't seem to be universally supported. So that means in many cases you are likely to be limited to 2GB in netbooks and 4GB in regular laptops. And thats just for newish machines, older ones will be worse.
Furthermore many of us are still stuck on 32 bit windows. In most cases that means 3. (with the something varying from machine to machine) gigabytes of usable ram. High end graphics cards can push this figure much lower.
The biggest issue with GC is it needs tuning, and some novice programmers make stupid mistakes such as creating objects in a loop rather than reusing them - the kind of thing that means 10,000 transient objects suddenly leap into and out of existence giving the GC a hernia.
The bigger issue is that in java (in many ways the poster-boy language for gc) you have to go out of your way to avoid creating lots of garbage.
Consider method a contains a loop which calls method b which in turn calls method c.
Now method c wants to return more than one double/long to method b. What are the options? In a conventional language b would just declare variables and pass them as pointers or references to c but that isn't an option in java.
1: create an object in c and return it, this is the most obvious thing to do but will create a storm of objects.
2: create an object in b and pass it to c, this would be a fine idea if b contained the loop but in this case it has no advantage over the first option.
3: create an object in a and pass it to b and then onto c. This avoids the object storm but exposes a to implementation details of b.
4: use some existing object or even a static field to carry the return values. This avoids the problems of the previous options but introduces a whole load of it's own (thread safety for example).
MS does have the option though of not operating directly in the EU at all and letting grey importers pick up the slack.............
While you can't completely avoid transactions in a country I imagine you could take a lot of steps to move as many of your transactions as possible out of the country with a transactional tax.
The key word I have trouble with here is "implement". Nowadays, with all the library routines available, if you can pseudo-code the algorithm, you have the "understanding of your craft" necessary at that level
Seems like a pretty minor distinction to me. If you can correctly psudo-code something but can't implement it that means you can't program.
Such stuff happens precisely to people who don't understand the underlying machine, virtual or not.
True, otoh as you post shows misunderstanding the underlying machine can be worse than not understanding it at all.
And how many people really have the time and inclination to properly study something like the pentium 4 or a modern JIT? And the machines (whether virtual or physical) don't sit still either. So the knowlage has a short shelf life.
IMO that all depends what downgrade rights 7 comes with.
If OEM vista buisness comes with downgrade rights to XP and OEM 7 buisness doesn't ( afaict both XP pro and vista buisness came with downgrade rights for one version back only ) then I can imagine there being quite a few orders.
Sure if you just want a basic pdf printer driver acrobat is indeed overkill.
Acrobat comes with other stuff though like a word plugin (which has significant advantages over using a printer driver like the ability to preserve links and generate pdf bookmarks) and the acrobat application itself (which allows you to split and splice pdfs far more easilly than any other tool I have tried)
BTW does anyone know of any good free (as in beer) software for making good* pdfs from office 2003?
* By good I mean able to preserve things like hyperlinks and produce the pdf "bookmarks" from the documents table of contents. Not just a pdf printer driver.
Yeah, there are ways of getting arround the copy/paste restrictions, and you don't often see that particular restriction enabled anyway (I think i've only ever spotted it twice).
A bigger problem is that pdf doesn't store document structure. This means copy and paste breaks horriblly when there are multiple columns of text next to each other.
Copying anything other than text out of a pdf without ending up with a low res bitmap is also a PITA (so far the only tool i've found that does a decent job is inkscape and that only got support for pdf import very recently).
Summary: the basic UI is bulkier but they made up for it by disabling some other stuff by default.
Lying to security guards seems like a bad idea to me. You may get away with it the vast majority of the time but if one does happen to catch you I could see it ending very badly.
Someone determined and knowlagable enough can almost certainly poke there nose where it doesn't belong. In java for example you can use reflection with access control turned off.
but an idiot with a debugger can do so far more easilly than an idiot without a debugger.
IIRC a value of 5 in the version field was used for some special purpose protocol (I can't remember the details right now and I CBA looking them up, if you really care look it up yourself). So ordinary IP went straight from v4 to v6
Not responding to ping (or even responding negatively to ping) does not nessacerally imply not in use.
Many home routers and machines with firewall software will not respond to ping dispite actively participating in the network. I strongly suspect many companies also have machines on public IPs but with either no access to the internet, access via statefull packet inspection firewalls or even access via NAT.
What will almost certainly change is that home users will be forced to go behind ISP level NAT (ISP level NAT is much worse than a NAT you control because you are unlikely to be able to port forward through it) or pay extra (perhaps a lot extra).
This will then free up address space for more lucrative customers.
What I find interesting on that page is the graph titled "directx 10 systems"
It shows that of the people who have DX10 capable GPUs only about half are using vista despite the fact that XP doesn't support DX10.
To me that says a lot of gamers are deliberately avoiding vista.
trouble is conficker can spread through flash sticks too, so it's fairly easy for it to jump from the internet to an isolated network.
Dell went through a phase of making you burn the CDs yourself (and my parents own a couple of dells from that era) but they seem to have gone back to shipping them now (and unlike some vendors it's a proper windows CD/DVD that they ship).
I think every other PC new PC i've seen came with some form of reinstall CD/DVDs. Sometimes it's only a "wipe everything and restore to factory stage" CD/DVD though :( (and one downgraded optiplex I ordered through uni for a project there only seemed to come with the vista CD not the XP CD, OTOH the downgraded vostro my brother bought more recently came with both CDs)
my pet peeve with that reader is it's handling of pdf "bookmarks". In large pdf datasheets (think say a pic datasheet) the "bookmarks" in the pdf are the main method of navigation,
Most such datasheets have a flag set that makes acrobat display the bookmarks panel as soon as the pdf is opened. If they don't have the flag set it's just one menu entry away and if I really want I can set the flag myself with jpdftweak.
OTOH in the gnome viewer I have to manually open the panel and then switch it to showing bookmarks.