Since Verizon is buying Alltel, and Sprint is working to put itself out of business as hard as it can, I don't think it's going to matter soon. Kinda pointless to have a RUIM or SIM or whatever if you only have one choice of CDMA carrier.;)
Star Office is slow, and importing word docs is still hit-or-miss. GNOME sucks, and KDE is better, but still sucks. XFCE would rule if there was an easy integrated VNC server like GNOME's vino.
When you get right down to it, LINUX on the desktop is great for programmers (like me) who want a nicer UI than CDE while they hack their command-line stuff, but it is not on par with OSX or Windows for usability. If KDE and GNOME could bury the hatchet and focus on making something good that everyone wanted to use, Linux would have a shot, but as it stands Linux is ceding it's shot at breaking the Windows monopoly to OSX.
I use all three (Mac, Linux, and Windows) regularly, but as life goes on, you start to realize you get what you pay for and shelling out the $$$ for a Mac as your non-coding desktop is totally worth it. People who say that Linux is ready for prime-time desktop use are fooling themselves. If I had to buy a machine for my mother-in-law today it wouldn't be a Dell with ubuntu, it'd be an iMac.
Sometimes you're stuck, and the only thing for it is slow, incremental improvement. Having been on one of those sorts of projects, I can actually report that there is a deep feeling of satisfaction that comes from eventually righting at least the most obvious of wrongs.. but the questions is still "where to start?"
The submitter mentioned cscope, and as much as I've looked, I haven't found anything significantly better. In some quick googling, I see a front-end called kscope which looks like it might be nice, but I've never used it, so I can't recommend it.
The other interesting tool to check out is "doxygen". Doxygen will build HTML documentation for source code. It uses a simple markup language in your comments to figure out what comments go with what code. By default "doxygen" will only build documentation for code that has doxygen comments, but that's easy to change in its config file.
The very interesting thing about it is that Doxygen can also *automatically* build call graphs, object hierarchy diagrams, and collaboration diagrams. This can be very useful for seeing the basic structure of the source code in a graphical way. Even if you don't bother to write doxygen comments for your code, this still might be useful.
Once you've got that set up, my advice would be to find the main entry-point for whatever your code does, and start following it with cscope. If your program processes packets, start with the rx function. If it processes data from the user start there. Start tracing through the "mainline" with cscope, and figure out how the most common input gets processed. From there, you should have at least a basic foundation for understanding what you're looking at.
If you want to be a very good citizen, write some doxygen comments while you're at it and submit them back. If you want to be a star performer, teach others how to use doxygen, and encourage them to do the same. If this is for a professional endeavor, I bet your manager will be impressed. It's really easy, and in the end the documentation it produces is well worth the trouble.
Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.
This is a huge part of making the battery life what it is. There's no "transmission" to piggback off of for battery life reasons, or if there is, it's as brief as possible to save battery life and bandwith. You wouldn't want that common signaling channel to be flooded with bit torrent traffic anyway!
P2P on a 2G or 3G cellphone is just dumb. The total bandwidth of a given cellsite is limited to some fairly small number, and trying to run P2P is just going to make a lousy experience for everyone. Maybe with some 4G tech, the story would be different, but right now, if you really need to go download some crap off P2P do it at home.
Not quite. CDMA is a digital technology, and it is actually superior (in terms of capacity) to the digital TDMA technology used in GSM. UMTS, the 3G "evolution" of GSM actually uses a CDMA radio interface as well, though the channel structure is different, so it is not compatible with the thing that Verizon, etc, use either. This is why UMTS is sometimes called WCDMA (Wideband CDMA).
Verizon, Sprint, and a bunch of other smaller US operators (US Cellular, etc) use CDMA (they use CDMA 1xRTT for voice and CDMA 1xEV-DO for high-speed data).
AT&T wireless (formerly Cingular) uses GSM as its main technology, and they are in the process of rolling out a nation-wide UMTS network. Most major cities currently have coverage.
T-Mobile in the US also uses GSM, but I haven't heard that they are planning any significant UMTS rollout just yet.
The 4G technologies (WiMAX, LTE, UMB) will ditch CDMA, and use another radio interface called OFDM, which is also digital, and, in theory, has even better capacity than CDMA.
We've already heard the reasons from Steve himself. Apple is a form-factor driven company, and from day one they wanted the iPhone to be slimmer than the Q or the Blackjack, and the only way that was going to happen (for now, of course) and still have good battery life was to go with GSM instead of UMTS. Go read the Blackjack comments on the review forums, and there's tons of complaints about the battery life.
I'm not paying $400 for a 2.5G phone, but guess what: over a million people already have, and I betcha a good number of them are going to do it again in a year or so when new UMTS chipsets with lower power usage come out, and Apple ships a 3G version.
Apple ain't dumb. They just made a pile of money on the 2.5G phone, and they're going to do it again in a year with the 3G version. Waiting until they could hit their desired form factor with a 3G chipset would've thrown away all the money they just made on those 2.5G phones.
Sadly, a typical response from the OSS community. It's the user's fault, not the software, of course! Let's give 'im a snarky comment, instead of making him feel welcomed to the community.
When will Ubuntu (which I use every day at work, and love, btw) displace windows? When its evangelists and developers decide that fixing the rough edges and making it work well is truly important, and scorning the users who they want to convert is no longer a good idea.
It doesn't matter why it didn't work for him, the point remains it didn't work, and now he feels like crap for it, too.
How about next time, you post the second paragraph, and not the first? Douche.
See, the thing is, programming and manufacturing are different. There's a much lower barrier to entry for coding, and it's easier to move work off-shore, and also easier to move stuff back.
What you had in the first part of this decade was a cash crunch among companies, and it was fashionable to try to show the shareholders that you were doing something about it by firing US engineers and moving the jobs to China or India.
But what you find out about India or China is that people there are just like people over here: There's a few great programmers, and a lot of crappy ones. And when you factor in the cost of having multiple sites, training people, high turnover, etc, you find out that the promised cost savings just isn't there.. BUT, you also find out that, hey, there's some good coders over there, too, that are worth employing. Right now, I'm working in the US as a software engineer at a major telecom with offices in the US and India and all over the rest of the world, and what has settled out is this: India and China are not going to consume all the programming jobs and destroy programming in the US. They are, however, a source of talent and here to stay.
In the long run, my project (a popular cellular wireless technology) has people working on it in several locations in the US and India, and I'll tell you what: when it comes crunch time at the end of a release, it *still* doesn't feel like we have enough staff. Our layoffs have been finished for a few years now, and we're not adding staff like we were at the height of the bubble, but neither are we laying off like we were at the end of the bubble either. I'm gainfully employed, and so are all my geek programmer friends.
Offshoring as a way to find new talent and staff projects that need staffing is here to stay.
Offshoring as a way to save major money and as the end of all programming jobs in the US (or whatever high-cost of living region you want to subsitute) is a myth propagated by consulting firms as a way to capitalize on the stupidity of the bean-counters.
If you love programming, and you're good at it, get a CS degree and become a software engineer. You will find a job. And if you can't, you can alway go buy a cheap machine and start a company in your garage, and wait to get bought by Google or Microsoft.:)
1. Better GNOME usability for Ubuntu (with delivery of Bulletproof X and the GTK Xconfig ASAP, please)
Seriously, the desktop lacks stuff that has been in Windoze since '95. The kernel works pretty good. We have pluggable storage okay.. but there's still basic holes in the usability (like changing the res on the fly when I move my laptop in and out of my office) that just need to get fixed.
2. Spend whatever time is left over to make OOo faster and easier to use.
The MS Office import filters are so *almost* there, but this app really needs to close the usability gap with Office. I have a semi-decent machine running Ubuntu, and even with Java disabled, it still takes what seems like forever to open a simple document that someone emails to me.
I know these aren't *really* linux-specific, especially OOo, but it's what needs to happen to make linux a real, legitimate desktop force. I'm an easy sell, I love open source, but right now there are too many excuses for why this stuff isn't gettin' fixed, and not enough fixin' it, and right now I'm not telling my computer-illiterate friends that they should go order a Dell machine with Ubuntu preloaded.. I'm telling them to buy a Mac, so I don't have to tell them how to fix basic stuff.
I found TaxAct a few years ago (http://www.taxact.com), on a link from the IRS website. They have a completely free option for filing the federal return, create nice PDFs of your documents when you're done, and work well with Safari and Firefox. Their state filing costs like $13, which I generally pay after I'm done doing the free federal, but you don't have to. They also nag you a bit here and there about upgrading to their "deluxe" product, but if you ignore that, you can truly file your federal return through them for free.
I've gone through a bunch of different CFL bulbs, trying to find one I liked. I'd been using the GE Reveal bulbs, and found them a minor improvement over "regular" bulbs, and I didn't want to take a step back with CFL.
The best ones I've found so far are the Sylvania "Daylight Extra" bulbs. They're marked 3500K, so they're really not "daylight" bulbs, but that's okay, since I think the 5600K bulbs all look way too blue. I don't really have a lot of red stuff in my house right now, so I haven't noticed how well or poorly they render reds.
I actually slightly prefer the color of these bulbs to the Reveals, or the Phillips Natual Light bulbs, thought they do have a little start-up lag, and they need 30 seconds or so to warm up. Plus I liked that I could replace 300w of incandescents in my dining room fixture with 65w of CFLs.
I'd be more okay with speed cameras if those "pen pushers" actually set resonable speed limits. Come check out the Chicagoland expressways where everyone does 70mph, the cops'll pass you doing 80+, and the speed limit on these 3,4,5 lane roads is 55. You tell me that the "pen pushers" are gonna set the speed limit to the 85th percentile speed like they should, and I'm okay with cameras, and I'll believe you when you tell me that they're thinking about my safety. Otherwise, it's just another revenue source, and a justification for the fuzz to pull over whomever they want, whenever they want.
Sadly, because of inflation, you *did* effectively pay $1300 for your C64. That's what a shiny new black MacBook costs now.. and back in the day, my Commie was pretty pimp.
I have an HDTV and stretch the hell out of SD to make it fit. I "know better", but much of my content is still in SD only. Right now all I watch in HD are sporting events, with an $20 OTA antenna. I know that I could subscribe to HD programming, but I'm waiting for DirecTV or Comcrap (It's Craptastic!) to put out an HD-DVR that isn't a total POS (or for TiVo to ship one that doesn't cost $800).
At least in my household there is demand for HD (even my wife, who doesn't know dink about TV can tell the difference), but not at the current pricepoint and quality level. DVDs and stretched SD (my Sharp has a pretty good "smart stretch") look just fine, and my trusty SD TiVo is very.. trusty.
Umm.. because (as in TFA), they didn't want into that small market before, because it wasn't profitable to go dig up the streets or put in WAPs or whatever. Now that market has something that they'll have to compete against (crappy, but some people won't change), making it potentially even less profitable. Therefore, as suggested above, stuck with dated hardware.
Why buy the CD? Physical backup. I also use 'em in the car on short trips when I don't want to use my iPod, but I'm mostly grateful for the fact that if my HD dies, I can re-rip without problem, and I don't have to bother making backups of MP3s.
Add to that the fact that you can usually buy catalog titles for about $8 from BMG, and new releases for about $12 from Target, I actually think that good old Compact Disc is a pretty decent value.
As for "music worth buying," that's a different argument altogether and downloads aren't exempt from that problem either.:)
They do claim that they've used a metabolic chamber, but of course the study is unpublished, as you noted. The article also points out that the claimed 60 to 100 calorie burn from three cans is not a very significant amount of calorie loss, and that three cans per day times $1.29 is going to be a lot of money, to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Unfortuantely, there doesn't seem to be a way to respond directly to their email, but they do have a suggestions page.
I have "suggested" that they keep this feature, and "suggested" that I will cancel my service or significantly reduce it if they do not.
I don't know if they will actually read and heed them or not, but it's worth a shot:
http://www.netflix.com/Suggest?type=2&lnkctr=cu_suggest
Since Verizon is buying Alltel, and Sprint is working to put itself out of business as hard as it can, I don't think it's going to matter soon. Kinda pointless to have a RUIM or SIM or whatever if you only have one choice of CDMA carrier. ;)
Star Office is slow, and importing word docs is still hit-or-miss. GNOME sucks, and KDE is better, but still sucks. XFCE would rule if there was an easy integrated VNC server like GNOME's vino.
When you get right down to it, LINUX on the desktop is great for programmers (like me) who want a nicer UI than CDE while they hack their command-line stuff, but it is not on par with OSX or Windows for usability. If KDE and GNOME could bury the hatchet and focus on making something good that everyone wanted to use, Linux would have a shot, but as it stands Linux is ceding it's shot at breaking the Windows monopoly to OSX.
I use all three (Mac, Linux, and Windows) regularly, but as life goes on, you start to realize you get what you pay for and shelling out the $$$ for a Mac as your non-coding desktop is totally worth it. People who say that Linux is ready for prime-time desktop use are fooling themselves. If I had to buy a machine for my mother-in-law today it wouldn't be a Dell with ubuntu, it'd be an iMac.
True true true true.
Sometimes you're stuck, and the only thing for it is slow, incremental improvement. Having been on one of those sorts of projects, I can actually report that there is a deep feeling of satisfaction that comes from eventually righting at least the most obvious of wrongs.. but the questions is still "where to start?"
The submitter mentioned cscope, and as much as I've looked, I haven't found anything significantly better. In some quick googling, I see a front-end called kscope which looks like it might be nice, but I've never used it, so I can't recommend it.
The other interesting tool to check out is "doxygen". Doxygen will build HTML documentation for source code. It uses a simple markup language in your comments to figure out what comments go with what code. By default "doxygen" will only build documentation for code that has doxygen comments, but that's easy to change in its config file.
The very interesting thing about it is that Doxygen can also *automatically* build call graphs, object hierarchy diagrams, and collaboration diagrams. This can be very useful for seeing the basic structure of the source code in a graphical way. Even if you don't bother to write doxygen comments for your code, this still might be useful.
Once you've got that set up, my advice would be to find the main entry-point for whatever your code does, and start following it with cscope. If your program processes packets, start with the rx function. If it processes data from the user start there. Start tracing through the "mainline" with cscope, and figure out how the most common input gets processed. From there, you should have at least a basic foundation for understanding what you're looking at.
If you want to be a very good citizen, write some doxygen comments while you're at it and submit them back. If you want to be a star performer, teach others how to use doxygen, and encourage them to do the same. If this is for a professional endeavor, I bet your manager will be impressed. It's really easy, and in the end the documentation it produces is well worth the trouble.
You are extremely wrong. :)
Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.
This is a huge part of making the battery life what it is. There's no "transmission" to piggback off of for battery life reasons, or if there is, it's as brief as possible to save battery life and bandwith. You wouldn't want that common signaling channel to be flooded with bit torrent traffic anyway!
P2P on a 2G or 3G cellphone is just dumb. The total bandwidth of a given cellsite is limited to some fairly small number, and trying to run P2P is just going to make a lousy experience for everyone. Maybe with some 4G tech, the story would be different, but right now, if you really need to go download some crap off P2P do it at home.
Not quite. CDMA is a digital technology, and it is actually superior (in terms of capacity) to the digital TDMA technology used in GSM. UMTS, the 3G "evolution" of GSM actually uses a CDMA radio interface as well, though the channel structure is different, so it is not compatible with the thing that Verizon, etc, use either. This is why UMTS is sometimes called WCDMA (Wideband CDMA).
Verizon, Sprint, and a bunch of other smaller US operators (US Cellular, etc) use CDMA (they use CDMA 1xRTT for voice and CDMA 1xEV-DO for high-speed data).
AT&T wireless (formerly Cingular) uses GSM as its main technology, and they are in the process of rolling out a nation-wide UMTS network. Most major cities currently have coverage.
T-Mobile in the US also uses GSM, but I haven't heard that they are planning any significant UMTS rollout just yet.
The 4G technologies (WiMAX, LTE, UMB) will ditch CDMA, and use another radio interface called OFDM, which is also digital, and, in theory, has even better capacity than CDMA.
I'm not paying $400 for a 2.5G phone, but guess what: over a million people already have, and I betcha a good number of them are going to do it again in a year or so when new UMTS chipsets with lower power usage come out, and Apple ships a 3G version.
Apple ain't dumb. They just made a pile of money on the 2.5G phone, and they're going to do it again in a year with the 3G version. Waiting until they could hit their desired form factor with a 3G chipset would've thrown away all the money they just made on those 2.5G phones.
Sadly, a typical response from the OSS community. It's the user's fault, not the software, of course! Let's give 'im a snarky comment, instead of making him feel welcomed to the community.
When will Ubuntu (which I use every day at work, and love, btw) displace windows? When its evangelists and developers decide that fixing the rough edges and making it work well is truly important, and scorning the users who they want to convert is no longer a good idea.
It doesn't matter why it didn't work for him, the point remains it didn't work, and now he feels like crap for it, too.
How about next time, you post the second paragraph, and not the first? Douche.
See, the thing is, programming and manufacturing are different. There's a much lower barrier to entry for coding, and it's easier to move work off-shore, and also easier to move stuff back.
:)
What you had in the first part of this decade was a cash crunch among companies, and it was fashionable to try to show the shareholders that you were doing something about it by firing US engineers and moving the jobs to China or India.
But what you find out about India or China is that people there are just like people over here: There's a few great programmers, and a lot of crappy ones. And when you factor in the cost of having multiple sites, training people, high turnover, etc, you find out that the promised cost savings just isn't there.. BUT, you also find out that, hey, there's some good coders over there, too, that are worth employing. Right now, I'm working in the US as a software engineer at a major telecom with offices in the US and India and all over the rest of the world, and what has settled out is this: India and China are not going to consume all the programming jobs and destroy programming in the US. They are, however, a source of talent and here to stay.
In the long run, my project (a popular cellular wireless technology) has people working on it in several locations in the US and India, and I'll tell you what: when it comes crunch time at the end of a release, it *still* doesn't feel like we have enough staff. Our layoffs have been finished for a few years now, and we're not adding staff like we were at the height of the bubble, but neither are we laying off like we were at the end of the bubble either. I'm gainfully employed, and so are all my geek programmer friends.
Offshoring as a way to find new talent and staff projects that need staffing is here to stay.
Offshoring as a way to save major money and as the end of all programming jobs in the US (or whatever high-cost of living region you want to subsitute) is a myth propagated by consulting firms as a way to capitalize on the stupidity of the bean-counters.
If you love programming, and you're good at it, get a CS degree and become a software engineer. You will find a job. And if you can't, you can alway go buy a cheap machine and start a company in your garage, and wait to get bought by Google or Microsoft.
1. Better GNOME usability for Ubuntu (with delivery of Bulletproof X and the GTK Xconfig ASAP, please)
Seriously, the desktop lacks stuff that has been in Windoze since '95. The kernel works pretty good. We have pluggable storage okay.. but there's still basic holes in the usability (like changing the res on the fly when I move my laptop in and out of my office) that just need to get fixed.
2. Spend whatever time is left over to make OOo faster and easier to use.
The MS Office import filters are so *almost* there, but this app really needs to close the usability gap with Office. I have a semi-decent machine running Ubuntu, and even with Java disabled, it still takes what seems like forever to open a simple document that someone emails to me.
I know these aren't *really* linux-specific, especially OOo, but it's what needs to happen to make linux a real, legitimate desktop force. I'm an easy sell, I love open source, but right now there are too many excuses for why this stuff isn't gettin' fixed, and not enough fixin' it, and right now I'm not telling my computer-illiterate friends that they should go order a Dell machine with Ubuntu preloaded.. I'm telling them to buy a Mac, so I don't have to tell them how to fix basic stuff.
I will agree that there were some weak episodes lately.. but last night's, with Jamie shooting an oven door with a shotgun, etc, was awesome.
I haven't given up hope yet. 'sides, there's still Dirty Jobs.
I blame Wired. I swear they make up new stupid trendy words just to piss me off. Web 2.0. Bah.
I found TaxAct a few years ago (http://www.taxact.com), on a link from the IRS website. They have a completely free option for filing the federal return, create nice PDFs of your documents when you're done, and work well with Safari and Firefox. Their state filing costs like $13, which I generally pay after I'm done doing the free federal, but you don't have to. They also nag you a bit here and there about upgrading to their "deluxe" product, but if you ignore that, you can truly file your federal return through them for free.
Woah. You're out of touch by more than a factor of three..
There's a reason that Baseball is the hardcore nerd sport. They try to play enough games to make statistically significant findings.
Good thing we'll have Google Earth to show us the apocalpyse in progress.
I've gone through a bunch of different CFL bulbs, trying to find one I liked. I'd been using the GE Reveal bulbs, and found them a minor improvement over "regular" bulbs, and I didn't want to take a step back with CFL.
The best ones I've found so far are the Sylvania "Daylight Extra" bulbs. They're marked 3500K, so they're really not "daylight" bulbs, but that's okay, since I think the 5600K bulbs all look way too blue. I don't really have a lot of red stuff in my house right now, so I haven't noticed how well or poorly they render reds.
I actually slightly prefer the color of these bulbs to the Reveals, or the Phillips Natual Light bulbs, thought they do have a little start-up lag, and they need 30 seconds or so to warm up. Plus I liked that I could replace 300w of incandescents in my dining room fixture with 65w of CFLs.
I'd be more okay with speed cameras if those "pen pushers" actually set resonable speed limits. Come check out the Chicagoland expressways where everyone does 70mph, the cops'll pass you doing 80+, and the speed limit on these 3,4,5 lane roads is 55. You tell me that the "pen pushers" are gonna set the speed limit to the 85th percentile speed like they should, and I'm okay with cameras, and I'll believe you when you tell me that they're thinking about my safety. Otherwise, it's just another revenue source, and a justification for the fuzz to pull over whomever they want, whenever they want.
Why are we talking about speed cameras?
Sadly, because of inflation, you *did* effectively pay $1300 for your C64. That's what a shiny new black MacBook costs now.. and back in the day, my Commie was pretty pimp.
I have an HDTV and stretch the hell out of SD to make it fit. I "know better", but much of my content is still in SD only. Right now all I watch in HD are sporting events, with an $20 OTA antenna. I know that I could subscribe to HD programming, but I'm waiting for DirecTV or Comcrap (It's Craptastic!) to put out an HD-DVR that isn't a total POS (or for TiVo to ship one that doesn't cost $800).
At least in my household there is demand for HD (even my wife, who doesn't know dink about TV can tell the difference), but not at the current pricepoint and quality level. DVDs and stretched SD (my Sharp has a pretty good "smart stretch") look just fine, and my trusty SD TiVo is very.. trusty.
But the mention of those pesky traffic circles is interesting. Are we getting ready to invade Europe?
The biggest irony is this:
1) Universal wants more money for their music
2) Apple (who really doesn't profit much on iTMS itself) tells them to fuck off
3) iTMS user can no longer buy tracks legally, so they go pirate it instead
Now, Universal, instead of getting some money for their music, gets zero dollars.
Nice.
Umm.. because (as in TFA), they didn't want into that small market before, because it wasn't profitable to go dig up the streets or put in WAPs or whatever. Now that market has something that they'll have to compete against (crappy, but some people won't change), making it potentially even less profitable. Therefore, as suggested above, stuck with dated hardware.
I'm pretty sure the license his comment was published under didn't allow modifications! You're going to jail!
Why buy the CD? Physical backup. I also use 'em in the car on short trips when I don't want to use my iPod, but I'm mostly grateful for the fact that if my HD dies, I can re-rip without problem, and I don't have to bother making backups of MP3s.
:)
Add to that the fact that you can usually buy catalog titles for about $8 from BMG, and new releases for about $12 from Target, I actually think that good old Compact Disc is a pretty decent value.
As for "music worth buying," that's a different argument altogether and downloads aren't exempt from that problem either.
Well, there's this WSJ article.
They do claim that they've used a metabolic chamber, but of course the study is unpublished, as you noted. The article also points out that the claimed 60 to 100 calorie burn from three cans is not a very significant amount of calorie loss, and that three cans per day times $1.29 is going to be a lot of money, to boot.