Avoid Green. It is the only colour of light that is not absorbed by chlorophyl. I would suggest using red LEDs, as most of the suns energy is in that end of the spectrum. Blue LEDs and White LEDs will appear brighter for a given energy input, however that is because our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than to red.
The Excel, PowerPoint, Word toolchain for advanced graphing particularly sucks. Gnuplot may be archaic, but it blows Excel away in graphing capabilities. WordPerfect for Windows is still better than Word for large document text editing. Latex is the only one that handles complex math in an easy to use fashion. Plus, Latex gives the ability to port the same document to multiple print styles, which WordPerfect only partially accomplishes.
Key problems:
- Excel reformats the document to handle different printers, and then doesn't reformat it back.
- Absence of advanced formating functions in graphing and in spreadsheets. No equivalent of the Latex $f_{\Chi^2}(\vec{x})$ exists in Excel, especially for graphs.
- The statistics professor had a list of known bugs in Excel math functions. I think some of the newer versions of Excel fix some of these.
- Excel doesn't support exponential notation, such as 1E-4096, properly or consistently.
- You can paste the Excel spreadsheet into PowerPoint, and then apply advanced formating in PowerPoint. However, this sucks, and PowerPoint moves the symbols around every once in a while.
- OpenOffice clones Microsoft Office. By and large, it has the same problems.
- Word has no proper support for advanced graphing.
- No reveal codes in Word. This causes graphs and equations to unexpectedly disappear.
- Word does not properly support big documents.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex support for BibTex.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex's ability to support multiple back end formats, for instance, print, PDF, and HTML.
- Word doesn't support properly large documents.
- Way easier to script LaTex and GnuPlot than Word.
- Has Word fixed that bug where it will randomly reformat and/or delete pictures yet?
- Has Word fixed that bug where if it crashes if the embedding becomes too complex?
Word does not work for complex documents. For years, the legal profession kept purchasing WordPerfect because it had a few key functions that were missing in Word. Every month or two, an article pops up in Groklaw about how a law firm was bit by Word. If you need Mathematics or advanced document generation, then Word still doesn't work either. PowerPoint and Excel are no substitutes for a image editing programs or graphing programs.
If in the 1980's you were predicting that the world would get noticably hotter in the 2000's, and if almost every year in the 2000's had record global temperature highs, then you might conclude that your 20 to 30 year long-term climate models aren't doing too badly.
Yes, the models in the 1980's weren't all that accurate, and the modellers new it. However, they have had 30 years to refine those models. Ignore the science at your peril...
This case is so peripherally connected with file sharing, that it could sour the public on the recording industry. Specifically, if England, if they go to trial, the can subpoena the record company executives to testify at trial. There is no end of embarassing documents that might come up.
If the iPhones are selling at 1,000,000 phones per day (or close to it) and my app can sell to 0.1% of that market, then $1,000/day in revenue. Figure out how to grow the market further, and your rich.
If the Microsoft surface tablets are selling 600,000 units/quarter, and my app sells to 0.1% of Surface owners, then I have $600/quarter in revenue. To avoid starvation, you need to either have 100% market penetration, or as the parent post put it: start "selling sandwiches at 7/11".
The problem is that a few players in the Windows App Store will have very large market penetrations. If those top players are selling $25,000/month, then the total market size avalable to a new entrant is small. Really small.
It doesn't matter if you are selling Singles on iTunes, Apps on Windows Store, or Sandwiches at 7/11. Multiply the selling price by the number of available customers and you get the market size. It is one of the first questions a CFO or venture capitalist will ask when you walk into the corner office to explain how you want money to fund your new idea.
Cassidy Pope singing Stupid Boy (The Voice Performance) sold $29,912 in the last 24 hours in the U.S.A. on iTunes. She likely sold even more the day before.
To be "a blip in Microsoft's accounting system", sales need to be at least 10 million. Reaching $25,000 in sales a month after launch, hobbyist platforms like the Rasberry Pi do better...
I suspect some independent software vendors are weeping quietly...
The documentation will be wrong, don't even bother.
I've programmed in more languages and on more platforms that most of the people here. The documentation is always a poor description of what the code does, and the researchers focused on formal methods would argue that any english language description of code must be a bad description.
If you are on a project where every exception must be handled properly, then you must cross-check against the upstream source. However, even this approach is dubious.
I've worked on a great many real-time embedded projects. When rare fault cases are analyzed, the software engineers preconceptions and real-life differ so radically, that faults and exceptions cannot be handled properly in advance in software. Software engineering has its limits, and you need to let the application testing people do their jobs.
Usually, I'm using DD-WRT in a small application. For instance, on a remote computer node that needs to connect to the office wirelessly. A small business or home network (less than 5 computers.) The home network of a business person that needs to connect to the office. etc.
Every once in a while I go looking. I know I can type some arcane commands into Linux, and make the router route IPv6. However, for any of my customers, I need either a GUI or a webpage based tool. The ease of configuration, the ability to set up a wireless bridge, and the configuration options on DNSMasq, keeps me coming back to DD-WRT.
Is there a more modern device with a Linux based kernel, at a reasonable price, that does IPv6 and is set up with a GUI and webpages?
At this point, businesses are wary of Microsoft's trendy application framework of the day. They are still recovering from IE6.
I remember that. I coded an entire front end for web browsers, and the next release deleted all of it. The revised software has been in production for the better part of a decade, and never needed further recoding. I don't get extra money for rewriting software every time Microsoft updates its operating systems. My programs run on big industrial machines, and my customers want write once - run for 20 years.
Way back, the US Military, probably under the guise of DARPA, wanted a new database written. The concept was that it could track, for example, the salaries of all civil servants. If someone queried for the salary for one particular civil servant, the database would refuse to return that data unless the requester had the specific security clearance required (the need to know).
A clever requester might know that one civil servant working in one particular division might be the one and only manager. As such, they could request the total salary for the divsion, and then request the total salary all the non-managers (secretaries) in that division. Then the manager's salary could be deduced by taking the difference between the two queries. This would be an obvious security violation, and as such the specification said that any sequence of operations that might give away classified data should also be prohibited (unless the requester had clearance.)
This database project generated lots of press, because it was such a good idea. Last I heard, no one quoted on the project, because no one had the faintest idea how to build the database.
Anyone have any updates? What was the standard called?
The backwater planet was EARTH. If memory serves, Susan met David while fighting the Daleks in Bedfordshire. The Doctor felt it was time for Susan to settle down with someone (David). He locked Susan out of the Tardis, so she would move on with her life and not spend her time looking after him.
Disease escape is a far more likely failure mode than terrorist attack. Microbes have evolved over millions of years to be easy to spread.
In terms of terrorist attack, New York is on the eastern seaboard not far from Washington DC. A relatively close radius should contain: half of the US Navy's Atlantic fleet, huge amounts of coast guard assets, thousands of FBI agents, and a pretty massive city police presence. No where else in America is safer.
Canada will never have a low per capita rate of energy usage. Firstly, it's cold here. Heating energy use is related to population density and average temperature. Canada has a low population density, and with exceptions like Toronto and Vancouver, will likely always have that population distributed over a large area. This means we will always have a high energy use per person, simply because of heat and transportation costs.
Secondly, Canada has a great deal of economic activity per person (farming, heavy industry, mining.) Europe does not grow enough food to feed itself. Canada one farmer may have several thousand acres of land to farm. It takes a significant amount of energy (fertilizer) and fuel to run a 1000 acre farm. With 2% of Canada's population in farming, Canada will have a rotten per capita energy score. The same logic applies to any kind of heavy industry. Heavy industry is energy intensive. Many industries exist in Canada because we have cheap energy. 30% of Canada's population is tied to manufacturing, and that 30% will use a huge amount of energy per capita.
Unless the entire population of India moves to Canada, Canada is never going to score well on any per capita energy consumption index. To a lesser extent, the same applies to the US. It's heavy industry and farming sectors are on the same scale as China's, however the US population is a fraction of China's. Even if the US consumer stopped using SUVs, the US would still use a great deal of energy per person. The most popular vehicles in Canada are one full vehicle size smaller than the most popular vehicles in the US, and our gas prices are almost as high as Europes. Canada's per capita energy consumption and CO2 numbers are remain high.
Per capita metrics only make sense when comparing between countries with similar industrial outputs and economies. Europe will have declining CO2 output levels, because they have light industry and a declining population. China, US, Canada will have huge and increasing energy and CO2 numbers, because we have growing economies and huge heavy industry. Per capita, China will look a lot better than the US and Canada, because of the population difference.
True software engineers use the words "Safety Critical System" and "Microsoft Windows" in the same sentence with the word "isolated" in between.
I hope to never see another "EMERGENCY STOP" circuit coded in.NET or VisualBasic in my life. Yes, the MSCE's solution is simpler and cheaper, because it elminates all those expensive hardware interlocks.
However, do you want your son's life in the hands of an MSCE or a Professional Engineer when he runs a 500 Ton press? An automatic production line? Drives a car?
For business, local currencies are a nightmare. The exchange rate risk becomes extreme, and eventually everyone just adds on an extra markup to make up for the risk. The result is that every consumer and business in the entire area just pays more money. This was what was happening in the Eurozone.
Imagine America, with every state having its own fiscal policy. Major transactions would be done in either New York, Texas or California dollars, and anyone that received a California dollar would immediately trade it for a New York dollar. If you went from Alibama to South Carolina, businesses wouldn't know how to exchange your currency. You would need to carry New York dollars for some exchanges, and Texas dollars for other exchanges. In this imaginary world, interstate trade would be a convoluted mess of foreign exchange transactions, and every middlemen would demand a cut.
That scenario was what was happening in Europe. As such, many countries developed a common monetary system around the Euro. The remaining two internationally easily convertable currencies for Europe are the British Pound and the Euro. For the most part, the British Pound is used for foreign transactions. EU businesses convert everything to Euros, as the Euro is the defacto liquid currency. For example: a Danish business will use Danish Krones and Euros, and a Hugarian business will use Hungarian Forints and Euros. To trade, the transaction will be priced in Euros, because both businesses use Euros.
The US has a huge commercial advantage with its federal reserve system, large size, and single common currency. Europe is trying to catch up. In the future, China's and India's currencies will be more important, as those countries grow in affluence and formalize their business practices. However, for the moment, it is difficult to explain to a US citizen what an incredible achievement the US economy is.
Surprisingly, if failure is measured in terms of human deaths, fairly high failure rates are tolerable in many branches of engineering. It was assumed that about 5 people would die in the construction of a tall sky scraper. Now, with massive changes in safety, it is possible to build a sky scraper with no deaths. However, injuries still happen.
Similarly, mining regularly kills people. They have reduced their deaths per year from several thousand (1907) to averaging 6/year (2001-2005). See government records for details.
Manufacturing regularly hurts people, with occasional fatal accidents. Same with forestry.
Space travel is relatively safe compared to some of the shit jobs out there, particularly in places with lax safety records, like China. It helps that the average astronaut trainee doesn't actually make it into space.
With falling hardware prices, Microsoft's ability to charge $200/computer (Windows+Office) for software is not supportable in the long-term. Customers will simply refuse to pay it.
People will pay a few percent of the unit price for software. After that point, it becomes very tough to sell bundled software. Microsoft has a massive lock-in on the Windows PC, however this lock in is not worth $200/unit * 500 million units/year, especially in expanding non-traditional markets like mobile phones.
In controlled situations, it can be a really good idea to send developers out to customers sites. It yields insights into what the customer and support staff are actually doing. This can be widely divergent from the developers initial expectations and specifications.
In one case, someone installed the system with a heavy duty industrial monitor mounted such that it faced away from the operator. This significantly complicated system operations. Unfortunately, that was only the first in a long line of significant installation problems present in that system. Purchasing a black and white printer to print color print outs was another issue. It took me weeks to get my software running properly in that environment.
On the other hand, if the developer cannot explain how to setup the software, then that also indicates some issues. In the case of the above system, the customer said they wanted to purchase software, but what they really needed was significant application engineering assistance.
Two reasons:
1. If Intel can use this processor to reestablish the Windows-Intel monopoly, then it will be a great move for Intel. This may be an attempt for Intel to throw a bone to Microsoft.
2. These processors might be very competitive in terms of processing power / watt. Intel may want to protect their Xeon server processor revenues. A Beosulf cluster of these processors may have a formidable amount of processing power.
You need to find your version of the secret undocumented _fsprintf function that is included in every version of Windows since version 2.0 in 1987.
These functions aren't officially documented, however they are required by Microsoft for the software it develops.
In the case of the _fsprintf function, it was used in Microsoft Excel and widely used by third party developers. As such, it was kept for compatibility for 25 years.
Finding out about these secret functions is tough. Waiting for the book to come out usually kills your time to market. As such, you need to make friends with the correct person on the development team. The easiest way to do this is to hope a former classmate works on the Microsoft Windows Phone development team.
Alternatively, you could offer to publish a book on Windows Phone 8 programming, and get access to the development team that way.
With Microsoft, the more things change, the more things stay the same...
Slashdot Mirror
Avoid Green. It is the only colour of light that is not absorbed by chlorophyl. I would suggest using red LEDs, as most of the suns energy is in that end of the spectrum. Blue LEDs and White LEDs will appear brighter for a given energy input, however that is because our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than to red.
Agreed. Latex and GnuPlot saved my thesis.
The Excel, PowerPoint, Word toolchain for advanced graphing particularly sucks. Gnuplot may be archaic, but it blows Excel away in graphing capabilities. WordPerfect for Windows is still better than Word for large document text editing. Latex is the only one that handles complex math in an easy to use fashion. Plus, Latex gives the ability to port the same document to multiple print styles, which WordPerfect only partially accomplishes.
Key problems:
- Excel reformats the document to handle different printers, and then doesn't reformat it back.
- Absence of advanced formating functions in graphing and in spreadsheets. No equivalent of the Latex $f_{\Chi^2}(\vec{x})$ exists in Excel, especially for graphs.
- The statistics professor had a list of known bugs in Excel math functions. I think some of the newer versions of Excel fix some of these.
- Excel doesn't support exponential notation, such as 1E-4096, properly or consistently.
- You can paste the Excel spreadsheet into PowerPoint, and then apply advanced formating in PowerPoint. However, this sucks, and PowerPoint moves the symbols around every once in a while.
- OpenOffice clones Microsoft Office. By and large, it has the same problems.
- Word has no proper support for advanced graphing.
- No reveal codes in Word. This causes graphs and equations to unexpectedly disappear.
- Word does not properly support big documents.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex support for BibTex.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex's ability to support multiple back end formats, for instance, print, PDF, and HTML.
- Word doesn't support properly large documents.
- Way easier to script LaTex and GnuPlot than Word.
- Has Word fixed that bug where it will randomly reformat and/or delete pictures yet?
- Has Word fixed that bug where if it crashes if the embedding becomes too complex?
Word does not work for complex documents. For years, the legal profession kept purchasing WordPerfect because it had a few key functions that were missing in Word. Every month or two, an article pops up in Groklaw about how a law firm was bit by Word. If you need Mathematics or advanced document generation, then Word still doesn't work either. PowerPoint and Excel are no substitutes for a image editing programs or graphing programs.
If in the 1980's you were predicting that the world would get noticably hotter in the 2000's, and if almost every year in the 2000's had record global temperature highs, then you might conclude that your 20 to 30 year long-term climate models aren't doing too badly.
Yes, the models in the 1980's weren't all that accurate, and the modellers new it. However, they have had 30 years to refine those models. Ignore the science at your peril ...
The McLibel trial was widely regarded as the biggest publicity disaster to every hit McDonalds.
This case is so peripherally connected with file sharing, that it could sour the public on the recording industry. Specifically, if England, if they go to trial, the can subpoena the record company executives to testify at trial. There is no end of embarassing documents that might come up.
In accounting, the term is: market size.
If the iPhones are selling at 1,000,000 phones per day (or close to it) and my app can sell to 0.1% of that market, then $1,000/day in revenue. Figure out how to grow the market further, and your rich.
If the Microsoft surface tablets are selling 600,000 units/quarter, and my app sells to 0.1% of Surface owners, then I have $600/quarter in revenue. To avoid starvation, you need to either have 100% market penetration, or as the parent post put it: start "selling sandwiches at 7/11".
The problem is that a few players in the Windows App Store will have very large market penetrations. If those top players are selling $25,000/month, then the total market size avalable to a new entrant is small. Really small.
It doesn't matter if you are selling Singles on iTunes, Apps on Windows Store, or Sandwiches at 7/11. Multiply the selling price by the number of available customers and you get the market size. It is one of the first questions a CFO or venture capitalist will ask when you walk into the corner office to explain how you want money to fund your new idea.
Cassidy Pope singing Stupid Boy (The Voice Performance) sold $29,912 in the last 24 hours in the U.S.A. on iTunes. She likely sold even more the day before.
To be "a blip in Microsoft's accounting system", sales need to be at least 10 million. Reaching $25,000 in sales a month after launch, hobbyist platforms like the Rasberry Pi do better ...
I suspect some independent software vendors are weeping quietly ...
The documentation will be wrong, don't even bother.
I've programmed in more languages and on more platforms that most of the people here. The documentation is always a poor description of what the code does, and the researchers focused on formal methods would argue that any english language description of code must be a bad description.
If you are on a project where every exception must be handled properly, then you must cross-check against the upstream source. However, even this approach is dubious.
I've worked on a great many real-time embedded projects. When rare fault cases are analyzed, the software engineers preconceptions and real-life differ so radically, that faults and exceptions cannot be handled properly in advance in software. Software engineering has its limits, and you need to let the application testing people do their jobs.
Usually, I'm using DD-WRT in a small application. For instance, on a remote computer node that needs to connect to the office wirelessly. A small business or home network (less than 5 computers.) The home network of a business person that needs to connect to the office. etc.
Is there a DD-WRT replacement for my WRT-54GL?
Every once in a while I go looking. I know I can type some arcane commands into Linux, and make the router route IPv6. However, for any of my customers, I need either a GUI or a webpage based tool. The ease of configuration, the ability to set up a wireless bridge, and the configuration options on DNSMasq, keeps me coming back to DD-WRT.
Is there a more modern device with a Linux based kernel, at a reasonable price, that does IPv6 and is set up with a GUI and webpages?
At this point, businesses are wary of Microsoft's trendy application framework of the day. They are still recovering from IE6.
I remember that. I coded an entire front end for web browsers, and the next release deleted all of it. The revised software has been in production for the better part of a decade, and never needed further recoding. I don't get extra money for rewriting software every time Microsoft updates its operating systems. My programs run on big industrial machines, and my customers want write once - run for 20 years.
Microsoft charged money for their software, and Nokia is history.
If you have a third party selling your free software for a price, it might explain a great many of those phone calls ...
Way back, the US Military, probably under the guise of DARPA, wanted a new database written. The concept was that it could track, for example, the salaries of all civil servants. If someone queried for the salary for one particular civil servant, the database would refuse to return that data unless the requester had the specific security clearance required (the need to know).
A clever requester might know that one civil servant working in one particular division might be the one and only manager. As such, they could request the total salary for the divsion, and then request the total salary all the non-managers (secretaries) in that division. Then the manager's salary could be deduced by taking the difference between the two queries. This would be an obvious security violation, and as such the specification said that any sequence of operations that might give away classified data should also be prohibited (unless the requester had clearance.)
This database project generated lots of press, because it was such a good idea. Last I heard, no one quoted on the project, because no one had the faintest idea how to build the database.
Anyone have any updates? What was the standard called?
The backwater planet was EARTH. If memory serves, Susan met David while fighting the Daleks in Bedfordshire. The Doctor felt it was time for Susan to settle down with someone (David). He locked Susan out of the Tardis, so she would move on with her life and not spend her time looking after him.
Clicky: Linus on "The abomination called EFI."
Disease escape is a far more likely failure mode than terrorist attack. Microbes have evolved over millions of years to be easy to spread.
In terms of terrorist attack, New York is on the eastern seaboard not far from Washington DC. A relatively close radius should contain: half of the US Navy's Atlantic fleet, huge amounts of coast guard assets, thousands of FBI agents, and a pretty massive city police presence. No where else in America is safer.
Canada will never have a low per capita rate of energy usage. Firstly, it's cold here. Heating energy use is related to population density and average temperature. Canada has a low population density, and with exceptions like Toronto and Vancouver, will likely always have that population distributed over a large area. This means we will always have a high energy use per person, simply because of heat and transportation costs.
Secondly, Canada has a great deal of economic activity per person (farming, heavy industry, mining.) Europe does not grow enough food to feed itself. Canada one farmer may have several thousand acres of land to farm. It takes a significant amount of energy (fertilizer) and fuel to run a 1000 acre farm. With 2% of Canada's population in farming, Canada will have a rotten per capita energy score. The same logic applies to any kind of heavy industry. Heavy industry is energy intensive. Many industries exist in Canada because we have cheap energy. 30% of Canada's population is tied to manufacturing, and that 30% will use a huge amount of energy per capita.
Unless the entire population of India moves to Canada, Canada is never going to score well on any per capita energy consumption index. To a lesser extent, the same applies to the US. It's heavy industry and farming sectors are on the same scale as China's, however the US population is a fraction of China's. Even if the US consumer stopped using SUVs, the US would still use a great deal of energy per person. The most popular vehicles in Canada are one full vehicle size smaller than the most popular vehicles in the US, and our gas prices are almost as high as Europes. Canada's per capita energy consumption and CO2 numbers are remain high.
Per capita metrics only make sense when comparing between countries with similar industrial outputs and economies. Europe will have declining CO2 output levels, because they have light industry and a declining population. China, US, Canada will have huge and increasing energy and CO2 numbers, because we have growing economies and huge heavy industry. Per capita, China will look a lot better than the US and Canada, because of the population difference.
True software engineers use the words "Safety Critical System" and "Microsoft Windows" in the same sentence with the word "isolated" in between.
I hope to never see another "EMERGENCY STOP" circuit coded in .NET or VisualBasic in my life. Yes, the MSCE's solution is simpler and cheaper, because it elminates all those expensive hardware interlocks.
However, do you want your son's life in the hands of an MSCE or a Professional Engineer when he runs a 500 Ton press? An automatic production line? Drives a car?
For business, local currencies are a nightmare. The exchange rate risk becomes extreme, and eventually everyone just adds on an extra markup to make up for the risk. The result is that every consumer and business in the entire area just pays more money. This was what was happening in the Eurozone.
Imagine America, with every state having its own fiscal policy. Major transactions would be done in either New York, Texas or California dollars, and anyone that received a California dollar would immediately trade it for a New York dollar. If you went from Alibama to South Carolina, businesses wouldn't know how to exchange your currency. You would need to carry New York dollars for some exchanges, and Texas dollars for other exchanges. In this imaginary world, interstate trade would be a convoluted mess of foreign exchange transactions, and every middlemen would demand a cut.
That scenario was what was happening in Europe. As such, many countries developed a common monetary system around the Euro. The remaining two internationally easily convertable currencies for Europe are the British Pound and the Euro. For the most part, the British Pound is used for foreign transactions. EU businesses convert everything to Euros, as the Euro is the defacto liquid currency. For example: a Danish business will use Danish Krones and Euros, and a Hugarian business will use Hungarian Forints and Euros. To trade, the transaction will be priced in Euros, because both businesses use Euros.
The US has a huge commercial advantage with its federal reserve system, large size, and single common currency. Europe is trying to catch up. In the future, China's and India's currencies will be more important, as those countries grow in affluence and formalize their business practices. However, for the moment, it is difficult to explain to a US citizen what an incredible achievement the US economy is.
Surprisingly, if failure is measured in terms of human deaths, fairly high failure rates are tolerable in many branches of engineering. It was assumed that about 5 people would die in the construction of a tall sky scraper. Now, with massive changes in safety, it is possible to build a sky scraper with no deaths. However, injuries still happen.
Similarly, mining regularly kills people. They have reduced their deaths per year from several thousand (1907) to averaging 6/year (2001-2005). See government records for details.
Manufacturing regularly hurts people, with occasional fatal accidents. Same with forestry.
Space travel is relatively safe compared to some of the shit jobs out there, particularly in places with lax safety records, like China. It helps that the average astronaut trainee doesn't actually make it into space.
With falling hardware prices, Microsoft's ability to charge $200/computer (Windows+Office) for software is not supportable in the long-term. Customers will simply refuse to pay it.
People will pay a few percent of the unit price for software. After that point, it becomes very tough to sell bundled software. Microsoft has a massive lock-in on the Windows PC, however this lock in is not worth $200/unit * 500 million units/year, especially in expanding non-traditional markets like mobile phones.
In controlled situations, it can be a really good idea to send developers out to customers sites. It yields insights into what the customer and support staff are actually doing. This can be widely divergent from the developers initial expectations and specifications.
In one case, someone installed the system with a heavy duty industrial monitor mounted such that it faced away from the operator. This significantly complicated system operations. Unfortunately, that was only the first in a long line of significant installation problems present in that system. Purchasing a black and white printer to print color print outs was another issue. It took me weeks to get my software running properly in that environment.
On the other hand, if the developer cannot explain how to setup the software, then that also indicates some issues. In the case of the above system, the customer said they wanted to purchase software, but what they really needed was significant application engineering assistance.
Two reasons:
1. If Intel can use this processor to reestablish the Windows-Intel monopoly, then it will be a great move for Intel. This may be an attempt for Intel to throw a bone to Microsoft.
2. These processors might be very competitive in terms of processing power / watt. Intel may want to protect their Xeon server processor revenues. A Beosulf cluster of these processors may have a formidable amount of processing power.
You need to find your version of the secret undocumented _fsprintf function that is included in every version of Windows since version 2.0 in 1987. These functions aren't officially documented, however they are required by Microsoft for the software it develops. In the case of the _fsprintf function, it was used in Microsoft Excel and widely used by third party developers. As such, it was kept for compatibility for 25 years.
Finding out about these secret functions is tough. Waiting for the book to come out usually kills your time to market. As such, you need to make friends with the correct person on the development team. The easiest way to do this is to hope a former classmate works on the Microsoft Windows Phone development team.
Alternatively, you could offer to publish a book on Windows Phone 8 programming, and get access to the development team that way.
With Microsoft, the more things change, the more things stay the same ...
I think I hear a swoosh sound ... You might want to check out the last half of the echo command.