That doesn't address the number of open connections issue. Bittorrent clients can often have hundreds of open connections while a browser or a game may only have 1 or 2 connections open. So when the game sends a packet, the router gets it and recognizes that it is connection 99 of 100 open connections. If the router equally prioritizes every packet, then the app that only utilizes a single connection can still wait before being serviced.
It also doesn't solve the problem of having a roommate who will leave bittorrent on indefinitely.
The real solution is to come up with a way to analyze packets and determine which packets should have the highest priority. This is called Quality of Service (QoS). Linux and routers based on linux have access to a number of different QoS schemes, but the off the shelf routers may not have good enough hardware to run it. For example I bought a ddwrt compatible router. I dumped the original factory firmware and installed ddwrt. I turned on QoS and put http and other types of traffic at higher priority than the rest. It worked great when the router could handle the traffic. I could let the bittorrent client eat as much as it wanted but when I hit a webpage, the page loaded just as fast. But every once in a while the router would crash or become really slow and inaccessible (can't access it through ssh or http). Turning off QoS alleviated that issue but of course bittorrent would starve out the other apps. In the future I plan on buying a router with a faster cpu so I can leave QoS on.
You just touched on a topic of valuation, that is how valuable a company or business is. From your argument you're falling into the "book value" kind of valuation or something similar. But if everything was so easily valued just from something like P/E then why would people buy stock in companies with high P/Es like Google and Apple? Based on their P/Es, these investors won't be getting their return until 40 years out.
There is a lot more to valuation than cash flow, profit, revenue, and stock price. In fact, stock price is already a form a valuation on its own (market value). And unfortunately there is no proven way to determine the value of a company. Everyone has their methods and arguments but there is no equation you can write into excel that will tell you how valuable your company is compared to what everyone else thinks.
The reason why people are valuing facebook at such a high price is not because of current revenue but because of current market share. Facebook currently has the highest market share compared to all other social networks today and it is still growing. So despite all the news about Zuckerberg and his success (or lack of), what investors and other companies see in facebook is a web based company that has millions of hits everyday. Everyone is banking on the idea that if there was some sort of way to turn those hits into profit, then the company would take off. Zuckerberg doesn't even have to maintain a huge profit, just enough to cover and maintain market share growth and he could probably still keep the company valued at such a high price on market share alone.
You may not agree with that train of thought, but apparently there are many others who disagree with you and are willing to throw huge amounts of money at facebook just to get a piece of the equity. It works the same with other elements of business like patents and people (who's behind you). If you've got Warren Buffett on your board, people will automatically value you higher. If you have a patent that can lock out your competitors and the legal means to make it happen, people will value you higher. All of these different factors play in the valuation of a company.
I wouldn't say "a lot of advertising" is necessary. Measurable and realistic marketing budgets are what is crucial to any business, new or old. You can market all you want but if it doesn't achieve the desired effect (bring in conversions or customers to generate revenue) then you're burning money with your marketing campaign. If you don't market at all, people may never know you exist. The trick is to figure out how to measure the degree of success your marketing campaign has. And I'll give you a hint that a famous company that starts with a G and is known for their search engine has already solved a good portion of that problem.
For anyone that wants to start a new web based company: marketing is your friend. Take a class or something and get the fundamentals or outsource your marketing needs to another company.
Back in high school I took a typing class that was filled with IBM computers and these so called loud and clicky keyboards. Some keyboards were worn down really well while others had crusty chunks of dirt on them. Regardless you were a high schooler so you didn't care, type away!
Anyhow the class was noisy as hell. 30 to 35 students all in the same room typing. Talking in normal voice to the person next to you would barely get heard 5 feet away. When the class first started, the first clicking sounds quickly started up as everyone could tell it was "typing time". When the class ended, the ringing in your ears died and silence or the noise from voices was much better to hear.
You were given these books with word patterns that would teach you how to touch type correctly. There'd be patterns starting with one hand on the home row, then the other hand, the adding the G and H keys and so on until you started typing real words, sentences, then paragraphs. The class was pretty stupid to be honest.
But then I wondered what would happen if I typed so fast that I finished the book. What would my teacher do then? Let me sit around and do nothing? So I kept at it and typed as fast as I could to finish the book. And I did with about a month left in the class. I proudly walked up to the teacher and said "I'm finished with this book." And he said, "Is that so?" and I said "Yeah." And so he then go up out of his chair and walked to a file cabinet, and on top of the file cabinet were new thicker and denser books. He grabbed one of them and handed it to me and said, "Start working on this one then." I crawled back to my computer and my 100 or so words-per-minute quickly dropped to 10 to 20.
So to make a long story short, the model M keyboard does not prevent you from typing fast and will actually allow you to get assigned more typing work. For that reason I'm okay with keyboards slowing me down--it guarantees that I won't be stuck doing more work than I had hoped for.
I don't hate Java the language. I'm even ok with the VM as it has gotten considerably better over the years.
But what really kills me as a developer is the fact that they change and deprecate things too easily. It is almost like they follow any new flashy trend going on and immediately proclaim it as "good". This mostly has to do with J2EE which is quite a bit different than J2SE. There's still some of it going on in J2SE but I'll stay away from any job that wants to use J2EE.
Today in J2EE you're probably going to end up using 10 different buzzword technologies (frameworks or libraries) to accomplish your simple action. Each layer adds a new "better" way of doing the same thing. So not only to you have to understand the new paradigm, but you also have to understand how many layers of crap you're sitting on top of. It would be great if the layers stayed the same, but they don't. Things get deprecated underneath you, next year the entire top layer changes in favor of a new flashy design scheme, etc.
They also have this strange liking to using vaguely abstract or even unrelated buzzwords to name their technologies. Java, java 2 enterprise edition, java beans, swing, struts, java server faces. They flip back and forth between being plain and to the point with descriptive or acronym names to names that loosely relate to the technology. I'm a developer, not a consumer, stop trying to market your stupid technology to me.
For naming conventions on technologies behind a language or in a language, I much prefer boring and to the point names. Fine, go ahead and name your language after girls, pets, animals, beverages, or jewels. I don't care about that part. But don't start naming the components that build your language after girls, pets, etc. I don't care about your strange obsession with coffee, snakes, or trains. It's just another unnecessary roadblock to the learning process.
Most impressive of all, however, was performance. We didn't run any benchmarks, but the MSI Wind felt extremely snappy in general use...
How can you claim performance is good without running quantitative benchmarks?
I am interested in the performance of the new Atom processor because it uses a new chip design that prioritizes cost (to manufacture) and power efficiency, but not necessarily performance.
Your Eee PC specs are off for the Eee 8G: 900mhz celeron and it is $499. The Eee 900 is 900mhz, 8.9" screen, 4GB + 16GB (or 8GB if you go with winxp) at $549.
The Wind is a little overpriced but is slightly different... hard drive vs ssd, slightly larger display (in dimensions, not pixels) and slightly larger keyboard. I can see some people paying the premium to have the large hard disk instead of the small ssd. The keyboard on the eee also takes a while to get used to and is very hard to touch-type on because the size of the keys are so small.
In the end I'd still keep my eee, but I don't mind the competition at all.
That's just Dell's sales department for you. You can probably find the same model and configuration at 3 different prices on certain days just by going through different pages or ways to get it configured. And honestly, it works. By hiding these little things or making you go through the effort of getting the price down you feel like you're getting a deal at the end of the day because, man, did you put in all that effort to get the cheapest price! Today $200 off, tomorrow 20% off laptops priced $999 or more!
Research satellite dish antennas or cantennas. Both are cheap directional antennas (buy someone's used satellite dish) and of course you will want direct line of sight between the two antennas.
He doesn't need python. He just needs a database. He can download a precompiled binary for windows that allows one to work with the database at the command line. Python is not necessary.
And if the command line is too much, as others have noted there is already a convenient firefox extension for graphically interacting with a sqlite database.
A little off-topic but one thing that annoys the hell out of me is maintaining food in the fridge. Just how far is the range on a passive RFID?
For example it would be really cool if things like mayonnaise jars came with RFIDs and your refrigerator had an RFID reader + internet connection. Then you could run a database on the fridge and when you were away from home you could figure out hold old the mayonnaise is without having to open the fridge. In fact we could go one step further and have the fridge email you when the mayonnaise gets too old or automatically add it your shopping list. So the next time you hit the store you'll have a preprepared list of items to buy without even having to think!
Okay, this is one of the things that bugs me. OpenOffice and the GIMP do everything that the average user needs them to.
Average users (American users at least) don't think logically. They think in terms of capability rather than need. In other words they are not necessarily in search for the platform that meets their needs, they are in search for the platform that will provide them the best experience even if they will not need parts of what that experience has to offer.
For example just take SUVs. For a while the cost of gas wasn't as expensive, so normal consumers didn't take MPG into account when buying a vehicle. So they show up at the dealer and figure they need a car, but they don't know which one yet. At the dealer there's a luxury sedan selling for the same price as an SUV. The sedan doesn't have as much potential as the SUV in terms of capabilities, but will do what they need just fine. The SUV, however, opens up a number of possibilities for their vehicle--some of which they won't use. So in their minds, the SUV is a better buy than the sedan if gas price, pollution, size etc does not matter.
What linux needs is more marketing acumen and to understand what users are really after. In fact, linux distros may already have what some users are after but nobody bothers to market those features in that manner. Some areas where Linux excels are security (incompatible with most malware), and "custom" user interfaces. By "custom" I don't mean that the user can customize it but rather a custom interface is presented to the user. A good example of this is the Asus eee-pc. The product intentionally has a dumbed-down interface to become a marketing point for the product. When normal people asked, Asus they didn't chant "we run OPEN SOURCE LINUX!" but instead they said, "hey, we're going to have this really easy to use interface." But instead most geeks just get on their F/OSS soap box not understanding that the average user doesn't care what F/OSS means.
Which brings up another issue. Many of the advocates of F/OSS are not marketers or business men. They are software guys, hackers that like to stick to their ideals. So this brings two goals for such a project. One goal being spreading and supporting their ideals in open source software and the other goal being to increase market share. The two goals have conflicts. If you want more market share, you must accept that some people do not care about the ideals or will even work against them (proprietary software/hardware solutions). The faster open source projects can get rid of their internal conflicts, the quicker they will become more successful in accomplishing their goals.
I've paid triple digits for many college text books. I would gladly buy an ebook and ebook reader if it meant all of my college material would cost half as much. Of course I wouldn't be able to sell the books after I was done with them. But it didn't matter half the time because they'd just release a new edition and obsolete your current book so new students were required to buy the latest edition.
I hate books for programming. Give me electronic. The main reason is electronic text search. With a book I have to flip through the pages, look through the contents, or manually search through the index to find the topic. Bookmarks get less effective as you add more and more bookmarks to the book. But now full text search and search engines... no more flipping through pages. Find me "BufferedString". Bam. I'm there.
For me small screens and PDFs suck. The DPI isn't good enough on small devices to display enough of the page. Maybe e-ink does better, but it hasn't caught on in display devices. I wouldn't mind having a 2nd display in e-ink attached to my computer if it was really large and really cheap.
If there is no news, there is no news. Don't post stupid news to ruin the reputation of the site. All this is saying is that they are starting to value site traffic more than site reputation.
To be more specific I don't come here to see "BREAKING: NES Nudity Galore [VIDEO]!!!" It is the same reason why an investor doesn't expect to see scandalous pictures of Britney Spears on the Wall Street Journal.
Now if Slashdot does want to compete with digg and reddit for the top nerd sensationalist website then fine. People like me will simply stop visiting.
I used to play a game that required lots of panning (180 degree rotation of the camera) just about every second or so, but also required fairly accurate clicking on the screen. I was happy with a logitech mx500 for a while but there was a point where if you set the sensitivity too high, your clicking accuracy would decrease because the smallest unit you could move the mouse would move the pointer too far on the screen. So later I got the logitech g5 and the difference was noticeable. I could set the sensitivity higher (less distance to move the mouse to pan) and the clicking accuracy was much better on higher sensitivities. So for some games it certainly does matter but for others not so much.
Another area where it matters is photoshop. With cheapo mice photoshop or any drawing program can be annoying to use because sometimes the mouse will jump more than one pixel. So you end up lowering the sensitivity but now your motion is all off. Zooming helps but throws you off when you want to free-hand something. I suppose I should've just gotten one of those drawing tablets but I think it would be equally hard to use because you have to look away from what your hand that is drawing.
I do agree that after a certain point the dpi doesn't matter because your hand can't effectively move the mouse accurately anymore. But I don't agree that any optical mouse has enough dpi to be reasonable for any task. The low end and portable mice are especially bad with accuracy. I'd say the ideal spot is somewhere between the logitech G5 and mx510. Any worse and you'll start getting accuracy errors, any higher and you won't get any extra benefit.
Strategically, MS buying Yahoo makes no sense at this point because they already have MSN and if they simply axed yahoo it will benefit Google more than MSN.
They aren't buying Yahoo to take them out of the picture. They're buying Yahoo to combine market share, technology, and resources so that they can compete with Google as one team. Right now Google is eating up market share from everyone else and both Microsoft and Yahoo are losing market share. It helps neither of them to compete with each other when the big kid in the room (Google) is causing all of the problems.
This is why Yahoo share prices are declining: the market expects that the trend will continue (Yahoo losing market share to Google) therefore profitability will decrease.
Now the actions through which Microsoft utilized (buying Yahoo) may have not been the right way to go about things. It may have been a better idea for Microsoft and Yahoo to enter a strategic alliance in the short term and assess the success or lack of it later.
In the mean time, Google is perfectly happy with throwing a bone to Yahoo to keep the merger from going through. This makes their lives easier because it prevents the two from sharing technology and helps to maintain Google's lead in market share and tech.
And if I was Microsoft and the merger went through, I would axe MSN, not Yahoo. Yahoo has too much branding behind it (especially internationally) that it would be a good facade to maintain.
Now the funny thing is that I own a share of Google, so the news of the Yahoo-MS merger not going through actually helps me:).
Your post makes no sense. Higher return = higher risk. You should be more worried in investing in a smaller company because while the higher return is there, there is also higher risk. MSFT recognizes that they cannot grow the company as fast as they have in the past and that is why now you can get dividends on MSFT.
The correct way to phrase your thought is "I don't care about a P/E of 38 because I am speculating high growth."
Now you've done it! Before I thought mouse dragging to highlight selected text was a waste of time...now here I am randomly ctrl+clicking cells in html tables.
Just from looking at the keyboard I hate it already. An L shaped enter/return key and a tiny backspace key with the backslash next to it.
I've always hated the L shaped return key because it forces you to move the center of the key slightly higher...which is too high for a pinky. The large size you could say makes it easier to hit, except that most L shaped keys have terrible balancing so hitting it slightly lower or higher than the middle of the key can cause the key press not to register.
Now the tiny backspace key really gets me. I had a keyboard with a tiny backspace key and it pissed the hell out of me because I would often hit the key next to it since it was so small.
I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" side of the argument and he falls on the "speed, memory, and response time at all cost" side.
You're both wrong. The choices made in design and implementation need to reflect the requirements for the project. Therefore, there is not "one size fits all" shoe. You can't take a great design and force it into a real-time system. You can't take a real-time system and force it to work for a subset of problems tomorrow. There are trade-offs and the requirements will dictate the decisions you make in design and implementation.
I assumed anyone at slashdot could take the math the rest of the way and apply it to their situation but apparently you need some help with yer figuring.
Clearly you're not in finance. All of these mathematical calculations are wrong in the face of finance. By finance I'm not talking the terms banks and lenders throw around as a verb, I'm talking about the finance department of any company to compute the feasibility of a project or investment. For example everyone likes to use the "pay back period" as a financially sound way to compare two projects when it ignores a critical factor: the time value of money.
So now you claim the original post not to "take the math the rest of the way" when you've clearly got some issues in your math. To settle this, I'll do a decent job in taking the math all the way by giving you a fairly sound financial computation on net present value. I'm no finance person, but I've been in accounting and finance classes to know that your calculations are wrong and there are better ways. So since you asked, here is your math problem solved correctly.
There are two common ways to compare to streams of cash flows financially: internal rate of return, and net present value. The easier one to understand (and also with fewer math issues) is net present value. All net present value is is taking a stream of cash flows and calculating their values in dollars at the current point in time. As you know, a dollar today is not worth the same amount as a dollar next year due to inflation and other things. Net present value accounts for this by introducing the risk free interest rate into the equation so that you can get two sums of money to compare at a single point in time.
Before I go further, I need to say that dividing the fixed investment cost and time zero (today) over the lifetime of the investment is wrong for time value of money reasons. That is when you buy a car in pure cash today, you cannot receive the benefit of reinvesting that cash because it is gone! What you can do is say you spent X dollars at time zero and if at the end of the useful life, you sell the asset, then you will receive some money back but quite a bit less due to depreciation and market value at the point of sale.
In order to compute the net present value, all you have to do is take the present value of each year or month's cash flow and compute the present value of that item. So for example let's assume the risk free rate is 2.5% and because we don't care about the rate of return (this is not really an investment to make money, but to save money and fill a need), all we care about is the risk free rate. So today a dollar is worth $1. Next year the same dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 1) = $1.025. (You can also think in the other direction and say that a dollar in the future by one year is worth $1 / (1.025 ^ 1) ~ $0.97561 today.) As you might guess, a dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 2) = $1.050625. If we keep doing this for 5 years, the factors for each year are:
So let's do the real financial math to compare costs. In order to do this, we need to compute how our cash will flow for each investment. I will reduce the calculations to years since it is easier to show, but you could also do the calculations compounded by month if you wish by dividing the interest rate by 12 and recomputing the multipliers on a monthly basis (or use Excel's net present value function hint hint). We will also assume that both cars depreciate at a rate of 20% a year so in 5 years, they will be worth (1 - 0.20) ^ 5 = 32.768% of their initial value and we will find a buyer that is willing to pay that exact value for the asset at the end of the year. That means after 5 years we will sell the econobox at $4,915 (rounding off 20 cents) and the Aptera at $8,683 (rounding off 52 cent
Someone I used to work with landed a job with Aptera. We keep pestering him to drive the prototype down here for lunch.
From some of the pictures he sent us, the area they work in looks pretty cool too. Like your average tech startup company, except they have prototype parts and equipment lying around instead of just desks and computers.
What I'm wondering about is when people are going to realize that static memory prevents the benefits of a reboot. If a system is shutdown and its memory is still flooded by a program with a memory leak, it may not be recoverable.
Easy. Right now we consider "reboot" to mean something like powering off and powering back up to reset the volatile memory. That's because the computer is basically a giant state machine and when memory is dumped, the state machine starts over. So what we really mean is we want to "reboot" is we want to reset the state machine to the start state. In order to do this without software all you have to do is include hardware logic to write the "starting state" values to specific areas in memory. That's actually simpler than it sounds because all you have to do is write the starting value for the instruction pointer. Now when you say "go" the state machine starts from the original starting state--just like it had been turned on for the first time.
Now where it gets hairy is when the entire CPU itself is non-volatile. So in order to reset in that case, you would have to write initial values for each necessary portion of the CPU in addition to the program counter. That is if the CPU starts from where it left off, it might ignore the value in the pc, so you would have to make sure enough of the control logic is reset to get it to start at reading the pc for the very first starting instruction.
Now by "benefits of reboot" I think you are talking about losing the data stored in memory. (I don't really consider that a benefit, but I guess it is to the security people). In order to do this, part of the startup programs would have to write zeros or ones to all of the memory. Though this is not necessary because current software practices make sure you assume that the memory has garbage in it. It is only necessary if you are paranoid about the lost data being read by someone you don't want.
Menubar at the top of the screen? Ever hear of Fitt's Law? Rather than the fiddly wasted screen space of dozens of menu bars repeated in every window, I've just got one.
I know Fitt's law but this isn't exactly the best application of it. Fitt's law works best for corners, not edges. If you jam your mouse to the edge of the screen, it will still slide in one direction. To some degree the menu bar at the top does make the buttons "bigger" but not as big as the corners are.
Having a single menu bar at the top does have the benefit of saving space and ensuring that the bar is stationary, but there are some downsides. The bar will change depending on which window you are working with. So if you have two windows side by side, you have to first click the window you want, then you will have the right menu bar. Additionally if you have a really large screen but a small application like say a calculator, then when you want to access the menu for the application you have a travel a longer distance to reach the menu bar. There are trade offs to both designs and it isn't clear that one is better over the other. That's just UI design "art" if you will.
Now my personal opinion is any UI that makes heavy use of the menu bar needs to die (in fact all menu bars need to die). It's too easy to stuff things into the menus without thinking about usability beforehand. That's how we end up with stupid UIs.
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That doesn't address the number of open connections issue. Bittorrent clients can often have hundreds of open connections while a browser or a game may only have 1 or 2 connections open. So when the game sends a packet, the router gets it and recognizes that it is connection 99 of 100 open connections. If the router equally prioritizes every packet, then the app that only utilizes a single connection can still wait before being serviced.
It also doesn't solve the problem of having a roommate who will leave bittorrent on indefinitely.
The real solution is to come up with a way to analyze packets and determine which packets should have the highest priority. This is called Quality of Service (QoS). Linux and routers based on linux have access to a number of different QoS schemes, but the off the shelf routers may not have good enough hardware to run it. For example I bought a ddwrt compatible router. I dumped the original factory firmware and installed ddwrt. I turned on QoS and put http and other types of traffic at higher priority than the rest. It worked great when the router could handle the traffic. I could let the bittorrent client eat as much as it wanted but when I hit a webpage, the page loaded just as fast. But every once in a while the router would crash or become really slow and inaccessible (can't access it through ssh or http). Turning off QoS alleviated that issue but of course bittorrent would starve out the other apps. In the future I plan on buying a router with a faster cpu so I can leave QoS on.
You just touched on a topic of valuation, that is how valuable a company or business is. From your argument you're falling into the "book value" kind of valuation or something similar. But if everything was so easily valued just from something like P/E then why would people buy stock in companies with high P/Es like Google and Apple? Based on their P/Es, these investors won't be getting their return until 40 years out.
There is a lot more to valuation than cash flow, profit, revenue, and stock price. In fact, stock price is already a form a valuation on its own (market value). And unfortunately there is no proven way to determine the value of a company. Everyone has their methods and arguments but there is no equation you can write into excel that will tell you how valuable your company is compared to what everyone else thinks.
The reason why people are valuing facebook at such a high price is not because of current revenue but because of current market share. Facebook currently has the highest market share compared to all other social networks today and it is still growing. So despite all the news about Zuckerberg and his success (or lack of), what investors and other companies see in facebook is a web based company that has millions of hits everyday. Everyone is banking on the idea that if there was some sort of way to turn those hits into profit, then the company would take off. Zuckerberg doesn't even have to maintain a huge profit, just enough to cover and maintain market share growth and he could probably still keep the company valued at such a high price on market share alone.
You may not agree with that train of thought, but apparently there are many others who disagree with you and are willing to throw huge amounts of money at facebook just to get a piece of the equity. It works the same with other elements of business like patents and people (who's behind you). If you've got Warren Buffett on your board, people will automatically value you higher. If you have a patent that can lock out your competitors and the legal means to make it happen, people will value you higher. All of these different factors play in the valuation of a company.
I wouldn't say "a lot of advertising" is necessary. Measurable and realistic marketing budgets are what is crucial to any business, new or old. You can market all you want but if it doesn't achieve the desired effect (bring in conversions or customers to generate revenue) then you're burning money with your marketing campaign. If you don't market at all, people may never know you exist. The trick is to figure out how to measure the degree of success your marketing campaign has. And I'll give you a hint that a famous company that starts with a G and is known for their search engine has already solved a good portion of that problem.
For anyone that wants to start a new web based company: marketing is your friend. Take a class or something and get the fundamentals or outsource your marketing needs to another company.
Back in high school I took a typing class that was filled with IBM computers and these so called loud and clicky keyboards. Some keyboards were worn down really well while others had crusty chunks of dirt on them. Regardless you were a high schooler so you didn't care, type away!
Anyhow the class was noisy as hell. 30 to 35 students all in the same room typing. Talking in normal voice to the person next to you would barely get heard 5 feet away. When the class first started, the first clicking sounds quickly started up as everyone could tell it was "typing time". When the class ended, the ringing in your ears died and silence or the noise from voices was much better to hear.
You were given these books with word patterns that would teach you how to touch type correctly. There'd be patterns starting with one hand on the home row, then the other hand, the adding the G and H keys and so on until you started typing real words, sentences, then paragraphs. The class was pretty stupid to be honest.
But then I wondered what would happen if I typed so fast that I finished the book. What would my teacher do then? Let me sit around and do nothing? So I kept at it and typed as fast as I could to finish the book. And I did with about a month left in the class. I proudly walked up to the teacher and said "I'm finished with this book." And he said, "Is that so?" and I said "Yeah." And so he then go up out of his chair and walked to a file cabinet, and on top of the file cabinet were new thicker and denser books. He grabbed one of them and handed it to me and said, "Start working on this one then." I crawled back to my computer and my 100 or so words-per-minute quickly dropped to 10 to 20.
So to make a long story short, the model M keyboard does not prevent you from typing fast and will actually allow you to get assigned more typing work. For that reason I'm okay with keyboards slowing me down--it guarantees that I won't be stuck doing more work than I had hoped for.
I don't hate Java the language. I'm even ok with the VM as it has gotten considerably better over the years.
But what really kills me as a developer is the fact that they change and deprecate things too easily. It is almost like they follow any new flashy trend going on and immediately proclaim it as "good". This mostly has to do with J2EE which is quite a bit different than J2SE. There's still some of it going on in J2SE but I'll stay away from any job that wants to use J2EE.
Today in J2EE you're probably going to end up using 10 different buzzword technologies (frameworks or libraries) to accomplish your simple action. Each layer adds a new "better" way of doing the same thing. So not only to you have to understand the new paradigm, but you also have to understand how many layers of crap you're sitting on top of. It would be great if the layers stayed the same, but they don't. Things get deprecated underneath you, next year the entire top layer changes in favor of a new flashy design scheme, etc.
They also have this strange liking to using vaguely abstract or even unrelated buzzwords to name their technologies. Java, java 2 enterprise edition, java beans, swing, struts, java server faces. They flip back and forth between being plain and to the point with descriptive or acronym names to names that loosely relate to the technology. I'm a developer, not a consumer, stop trying to market your stupid technology to me.
For naming conventions on technologies behind a language or in a language, I much prefer boring and to the point names. Fine, go ahead and name your language after girls, pets, animals, beverages, or jewels. I don't care about that part. But don't start naming the components that build your language after girls, pets, etc. I don't care about your strange obsession with coffee, snakes, or trains. It's just another unnecessary roadblock to the learning process.
FTA:
How can you claim performance is good without running quantitative benchmarks?
I am interested in the performance of the new Atom processor because it uses a new chip design that prioritizes cost (to manufacture) and power efficiency, but not necessarily performance.
Your Eee PC specs are off for the Eee 8G: 900mhz celeron and it is $499. The Eee 900 is 900mhz, 8.9" screen, 4GB + 16GB (or 8GB if you go with winxp) at $549.
The Wind is a little overpriced but is slightly different... hard drive vs ssd, slightly larger display (in dimensions, not pixels) and slightly larger keyboard. I can see some people paying the premium to have the large hard disk instead of the small ssd. The keyboard on the eee also takes a while to get used to and is very hard to touch-type on because the size of the keys are so small.
In the end I'd still keep my eee, but I don't mind the competition at all.
That's just Dell's sales department for you. You can probably find the same model and configuration at 3 different prices on certain days just by going through different pages or ways to get it configured. And honestly, it works. By hiding these little things or making you go through the effort of getting the price down you feel like you're getting a deal at the end of the day because, man, did you put in all that effort to get the cheapest price! Today $200 off, tomorrow 20% off laptops priced $999 or more!
Research satellite dish antennas or cantennas. Both are cheap directional antennas (buy someone's used satellite dish) and of course you will want direct line of sight between the two antennas.
He doesn't need python. He just needs a database. He can download a precompiled binary for windows that allows one to work with the database at the command line. Python is not necessary.
And if the command line is too much, as others have noted there is already a convenient firefox extension for graphically interacting with a sqlite database.
A little off-topic but one thing that annoys the hell out of me is maintaining food in the fridge. Just how far is the range on a passive RFID?
For example it would be really cool if things like mayonnaise jars came with RFIDs and your refrigerator had an RFID reader + internet connection. Then you could run a database on the fridge and when you were away from home you could figure out hold old the mayonnaise is without having to open the fridge. In fact we could go one step further and have the fridge email you when the mayonnaise gets too old or automatically add it your shopping list. So the next time you hit the store you'll have a preprepared list of items to buy without even having to think!
Average users (American users at least) don't think logically. They think in terms of capability rather than need. In other words they are not necessarily in search for the platform that meets their needs, they are in search for the platform that will provide them the best experience even if they will not need parts of what that experience has to offer.
For example just take SUVs. For a while the cost of gas wasn't as expensive, so normal consumers didn't take MPG into account when buying a vehicle. So they show up at the dealer and figure they need a car, but they don't know which one yet. At the dealer there's a luxury sedan selling for the same price as an SUV. The sedan doesn't have as much potential as the SUV in terms of capabilities, but will do what they need just fine. The SUV, however, opens up a number of possibilities for their vehicle--some of which they won't use. So in their minds, the SUV is a better buy than the sedan if gas price, pollution, size etc does not matter.
What linux needs is more marketing acumen and to understand what users are really after. In fact, linux distros may already have what some users are after but nobody bothers to market those features in that manner. Some areas where Linux excels are security (incompatible with most malware), and "custom" user interfaces. By "custom" I don't mean that the user can customize it but rather a custom interface is presented to the user. A good example of this is the Asus eee-pc. The product intentionally has a dumbed-down interface to become a marketing point for the product. When normal people asked, Asus they didn't chant "we run OPEN SOURCE LINUX!" but instead they said, "hey, we're going to have this really easy to use interface." But instead most geeks just get on their F/OSS soap box not understanding that the average user doesn't care what F/OSS means.
Which brings up another issue. Many of the advocates of F/OSS are not marketers or business men. They are software guys, hackers that like to stick to their ideals. So this brings two goals for such a project. One goal being spreading and supporting their ideals in open source software and the other goal being to increase market share. The two goals have conflicts. If you want more market share, you must accept that some people do not care about the ideals or will even work against them (proprietary software/hardware solutions). The faster open source projects can get rid of their internal conflicts, the quicker they will become more successful in accomplishing their goals.
I've paid triple digits for many college text books. I would gladly buy an ebook and ebook reader if it meant all of my college material would cost half as much. Of course I wouldn't be able to sell the books after I was done with them. But it didn't matter half the time because they'd just release a new edition and obsolete your current book so new students were required to buy the latest edition.
I hate books for programming. Give me electronic. The main reason is electronic text search. With a book I have to flip through the pages, look through the contents, or manually search through the index to find the topic. Bookmarks get less effective as you add more and more bookmarks to the book. But now full text search and search engines... no more flipping through pages. Find me "BufferedString". Bam. I'm there.
For me small screens and PDFs suck. The DPI isn't good enough on small devices to display enough of the page. Maybe e-ink does better, but it hasn't caught on in display devices. I wouldn't mind having a 2nd display in e-ink attached to my computer if it was really large and really cheap.
If there is no news, there is no news. Don't post stupid news to ruin the reputation of the site. All this is saying is that they are starting to value site traffic more than site reputation.
To be more specific I don't come here to see "BREAKING: NES Nudity Galore [VIDEO]!!!" It is the same reason why an investor doesn't expect to see scandalous pictures of Britney Spears on the Wall Street Journal.
Now if Slashdot does want to compete with digg and reddit for the top nerd sensationalist website then fine. People like me will simply stop visiting.
I used to play a game that required lots of panning (180 degree rotation of the camera) just about every second or so, but also required fairly accurate clicking on the screen. I was happy with a logitech mx500 for a while but there was a point where if you set the sensitivity too high, your clicking accuracy would decrease because the smallest unit you could move the mouse would move the pointer too far on the screen. So later I got the logitech g5 and the difference was noticeable. I could set the sensitivity higher (less distance to move the mouse to pan) and the clicking accuracy was much better on higher sensitivities. So for some games it certainly does matter but for others not so much.
Another area where it matters is photoshop. With cheapo mice photoshop or any drawing program can be annoying to use because sometimes the mouse will jump more than one pixel. So you end up lowering the sensitivity but now your motion is all off. Zooming helps but throws you off when you want to free-hand something. I suppose I should've just gotten one of those drawing tablets but I think it would be equally hard to use because you have to look away from what your hand that is drawing.
I do agree that after a certain point the dpi doesn't matter because your hand can't effectively move the mouse accurately anymore. But I don't agree that any optical mouse has enough dpi to be reasonable for any task. The low end and portable mice are especially bad with accuracy. I'd say the ideal spot is somewhere between the logitech G5 and mx510. Any worse and you'll start getting accuracy errors, any higher and you won't get any extra benefit.
They aren't buying Yahoo to take them out of the picture. They're buying Yahoo to combine market share, technology, and resources so that they can compete with Google as one team. Right now Google is eating up market share from everyone else and both Microsoft and Yahoo are losing market share. It helps neither of them to compete with each other when the big kid in the room (Google) is causing all of the problems.
This is why Yahoo share prices are declining: the market expects that the trend will continue (Yahoo losing market share to Google) therefore profitability will decrease.
Now the actions through which Microsoft utilized (buying Yahoo) may have not been the right way to go about things. It may have been a better idea for Microsoft and Yahoo to enter a strategic alliance in the short term and assess the success or lack of it later.
In the mean time, Google is perfectly happy with throwing a bone to Yahoo to keep the merger from going through. This makes their lives easier because it prevents the two from sharing technology and helps to maintain Google's lead in market share and tech.
And if I was Microsoft and the merger went through, I would axe MSN, not Yahoo. Yahoo has too much branding behind it (especially internationally) that it would be a good facade to maintain.
Now the funny thing is that I own a share of Google, so the news of the Yahoo-MS merger not going through actually helps me :).
Your post makes no sense. Higher return = higher risk. You should be more worried in investing in a smaller company because while the higher return is there, there is also higher risk. MSFT recognizes that they cannot grow the company as fast as they have in the past and that is why now you can get dividends on MSFT.
The correct way to phrase your thought is "I don't care about a P/E of 38 because I am speculating high growth."
Now you've done it! Before I thought mouse dragging to highlight selected text was a waste of time...now here I am randomly ctrl+clicking cells in html tables.
Just from looking at the keyboard I hate it already. An L shaped enter/return key and a tiny backspace key with the backslash next to it.
I've always hated the L shaped return key because it forces you to move the center of the key slightly higher...which is too high for a pinky. The large size you could say makes it easier to hit, except that most L shaped keys have terrible balancing so hitting it slightly lower or higher than the middle of the key can cause the key press not to register.
Now the tiny backspace key really gets me. I had a keyboard with a tiny backspace key and it pissed the hell out of me because I would often hit the key next to it since it was so small.
You're both wrong. The choices made in design and implementation need to reflect the requirements for the project. Therefore, there is not "one size fits all" shoe. You can't take a great design and force it into a real-time system. You can't take a real-time system and force it to work for a subset of problems tomorrow. There are trade-offs and the requirements will dictate the decisions you make in design and implementation.
I assumed anyone at slashdot could take the math the rest of the way and apply it to their situation but apparently you need some help with yer figuring.
Clearly you're not in finance. All of these mathematical calculations are wrong in the face of finance. By finance I'm not talking the terms banks and lenders throw around as a verb, I'm talking about the finance department of any company to compute the feasibility of a project or investment. For example everyone likes to use the "pay back period" as a financially sound way to compare two projects when it ignores a critical factor: the time value of money.
So now you claim the original post not to "take the math the rest of the way" when you've clearly got some issues in your math. To settle this, I'll do a decent job in taking the math all the way by giving you a fairly sound financial computation on net present value. I'm no finance person, but I've been in accounting and finance classes to know that your calculations are wrong and there are better ways. So since you asked, here is your math problem solved correctly.
There are two common ways to compare to streams of cash flows financially: internal rate of return, and net present value. The easier one to understand (and also with fewer math issues) is net present value. All net present value is is taking a stream of cash flows and calculating their values in dollars at the current point in time. As you know, a dollar today is not worth the same amount as a dollar next year due to inflation and other things. Net present value accounts for this by introducing the risk free interest rate into the equation so that you can get two sums of money to compare at a single point in time.
Before I go further, I need to say that dividing the fixed investment cost and time zero (today) over the lifetime of the investment is wrong for time value of money reasons. That is when you buy a car in pure cash today, you cannot receive the benefit of reinvesting that cash because it is gone! What you can do is say you spent X dollars at time zero and if at the end of the useful life, you sell the asset, then you will receive some money back but quite a bit less due to depreciation and market value at the point of sale.
In order to compute the net present value, all you have to do is take the present value of each year or month's cash flow and compute the present value of that item. So for example let's assume the risk free rate is 2.5% and because we don't care about the rate of return (this is not really an investment to make money, but to save money and fill a need), all we care about is the risk free rate. So today a dollar is worth $1. Next year the same dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 1) = $1.025. (You can also think in the other direction and say that a dollar in the future by one year is worth $1 / (1.025 ^ 1) ~ $0.97561 today.) As you might guess, a dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 2) = $1.050625. If we keep doing this for 5 years, the factors for each year are:
So let's do the real financial math to compare costs. In order to do this, we need to compute how our cash will flow for each investment. I will reduce the calculations to years since it is easier to show, but you could also do the calculations compounded by month if you wish by dividing the interest rate by 12 and recomputing the multipliers on a monthly basis (or use Excel's net present value function hint hint). We will also assume that both cars depreciate at a rate of 20% a year so in 5 years, they will be worth (1 - 0.20) ^ 5 = 32.768% of their initial value and we will find a buyer that is willing to pay that exact value for the asset at the end of the year. That means after 5 years we will sell the econobox at $4,915 (rounding off 20 cents) and the Aptera at $8,683 (rounding off 52 cent
Someone I used to work with landed a job with Aptera. We keep pestering him to drive the prototype down here for lunch.
From some of the pictures he sent us, the area they work in looks pretty cool too. Like your average tech startup company, except they have prototype parts and equipment lying around instead of just desks and computers.
Easy. Right now we consider "reboot" to mean something like powering off and powering back up to reset the volatile memory. That's because the computer is basically a giant state machine and when memory is dumped, the state machine starts over. So what we really mean is we want to "reboot" is we want to reset the state machine to the start state. In order to do this without software all you have to do is include hardware logic to write the "starting state" values to specific areas in memory. That's actually simpler than it sounds because all you have to do is write the starting value for the instruction pointer. Now when you say "go" the state machine starts from the original starting state--just like it had been turned on for the first time.
Now where it gets hairy is when the entire CPU itself is non-volatile. So in order to reset in that case, you would have to write initial values for each necessary portion of the CPU in addition to the program counter. That is if the CPU starts from where it left off, it might ignore the value in the pc, so you would have to make sure enough of the control logic is reset to get it to start at reading the pc for the very first starting instruction.
Now by "benefits of reboot" I think you are talking about losing the data stored in memory. (I don't really consider that a benefit, but I guess it is to the security people). In order to do this, part of the startup programs would have to write zeros or ones to all of the memory. Though this is not necessary because current software practices make sure you assume that the memory has garbage in it. It is only necessary if you are paranoid about the lost data being read by someone you don't want.
I know Fitt's law but this isn't exactly the best application of it. Fitt's law works best for corners, not edges. If you jam your mouse to the edge of the screen, it will still slide in one direction. To some degree the menu bar at the top does make the buttons "bigger" but not as big as the corners are.
Having a single menu bar at the top does have the benefit of saving space and ensuring that the bar is stationary, but there are some downsides. The bar will change depending on which window you are working with. So if you have two windows side by side, you have to first click the window you want, then you will have the right menu bar. Additionally if you have a really large screen but a small application like say a calculator, then when you want to access the menu for the application you have a travel a longer distance to reach the menu bar. There are trade offs to both designs and it isn't clear that one is better over the other. That's just UI design "art" if you will.
Now my personal opinion is any UI that makes heavy use of the menu bar needs to die (in fact all menu bars need to die). It's too easy to stuff things into the menus without thinking about usability beforehand. That's how we end up with stupid UIs.