There are a couple of issues with easy installation, none of them insurmountable but most of them tricky.
the first is partitioning, you could of course make an installer that just wiped everything out and enforced it's preffered structure by default but many many people would complain if you did.
the second and more significant one is the huge huge range of PC hardware out there. This makes it practically impossible for an OS vendor to test on every possible configuration of hardware and the OS vendor can only ship drivers for hardware they know about and have either written drivers for themselves or got suitable licenses in place to allow them to redistribute the manufacturers driver.
Just be very careful when Greenspunning more sophisticated capabilities you end up needing Maybe so but equally overusing library functions especially in embedded environments can bring in overhead you can't afford. That may be time overhead but it may also be code size overhead or ram overhead.
while COM-style AddRef/Release reference counting breaks realtime since Release can cascade indefinitely. True but if you are making and dumping objects willy nilly then no system is going to make you safe from running out of time. For stuff that has to be that predictable it is often a good idea to just completely avoid dynamic memory or at least keep a very close eye on when and at what priority objects are being constructed and disposed of.
In either case, the PC is not exactly the best one to run Engineering/Math or even a compiler on. I can't say I agree, there are some small subcategories of both software development (mainly packaging/testing work that requires frequent recompilation of huge source trees from scratch), engineering (FPGA development, finite element work) and math (doing big numerical approximations) for which huge ammounts of computing power are required but I belive such applications are the exception not the rule.
Though I do wonder what giving ultraportables to first world kids who already have computer access would achive. Not all that much would be my guess.
But watermarking? Eh. I don't care. You're supposed to not be sharing music you bought, and unless someone actually breaks in and steals it, there's really no legitimate reason to find music that you bought out on the net somewhere. For many years even if technically illegal it was quite normal to share music with friends.
Also PC repair places are well known for taking copies of media (yes, this is definately wrong but very very common).
And hacking is another possibility it doesn't have to be a physical breakin.
What worries me is if a copy sold to joe blogs ends up on a major torrent site joe blogs will be blamed for all those copies even though all he really did was send his PC in for repair or give one track to a friend or got hacked.
AMD did produce a 486 clone and it lasted for many years it just took them a bit longer because IIRC they had to reverse engineer it.
The only reason there was competition in the PC processor market in the first place was because IBM insisted on it. As IBM lost power there was noone with the clout to pressure intel into releasing it's designs so the other manufacturers of PC processors had to switch to reverse engineering or making thier own designs.
My understanding is a developer key will only help you for the particular machine that it is tied to. More general support would require a different and much harder to obtain type of key.
Your job is not to know the languages and the tools I think to be a decent engineer you should know at least one tool/language in each relavent category. It may or may not be the same one you end up using but at least you will know the basic concepts. To use an analogy from the world of electronics in PCB design the tools will change as will the number of layers (though i'm sure there are still a hell of a lot of 1 and 2 layer boards being designed and made) but the concepts of PCB design (tracks, vias, pads, pours etc) don't.
Since C and C++ practically define thier own categories and are very common that means that IMO you should learn them both though not nessacerally in great detail. C fills the niche of being about as close to the metal as you can get without actually writing assembler. C++ fills the niche of where you still want tight control but some OOP capabilities would be usefull. For higher level stuff things aren't so settled but still I think knowing at least one GUI framework and at least one high level networking library and so on will be very usefull to you later when you come accross a similar thing in future.
I have to say I think using the 4 pin connector for the computer end (which is pracitally ubiguous on laptops though as you say far less common on desktops) was a bad thing for firewire. It means that either device manufacturers have to ship two cables one of which can't be used or consumers have to buy the cable seperately.
Firewire 800 makes things even worse by requiring yet more cable types.
Also, the software/firmware overhead will continue to get more complex. The design goal, I think, is to make it so that only Large Companies can design any hardware peripherals. If you don't need high performance then you can do USB full speed with a single not too expensive microcontroller that is availible in a DIP package and for which the firmware is freely downloadable from the manufacturers website. Hell you can even get free samples of this chip.
If you need high speed then things do get harder simply because dealing with 480 megabits per second is not trivial but it certainly isn't large companies only either.
No it is not like a null modem cable. Afaict USB is always wired D+ to D+ and D- to D-.
There are two types of full size USB plugs, A and B. A always goes at the host end B always goes at the perhipheral end.
There are also two types of mini plugs mini A and mini B. But unlike with the full size connectors there is also a socket called mini AB that takes both. The same applies to the micro connectors.
Mini plugs have five pins. The extra pin is used to indicate to a device with a mini AB socket whether it should be acting as a host or as a perhiperal. (I think in a mini B plug it is open circuit in a mini A plug it is connected to ground but i'm not positive and the information seems to have dissapeared from wikipedia).
If everyone followed the rules it would be easy as you would not be able to create an out of whack network. Sadly a wide variety of noncompliant cables and adaptors are commonly availible, the difference between mini-A and mini-B is not that obvious to the untrained eye and many people are unaware that mini-A even exists.
passed arround the bus is a bit of an exaggeration. If you have only two devices and both are otg capable they can swap between being master and slave but as soon as you introduce a hub into the system the master can no longer move.
The main issue with ethernet is what you run on top. TCP/IP is a very nice protocol but requires all devices to be using a matching setup, you can use your own protocol of course but that isn't free of issues either. Having perhiperal devices on the network you also use for connectivity between your PCs also raises some major security considerations. Yes you could have two seperate ethernet networks but then you have to make sure people plug thier devices into the right one.
Also the normal variants of ethernet are rather power hungry because they are designed to support long runs and by using a specialist variant you just lost most of the advantages of using ethernet.
the gold standard fixes the exchange rate between gold and the currency. So a fixed ammount of gold will get you a fixed ammount of currency and vice-versa. The value of gold and the currency tied to it will of course vary relative to other commodities.
If we assume governments don't cheat on the gold standard (that is they hold enough gold to back up all the money they issue, something not all did in practice) then what this means is that if gold becomes rarer (say because it is used in some valuable new industrial process) you get deflation. If on the other hand gold becomes more plentiful (say the discovery of a big new gold deposit) you get inflation.
Which would you rather have controlling the value of your currency? Your government (which is presumablly acting at least somewhat in the direction of self preservation) or the variations of a metal market?
A gold standard also wastes a lot of rescourses mining a difficult to mine commodity just to store it in bank vaults.
I didn't think you could buy them new at all anymore unless you were a third world educational authority. Theres a few on ebay but they seem to be going for closer to the g1g1 price ($400 each) than the price you give ($300 for two).
The question is whether there is such a thing as a matched nerve map in the first place or if the nerve map we get from birth is itself basically random.
If Sony was against Linux (as some think), why did they bother sponsoring/helping YDL vendor Terrasoft to ship a PS3 Linux for that -really strange- computer? I belive sonys idea was that the PS3 could somewhat replace a wintel/mac desktop PC by doing the things linux doesn't cover well (gaming, playing media from organisations who don't want it copied) under the PS3s propietry closed environment while being able to be used under linux for things like web browsing, word processing etc.
The way I see it sony was trying to usurp wintel in the home computer marketplace and replace it with playstation 3. They got cold feet about shipping linux in the box at the last minuite though for some reason (my guess is that someone baulked at the idea of having to support it).
I tend to agree there is no need to transfer them right now but I would advise doing it at least a couple of months before expiry so you can sort out any unanticipated problems that come up.
I doubt they will take the steering wheels out. There will probablly still be a need to manually drive cars on local and rural roads that were decided to be not worth upgrading.
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There are a couple of issues with easy installation, none of them insurmountable but most of them tricky.
the first is partitioning, you could of course make an installer that just wiped everything out and enforced it's preffered structure by default but many many people would complain if you did.
the second and more significant one is the huge huge range of PC hardware out there. This makes it practically impossible for an OS vendor to test on every possible configuration of hardware and the OS vendor can only ship drivers for hardware they know about and have either written drivers for themselves or got suitable licenses in place to allow them to redistribute the manufacturers driver.
But since the OS is Suse, you still pay a Microsoft tax, am I right?
Not exactly, in the MS Novell deal MS actually paid novell.
Just be very careful when Greenspunning more sophisticated capabilities you end up needing
Maybe so but equally overusing library functions especially in embedded environments can bring in overhead you can't afford. That may be time overhead but it may also be code size overhead or ram overhead.
while COM-style AddRef/Release reference counting breaks realtime since Release can cascade indefinitely.
True but if you are making and dumping objects willy nilly then no system is going to make you safe from running out of time. For stuff that has to be that predictable it is often a good idea to just completely avoid dynamic memory or at least keep a very close eye on when and at what priority objects are being constructed and disposed of.
In either case, the PC is not exactly the best one to run Engineering/Math or even a compiler on.
I can't say I agree, there are some small subcategories of both software development (mainly packaging/testing work that requires frequent recompilation of huge source trees from scratch), engineering (FPGA development, finite element work) and math (doing big numerical approximations) for which huge ammounts of computing power are required but I belive such applications are the exception not the rule.
Though I do wonder what giving ultraportables to first world kids who already have computer access would achive. Not all that much would be my guess.
But watermarking? Eh. I don't care. You're supposed to not be sharing music you bought, and unless someone actually breaks in and steals it, there's really no legitimate reason to find music that you bought out on the net somewhere.
For many years even if technically illegal it was quite normal to share music with friends.
Also PC repair places are well known for taking copies of media (yes, this is definately wrong but very very common).
And hacking is another possibility it doesn't have to be a physical breakin.
What worries me is if a copy sold to joe blogs ends up on a major torrent site joe blogs will be blamed for all those copies even though all he really did was send his PC in for repair or give one track to a friend or got hacked.
AMD did produce a 486 clone and it lasted for many years it just took them a bit longer because IIRC they had to reverse engineer it.
The only reason there was competition in the PC processor market in the first place was because IBM insisted on it. As IBM lost power there was noone with the clout to pressure intel into releasing it's designs so the other manufacturers of PC processors had to switch to reverse engineering or making thier own designs.
how slow is slow?
even at 20mph or so a head on collision is going to do quite a bit of damage.
My understanding is a developer key will only help you for the particular machine that it is tied to. More general support would require a different and much harder to obtain type of key.
where are you?
Your job is not to know the languages and the tools
I think to be a decent engineer you should know at least one tool/language in each relavent category. It may or may not be the same one you end up using but at least you will know the basic concepts. To use an analogy from the world of electronics in PCB design the tools will change as will the number of layers (though i'm sure there are still a hell of a lot of 1 and 2 layer boards being designed and made) but the concepts of PCB design (tracks, vias, pads, pours etc) don't.
Since C and C++ practically define thier own categories and are very common that means that IMO you should learn them both though not nessacerally in great detail. C fills the niche of being about as close to the metal as you can get without actually writing assembler. C++ fills the niche of where you still want tight control but some OOP capabilities would be usefull. For higher level stuff things aren't so settled but still I think knowing at least one GUI framework and at least one high level networking library and so on will be very usefull to you later when you come accross a similar thing in future.
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1335&dDocName=en010280 for 28 pin
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1335&dDocName=en010300 for 40 pin
All your circuit needs to contain for USB to work is the pic, a crystal and a handfull of passives.
You will need a suitable programmer but they aren't too expensive either. e.g. the pickit 2 is less than £20 http://www.microchipdirect.com/productsearch.aspx?Keywords=PICkit+2+Microcontroller+.
You will need microchip C18 but the "student edition/demo" version of that is perfectly adequate even when it has gone into feature limited mode.
The firmware is a little trickier to find as it is grouped under the stuff for the demo board at http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en021940
I have to say I think using the 4 pin connector for the computer end (which is pracitally ubiguous on laptops though as you say far less common on desktops) was a bad thing for firewire. It means that either device manufacturers have to ship two cables one of which can't be used or consumers have to buy the cable seperately.
Firewire 800 makes things even worse by requiring yet more cable types.
In the consumer market usbs low price and intels market pressure won out over firewires better performance and host independence.
In other markets such as proffessional AV firewire is still strong.
but how much kit is REALLY esata compliant rather than just being ordinary sata devices with ESATA plug adaptors built into it's case.
Also, the software/firmware overhead will continue to get more complex. The design goal, I think, is to make it so that only Large Companies can design any hardware peripherals.
If you don't need high performance then you can do USB full speed with a single not too expensive microcontroller that is availible in a DIP package and for which the firmware is freely downloadable from the manufacturers website. Hell you can even get free samples of this chip.
If you need high speed then things do get harder simply because dealing with 480 megabits per second is not trivial but it certainly isn't large companies only either.
No it is not like a null modem cable. Afaict USB is always wired D+ to D+ and D- to D-.
There are two types of full size USB plugs, A and B. A always goes at the host end B always goes at the perhipheral end.
There are also two types of mini plugs mini A and mini B. But unlike with the full size connectors there is also a socket called mini AB that takes both. The same applies to the micro connectors.
Mini plugs have five pins. The extra pin is used to indicate to a device with a mini AB socket whether it should be acting as a host or as a perhiperal. (I think in a mini B plug it is open circuit in a mini A plug it is connected to ground but i'm not positive and the information seems to have dissapeared from wikipedia).
If everyone followed the rules it would be easy as you would not be able to create an out of whack network. Sadly a wide variety of noncompliant cables and adaptors are commonly availible, the difference between mini-A and mini-B is not that obvious to the untrained eye and many people are unaware that mini-A even exists.
passed arround the bus is a bit of an exaggeration. If you have only two devices and both are otg capable they can swap between being master and slave but as soon as you introduce a hub into the system the master can no longer move.
The main issue with ethernet is what you run on top. TCP/IP is a very nice protocol but requires all devices to be using a matching setup, you can use your own protocol of course but that isn't free of issues either. Having perhiperal devices on the network you also use for connectivity between your PCs also raises some major security considerations. Yes you could have two seperate ethernet networks but then you have to make sure people plug thier devices into the right one.
Also the normal variants of ethernet are rather power hungry because they are designed to support long runs and by using a specialist variant you just lost most of the advantages of using ethernet.
the gold standard fixes the exchange rate between gold and the currency. So a fixed ammount of gold will get you a fixed ammount of currency and vice-versa. The value of gold and the currency tied to it will of course vary relative to other commodities.
If we assume governments don't cheat on the gold standard (that is they hold enough gold to back up all the money they issue, something not all did in practice) then what this means is that if gold becomes rarer (say because it is used in some valuable new industrial process) you get deflation. If on the other hand gold becomes more plentiful (say the discovery of a big new gold deposit) you get inflation.
Which would you rather have controlling the value of your currency? Your government (which is presumablly acting at least somewhat in the direction of self preservation) or the variations of a metal market?
A gold standard also wastes a lot of rescourses mining a difficult to mine commodity just to store it in bank vaults.
that depends if you are a discerning householder or someone who doesn't give a f*ck what it looks like. Surface cabling is piss easy to run.
I didn't think you could buy them new at all anymore unless you were a third world educational authority. Theres a few on ebay but they seem to be going for closer to the g1g1 price ($400 each) than the price you give ($300 for two).
The question is whether there is such a thing as a matched nerve map in the first place or if the nerve map we get from birth is itself basically random.
If Sony was against Linux (as some think), why did they bother sponsoring/helping YDL vendor Terrasoft to ship a PS3 Linux for that -really strange- computer?
I belive sonys idea was that the PS3 could somewhat replace a wintel/mac desktop PC by doing the things linux doesn't cover well (gaming, playing media from organisations who don't want it copied) under the PS3s propietry closed environment while being able to be used under linux for things like web browsing, word processing etc.
The way I see it sony was trying to usurp wintel in the home computer marketplace and replace it with playstation 3. They got cold feet about shipping linux in the box at the last minuite though for some reason (my guess is that someone baulked at the idea of having to support it).
I tend to agree there is no need to transfer them right now but I would advise doing it at least a couple of months before expiry so you can sort out any unanticipated problems that come up.
I doubt they will take the steering wheels out. There will probablly still be a need to manually drive cars on local and rural roads that were decided to be not worth upgrading.