In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM! I don't know about C# but in java null pointers are a lot less dangerous than null pointers are in C.
In java the worst a null pointer will do is give you a nullpointerexception.
In more traditional languages which support pointer arthmetic or pointers to raw arrays things are much worse. Doing pointer arithmetic on a null pointer is essentially equivilent to doing an integer to pointer conversion.
Agreed on most of that, but be careful about the libraries. What a lot of C coders like to call "C libraries" are really just plain "libraries" that can be used just fine by any compiler that uses the system linker. Sure if you are willing to spend lots of time turning the output of a tool like h2pas into something that will actually compile and reimplementing stuff that the library author implemented as macros rather than real functions.
the problem is of course that the "nerfed" languages have to be interpreted or compiled by something.
Both java and flash are vm based enviroments intended to allow untrusted code to run safely. Both of them are also highly complex and as such almost certainly have exploitable bugs.
canonical is a private company owned by a very wealthy man who fancied taking a pot shot at MS. As such it doesn't really need to make any profit (though it would be good for it to break even).
the thing with apple is thier hardware range is very small and biased towards a particular class of user. For other classes of user going apple means spending a lot more money and/or losing features they are used to.
Firsly apples cheapest machines are over twice the price of dells cheapest machines.
Secondly none of apples cheap machines have expansion slots or spare drive bays. Even the more expensive machines don't have conventional PCI slots. Expansion room is very usefull for prolonging the life of a machine by adding more disk space and support for new interfaces.
Thirdly apples only sub £1000 machines with decent (read: nvidia or ATI) graphics also have integrated monitors (and big ones at that).
Fourthly in the laptop line apple ties in screen size with other features. If you want more than a 13 inch screen you double the base price.
The thing I don't get is companies. They presumably have IT support... Yes, they have IT support who only know windows and probablly a nontrivial number of internal buisness apps that are windows only. Plus for any computer that is used for more than basic office work whatever specialist apps that particular user needs.
And Academia where money is short... At least at the uni I go to they have a campus agreement for windows upgrades/downgrades and for office (and for some other MS products too). So the only thing the individual specing a machine saves by going non MS is the OEM windows license (whih frankly isn't very much, especially when the windows upgrade/downgrade license lets you select whichever OEM windows option happens to be cheapest at the time)
The only compelling reason I have for the everyman is $200.00 (100 for windows + 100 for works). Thing is it isn't too compelling.
For a high end rig windows is a negligable part of the cost.
For a low end rig the big brands seem much better than the whitebox vendors at making machines that are cheap while also being pretty reliable and that pretty much means you get windows thrown in whether you want it or not.
Surely the way to avoid daisy chaning racks is to have a switch in the rack with a load of copper ports and one fiber port and then a core switch with all fiber ports.
That should certainly be possible with 10 gigabit ethernet, I dunno about infiniband.
With the right NICs and switches you can already do this. You will probablly find it much easier if all the nics are from the same range.
You may be able to get away with cheap nics if you are running linux (you won't be able to if you are running windows as bonding must be implemented at the device driver level). You will certainly need managed switches which explicitly support this feature.
The previous reply was good, just wanted to expand. File access is literally grabbing a file over the network. Like opening a word document. It pulls the entire file over the network, then opens it. hmm, i'm pretty sure both nfs and smb only transmit the bits of the file the app wants (and maybe a little bit extra to reduce network traffic) not the entire file.
CSMA/CD still applies, except for the fact that on a switched architecture your collision domain is only a single port on the switch. CSMA/CD does not apply on full duplex links. On a full duplex link collisions simply cannot happen.
Yes decent CSMA/CD support may be important for good interoperation with legacy equipment where half duplex is unavoidable (say an old device with broken autonegotiation connected to an unmanaged switch) but it should not be in use on any link where top performance is required.
Modern ethernet networks do not use CSMA/CD they use switches and point to point full duplex links. As such with good quality equipment they can get very close to 100% saturation.
1: it would probablly increase the cost. A connector as fancy as the DVI one is almost certainly more expensive than a plain 15 way high density D connector.
2: Unless they have both a VGA and a DVI connector (which would almost certainly be space and cost prohibitive) it means that the user will need an adpator to use the vast majority of presentation root projector setups (and presentation room projector setups are probablly the primary use case for monitor ports on laptops).
3: It would take up more space. Just because you see a bit of blank panel doesn't mean there is space behind it to put a connector there. Another alternative would be to go with a propeitry connector like apple do but having to find or carry a rare propietry adaptor to hook up your projector is even worse than having to find a generic DVI-VGA adaptor.
The downside is that 701's screen is too small so you have to mess with tiny fonts and themes to make it acceptable. I think the 900 sounds great but I wonder if by piling too much stuff into it they negate one of the reasons for buying it in the first place - a low price. Maybe but it is still a hell of a lot cheaper than previous ultraportables (I rememeber when the EEE first came out I compared the prices comparison of EEEPC+big SD card+whitebox OEM windows XP home with the price of a refurbished late model libretto. The EEEPC had comparable specs and size at about half the price of the refurbished libretto).
if you actually read that article ou will find that they found XP usable though the low screen resoloution was a bit of a pain (though once initial setup is done this depends more on the application software than the OS).
the larger higher resoloution screen and more disk space should make using the machine under any OS more pleasant.
Electricity is NOT what the "oil addiction" is about. Afaict no first world country gets a significant portion of their electrity from oil because it just doesn't make economic sense to generate electricity from it. Most electricity comes from coal, natural gas, dam based hydro or nuclear.
Afiact europe tends to be less sensitive to oil price increases than the USA because of tax structures that have discouraged SUV ownership and better public transport networks. but we europeans would definately be hit hard by a major oil shortage.
It wouldn't have happened in Ada, since the US system would be using SpeedMPH and the metric system would be using SpeedKMPH, both derived types from whatever precision decimal is required, and attempting to use a SpeedMPH decimal as a SpeedKMPH would be a compile time error and would be caught. Does anyone actually bother to do that though? or do people just use a generic floating point type for everything?
BTW you should be create such types in C++ fairly easilly.
moving offshore can work very well for small items.
jersy is a classic for this. It is not part of the EU VAT system. It is also very close to britan (and to france too for that matter, I dunno if there are french companies who use the same trick).
So small items which are under the threshold for import VAT are frequently shipped from there to UK customers hence avoiding the VAT on those items.
because there are loads of people out there who have windows apps they are reliant on and who would like to run them on a cheap ultraportable.
please provide some evidence that XP is unsuitable for the EEEPC. The EEEPC is well above the minium hardware requirements. most if not all of XPs dialogs are usable in 640x480 at least under the classic theme (the tellytubby theme makes some not quite fit as demonstrated in the article) and the EEEPC also offers an 800x600 scrolling mode (such modes used to be very common on laptops before the big screen revoloution).
* CE run (or ran, I think it's arm only now) on a whole load of architectures, win3.x and win9x were pretty tied into PC architecture afacit. * CE is unicode only at the API level. I don't think win32s supports unicode at all.
At the university I used to work for we paid extra to Dell to get a clean install without the RealPlayer installs, broken demos, haphazzardly written power-saving utilities, and that forsaken Yahoo toolbar. Seems rather odd, I thought places like big buisnesses and universities tended to put thier own image (with site licensed applications, correct security settings etc) on incoming machines anyway so why would they care what is in the OEM load they are about to blow away..
Unless you mean they payed dell to put the university image on. I can well imagine them doing that
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In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM!
I don't know about C# but in java null pointers are a lot less dangerous than null pointers are in C.
In java the worst a null pointer will do is give you a nullpointerexception.
In more traditional languages which support pointer arthmetic or pointers to raw arrays things are much worse. Doing pointer arithmetic on a null pointer is essentially equivilent to doing an integer to pointer conversion.
Agreed on most of that, but be careful about the libraries. What a lot of C coders like to call "C libraries" are really just plain "libraries" that can be used just fine by any compiler that uses the system linker.
Sure if you are willing to spend lots of time turning the output of a tool like h2pas into something that will actually compile and reimplementing stuff that the library author implemented as macros rather than real functions.
the problem is of course that the "nerfed" languages have to be interpreted or compiled by something.
Both java and flash are vm based enviroments intended to allow untrusted code to run safely. Both of them are also highly complex and as such almost certainly have exploitable bugs.
canonical is a private company owned by a very wealthy man who fancied taking a pot shot at MS. As such it doesn't really need to make any profit (though it would be good for it to break even).
the thing with apple is thier hardware range is very small and biased towards a particular class of user. For other classes of user going apple means spending a lot more money and/or losing features they are used to.
Firsly apples cheapest machines are over twice the price of dells cheapest machines.
Secondly none of apples cheap machines have expansion slots or spare drive bays. Even the more expensive machines don't have conventional PCI slots. Expansion room is very usefull for prolonging the life of a machine by adding more disk space and support for new interfaces.
Thirdly apples only sub £1000 machines with decent (read: nvidia or ATI) graphics also have integrated monitors (and big ones at that).
Fourthly in the laptop line apple ties in screen size with other features. If you want more than a 13 inch screen you double the base price.
The thing I don't get is companies. They presumably have IT support...
Yes, they have IT support who only know windows and probablly a nontrivial number of internal buisness apps that are windows only. Plus for any computer that is used for more than basic office work whatever specialist apps that particular user needs.
And Academia where money is short...
At least at the uni I go to they have a campus agreement for windows upgrades/downgrades and for office (and for some other MS products too). So the only thing the individual specing a machine saves by going non MS is the OEM windows license (whih frankly isn't very much, especially when the windows upgrade/downgrade license lets you select whichever OEM windows option happens to be cheapest at the time)
The only compelling reason I have for the everyman is $200.00 (100 for windows + 100 for works).
Thing is it isn't too compelling.
For a high end rig windows is a negligable part of the cost.
For a low end rig the big brands seem much better than the whitebox vendors at making machines that are cheap while also being pretty reliable and that pretty much means you get windows thrown in whether you want it or not.
I'm sure they are usefull for large commercial/industrial ducts but there is no way they would get down normal building wiring conduit.
Surely the way to avoid daisy chaning racks is to have a switch in the rack with a load of copper ports and one fiber port and then a core switch with all fiber ports.
That should certainly be possible with 10 gigabit ethernet, I dunno about infiniband.
With the right NICs and switches you can already do this. You will probablly find it much easier if all the nics are from the same range.
You may be able to get away with cheap nics if you are running linux (you won't be able to if you are running windows as bonding must be implemented at the device driver level). You will certainly need managed switches which explicitly support this feature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation seems like a good starting point for finding information on this topic.
The previous reply was good, just wanted to expand. File access is literally grabbing a file over the network. Like opening a word document. It pulls the entire file over the network, then opens it.
hmm, i'm pretty sure both nfs and smb only transmit the bits of the file the app wants (and maybe a little bit extra to reduce network traffic) not the entire file.
BTW 10 gigabit ethernet has completely dropped support for half duplex links.
CSMA/CD still applies, except for the fact that on a switched architecture your collision domain is only a single port on the switch.
CSMA/CD does not apply on full duplex links. On a full duplex link collisions simply cannot happen.
Yes decent CSMA/CD support may be important for good interoperation with legacy equipment where half duplex is unavoidable (say an old device with broken autonegotiation connected to an unmanaged switch) but it should not be in use on any link where top performance is required.
Modern ethernet networks do not use CSMA/CD they use switches and point to point full duplex links. As such with good quality equipment they can get very close to 100% saturation.
I can see several issues with adding a DVI port
1: it would probablly increase the cost. A connector as fancy as the DVI one is almost certainly more expensive than a plain 15 way high density D connector.
2: Unless they have both a VGA and a DVI connector (which would almost certainly be space and cost prohibitive) it means that the user will need an adpator to use the vast majority of presentation root projector setups (and presentation room projector setups are probablly the primary use case for monitor ports on laptops).
3: It would take up more space. Just because you see a bit of blank panel doesn't mean there is space behind it to put a connector there. Another alternative would be to go with a propeitry connector like apple do but having to find or carry a rare propietry adaptor to hook up your projector is even worse than having to find a generic DVI-VGA adaptor.
The downside is that 701's screen is too small so you have to mess with tiny fonts and themes to make it acceptable. I think the 900 sounds great but I wonder if by piling too much stuff into it they negate one of the reasons for buying it in the first place - a low price.
Maybe but it is still a hell of a lot cheaper than previous ultraportables (I rememeber when the EEE first came out I compared the prices comparison of EEEPC+big SD card+whitebox OEM windows XP home with the price of a refurbished late model libretto. The EEEPC had comparable specs and size at about half the price of the refurbished libretto).
if you actually read that article ou will find that they found XP usable though the low screen resoloution was a bit of a pain (though once initial setup is done this depends more on the application software than the OS).
the larger higher resoloution screen and more disk space should make using the machine under any OS more pleasant.
Electricity is NOT what the "oil addiction" is about. Afaict no first world country gets a significant portion of their electrity from oil because it just doesn't make economic sense to generate electricity from it. Most electricity comes from coal, natural gas, dam based hydro or nuclear.
Afiact europe tends to be less sensitive to oil price increases than the USA because of tax structures that have discouraged SUV ownership and better public transport networks. but we europeans would definately be hit hard by a major oil shortage.
It wouldn't have happened in Ada, since the US system would be using SpeedMPH and the metric system would be using SpeedKMPH, both derived types from whatever precision decimal is required, and attempting to use a SpeedMPH decimal as a SpeedKMPH would be a compile time error and would be caught.
Does anyone actually bother to do that though? or do people just use a generic floating point type for everything?
BTW you should be create such types in C++ fairly easilly.
moving offshore can work very well for small items.
jersy is a classic for this. It is not part of the EU VAT system. It is also very close to britan (and to france too for that matter, I dunno if there are french companies who use the same trick).
So small items which are under the threshold for import VAT are frequently shipped from there to UK customers hence avoiding the VAT on those items.
because there are loads of people out there who have windows apps they are reliant on and who would like to run them on a cheap ultraportable.
please provide some evidence that XP is unsuitable for the EEEPC. The EEEPC is well above the minium hardware requirements. most if not all of XPs dialogs are usable in 640x480 at least under the classic theme (the tellytubby theme makes some not quite fit as demonstrated in the article) and the EEEPC also offers an 800x600 scrolling mode (such modes used to be very common on laptops before the big screen revoloution).
I call bullshit
* CE run (or ran, I think it's arm only now) on a whole load of architectures, win3.x and win9x were pretty tied into PC architecture afacit.
* CE is unicode only at the API level. I don't think win32s supports unicode at all.
Yeah but afaict the only legal way to get it is through software assurance.
They don't even give it to MSDN subscribers on the grounds that it is supposed to be for thin client use only.
or they could just bios lock it like they do with big brand OEM versions of windows today.
At the university I used to work for we paid extra to Dell to get a clean install without the RealPlayer installs, broken demos, haphazzardly written power-saving utilities, and that forsaken Yahoo toolbar.
Seems rather odd, I thought places like big buisnesses and universities tended to put thier own image (with site licensed applications, correct security settings etc) on incoming machines anyway so why would they care what is in the OEM load they are about to blow away..
Unless you mean they payed dell to put the university image on. I can well imagine them doing that