Yeah, but Windows is only gonna knock off $129; you are probably gonna save more money by scaling down the processor, buying a 100gig hard drive and just a gig of RAM.
Honestly I was impressed with Windows MCE compared to MythTV. It is easy to bash Microsoft but MCE is a nice piece of software; I'm not sure how you quantify "vastly superior", I'd be interested in seeing your metric.
I've written scanner firmware before, do you think I have a PHD in physics and understand optics?
Motor feedback circuits are easy. Lego's Robotic Invention System 2.0 contains enough parts to build a rudiamentary scanner, many grade school and high school kids have built scanners with them (google it). Not trying to belittle your accomplishment.
I disagree with your opinions but I can't really go into more detail on the public forum. Sorry. Bio may clue you in as to why.
By validating, we aren't validating the application as a whole. We are talking about validating the algorithms
(1) as implemented in the code
(2) as they interact with the rest of the system (other algorithms)
You can't ask someone who doesn't understand the physics behind the problem (IE: a CS) to do that. You need the AE to do that. And you can't ask the AE to do that if he doesn't know the language well enough to jump in and mess around with it. I'm not saying throwing a CS or two in the mix is unwise, I'm just saying that you can't remove the engineers from the programming for what I do; I will always spend 4-6 hours working in c++ at my current job even though I didn't take a single college course in c++. 100% self-taught; my buddy who was a CS would write elegant code, and gets a good chuckle when I tell him some of the stuff I do (he's nice enough to take the time to tell me how to fix it and the proper approach to take next time...).
What Quarters said, plus you have problems with verification and validation. You need the engineers to do the actual verification and validation of the codes with the algorithms, how can they do that if they didn't write and are not compotent with the code? I think the better compromise is to hire engineers with some level of programming experiance and tolerate the fact that they will spend a few hours a week educating themselves.
You didn't read the spec sheet. The brightness at 15" is 200 candela - aproximately the brightness of a LCD screen. The brightness at 7" - half the distance - is 880 candela. Now do a curvefit and tell me how bright it is going to be at a comfortable viewing distance - 120"++ for a home theater (~50 candela). (answer: not very.)
In this day and age a lot of us are asked to program who are not by nature computer programmers. In a perfect world all the programmers would be CS majors. For example, I am an Aerospace Engineer, however I spend 6 hours a day writing code in c++. It isn't pretty but it works. Why? The company I work for could either:
(a) Hire engineers who know engineering and are crappy programmers, and make them learn programming, or
(b) Hire CS majors who don't know engineering, and spend 4 years to teach them engineering
(a) makes more sense to me. A lot of my code looks like crap, and I know my CS friends could do better quicker, but they don't know the engineering principles I do. Long story short, I didn't have CS101, CS102, etc. There are a lot of us out here who are asked to code, who weren't brought up to be coders, who have to be taught some principles that aren't immediately apparent:P
Low energy, small size = low brightness. You won't get a big screen with a bright picture. That is why this is ideal for a laptop where you sit it on your desk a few feet from a wall and get a decent sized screen. For a home entertainment center you'd have a much longer focal length, meaning you'd need a much higher power projector. This thing couldn't handle it, no match for a good DLP or projector even when the color models come out. But at a few feet range it would work well.
Once these come out in color, imagine having one of these babies inside your laptop. You can then set your laptop on any work surface 2-10' from a wall and have a big screen monitor. If we want to get fancy even we can slap some gyros and accelerometers into the computer and you can have the computer on your lap, and provided you don't wiggle too much ( no pr0n ) you could probably work fairly well from a sofa as well, the software would adjust the image and angle of the projector using servos, etc. Very cool.
Cell phone is cheaper than a landline where I live. Leave it in the car, bring it home to charge, take it to the friends' house so the wife can get ahold of me when she needs me. Sheesh, think in more than 1 dimension. I'm just saying, there are uses for tech like this in ways that some people don't see, but others see quite clearly.
I've been running Apache+PHP+SSL on XP Pro for over a year now without any problems, serving up mostly pictures using dynamic scripts. Granted I'm a bit more compotent than most (I've worked with PHP/Apache off and on for 7 years now... not my day job).
No there isn't a module for PHP, it is a standalone application. Installation is fairly straightforward. Follow *both* PHP's and Apache's instructions. You need to change httpd.conf to enable PHP (just like linux/unix/bsd)
Claiming that spending money on software is a good idea when there are at least as good alternatives that are free? Sounds silly to me.
XP Pro is so much better than home edition, it is worth the $50-$75 upgrade price. Many college campuses won't allow you to run it on their networks due to all of the security holes. Home is a piece of crap. Pro, SP2 is a good piece of software. I'd recommend it without reservation regardless of IIS.
Plain and simple. This is a censorship issue. It isn't a "we like china" or "we dislike china" issue. When Google or Microsoft or Yahoo sit down with the Chinese and decide to open up shop they have to censor, and part of that is having programmers who work on censoring software. Are you really comfortable with the fact that Google is using money they make off of you to write censorship software? They are only improving the state of censorship in China and who knows maybe someday that censorship software might just end up censoring you, or censoring something you want to access. Makes me sick.
Choices this person has:
1. Run a free web server on his current platform (which in the large majority of cases will be XP home edition)
2. Upgrade to a version of his platform that comes with a webserver
3. Change to a different platform that comes with a webserver
(1) All of the following are free and usable. I recommend Apache:
Apache
OmniHTTPd
IIS
(2)... Sure. Windows XP Professional. You should be using it anyways, home sucks.
(3)... yeah, if you are a linux zealot. Properly configured windows box is secure. I see no reason to switch just to serve up web pages as a hobby, and for the target audience (you were talking about people running WINDOWS XP HOME after all) that is a pretty big step.
I had php working in 20 minutes. (Extract the zip files, copy the DLL's to the c:\windows\system32, update apache configuration file) SSH was easy too. I didn't need perl, so I can't coment.
Most home users have XP pro, because most vendors ship with XP pro. Believe it or not. Home is such a piece of crap, unless the users upgrade themselves they have XP pro. And if they upgrade themselves they are savvy enough to install apache.
I work in a high-security building and can't take my cell phone in. Vibrating cell phone on my car seat does not make enough noise to alert me if I have a voicemail left by my wife, kids, etc during the day. Otherwise I am very considerate with my cell phone, but I am also very forgetful... stuff like this is very useful for the forgetful among us.
Very few vendors actually ship home edition... and very few of the people ACTUALLY SAVVY ENOUGH TO RUN A WEB SERVER would purchase home, given the option.
not to mention that imho getting something like Apache to work on Windows is more efford then installing Suse with a webserver for example.
I've used IIS and Apache on Windows. While both have their perks, Apache is dead easy to install on windows. It has a graphical installer and installs as a service in less than 10 clicks. Way easier than installing Suse.
I have with Comcast and Knology. It might not be explicity granted but as long as you aren't dominating the bandwith it hasn't been explicitly denied. You can request static IP addresses with either comapny for a marginal fee - I did not, and with Comcast over a 2 year period my IP only changed 4 times! I ran a low-traffic site with a dynamic IP service, no problem.
I used my home computer to host a few personal web sites, pictures of my son (we live far away from the grandparents and they want pictures) and access to documents from work and grad school (via either FTP or remote desktop)
No shit. No one is altruistic without motive. No one. Its a f*cking business, they make business decisions that make business sense. This is a double whammy, IP defense (1) encourages developers who are already there to stick it out since they have some extra cash to spend on a good defense and (2) might sway a few undecided new projects Microsoft's way. Its a good business decision.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Li censing/WindowsCE.mspx
Free. Kinda levels the playing field.
Yeah, but Windows is only gonna knock off $129; you are probably gonna save more money by scaling down the processor, buying a 100gig hard drive and just a gig of RAM.
Honestly I was impressed with Windows MCE compared to MythTV. It is easy to bash Microsoft but MCE is a nice piece of software; I'm not sure how you quantify "vastly superior", I'd be interested in seeing your metric.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16832102311
Current build doesn't have EFI enabled yet. *supposedly* the next CTP will have it enabled.
Rumor has it on one of the forums that they have Vista running on a Mac, internally but personally I take it with a grain of salt...
The new XML format is interoperable and patches will be released for older versions (back to 97 I believe).
I've written scanner firmware before, do you think I have a PHD in physics and understand optics?
Motor feedback circuits are easy. Lego's Robotic Invention System 2.0 contains enough parts to build a rudiamentary scanner, many grade school and high school kids have built scanners with them (google it). Not trying to belittle your accomplishment.
I disagree with your opinions but I can't really go into more detail on the public forum. Sorry. Bio may clue you in as to why.
By validating, we aren't validating the application as a whole. We are talking about validating the algorithms
(1) as implemented in the code
(2) as they interact with the rest of the system (other algorithms)
You can't ask someone who doesn't understand the physics behind the problem (IE: a CS) to do that. You need the AE to do that. And you can't ask the AE to do that if he doesn't know the language well enough to jump in and mess around with it. I'm not saying throwing a CS or two in the mix is unwise, I'm just saying that you can't remove the engineers from the programming for what I do; I will always spend 4-6 hours working in c++ at my current job even though I didn't take a single college course in c++. 100% self-taught; my buddy who was a CS would write elegant code, and gets a good chuckle when I tell him some of the stuff I do (he's nice enough to take the time to tell me how to fix it and the proper approach to take next time...).
*shudder* simulink.... C++ all the way :P
What Quarters said, plus you have problems with verification and validation. You need the engineers to do the actual verification and validation of the codes with the algorithms, how can they do that if they didn't write and are not compotent with the code? I think the better compromise is to hire engineers with some level of programming experiance and tolerate the fact that they will spend a few hours a week educating themselves.
You didn't read the spec sheet. The brightness at 15" is 200 candela - aproximately the brightness of a LCD screen. The brightness at 7" - half the distance - is 880 candela. Now do a curvefit and tell me how bright it is going to be at a comfortable viewing distance - 120"++ for a home theater (~50 candela). (answer: not very.)
In this day and age a lot of us are asked to program who are not by nature computer programmers. In a perfect world all the programmers would be CS majors. For example, I am an Aerospace Engineer, however I spend 6 hours a day writing code in c++. It isn't pretty but it works. Why? The company I work for could either:
:P
(a) Hire engineers who know engineering and are crappy programmers, and make them learn programming, or
(b) Hire CS majors who don't know engineering, and spend 4 years to teach them engineering
(a) makes more sense to me. A lot of my code looks like crap, and I know my CS friends could do better quicker, but they don't know the engineering principles I do. Long story short, I didn't have CS101, CS102, etc. There are a lot of us out here who are asked to code, who weren't brought up to be coders, who have to be taught some principles that aren't immediately apparent
Low energy, small size = low brightness. You won't get a big screen with a bright picture. That is why this is ideal for a laptop where you sit it on your desk a few feet from a wall and get a decent sized screen. For a home entertainment center you'd have a much longer focal length, meaning you'd need a much higher power projector. This thing couldn't handle it, no match for a good DLP or projector even when the color models come out. But at a few feet range it would work well.
Once these come out in color, imagine having one of these babies inside your laptop. You can then set your laptop on any work surface 2-10' from a wall and have a big screen monitor. If we want to get fancy even we can slap some gyros and accelerometers into the computer and you can have the computer on your lap, and provided you don't wiggle too much ( no pr0n ) you could probably work fairly well from a sofa as well, the software would adjust the image and angle of the projector using servos, etc. Very cool.
Cell phone is cheaper than a landline where I live. Leave it in the car, bring it home to charge, take it to the friends' house so the wife can get ahold of me when she needs me. Sheesh, think in more than 1 dimension. I'm just saying, there are uses for tech like this in ways that some people don't see, but others see quite clearly.
I've been running Apache+PHP+SSL on XP Pro for over a year now without any problems, serving up mostly pictures using dynamic scripts. Granted I'm a bit more compotent than most (I've worked with PHP/Apache off and on for 7 years now... not my day job).
No there isn't a module for PHP, it is a standalone application. Installation is fairly straightforward. Follow *both* PHP's and Apache's instructions. You need to change httpd.conf to enable PHP (just like linux/unix/bsd)
Claiming that spending money on software is a good idea when there are at least as good alternatives that are free? Sounds silly to me.
XP Pro is so much better than home edition, it is worth the $50-$75 upgrade price. Many college campuses won't allow you to run it on their networks due to all of the security holes. Home is a piece of crap. Pro, SP2 is a good piece of software. I'd recommend it without reservation regardless of IIS.
Plain and simple. This is a censorship issue. It isn't a "we like china" or "we dislike china" issue. When Google or Microsoft or Yahoo sit down with the Chinese and decide to open up shop they have to censor, and part of that is having programmers who work on censoring software. Are you really comfortable with the fact that Google is using money they make off of you to write censorship software? They are only improving the state of censorship in China and who knows maybe someday that censorship software might just end up censoring you, or censoring something you want to access. Makes me sick.
... they might actually have to ... strech their minds ... and see other products? Heaven forbid!
its ok. The second mouse button isn't as difficult as it looks...
Cool that it can run... but... where exactly would IIS come from in that case? I mean legally...e commended/NT4OptPk/default.asp (that's a link to download 4. You can upgrade to 5. 6+ require server to run on)
... Sure. Windows XP Professional. You should be using it anyways, home sucks.
... yeah, if you are a linux zealot. Properly configured windows box is secure. I see no reason to switch just to serve up web pages as a hobby, and for the target audience (you were talking about people running WINDOWS XP HOME after all) that is a pretty big step.
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/r
Choices this person has:
1. Run a free web server on his current platform (which in the large majority of cases will be XP home edition)
2. Upgrade to a version of his platform that comes with a webserver
3. Change to a different platform that comes with a webserver
(1) All of the following are free and usable. I recommend Apache:
Apache
OmniHTTPd
IIS
(2)
(3)
I had php working in 20 minutes. (Extract the zip files, copy the DLL's to the c:\windows\system32, update apache configuration file) SSH was easy too. I didn't need perl, so I can't coment.
Most home users have XP pro, because most vendors ship with XP pro. Believe it or not. Home is such a piece of crap, unless the users upgrade themselves they have XP pro. And if they upgrade themselves they are savvy enough to install apache.
I work in a high-security building and can't take my cell phone in. Vibrating cell phone on my car seat does not make enough noise to alert me if I have a voicemail left by my wife, kids, etc during the day. Otherwise I am very considerate with my cell phone, but I am also very forgetful ... stuff like this is very useful for the forgetful among us.
Very few vendors actually ship home edition... and very few of the people ACTUALLY SAVVY ENOUGH TO RUN A WEB SERVER would purchase home, given the option.
l e.php?storyid=48 to get IIS working on Home.
And there are workaround such as:http://www.iis-resources.com/modules/AMS/artic
http://www.webwizguide.com/asp/tutorials/installin g_iis_winXP_pro.asp
XP Pro ships with IIS. Unless they are running XP home, they probably have IIS on their CD. Just need to install and patch...
not to mention that imho getting something like Apache to work on Windows is more efford then installing Suse with a webserver for example.
I've used IIS and Apache on Windows. While both have their perks, Apache is dead easy to install on windows. It has a graphical installer and installs as a service in less than 10 clicks. Way easier than installing Suse.
(Not to mention that XP Pro comes with IIS...)
I have with Comcast and Knology. It might not be explicity granted but as long as you aren't dominating the bandwith it hasn't been explicitly denied. You can request static IP addresses with either comapny for a marginal fee - I did not, and with Comcast over a 2 year period my IP only changed 4 times! I ran a low-traffic site with a dynamic IP service, no problem.
I used my home computer to host a few personal web sites, pictures of my son (we live far away from the grandparents and they want pictures) and access to documents from work and grad school (via either FTP or remote desktop)
Among us? How lucky are we.
No shit. No one is altruistic without motive. No one. Its a f*cking business, they make business decisions that make business sense. This is a double whammy, IP defense (1) encourages developers who are already there to stick it out since they have some extra cash to spend on a good defense and (2) might sway a few undecided new projects Microsoft's way. Its a good business decision.