There's this thing called "productivity" that businesses seem to have a bit of a concern over.
Perhaps the reason why your training costs are so high is because there's something incredibly wrong with the old interface: if I want to insert a row in a table in Word, is it in the "Insert" menu, or the "Table" menu? If I want to insert a cross reference point in a Word document, I have to go to Insert menu > reference > cross reference. Then it pops open this stupid dialog where I have to pick through two drop down menus to find the reference and some check boxes. If the references get outdated how do I update them?
It's about time they changed the interface dramatically. The menu system makes no sense and isn't productive. The only real reason for sticking to the old system is because of consistency with old versions. But if you break the consistency everyone is going to complain even if the old method was broken to begin with. So maybe *you* need to re-evaluate if you're even productive with the current tool in the first place.
No because it is part of the HTTP header. There's nothing stopping me from going into telnet and writing up my own http header or using netcat to grab the http request from IE, Firefox, or Opera and duplicating it myself.
Companies will also find new ways to deliver ads - and those that do so in a way that results in more viewer ship will make money.
One additional point: the entire advertising scheme runs on taking your time. So when an ice cream truck drives down the road blasting the ice cream music, is it a crime if I have ear plugs in? It's my time, my ears, and my eyes. The advertisers are taking something from me, not the other way around. Consumers have zero obligation to sit around and give their time to salesmen.
uTorrent is pretty nice, yeah. I wish more developers would follow its example
I don't like uTorrent. Everyone seems to rave about how it is better but I simply don't see it. In fact, I haven't come across a single Windows GUI based torrent application that I like. They all feel like they have something incredibly wrong with them.
The bittorrent client I do like is rtorrent which is text based. Even though, I still find it worlds better than any other client I've used. Maybe part of it has to do with simplicity and the fact that the interface actually only shows me relevant information because screen real estate is limited in a text environment.
I don't know what's worse. A company that honestly admits they were ripping off early adopters by slashing the price $200 a month and a half later or a company that doesn't share that information. In fact, it's worse than that. A 4GB iphone was going for $299 and it was already stated that the product cost about $230 to build. So if we give a generous $70 to account for the more expensive 8GB flash chip, it becomes blatantly obvious why they would discontinue 4GB models and only sell 8GB. At $299 and 4GB, their margin is $69, but at $399 with an estimated $300 to make, their margin is $100 per a unit.
Sure, it's their product and they can sell it for whatever they can get. But I at least hope it knocks some sense into fanboys that are willing to fund a company that is selling a product so blatantly overpriced to consider otherwise. If Apple had priced the product correctly from the start, this would have never happened and it would have shown some faith that they actually have some understanding of a consumer's pocket. But they didn't, they wanted your money and all $200 of it up front. It just reiterates the fact that at the end of the day, things like cash flow, net income, and revenues are what the Company wants.
If Jobs is willing to refund $100, he should pay it back in cash with 1.5 months of interest, not in-store credit to save face by keeping his revenue.
Finally, there's proof that if you respect the customer's wallet, they will reward you in return than had you ripped them off in the first place. Look no further than the Wii. Nintendo could have easily charged $300 and still come in under its competitors while increasing margin, but they actually thought about it. They figured if they set the price low enough, people would be more willing to buy so they could win on turnover (volume) rather than on margin. It was risky, but they had faith in their product and the consumers. But because they did, they're now taking over the market.
Jobs had the same chance and he missed it by a long shot.
If one breaks this data into multiple rows - then a merge may need to take place and this can be costly compared to the much easier job of just ignoring a few fields which are not needed.
I'm not sure I follow that form of logic. Yes, sometimes it's easier just to have a big number of columns, but almost always is the first quick death to RDBMS. The strength of RDBMS comes from the relationships portion, not the tables portion. In fact, when you enter that large a number of columns per a row, and you query that row, the database has to read the entire row and think that you want all of that data. Even if every field is not in use, they may still take up space on the disk, so you're losing storage space AND time to transfer the data back to the application because you're essentially trying to communicate that "50 fields in this row are unused."
Let's consider your borehole example for a moment. You would have a table representing each unique borehole followed by a way of identifying and attributes tied to the borehole. At first glance, your approach is right, but at second glance when all attributes are not in use, it isn't necessarily a good idea. So take for example your approach, your table would look something like:
Borehole ID Company Date DirectionX DirectionY Directi onZ ... Attribute100
A simple structure, right? Except the notion that you don't necessarily use each column all the time. That alone is a hint that perhaps the columns are not always necessary. Instead, I would organize the data into two tables: one to identify the borehole and key pieces of information directly associated with the borehole and another table to store the attributes:
-BOREHOLE TABLE- Borehole ID Date Name
-BOREHOLE ATTRIBUTES TABLE- Attribute ID Borehole ID Attribute_Name Attribute_Value
Now to reconstruct the data, I need to perform a join. Luckily, the Borehole ID is a primary key foreign key relationship so the database should have built some index to quickly map the pieces of data together so the join isn't that bad at all. It only becomes bad if I happen to ask for all of the data (in this case one table *might* be faster) or there is no index or relationship between the joined columns.
So here comes the critical question: how much of the data do you need? If you are querying for all of the data at a time, but do not use any of the SQL query features, why did you use RDBMS in the first place? The benefit of RDBMS is that you can look at slices of the data quickly and easily. For example if I wanted to know what companies operated on which boreholes, that is an easy query even with my proposed data arrangement:
select b.NAME from BOREHOLE b, BOREHOLE_ATTR batr where batr.borehole_id = b.borehold_id and batr.attribute_name = 'Company' and batr.attribute_value = 'ACME'
If implemented as a flat file, I lose that functionality and have to implement it myself. In fact, in a flat file format, that operation can be horrible because I would have to search the entire flat file. In Oracle, I can use indexes and optimizer hints to speed up the query.
The hard part now becomes what happens when you want to query on multiple attributes? For example if I wanted to query on boreholes by company ACME and on directionX = 0 and directionY = 1, now I have to use the set operations. One straight-forward way to do that is:
select NAME from BOREHOLE where BOREHOLE_ID in ( select borehole_id from BOREHOLE_ATTR where attribute_name = 'Company' and attribute_value = 'ACME' intersect select borehole_id from BOREHOLE_ATTR where attribute_name = 'directionX' and attribute_value = 0 intersect select borehole_id from BOREHOLE_ATTR where attribute_name = 'directionY' and attribute_value = 1)
When I was in high school and college, AOL Instant Messenger was really popular. It was pretty much AIM or die. The first big thing was ICQ but had a ton of rough edges. You used to have to click or tab to the "send" button and the window would only show one message at a time rather than a log of messages. You were also given a number instead of an account name so it made it much harder to remember other's numbers or even your own. It did have some of the best off-line features though. With people outside of the U.S. however, Yahoo was gaining quite a bit of traction. Later, I found that older coworkers preferred MSN. Years later, I still find the same thing happens. The younger American high schoolers and college students prefer AIM while the older generations prefer MSN. Many people I know from other countries still prefer Yahoo.
Now I've given up on IM. At home I don't run any client because the last thing I need is someone talking to me and consuming my free time. The greatest invention is the buttons on cell phones to silent the call without the caller knowing. This is good because the caller will usually assume otherwise or leave a message. With IM however they just keep leaving messages because they expect you to be there. The same thing can happen on cell phones but usually people have some decency to understand that they're making an impact on your cell phone bill.
Imperative, OO, Functional, and Logic
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Programming Erlang
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· Score: 1
For my bachelor's I was required to take a Programming Languages course. Unfortunately, I'm finding many other students that went to other universities don't have the same requirements or the same type of professor I had.
The course covers different areas of programming languages: imperative (C, Perl, basic), object oriented (C++, Java, Smalltalk), functional (lisp, scheme), and logic (Prolog). My professor did the smart thing (or the thing he liked the most if you want to look at it from another perspective) and started the course by teaching Prolog. Everyone up till this point had been exposed to imperative and OO programming styles so Prolog even for me was very new. But it made the other thing CS students cringe on much easier. That other this is pure functional languages like pure Lisp and pure Scheme.
Very briefly, Prolog is a logic based language. What you're used to and what most of the world uses is some mixture of imperative programming and OO programming (though that's slowly changing). In those types of languages it's basically like coming up with a set of steps to execute in order to perform some operation of algorithm; you think in the order in which you would perform the operation most of the time. Prolog is completely different. Instead, you take a more mathematical approach and come up with a set of rules. A common problem that's easily solved in this manner is explaining a family tree with a grandparent relationship. In a logic based language, the procedure is something like:
define a parent to child relationship (example: John is a parent of Chris, John is aparent of Jane, Chris is a parent of Amy)
define the definition of a grand parent ( a parent of a parent is a grandparent )
Once that's completed, then you "ask" the program for rules that are true and it should return true or false. So in the above examples, I could ask "is John a grand parent of Amy, and prolog would return true, and I could also ask "is John a grand parent of Jane, and prolog would return false. There was never an instance of the programmer defining anything except logic based rules. However, because of this, the program can now answer all questions that fit within that set of rules. As you might imagine, when you are trying to implement not so trivial things like sorting lists, logic based programming gets really strange to think in.
But that strangeness pays off because at some point you will have learned essentially what you needed to get by in functional programming: recursion. Everything in functional programming is done by recursion and as you might guess functions. In "pure" functional programming, there is no such thing as a "variable". All functions operate on a list data structure with functions that only allow you to access the head item the next item because by definition, you could just keep taking the next item to traverse the list. Functional programming isn't actually that bad once you've gotten your head over how to use recursion to replace almost any loop.
For example lets take adding all the numbers in a given list with only functions. In the imperative style you'd probably use an accumulator just as you normally do when you physically add numbers:
accumulator = 0 foreach number in list accumulator = accumulator + number
However in functional programming, we have no variables and we have only have functions. Therefore, we need to define what it means to add the numbers in a list using functions and recursion:
function add (a b) (return a + b) function sum (L) ( return add(head L, sum(next L)))
Psuedo code aside, all I have are two functions, the first is basically the definition of addition. The second is the definition of adding numbers in a list in terms of recursion. In English, that is: the sum of a list of numbers is the first number in the list plus the sum of the remaining list of numbers.
I don't understand the impetus behind removing all tactile controls from a portable audio player.
Oh, it makes perfect sense. iPod Touch is like a slut. You watch, and keep watching, and before you know it you want to reach out and touch it for yourself. So finally it's yours, all yours to gaze and touch as much as you want. And it's great at first, when everything is new and fresh. But as you constantly touch and slobber all over it, it gets worn and dirty. You try to protect it or make it look better by putting on some accessories (make up) but it really does the trick. Having lost attention to it, it becomes far easier to lose... and eventually it is lost.
But that's ok, because by then the iPod Rub will have come out and be even more slutty than the iPod Touch.
Perhaps ignore prefixes / suffixes as well -- pSomething is fine, pSometihng isn't.
I'd say a better solution is to have the spell checker hook into the parser to add identifiers (function names, variable names, class names) and language keywords to the dictionary. The only time it would then fail is commented-out code blocks.
I think that that is the case ONLY because those people are coming from a Windows background.
And the problem with your perception is that you think that the linux command line mentality is better for the average joe user. I don't disagree that if you know what you're doing, it is much easier to fix a broken Linux than it is to fix a broken Windows. But the key here is that most people don't know what they're doing. Parts of the design of Windows are aimed at users that don't know what they're doing so that their PC will at least be somewhat functional for them with all of the familiar interfaces even if something bad happens.
You see, the command line or text messages with a black background mean nothing to the user. For all purposes, if they don't see something that resembles their desktop, they think their computer is broken. They also don't care if they have to type in one command to fix it because to them, learning that the command line exists and that you can even enter text commands is too much to deal with. If you can't expect failure in your software and implement necessary messages and functionality to recover to a close but not quite mode expected by the user, it doesn't mean a damn thing because they will end up calling the nearest geek to fix it. And when they do that, it doesn't matter how long it takes you to fix or even if you can't fix it. They've already lost time waiting for your service and your service is only seen as a backup effort. If geeks were not available, they probably would have considered their computer broken and the only way to fix it would be to purchase a new one.
The people at Ubuntu are doing more for linux and open source software adoption than anyone else has. Take a hint and learn something about understanding other (non-techy) user's viewpoints. If all open source developers could actually understand those users, then linux might eventually be ready for the desktop.
I can say the same for my Dell desktop pc I received more than 2 years ago when I started working full time. The machine has never crashed on me. The performance isn't bad. The only performance issue I can legitimately complain about is the boot time. The machine does get restarted occasionally due to patches but other than that I leave it on all the time.
The problem with PCs is that people want to buy the cheapest junk out there or think they can buy parts and build their own computers. Then the complaints roll in when had they invested enough at the start, that might not have been the case. But even for "cheap" manufacturers like Dell, there are quality machines/configurations that can be bought. What Apple has behind it is a great marketing department and CEO that actually understands how to appeal to the general non-techy population.
But more important is the fact that Apple is selling premium gear at a tidy profit while Gateway sells commodity gear at a razor thin margin. If you're a stockholder who are you going to reward and who are you going to punish, regardless of marketshare?
There's nothing wrong with small margins if turnover is high.
And the parent's post was pointing out the fact that Gateway hadn't been doing well anyway, therefore it is no remarkable achievement to be ahead of Gateway. It's just a way to spin things to make Apple's increase in market share bigger than it really is. In fact, I never see Gateways at the stores anymore, only HP/Compaq and Sony.
I would even recommend financial account as well. Accounting (financial and managerial) are the basis for understanding any company's finances small or large. Managerial accounting will give you insight into how to deal with upper management and why the do some of the awkward things they do.
In winxp, occasionally audio will "skip" when flipping between applications. It rarely occurs, but I've had it occur a few times when I was running too many things. Whether or not it was purely because of too much network activity is another issue.
The VIA epia platforms like the one you have weren't that great. I had their 600mhz chip and ITX board and on the meter it was still drawing about 40 watts idle at the plug. The power supply probably wasn't the greatest but still I had higher hopes. That was only the ITX board plus a normal 3.5" 7200rpm hard drive. The cpu was barely enough for most tasks and some tasks you didn't even want to do. It is probably much better with your cpu but you're still drawing more power than necessary.
As a comparison, I built an Athlon64 power efficient system with normal PC parts (no laptop parts, including the CPU). I clocked down the cpu to 1ghz and with a radeon 7500 video card plus a standard 3.5" 7200 rpm hard disk and a atheros 802.11g pci card, I was able to get it to draw about 46 watts at the plug idle. During boot and while it loaded the OS, the power draw was around 60watts to 80watts. Even with only 1ghz, the athlon box could do a whole lot more than the epia. Replacing the video card with something more useful like a geforce 6200 bumped the idle watts to the 50s.
I also have a dell 600m with a pentium M chip that has the "centrino" sticker on it. The power draw from the laptop while idle with the screen off is 26 watts. If you run something it can jump up to the 60 watt range.
I've found that when buying PC parts, the hardest part to evaluate for power consumption is the motherboard because there are no specifications that really help you and the amount of parts used on the board vary. Just by replacing the motherboard in the athlon64 system, I could increase the idle wattage by 10 to 20 watts. I've also found that all motherboards are coming with more and more junk these days. There are few bare and basic full size motherboards for PCs. There are some companies that manufacture and sell small form factor itx size motherboards with laptop grade chipsets and parts, but the prices are usually insane.
How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell?
You don't. But what we do know is that if you take a balanced 6-sided die and roll it a large number of times, the distribution of faces to come up will be uniform. That is, each face has an equal chance of being selected. So if we randomly choose a sector and write to it, the wear over large numbers of writes will be uniform over all sectors.
Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or changed much more frequently.
That's why if you happen to hit a cell that already has data, you relocate the existing data and write to it anyway. Even though you are using more write cycles, as long as you don't max the capacity the disk will wear out evenly and you won't use up all of the write cycles anytime soon. Assuming a 40GB disk with a poor 10,000 write cycle limit, that would be 400,000GB of data to write before the disk completely fails. That means over one year (365 days) you'd have to write 1095GB of data a day to kill a disk that had the most optimal wear-leveling algorithm. If the algorithm required an average of 2 writes per every 1 write of actual data due to moving around data, then you'd still have to write more than 500GB to kill the disk in a year. The truth is most people don't immediately max the disk until a good year later if at all. Even then, they would only write in the 10s of GBs unless they totally stripped out their ram capacity.
So it's safe to say that the write cycles are nearly unlimited for useful purposes as long as we attempt to do some kind of uniform distribution across all the cells. Most tech only has a max life span of around 10 years so the write cycles for even poor flash cells is pretty much unlimited for it's useful lifespan. In a laptop or portable device, I'm willing to bet your battery will give you problems before any other hardware. Battery recharge cycles are usually around 500 cycles, yet nobody complains about batteries like they do about flash write cycles.
The water coming from the hose can't go back in, therefore taking the wasted water has no affect. The wifi connection however is a 2-way transmission and can be abused by parties connected to it. For example what if it was later found that the man had been purposely been using the connection for illegal activity. Is the owner of the wifi access point truly at fault?
The way people and organizations select version numbers has always annoyed me and Linus is spot on on this topic. To me, version numbers are stupid. The only number that really matters is the revision number, all other numbers either encapsulate too much non-sense or require too much "thinking" and "creativity" based on the developer's part. At the end of the day it's just a label to say that this version was created after all of those other versions, nothing more nothing less.
In these days, versions and releases are becoming more and more of a marketing strategy or even a get out of jail card (see Google and "beta"). The real answer is, from the first day you decide to even write a document, a version number exists and should keep ticking with every change contributed to the project. That's probably too much information that the user doesn't care about so let's simplify it to only new builds of a binary. But the build of the binary could be from various sources with various optimizations and features. Blah blah blah. So the end result is someone gets a grand idea of "NOW let's give it a version number." BS, finish it and release it or don't. End of story.
At the end of the day, the user probably only cares about a couple of things: is the newer version better than the older version (what are the new features, fixes), is it compatible with my current platform software and hardware, and finally will it break anything or do something to make me very frustrated (dependencies, deprecated features). Version numbers should only be made to address these issues, anymore than that is just marketing. I don't care if it is major or minor in the developer's minds. That tells me nothing. Make the version number useful to the users, not another confusing marketing term.
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Why is the cost of hardware little for open office and moderate for office 2007? You can still run office 2007 on windows xp.
There's this thing called "productivity" that businesses seem to have a bit of a concern over.
Perhaps the reason why your training costs are so high is because there's something incredibly wrong with the old interface: if I want to insert a row in a table in Word, is it in the "Insert" menu, or the "Table" menu? If I want to insert a cross reference point in a Word document, I have to go to Insert menu > reference > cross reference. Then it pops open this stupid dialog where I have to pick through two drop down menus to find the reference and some check boxes. If the references get outdated how do I update them?
It's about time they changed the interface dramatically. The menu system makes no sense and isn't productive. The only real reason for sticking to the old system is because of consistency with old versions. But if you break the consistency everyone is going to complain even if the old method was broken to begin with. So maybe *you* need to re-evaluate if you're even productive with the current tool in the first place.
can they tell if FF spoofs itself as IE?
No because it is part of the HTTP header. There's nothing stopping me from going into telnet and writing up my own http header or using netcat to grab the http request from IE, Firefox, or Opera and duplicating it myself.
Companies will also find new ways to deliver ads - and those that do so in a way that results in more viewer ship will make money.
One additional point: the entire advertising scheme runs on taking your time. So when an ice cream truck drives down the road blasting the ice cream music, is it a crime if I have ear plugs in? It's my time, my ears, and my eyes. The advertisers are taking something from me, not the other way around. Consumers have zero obligation to sit around and give their time to salesmen.
Windows XP also booted faster than 2k.
uTorrent is pretty nice, yeah. I wish more developers would follow its example
I don't like uTorrent. Everyone seems to rave about how it is better but I simply don't see it. In fact, I haven't come across a single Windows GUI based torrent application that I like. They all feel like they have something incredibly wrong with them.
The bittorrent client I do like is rtorrent which is text based. Even though, I still find it worlds better than any other client I've used. Maybe part of it has to do with simplicity and the fact that the interface actually only shows me relevant information because screen real estate is limited in a text environment.
I don't know what's worse. A company that honestly admits they were ripping off early adopters by slashing the price $200 a month and a half later or a company that doesn't share that information. In fact, it's worse than that. A 4GB iphone was going for $299 and it was already stated that the product cost about $230 to build. So if we give a generous $70 to account for the more expensive 8GB flash chip, it becomes blatantly obvious why they would discontinue 4GB models and only sell 8GB. At $299 and 4GB, their margin is $69, but at $399 with an estimated $300 to make, their margin is $100 per a unit.
Sure, it's their product and they can sell it for whatever they can get. But I at least hope it knocks some sense into fanboys that are willing to fund a company that is selling a product so blatantly overpriced to consider otherwise. If Apple had priced the product correctly from the start, this would have never happened and it would have shown some faith that they actually have some understanding of a consumer's pocket. But they didn't, they wanted your money and all $200 of it up front. It just reiterates the fact that at the end of the day, things like cash flow, net income, and revenues are what the Company wants.
If Jobs is willing to refund $100, he should pay it back in cash with 1.5 months of interest, not in-store credit to save face by keeping his revenue.
Finally, there's proof that if you respect the customer's wallet, they will reward you in return than had you ripped them off in the first place. Look no further than the Wii. Nintendo could have easily charged $300 and still come in under its competitors while increasing margin, but they actually thought about it. They figured if they set the price low enough, people would be more willing to buy so they could win on turnover (volume) rather than on margin. It was risky, but they had faith in their product and the consumers. But because they did, they're now taking over the market.
Jobs had the same chance and he missed it by a long shot.
If one breaks this data into multiple rows - then a merge may need to take place and this can be costly compared to the much easier job of just ignoring a few fields which are not needed.
I'm not sure I follow that form of logic. Yes, sometimes it's easier just to have a big number of columns, but almost always is the first quick death to RDBMS. The strength of RDBMS comes from the relationships portion, not the tables portion. In fact, when you enter that large a number of columns per a row, and you query that row, the database has to read the entire row and think that you want all of that data. Even if every field is not in use, they may still take up space on the disk, so you're losing storage space AND time to transfer the data back to the application because you're essentially trying to communicate that "50 fields in this row are unused."
Let's consider your borehole example for a moment. You would have a table representing each unique borehole followed by a way of identifying and attributes tied to the borehole. At first glance, your approach is right, but at second glance when all attributes are not in use, it isn't necessarily a good idea. So take for example your approach, your table would look something like:
A simple structure, right? Except the notion that you don't necessarily use each column all the time. That alone is a hint that perhaps the columns are not always necessary. Instead, I would organize the data into two tables: one to identify the borehole and key pieces of information directly associated with the borehole and another table to store the attributes:
Now to reconstruct the data, I need to perform a join. Luckily, the Borehole ID is a primary key foreign key relationship so the database should have built some index to quickly map the pieces of data together so the join isn't that bad at all. It only becomes bad if I happen to ask for all of the data (in this case one table *might* be faster) or there is no index or relationship between the joined columns.
So here comes the critical question: how much of the data do you need? If you are querying for all of the data at a time, but do not use any of the SQL query features, why did you use RDBMS in the first place? The benefit of RDBMS is that you can look at slices of the data quickly and easily. For example if I wanted to know what companies operated on which boreholes, that is an easy query even with my proposed data arrangement:
If implemented as a flat file, I lose that functionality and have to implement it myself. In fact, in a flat file format, that operation can be horrible because I would have to search the entire flat file. In Oracle, I can use indexes and optimizer hints to speed up the query.
The hard part now becomes what happens when you want to query on multiple attributes? For example if I wanted to query on boreholes by company ACME and on directionX = 0 and directionY = 1, now I have to use the set operations. One straight-forward way to do that is:
Now I
I wonder what nukes-flying-over-your-head sounds like... oh wait.
When I was in high school and college, AOL Instant Messenger was really popular. It was pretty much AIM or die. The first big thing was ICQ but had a ton of rough edges. You used to have to click or tab to the "send" button and the window would only show one message at a time rather than a log of messages. You were also given a number instead of an account name so it made it much harder to remember other's numbers or even your own. It did have some of the best off-line features though. With people outside of the U.S. however, Yahoo was gaining quite a bit of traction. Later, I found that older coworkers preferred MSN. Years later, I still find the same thing happens. The younger American high schoolers and college students prefer AIM while the older generations prefer MSN. Many people I know from other countries still prefer Yahoo.
Now I've given up on IM. At home I don't run any client because the last thing I need is someone talking to me and consuming my free time. The greatest invention is the buttons on cell phones to silent the call without the caller knowing. This is good because the caller will usually assume otherwise or leave a message. With IM however they just keep leaving messages because they expect you to be there. The same thing can happen on cell phones but usually people have some decency to understand that they're making an impact on your cell phone bill.
For my bachelor's I was required to take a Programming Languages course. Unfortunately, I'm finding many other students that went to other universities don't have the same requirements or the same type of professor I had.
The course covers different areas of programming languages: imperative (C, Perl, basic), object oriented (C++, Java, Smalltalk), functional (lisp, scheme), and logic (Prolog). My professor did the smart thing (or the thing he liked the most if you want to look at it from another perspective) and started the course by teaching Prolog. Everyone up till this point had been exposed to imperative and OO programming styles so Prolog even for me was very new. But it made the other thing CS students cringe on much easier. That other this is pure functional languages like pure Lisp and pure Scheme.
Very briefly, Prolog is a logic based language. What you're used to and what most of the world uses is some mixture of imperative programming and OO programming (though that's slowly changing). In those types of languages it's basically like coming up with a set of steps to execute in order to perform some operation of algorithm; you think in the order in which you would perform the operation most of the time. Prolog is completely different. Instead, you take a more mathematical approach and come up with a set of rules. A common problem that's easily solved in this manner is explaining a family tree with a grandparent relationship. In a logic based language, the procedure is something like:
Once that's completed, then you "ask" the program for rules that are true and it should return true or false. So in the above examples, I could ask "is John a grand parent of Amy, and prolog would return true, and I could also ask "is John a grand parent of Jane, and prolog would return false. There was never an instance of the programmer defining anything except logic based rules. However, because of this, the program can now answer all questions that fit within that set of rules. As you might imagine, when you are trying to implement not so trivial things like sorting lists, logic based programming gets really strange to think in.
But that strangeness pays off because at some point you will have learned essentially what you needed to get by in functional programming: recursion. Everything in functional programming is done by recursion and as you might guess functions. In "pure" functional programming, there is no such thing as a "variable". All functions operate on a list data structure with functions that only allow you to access the head item the next item because by definition, you could just keep taking the next item to traverse the list. Functional programming isn't actually that bad once you've gotten your head over how to use recursion to replace almost any loop.
For example lets take adding all the numbers in a given list with only functions. In the imperative style you'd probably use an accumulator just as you normally do when you physically add numbers:
However in functional programming, we have no variables and we have only have functions. Therefore, we need to define what it means to add the numbers in a list using functions and recursion:
Psuedo code aside, all I have are two functions, the first is basically the definition of addition. The second is the definition of adding numbers in a list in terms of recursion. In English, that is: the sum of a list of numbers is the first number in the list plus the sum of the remaining list of numbers.
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I don't understand the impetus behind removing all tactile controls from a portable audio player.
Oh, it makes perfect sense. iPod Touch is like a slut. You watch, and keep watching, and before you know it you want to reach out and touch it for yourself. So finally it's yours, all yours to gaze and touch as much as you want. And it's great at first, when everything is new and fresh. But as you constantly touch and slobber all over it, it gets worn and dirty. You try to protect it or make it look better by putting on some accessories (make up) but it really does the trick. Having lost attention to it, it becomes far easier to lose... and eventually it is lost.
But that's ok, because by then the iPod Rub will have come out and be even more slutty than the iPod Touch.
Don't worry. In my mind you're still a chump even without the shirt: $299 4GB iPhone.
Perhaps ignore prefixes / suffixes as well -- pSomething is fine, pSometihng isn't.
I'd say a better solution is to have the spell checker hook into the parser to add identifiers (function names, variable names, class names) and language keywords to the dictionary. The only time it would then fail is commented-out code blocks.
Sounds like the next big Hollywood movie. When does it come out?
I think that that is the case ONLY because those people are coming from a Windows background.
And the problem with your perception is that you think that the linux command line mentality is better for the average joe user. I don't disagree that if you know what you're doing, it is much easier to fix a broken Linux than it is to fix a broken Windows. But the key here is that most people don't know what they're doing. Parts of the design of Windows are aimed at users that don't know what they're doing so that their PC will at least be somewhat functional for them with all of the familiar interfaces even if something bad happens.
You see, the command line or text messages with a black background mean nothing to the user. For all purposes, if they don't see something that resembles their desktop, they think their computer is broken. They also don't care if they have to type in one command to fix it because to them, learning that the command line exists and that you can even enter text commands is too much to deal with. If you can't expect failure in your software and implement necessary messages and functionality to recover to a close but not quite mode expected by the user, it doesn't mean a damn thing because they will end up calling the nearest geek to fix it. And when they do that, it doesn't matter how long it takes you to fix or even if you can't fix it. They've already lost time waiting for your service and your service is only seen as a backup effort. If geeks were not available, they probably would have considered their computer broken and the only way to fix it would be to purchase a new one.
The people at Ubuntu are doing more for linux and open source software adoption than anyone else has. Take a hint and learn something about understanding other (non-techy) user's viewpoints. If all open source developers could actually understand those users, then linux might eventually be ready for the desktop.
Well, they could just take the service pack and give it some fancy name like, I don't know, "tiger" and sell it to their users.
Or they could name it after some wacky animal like a badger and claim they'll have another release in 6 months.
Better yet, they could just release it and call it "beta" for... well... forever.
It might be a visual studio bug. I remember VC++ 6 was known to cause some big issues with your OS. Not sure about .net.
I no longer use visual studio but I occasionally run into the same problem. But I do find that closing windows does let me create new ones.
But my Mac just never crashes.
I can say the same for my Dell desktop pc I received more than 2 years ago when I started working full time. The machine has never crashed on me. The performance isn't bad. The only performance issue I can legitimately complain about is the boot time. The machine does get restarted occasionally due to patches but other than that I leave it on all the time.
The problem with PCs is that people want to buy the cheapest junk out there or think they can buy parts and build their own computers. Then the complaints roll in when had they invested enough at the start, that might not have been the case. But even for "cheap" manufacturers like Dell, there are quality machines/configurations that can be bought. What Apple has behind it is a great marketing department and CEO that actually understands how to appeal to the general non-techy population.
But more important is the fact that Apple is selling premium gear at a tidy profit while Gateway sells commodity gear at a razor thin margin. If you're a stockholder who are you going to reward and who are you going to punish, regardless of marketshare?
There's nothing wrong with small margins if turnover is high.
And the parent's post was pointing out the fact that Gateway hadn't been doing well anyway, therefore it is no remarkable achievement to be ahead of Gateway. It's just a way to spin things to make Apple's increase in market share bigger than it really is. In fact, I never see Gateways at the stores anymore, only HP/Compaq and Sony.
I would even recommend financial account as well. Accounting (financial and managerial) are the basis for understanding any company's finances small or large. Managerial accounting will give you insight into how to deal with upper management and why the do some of the awkward things they do.
In winxp, occasionally audio will "skip" when flipping between applications. It rarely occurs, but I've had it occur a few times when I was running too many things. Whether or not it was purely because of too much network activity is another issue.
The VIA epia platforms like the one you have weren't that great. I had their 600mhz chip and ITX board and on the meter it was still drawing about 40 watts idle at the plug. The power supply probably wasn't the greatest but still I had higher hopes. That was only the ITX board plus a normal 3.5" 7200rpm hard drive. The cpu was barely enough for most tasks and some tasks you didn't even want to do. It is probably much better with your cpu but you're still drawing more power than necessary.
As a comparison, I built an Athlon64 power efficient system with normal PC parts (no laptop parts, including the CPU). I clocked down the cpu to 1ghz and with a radeon 7500 video card plus a standard 3.5" 7200 rpm hard disk and a atheros 802.11g pci card, I was able to get it to draw about 46 watts at the plug idle. During boot and while it loaded the OS, the power draw was around 60watts to 80watts. Even with only 1ghz, the athlon box could do a whole lot more than the epia. Replacing the video card with something more useful like a geforce 6200 bumped the idle watts to the 50s.
I also have a dell 600m with a pentium M chip that has the "centrino" sticker on it. The power draw from the laptop while idle with the screen off is 26 watts. If you run something it can jump up to the 60 watt range.
I've found that when buying PC parts, the hardest part to evaluate for power consumption is the motherboard because there are no specifications that really help you and the amount of parts used on the board vary. Just by replacing the motherboard in the athlon64 system, I could increase the idle wattage by 10 to 20 watts. I've also found that all motherboards are coming with more and more junk these days. There are few bare and basic full size motherboards for PCs. There are some companies that manufacture and sell small form factor itx size motherboards with laptop grade chipsets and parts, but the prices are usually insane.
How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell?
You don't. But what we do know is that if you take a balanced 6-sided die and roll it a large number of times, the distribution of faces to come up will be uniform. That is, each face has an equal chance of being selected. So if we randomly choose a sector and write to it, the wear over large numbers of writes will be uniform over all sectors.
Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or changed much more frequently.
That's why if you happen to hit a cell that already has data, you relocate the existing data and write to it anyway. Even though you are using more write cycles, as long as you don't max the capacity the disk will wear out evenly and you won't use up all of the write cycles anytime soon. Assuming a 40GB disk with a poor 10,000 write cycle limit, that would be 400,000GB of data to write before the disk completely fails. That means over one year (365 days) you'd have to write 1095GB of data a day to kill a disk that had the most optimal wear-leveling algorithm. If the algorithm required an average of 2 writes per every 1 write of actual data due to moving around data, then you'd still have to write more than 500GB to kill the disk in a year. The truth is most people don't immediately max the disk until a good year later if at all. Even then, they would only write in the 10s of GBs unless they totally stripped out their ram capacity.
So it's safe to say that the write cycles are nearly unlimited for useful purposes as long as we attempt to do some kind of uniform distribution across all the cells. Most tech only has a max life span of around 10 years so the write cycles for even poor flash cells is pretty much unlimited for it's useful lifespan. In a laptop or portable device, I'm willing to bet your battery will give you problems before any other hardware. Battery recharge cycles are usually around 500 cycles, yet nobody complains about batteries like they do about flash write cycles.
The water coming from the hose can't go back in, therefore taking the wasted water has no affect. The wifi connection however is a 2-way transmission and can be abused by parties connected to it. For example what if it was later found that the man had been purposely been using the connection for illegal activity. Is the owner of the wifi access point truly at fault?
The way people and organizations select version numbers has always annoyed me and Linus is spot on on this topic. To me, version numbers are stupid. The only number that really matters is the revision number, all other numbers either encapsulate too much non-sense or require too much "thinking" and "creativity" based on the developer's part. At the end of the day it's just a label to say that this version was created after all of those other versions, nothing more nothing less.
In these days, versions and releases are becoming more and more of a marketing strategy or even a get out of jail card (see Google and "beta"). The real answer is, from the first day you decide to even write a document, a version number exists and should keep ticking with every change contributed to the project. That's probably too much information that the user doesn't care about so let's simplify it to only new builds of a binary. But the build of the binary could be from various sources with various optimizations and features. Blah blah blah. So the end result is someone gets a grand idea of "NOW let's give it a version number." BS, finish it and release it or don't. End of story.
At the end of the day, the user probably only cares about a couple of things: is the newer version better than the older version (what are the new features, fixes), is it compatible with my current platform software and hardware, and finally will it break anything or do something to make me very frustrated (dependencies, deprecated features). Version numbers should only be made to address these issues, anymore than that is just marketing. I don't care if it is major or minor in the developer's minds. That tells me nothing. Make the version number useful to the users, not another confusing marketing term.