The problem with having the students work on the actual software projects is that often they may not have enough experience to correctly perform the change. I certainly wouldn't trust pretty much all first and second year CS students with changes and I'd feel more at ease with 3rd and 4th year students. A good portion of the first year students end up dropping out and a good portion of the remaining students still can't write good code. That doesn't mean they're bad students, in fact they might even be very good computer scientists. But there's a big difference in understanding and having experience in the basic principles of software engineering.
For example, my school required all students to take project courses (one where you work on a project the entire quarter rather than sit through lecture) and one course I took was software engineering. We were required to make a team of four students (our choice, at the beginning of the quarter) and we were given a "customer" who was either a graduate student or a representative from a company. In the class we were tasked with constructing a complete proposal and presentation for our specific project, capturing requirements, designing the solution, implementing it, and testing and documenting it. It was not and easy class (there were times where we were in the lab for more than 24 hours) and often teams failed. The teams that did succeed, did not necessarily put together something that met the customer's initial expectations. Often, requirements were scoped down, the final product was not completely finished, and so on. There were even bad customers who poorly communicated with the team (if at all). My assumption is that most of these customers understood that the work done by the students was likely to not meet their expectations, but they're still getting free labor with few hours invested.
The students, however, benefited immensely from this experience--it gave everyone in the class a real perspective of what was beyond the lecture room. But as I said, often what the students produced was of considerably lower quality. I'm not sure that's good for all open source projects as it's quite likely that the quality of work many students will put out can introduce more defects than they solve. I do think it is good for companies and grad students trying to get some free/cheap research done on the side, and I do think that it is a good experience for the students.
Windows has the worst desktop in all of computing.
The windows desktop isn't all bad. There are some good usable elements to it.
Start buttons,
While the layout of what's in the start menu is more of an issue, the actual concept of a start menu isn't really bad. The start menu gives you a single point that is always available on the screen to access almost everything on the computer. Pretty good usability decision in my opinion. Unlike way before when you always had to keep going back to the desktop or "program manager" to get to programs you can leave what you're working with and start up another application or open another document. Also, unlike toolbars and docks, it doesn't take up additional screen real estate.
taskbars,
What's wrong with the taskbar? It's a great idea that could be implemented a little better. It shows me all of my applications that are running regardless of if I can see the window or not. Sure, it looks cluttered when there are too many windows but that's find because I always have full visibility of what applications are running or open. We're even seeing the concept reused as something called "tabs."
a work paradigm that encourages monolithic apps and maximized windows,
Ok, this is more of the fault of the developers of applications and not necessarily the desktop. But with all of the applications I work with, I have sometimes felt that working maximized was better while other times working with multiple windows is better. Windows is great because it allows you to do both. For example, when I just need to sit in front of the text editor to really just finish writing a module, I maximize the window because I know I won't be using other windows much if ever. Now when I move over to testing and debugging, having the other windows open like the shell alongside the text editor help and that's when I "un-maximize" the text editor window so I can see both. On the mac desktop you always see people resizing windows especially when they really just want to work with one application. I find that clumsy compared to windows where if you really just want to work with one application, you maximize. When you "un-maximize" (restore down) it returns the window to the original size. I find this saves me a lot of time since I don't have to spend that much time resizing windows.
Another trick is that if you double click the title bar for any window, it is the same thing as clicking the maximize button. If the window is already maximized, it "un-maximizes" the window. Since the window title bar (while in the maximized state) is flush against the top of the screen, it's actually very fast to un-maximize the window with the mouse.
a desktop that gets abusively filled with every program shortcut known to man,
Again, this is more of the fault of the application developers than the desktop. The Windows desktop actually was going in the right direction by removing things from the desktop except the trash bin. I find that every application has the stupid "install icon to desktop" option checked by default when it really should be left off. I no longer start things from the desktop and my desktop space is more of a temporary space with a bunch of junk on it. Everything I actually need to save is kept in a place away from the desktop. That's because with the way I work, I treat anything on the desktop as one-time use that will probably be trashed later. But if it wasn't right there in front of my face, it would just get lost somewhere and I would never clean it up.
a defective clipboard model (crtl-C!?),
The actual windows clipboard is far from defective and actually works the best out of any platform I've used. Now, the key-binding could be better and so could other things like drag and drop. But if there's anything windows has done well, it's gotten developers to stick to some standards like this. On other systems (linux comes to mind) there's so many d
My guess at the whitespace (nothing has been modified except whitespace):
This is like my third post ever on slashdot. I read it often, though. I am the guy with the brick quote. Here is the whole story to be fair to Dell.
On Friday, my laptop died. It was an Acer. The screen was damaged. Replacement cost of cracked screen is more than halfway to the cost of a new laptop. So I decide I will support the new Ubuntu Dell Laptops. I go online to Dell's Website and go to the Ubuntu page. I choose the E1505n. I upgrade to a GB of Ram, I get the Nvidia 256 MB graphics card, I get the DVD burner optical drive. So far so good. I am happy with the default processor and the screen.
Now, another driving factor is that Dell has the nifty cool complete care (tm) plan. With this bad boy, a random brick can fly through the air, hit my laptop, shatter it to threads, and Dell will cover it. Think of it more as an insurance plan than a service plan. I have a friend with 3 kids who has had to take advantage of it not once, but twice. Both times Dell took care of them no questions asked. Now, the first time the Dell laptop had XP on it...the second time..gentoo. Still, no problems here. So, I decide to get it....just in case I get burned twice.
On June 2, I get an email telling me my order has been acknowledged and I will get another email shortly giving me a order number (I also paid for next day shipping). Well, the rest of June 2 and all of June 3 goes by. No new email. I check my spam folder...nada...just the usual assortment of male enhancement and refi deals.
So on June 4 I call Dell. They can see no order...they can see they debited my account...but no order. Hmmm...confusing. Very sorry, sir. Let me talk to my supervisor, please hold. She has no explanation for the lost order, but she will reprocess the order and I will get my next day shipping for free since I lost time. YAY! But wait! When we "build" my Dell, there is no longer a Complete Care (tm) plan for Ubuntu. She puts me on hold. She find out that my order was bumped out since they changed the policy on offering Complete Care (tm) on Ubuntu Dells. Why? She puts me on hold.
Now comes the fun. "Sir, Ubuntu is a third party software and applications come from sources not from Dell." "Vista is a product of Dell?" "No sir, but we have a relationship with MS." "So you do not have a relationship with Canonical, the commercial company that sponsors Ubuntu?" "Hold.........Yes we do, but the software for other things comes from third parties." "So what if I buy a game for a Vista laptop from Best Buy? As that is a third party software..does that invalidate a Complete Care (tm) policy?" "No, sir." "What if I download an update from Microsoft to keep my Vista Current, how does that differ from an update from Ubuntu other than the fact the Ubuntu update actually helps my system?" "I do not know sir. See, sir, Linux comes from all over the place and as such cannot be supported." "I believe Redhat and even Microsoft differ with that opinion. I am not looking for support, that is another option I can click on another screen in your website. I am looking for protection from bricks. The laws of physics do not differ from one OS to the other...do they?" "No Sir." "Talking to your superior will not help my cause, do you have the phone number and email address of an executive do you?" She gave it to me. I wrote an email. I expressed my concerns politely and professionally.
The next day-early this morning, I got a reply from a Dell Representative named Todd. Todd wrote,
"Mr. Green, Thank you for your note and a chance to solve this issue. I am about to get on an airplane, but will get your issue to our executive resolution team. They should be able to resolve. If you are not satisfied, please do not hesitate to contact me again. Thank you for your business. Todd XXXXX"
I will be honest, I thought it was a passing of the hot potato.
Although you can think of the Standby list as the file cache, it comprises most of the available memory, so it may be more useful to think of available memory as the file cache.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312628
Also note that this article only applies to Win2k and XP. I have not found any Microsoft resources reflecting exact details on what the Vista task manager memory statistics mean. So to the grandparent: those numbers may not mean what you think they mean.
$500 amortized over 24 months of the contract comes out to just under $21 a month. Considering typical monthly service plan fees, that is not so bad. I started off with a Treo 650 a few years ago for which I paid around $350 ($15 a month). Not so huge a difference.
You must be affluent or have a really bad sense of math/economics. With your argument you could probably convince yourself that anything amortized enough is cheap. Example: let's say the iphone2 costs $1000, well amortized across 4 years that's only $21 a month, that's not so bad. But Apple/Cingular/Att aren't going to give you a free no-interest loan for that sum of money, either you pay it up front or you will get charged some kind of interest (your total monthly payments will be higher than the upfront cost). If every loan could be amortized at zero interest, people would just put everything on loan and invest their money elsewhere.
I paid zero dollars for my phone along with my contract. With the iphone they want you to pay $499 along with a contract. My phone meets 100% of my requirements for the device (I need to make calls), everything else is extra. My phone can't play mp3s, movies, or lookup google maps, but that's ok, because I don't need that. Maybe you do, but for many other people, they only buy a phone to make calls.
I once almost gave out my telephone number but at the last second changed the last digit to the wrong number. After having done so I felt evil, yet good, knowing that after I was done I'd never talk to that annoying person ever again. But then it started giving me ideas of grabbing actual phone numbers of, I don't know, the police department and things like that. Of course this was all in person so it doesn't happen very often, and telemarketers obviously have your phone number so you can't lie about the number you're using.
The only balance issue I had with SC was playing as zerg. I used to always play as random so I played all the races, but zerg always hit a limit later in the game once everyone essentially "caught up". Sure, as zerg you could always pull off a rush faster than the others and if you were good you could overwhelm them early in the game. But it was still hard to fight with the other terran and protoss upper tech trees. Defilers simply didn't cut it, scourges can't be saved, etc. The other annoying thing was how you had no good way of protecting your overlords other than by simply hiding them or making new ones. Corsairs or wraiths would just hunt your overlords down late in the game and slow down your production of units (your only real reliable strategy).
When will they update the satellite images? There's an awful lot of new roads popping up where I live that don't show up on the satellite images. These images are useful so I can see some landmarks to look for while driving and what the turn/lane markings are before getting there.
Oh, well you just needed to update your compiler to the new gcc by compiling the new gcc sources. And when that's done then you recompile your entire system. And when that's done you then recompile gcc again so that gcc can then optimize itself making all of your future compiles even faster. Oh and when that's done then you do emerge --sync and there will be 5 or so updated packages while you were compiling so you better start compiling those too.
Unlike us geeks who are pretty knowledgeable about figuring things out with software, others don't quite pick it up that quickly. People are trained in MS Office and other applications for tasks you would probably laugh at as well as tasks that aren't quite as trivial.
My friend who recently graduated with his bachelors was applying for jobs outside of the tech industry (financial institutions) and one of the interviews had an automated MS Excel test. He said none of the help menus worked and you had to do the operation correctly the first time in order to get it right. For their lines of work, maybe being that handy with Excel is a big bonus because they aren't guaranteed to hire someone that is that good with software for their lines of work.
So, sure, while other educational institutions would probably get by with the open source alternatives, they surely would run into problems when employers demand skills in software they don't teach.
From what we know about the brain it takes advantage of many different techniques but I wouldn't necessarily agree that it is pipelined. Pipelining is a parallelization technique for making a serial set of operations execute faster through a processor by changing how the processor executes each instruction. When the brain processes information, it is basically a giant circuit that does all the processing for vision only, nothing else--break anything in the chain and the "vision" capability is either hindered or stopped.
The brain has two separate pathways "vision" data takes: one path determines things like dimensional properties (as in how far away a cup is from you) while the other path determines identification (is what you're looking at a cup?). There have been documented cases where one pathway was lesioned and the patient could identify the object, but could not physically reach out and grab it while if the other pathway was broken the patient could physically catch a ball thrown at them and they could catch it, but they could not recognize what object was thrown at them until they used their other senses (like touch) to determine it.
Each processing unit in the brain does some sort of processing on the data rather than contributing to make the final product. When you "see" an image, you are actual interpreting many different senses from your vision pathways. The only processing that might potentially be shared (as far as I know) is the processing done by the retina like edge detection. All of the other areas are very specialized at what they do and are only designed to do that one task. That's way different from pipelining where each unit is reused for different instructions giving the cpu its general purpose traits.
I'd say multiple processors/cores is more how the brain operates but does not necessarily model how "we" think. What I mean by "we" is that each person has a pre-frontal cortex in their brain has that is where their personality and where their actual "thinking" as a person goes on. The rest of the brain is specialized to do other tasks. Some of those tasks are controlling emotions, labeling and highlighting memories, vision processing, motor skills, and so on. For example, when you first learned to write, you were probably intensely utilizing your prefrontal cortex to write letters. That's because the motor section of your brain specializing in hand-finger motions for writing the letter had not been trained yet. However, as time goes on, you no longer have to think in order to write the letter, in fact you could probably close your eyes and start writing--no prefrontal cortex processing is needed because the motor section now has it programmed in.
So when you're thinking, you're really just utilizing your prefrontal cortex, but if the operation or task your performing is repetitive and can be memorized, at some point that task will be programmed into a specialized unit in your brain leading you to require less or no thinking at all. I'd say the brain itself is designed as a massively parallel unit with multiple areas that can be trained to perform specialized operations.
Now, you may be thinking if each section of the brain can be trained to do something, can they be retrained to do other things? The answer is yes. There have also been cases where due to some reason, people lost a need to utilize one portion of their brain but started utilizing those portions to do other things. For example say a person lost their arms, well now their motor section for their arms is completely useless in their brain. But, because they must not be forced to use their feet and legs in ways they hadn't before, eventually the parts of the brain trained to do arm and hand motions will gradually be utilized to learn and control feet and leg movements. In fact, if you were to map out the amount of brain space used for each portion of the body, you would get a huge proportion devoted to things like hands and mouth where other portions of the body would utilize an insanely small portion of th
On Windows one of the most annoying things that that things install themselves -- which gives them full control over what goes where, up to modifying obscure registry settings and overwriting files. That means you can never be sure you can uninstall something.
He said he was making this package manager for free/open source software, not all windows software. Given that the source code is probably available, it would be possible to determine what files/settings the software requires to allow safe installation and removal. How he would deal with MSIs, I'm not sure since I don't know how those work.
Ubuntu can run well on cheaper hardware than Vista (mainly RAM and video, if you want Aero). So comparing the same hardware means one OS will run better than the other.
But these Dells have the same specs as windows vista machines capable of running aero. I have an E521 with an athlon X2, 1gb ram, and the onboard GeForce 6150 graphics and I've never seen a problem in vista business (in fact the sleep function is quite convenient). The machine was a refurb, costed around $360 shipped, and runs flawlessly: apps start quickly, multitasking is fast, aero isn't choppy or adding considerable lag. I'd actually prefer the dell box with vista to my custom gentoo box with kde for simple tasks. So it's really a moot point as dell is selling quite capable machines rather than the bare minumum specs to sell ubuntu. If they were to offer "last generation" hardware at around $200 it might be possible to get "more" for running ubuntu at a much lower price. But with my experience with vista, once you meet the graphics card and 1gb ram specs, it actually runs quite smoothly.
I'd say the main selling point of C is that you can jump into assembly code and start toying with the layer below. That's pretty useful when you want to exploit something about the hardware to boost performance or whatever you may need to do because your compiler doesn't/can't do it for you. Very few other and newer languages allow that.
Splashscreens: Please, no more splash screens. Just load the stupid application.
Desktop and Program Icons: Applications that feel a need to always put their icons on the desktop (and 10 other places).
Tool bars: There seems to be a "tool bar" for every service/web page these days.
And one last one (that may not quite fit in the category but anyway):
Mapping websites/tools that give you a single line text box to type your address. You listening Google/MS/Yahoo/Mapquest/etc? Give me a text-area control and you parse the stupid newlines! Whoever thought (and continues to think) that single line address inputs are great needs to be shot.
The E520n configuration includes a 17" flat panel monitor. If you select "no monitor" it will drop the price to $409 for the Ubuntu base configuration. The same spec'ed FreeDOS machine is $399. The cheaper FreeDOS configurations come with celeron or pentium 4 processors which are not available with Ubuntu configurations.
When I was in lecture some years ago, there was a girl in the row in front of me with a really small bag for a "backpack". In it she had notebooks and pens/pencils. However, later in the lecture, she pulled out an ultra slim toshiba portege laptop that was literally the size of a spiral notebook. Though it was running win2k at the time, I was still impressed and immediately wished I had one.
One of the problems then with ultra portables or ultra thin laptops was the optical drive and no good form of external storage. These days everything is networked and there a tons of lightweight options for external storage (flash media). In fact, I only use the optical drive as a form of backup, not as a way of transferring data since a usb stick or a network connection is much more convenient.
So if the price is right, I'd buy one too even if it was marketed for girls.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with having the students work on the actual software projects is that often they may not have enough experience to correctly perform the change. I certainly wouldn't trust pretty much all first and second year CS students with changes and I'd feel more at ease with 3rd and 4th year students. A good portion of the first year students end up dropping out and a good portion of the remaining students still can't write good code. That doesn't mean they're bad students, in fact they might even be very good computer scientists. But there's a big difference in understanding and having experience in the basic principles of software engineering.
For example, my school required all students to take project courses (one where you work on a project the entire quarter rather than sit through lecture) and one course I took was software engineering. We were required to make a team of four students (our choice, at the beginning of the quarter) and we were given a "customer" who was either a graduate student or a representative from a company. In the class we were tasked with constructing a complete proposal and presentation for our specific project, capturing requirements, designing the solution, implementing it, and testing and documenting it. It was not and easy class (there were times where we were in the lab for more than 24 hours) and often teams failed. The teams that did succeed, did not necessarily put together something that met the customer's initial expectations. Often, requirements were scoped down, the final product was not completely finished, and so on. There were even bad customers who poorly communicated with the team (if at all). My assumption is that most of these customers understood that the work done by the students was likely to not meet their expectations, but they're still getting free labor with few hours invested.
The students, however, benefited immensely from this experience--it gave everyone in the class a real perspective of what was beyond the lecture room. But as I said, often what the students produced was of considerably lower quality. I'm not sure that's good for all open source projects as it's quite likely that the quality of work many students will put out can introduce more defects than they solve. I do think it is good for companies and grad students trying to get some free/cheap research done on the side, and I do think that it is a good experience for the students.
That's also true in some other large, wealthy, and powerful nation...
Sorry everyone, but this problem has already been solved.
So does this mean they found a new place for the turbo button?
Windows has the worst desktop in all of computing.
The windows desktop isn't all bad. There are some good usable elements to it.
Start buttons,
While the layout of what's in the start menu is more of an issue, the actual concept of a start menu isn't really bad. The start menu gives you a single point that is always available on the screen to access almost everything on the computer. Pretty good usability decision in my opinion. Unlike way before when you always had to keep going back to the desktop or "program manager" to get to programs you can leave what you're working with and start up another application or open another document. Also, unlike toolbars and docks, it doesn't take up additional screen real estate.
taskbars,
What's wrong with the taskbar? It's a great idea that could be implemented a little better. It shows me all of my applications that are running regardless of if I can see the window or not. Sure, it looks cluttered when there are too many windows but that's find because I always have full visibility of what applications are running or open. We're even seeing the concept reused as something called "tabs."
a work paradigm that encourages monolithic apps and maximized windows,
Ok, this is more of the fault of the developers of applications and not necessarily the desktop. But with all of the applications I work with, I have sometimes felt that working maximized was better while other times working with multiple windows is better. Windows is great because it allows you to do both. For example, when I just need to sit in front of the text editor to really just finish writing a module, I maximize the window because I know I won't be using other windows much if ever. Now when I move over to testing and debugging, having the other windows open like the shell alongside the text editor help and that's when I "un-maximize" the text editor window so I can see both. On the mac desktop you always see people resizing windows especially when they really just want to work with one application. I find that clumsy compared to windows where if you really just want to work with one application, you maximize. When you "un-maximize" (restore down) it returns the window to the original size. I find this saves me a lot of time since I don't have to spend that much time resizing windows.
Another trick is that if you double click the title bar for any window, it is the same thing as clicking the maximize button. If the window is already maximized, it "un-maximizes" the window. Since the window title bar (while in the maximized state) is flush against the top of the screen, it's actually very fast to un-maximize the window with the mouse.
a desktop that gets abusively filled with every program shortcut known to man,
Again, this is more of the fault of the application developers than the desktop. The Windows desktop actually was going in the right direction by removing things from the desktop except the trash bin. I find that every application has the stupid "install icon to desktop" option checked by default when it really should be left off. I no longer start things from the desktop and my desktop space is more of a temporary space with a bunch of junk on it. Everything I actually need to save is kept in a place away from the desktop. That's because with the way I work, I treat anything on the desktop as one-time use that will probably be trashed later. But if it wasn't right there in front of my face, it would just get lost somewhere and I would never clean it up.
a defective clipboard model (crtl-C!?),
The actual windows clipboard is far from defective and actually works the best out of any platform I've used. Now, the key-binding could be better and so could other things like drag and drop. But if there's anything windows has done well, it's gotten developers to stick to some standards like this. On other systems (linux comes to mind) there's so many d
Better change your order to include some heat-sinks or you'll just keep shutting down all the time.
My guess at the whitespace (nothing has been modified except whitespace):
This is like my third post ever on slashdot. I read it often, though. I am the guy with the brick quote. Here is the whole story to be fair to Dell.
On Friday, my laptop died. It was an Acer. The screen was damaged. Replacement cost of cracked screen is more than halfway to the cost of a new laptop. So I decide I will support the new Ubuntu Dell Laptops. I go online to Dell's Website and go to the Ubuntu page. I choose the E1505n. I upgrade to a GB of Ram, I get the Nvidia 256 MB graphics card, I get the DVD burner optical drive. So far so good. I am happy with the default processor and the screen.
Now, another driving factor is that Dell has the nifty cool complete care (tm) plan. With this bad boy, a random brick can fly through the air, hit my laptop, shatter it to threads, and Dell will cover it. Think of it more as an insurance plan than a service plan. I have a friend with 3 kids who has had to take advantage of it not once, but twice. Both times Dell took care of them no questions asked. Now, the first time the Dell laptop had XP on it...the second time..gentoo. Still, no problems here. So, I decide to get it....just in case I get burned twice.
On June 2, I get an email telling me my order has been acknowledged and I will get another email shortly giving me a order number (I also paid for next day shipping). Well, the rest of June 2 and all of June 3 goes by. No new email. I check my spam folder...nada...just the usual assortment of male enhancement and refi deals.
So on June 4 I call Dell. They can see no order...they can see they debited my account...but no order. Hmmm...confusing. Very sorry, sir. Let me talk to my supervisor, please hold. She has no explanation for the lost order, but she will reprocess the order and I will get my next day shipping for free since I lost time. YAY! But wait! When we "build" my Dell, there is no longer a Complete Care (tm) plan for Ubuntu. She puts me on hold. She find out that my order was bumped out since they changed the policy on offering Complete Care (tm) on Ubuntu Dells. Why? She puts me on hold.
Now comes the fun.
"Sir, Ubuntu is a third party software and applications come from sources not from Dell."
"Vista is a product of Dell?"
"No sir, but we have a relationship with MS."
"So you do not have a relationship with Canonical, the commercial company that sponsors Ubuntu?"
"Hold.........Yes we do, but the software for other things comes from third parties."
"So what if I buy a game for a Vista laptop from Best Buy? As that is a third party software..does that invalidate a Complete Care (tm) policy?"
"No, sir."
"What if I download an update from Microsoft to keep my Vista Current, how does that differ from an update from Ubuntu other than the fact the Ubuntu update actually helps my system?"
"I do not know sir. See, sir, Linux comes from all over the place and as such cannot be supported."
"I believe Redhat and even Microsoft differ with that opinion. I am not looking for support, that is another option I can click on another screen in your website. I am looking for protection from bricks. The laws of physics do not differ from one OS to the other...do they?"
"No Sir."
"Talking to your superior will not help my cause, do you have the phone number and email address of an executive do you?"
She gave it to me. I wrote an email. I expressed my concerns politely and professionally.
The next day-early this morning, I got a reply from a Dell Representative named Todd. Todd wrote,
"Mr. Green, Thank you for your note and a chance to solve this issue. I am about to get on an airplane, but will get your issue to our executive resolution team. They should be able to resolve. If you are not satisfied, please do not hesitate to contact me again. Thank you for your business. Todd XXXXX"
I will be honest, I thought it was a passing of the hot potato.
However, earlier this m
NT has file caching since Win2k:
Although you can think of the Standby list as the file cache, it comprises most of the available memory, so it may be more useful to think of available memory as the file cache. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312628
Also note that this article only applies to Win2k and XP. I have not found any Microsoft resources reflecting exact details on what the Vista task manager memory statistics mean. So to the grandparent: those numbers may not mean what you think they mean.
You must be affluent or have a really bad sense of math/economics. With your argument you could probably convince yourself that anything amortized enough is cheap. Example: let's say the iphone2 costs $1000, well amortized across 4 years that's only $21 a month, that's not so bad. But Apple/Cingular/Att aren't going to give you a free no-interest loan for that sum of money, either you pay it up front or you will get charged some kind of interest (your total monthly payments will be higher than the upfront cost). If every loan could be amortized at zero interest, people would just put everything on loan and invest their money elsewhere.
I paid zero dollars for my phone along with my contract. With the iphone they want you to pay $499 along with a contract. My phone meets 100% of my requirements for the device (I need to make calls), everything else is extra. My phone can't play mp3s, movies, or lookup google maps, but that's ok, because I don't need that. Maybe you do, but for many other people, they only buy a phone to make calls.
Because the government wants to sell the spectrum for money rather than open it to the public which would get the government zero dollars.
Makes you wonder what our computers and I/O devices will be like when we get to the point where we really grok biochemistry.
Yeah, just imagine sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
I once almost gave out my telephone number but at the last second changed the last digit to the wrong number. After having done so I felt evil, yet good, knowing that after I was done I'd never talk to that annoying person ever again. But then it started giving me ideas of grabbing actual phone numbers of, I don't know, the police department and things like that. Of course this was all in person so it doesn't happen very often, and telemarketers obviously have your phone number so you can't lie about the number you're using.
The only balance issue I had with SC was playing as zerg. I used to always play as random so I played all the races, but zerg always hit a limit later in the game once everyone essentially "caught up". Sure, as zerg you could always pull off a rush faster than the others and if you were good you could overwhelm them early in the game. But it was still hard to fight with the other terran and protoss upper tech trees. Defilers simply didn't cut it, scourges can't be saved, etc. The other annoying thing was how you had no good way of protecting your overlords other than by simply hiding them or making new ones. Corsairs or wraiths would just hunt your overlords down late in the game and slow down your production of units (your only real reliable strategy).
When will they update the satellite images? There's an awful lot of new roads popping up where I live that don't show up on the satellite images. These images are useful so I can see some landmarks to look for while driving and what the turn/lane markings are before getting there.
Oh, well you just needed to update your compiler to the new gcc by compiling the new gcc sources. And when that's done then you recompile your entire system. And when that's done you then recompile gcc again so that gcc can then optimize itself making all of your future compiles even faster. Oh and when that's done then you do emerge --sync and there will be 5 or so updated packages while you were compiling so you better start compiling those too.
Sure, just spend a couple weeks recompiling.
Unlike us geeks who are pretty knowledgeable about figuring things out with software, others don't quite pick it up that quickly. People are trained in MS Office and other applications for tasks you would probably laugh at as well as tasks that aren't quite as trivial.
My friend who recently graduated with his bachelors was applying for jobs outside of the tech industry (financial institutions) and one of the interviews had an automated MS Excel test. He said none of the help menus worked and you had to do the operation correctly the first time in order to get it right. For their lines of work, maybe being that handy with Excel is a big bonus because they aren't guaranteed to hire someone that is that good with software for their lines of work.
So, sure, while other educational institutions would probably get by with the open source alternatives, they surely would run into problems when employers demand skills in software they don't teach.
From what we know about the brain it takes advantage of many different techniques but I wouldn't necessarily agree that it is pipelined. Pipelining is a parallelization technique for making a serial set of operations execute faster through a processor by changing how the processor executes each instruction. When the brain processes information, it is basically a giant circuit that does all the processing for vision only, nothing else--break anything in the chain and the "vision" capability is either hindered or stopped.
The brain has two separate pathways "vision" data takes: one path determines things like dimensional properties (as in how far away a cup is from you) while the other path determines identification (is what you're looking at a cup?). There have been documented cases where one pathway was lesioned and the patient could identify the object, but could not physically reach out and grab it while if the other pathway was broken the patient could physically catch a ball thrown at them and they could catch it, but they could not recognize what object was thrown at them until they used their other senses (like touch) to determine it.
Each processing unit in the brain does some sort of processing on the data rather than contributing to make the final product. When you "see" an image, you are actual interpreting many different senses from your vision pathways. The only processing that might potentially be shared (as far as I know) is the processing done by the retina like edge detection. All of the other areas are very specialized at what they do and are only designed to do that one task. That's way different from pipelining where each unit is reused for different instructions giving the cpu its general purpose traits.
I'd say multiple processors/cores is more how the brain operates but does not necessarily model how "we" think. What I mean by "we" is that each person has a pre-frontal cortex in their brain has that is where their personality and where their actual "thinking" as a person goes on. The rest of the brain is specialized to do other tasks. Some of those tasks are controlling emotions, labeling and highlighting memories, vision processing, motor skills, and so on. For example, when you first learned to write, you were probably intensely utilizing your prefrontal cortex to write letters. That's because the motor section of your brain specializing in hand-finger motions for writing the letter had not been trained yet. However, as time goes on, you no longer have to think in order to write the letter, in fact you could probably close your eyes and start writing--no prefrontal cortex processing is needed because the motor section now has it programmed in.
So when you're thinking, you're really just utilizing your prefrontal cortex, but if the operation or task your performing is repetitive and can be memorized, at some point that task will be programmed into a specialized unit in your brain leading you to require less or no thinking at all. I'd say the brain itself is designed as a massively parallel unit with multiple areas that can be trained to perform specialized operations.
Now, you may be thinking if each section of the brain can be trained to do something, can they be retrained to do other things? The answer is yes. There have also been cases where due to some reason, people lost a need to utilize one portion of their brain but started utilizing those portions to do other things. For example say a person lost their arms, well now their motor section for their arms is completely useless in their brain. But, because they must not be forced to use their feet and legs in ways they hadn't before, eventually the parts of the brain trained to do arm and hand motions will gradually be utilized to learn and control feet and leg movements. In fact, if you were to map out the amount of brain space used for each portion of the body, you would get a huge proportion devoted to things like hands and mouth where other portions of the body would utilize an insanely small portion of th
On Windows one of the most annoying things that that things install themselves -- which gives them full control over what goes where, up to modifying obscure registry settings and overwriting files. That means you can never be sure you can uninstall something.
He said he was making this package manager for free/open source software, not all windows software. Given that the source code is probably available, it would be possible to determine what files/settings the software requires to allow safe installation and removal. How he would deal with MSIs, I'm not sure since I don't know how those work.
Ubuntu can run well on cheaper hardware than Vista (mainly RAM and video, if you want Aero). So comparing the same hardware means one OS will run better than the other.
But these Dells have the same specs as windows vista machines capable of running aero. I have an E521 with an athlon X2, 1gb ram, and the onboard GeForce 6150 graphics and I've never seen a problem in vista business (in fact the sleep function is quite convenient). The machine was a refurb, costed around $360 shipped, and runs flawlessly: apps start quickly, multitasking is fast, aero isn't choppy or adding considerable lag. I'd actually prefer the dell box with vista to my custom gentoo box with kde for simple tasks. So it's really a moot point as dell is selling quite capable machines rather than the bare minumum specs to sell ubuntu. If they were to offer "last generation" hardware at around $200 it might be possible to get "more" for running ubuntu at a much lower price. But with my experience with vista, once you meet the graphics card and 1gb ram specs, it actually runs quite smoothly.
I'd say the main selling point of C is that you can jump into assembly code and start toying with the layer below. That's pretty useful when you want to exploit something about the hardware to boost performance or whatever you may need to do because your compiler doesn't/can't do it for you. Very few other and newer languages allow that.
Splashscreens: Please, no more splash screens. Just load the stupid application.
Desktop and Program Icons: Applications that feel a need to always put their icons on the desktop (and 10 other places).
Tool bars: There seems to be a "tool bar" for every service/web page these days.
And one last one (that may not quite fit in the category but anyway):
Mapping websites/tools that give you a single line text box to type your address. You listening Google/MS/Yahoo/Mapquest/etc? Give me a text-area control and you parse the stupid newlines! Whoever thought (and continues to think) that single line address inputs are great needs to be shot.
Seriously, if you find it (with equivalent or better specifications), I'd probably think about buying it.
Right now the E520n machine is $409 without the monitor. I haven't been able to find a core 2 duo E520 for a price close to that.
The E520n configuration includes a 17" flat panel monitor. If you select "no monitor" it will drop the price to $409 for the Ubuntu base configuration. The same spec'ed FreeDOS machine is $399. The cheaper FreeDOS configurations come with celeron or pentium 4 processors which are not available with Ubuntu configurations.
When I was in lecture some years ago, there was a girl in the row in front of me with a really small bag for a "backpack". In it she had notebooks and pens/pencils. However, later in the lecture, she pulled out an ultra slim toshiba portege laptop that was literally the size of a spiral notebook. Though it was running win2k at the time, I was still impressed and immediately wished I had one.
One of the problems then with ultra portables or ultra thin laptops was the optical drive and no good form of external storage. These days everything is networked and there a tons of lightweight options for external storage (flash media). In fact, I only use the optical drive as a form of backup, not as a way of transferring data since a usb stick or a network connection is much more convenient.
So if the price is right, I'd buy one too even if it was marketed for girls.