You're missing the bit where the other companies (the ones that Nokia charges the RAND rate to) have contributed back to the general body of patents that cover 3G cellular connections. They helped reduce the time, and therefore cost, of R&D, which helped Nokia bring new products to market sooner.
Apple, which does basically jack shit research of any type, let alone in phone technology, decides they want to use 3G tech, but expects to pay only as much as the companies who (through their own work) helped bring that tech to market. IANAL, but as far as I know they have no legal reason to expect this; Nokia can charge them whatever it feels like.
If Apple didn't like Nokia's behavior and thought they had a case in court, they could have sued Nokia for the "right" to pay the same price as another company, regardless of any differences in the value those companies have to Nokia. They might even have won that case. However, to start selling product that is using the patented technology, knowing full well it is patented, and lacking a license to use those patents... well, you don't need to have a degree in law to recognize that as illegal. *Maybe* Nokia will be forced to let Apple license their tech at the same price as LG, but Apple will still owe Nokia an awful lot of money for all those illegally sold iPhones.
The main difference here is that they advertised, quite clearly, what you do or don't get at which prices. This is more like if you paid the full price (that the market would support) for Windows, thinking you were getting the full product, and only after installing did you find out that you only had Home and would need to pay even more (bringing the total cost to above the market price) for the full version.
That said, maybe my view of this is outdated because I don't consider DLC when determining the market price of a game. This is at least partly because I'm still of the mindset that DLC should be free. I expect that expansion sets which greatly increase the scope of a game will cost money, but I don't expect that a handful of multiplayer-only maps that introduce no new game mechanics will cost money. This may be why I have the expansions to both SC and WC3 (and dozens of maps made post-release by Blizzard, not to mention the maps made by community members) but the only song I got from the Rock Band music store was Still Alive... (in case anybody doesn't know, it's the only free song in the store).
Where the *HELL* do people keep getting this "$50 or $60" for each SC2 expansion from? AFAIK Blizzard expansions have never cost anywhere near that even at release ($30 for Frozen Throne, the last one I checked - not a fan of WOW and its pricing model is different anyhow), and they drop off quickly.
Assuming the campaign missions are of roughly equal length and depth to those of SC1, you're getting exactly the same amount of content - about 30 missions plus multiplayer in the first release, and another 30 missions per expansion - for what should be the same price. There are only two differences: the campaigns are re-ordered, and you know from the beginning that there will be expansions. I don't see either of those as being worth crying foul over.
That said, do *not* get me started on their elimination of LAN support. The only reason I ever play DotA anymore is because HoN doesn't support LAN (yet, not sure if it ever will though there's a grayed-out button for it in the beta). If SC2 doesn't get LAN, I might just not buy it - there are lots of other good RTS games, and I spend a lot of time in places without a reliable, fast, cheap, or low-latency Internet connection.
Are you seriously comparing a modern language that supports OOP or procedural code with structured exception handling and runs on a cross-platform garbage-collected type-safe JIT-compiled runtime to A) A language primarily used to write macros in Excel and becoming obsolete even there, and B) A scripting language which is already quite obsolete?
Don't use Java/C#/Python anything unless you hate these kids. I haven't used Java/C#/Python but if they bear any resemblance to K&R C or ADA 83 whatsoever stay far away.
I generally hate this meme, but seriously, fixed that for you. Languages are often a *lot* better than their predecessors, let alone the special-purpose offshoots of said predecessors.
C++ is definitely still a very popular language, but it is losing ground. While I doubt it will ever vanish entirely, I expect that within the next decade it will diminish until it is no longer the most common language for new development, let alone being more popular than the rest put together. JIT-compiled languages like Java and C# are catching up very rapidly. True embedded development will always be in a relatively low-level language, but things like phones are started to expect developers to use Java or C# or sometimes even Python. Finally, don't forget JavaScript - not only is it also becoming a JIT-compiled language on most popular implementations (even IE, whenever 9 comes out), it's used on nearly every PC-like device (smartphones, Internet tablets, handheld gaming consoles, and of course desktops/laptops).
As for C vs. C++, there are definitely some advantages to learning C. One of them is that learning the C++ way of doing things obscures some information from the inexperienced coder - e.g. a lot of people seem to not realize that overloaded operators, such as for cout, are actually procedure calls - and another is that C++ is a much more complex language to learn; C holds your hand less, but learning enough to read other peoples' C code, and write good C code for other people to read, takes less time than the equivalent learning for C++.
As another poster pointed out, your knowledge of Pascal is completely obsolete. In similar vein, I wonder if you've even glanced at a modern BASIC derivative; aside from the generally human-readable syntax, which admittedly constrains one's options slightly in how you write your code (no, for(;;) is not a valid way to write a "forever" or while (true) loop in VB, I'm sorry) it bears almost no resemblance to the BASIC of which Dijkstra spoke. I see more goto in C/C++ than in modern VB (which doesn't even need it for exceptions anymore), it cleanly supports procedural or OOP paradigms, and while it does suffer the "hides what the runtime is doing" somewhat (garbage collection, etc.) it is functionally near-identical to Java.
Python, Java, and VB (one must assume it's VB.NET, and thus has the same libraries as C#) are definitely what I would suggest on the basis of libraries. OK, you can do C++ with the CLR and CLR libraries, but C++ is *not* a good choice for a first language.
There's a lot of hate on/. for VB, perhaps because not many Slashdotters have tried any version of the language from the last 8 years, but it *is* a good first language - static and strong typing (by default now, I believe), either procedural or OOP (full support for inheritance, unlike legacy VB), BASIC-style syntax (intuitive and quick to pick up), fully memory managed (real GC, not just ref-counting), structured exception handling (no, it's not On Error Goto anymore), and all the.NET/Mono libraries available (before you ask, yes Mono has a VB compiler/runtime, and once you compile it all down to CIL the libraries are usable by any language).
Java has about half those advantages plus a lot of silly restrictions (although at least Scanner makes getting keyboard input a lot less retarded than it used to be), but it's still a popular choice for learning a first language, and a practical choice for those who want to make a career of programming (though they should learn multiple languages anyhow). Python is a better choice, and possibly quicker to learn, although I'm not a fan of dynamically typed languages with significant whitespace.
I'm actually somewhat surprised that of the (wide variety of) languages that can run on.NET / Mono, the only major one they're missing is the language that was built for the framework. C# is basically Java with more C-like syntax (namespaces, the use of : for inheritance, etc.), fewer restrictions on what you can do (stack-allocated objects, unsigned types, et.c), fewer stupid restrictions (multiple public classes per file allowed, or one class across multiple files, no requirements of classname = filename or directory structure = namespace structure), fewer legacy hacks (generics, I'm looking at you), and the ability to use pointers if you *REALLY* want to.
VB.NET is typesafe and statically typed (I think you could force VB6 to do the same, not that it matters), and its syntax is, well, BASIC. Love it or hate it, it's undeniably simple and quick to pick up. Although technically proprietary, Mono has a pretty good implementation of the language; aside from a few intrinsic functions carried over from legacy VB (most of which have.NET/Mono library equivalents) it's not that hard to compile or run once you've got a working Common Language Runtime.
For Python, I suppose they probably want the reference implementation (CPython) but IronPython is also quite a good implementation, and has become fairly popular. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the 3rd-most common CLR language after C# and VB, although C++ might have it beat there.
C++ is not a language I would suggest starting on, although it's a valuable one to know. It also makes for pretty seamless interaction between managed and unmanaged code, if you want to link it into the CLR... but for a project like this it's not the right choice, I think. Too much weird syntax, too much potential for obscure error messages, and while you *can* avoid the issue of manual memory management I would not choose C++ as my language of choice if I'm working entirely with memory-managed code.
Hmm... this depends on the implementation that the examiners require. If you're allowed to use any runtime at all, then there are lots of (JIT) compilers for Python - IronPython, Jython, and Unladen Swallow are all reasonably fast (Psyco may be faster; I've never seen it used). However, they all also have slight differences, even if only in what version of the language they support, from the reference implementation.
He could be. They don't market it for the purpose, but you can browse the web on the Kindle. It has a full keyboard too, not large or terribly easy to type on but I'd take it over a touch-screen keyboard that covers much of the viewable area.
Off-topic, but that reminds me of a humorous anecdote from a co-worker who's been in the industry for a while: back in the day when cryptography was classified as a munition and export of it was forbidden, there was a special exemption in the law for missiles (I suppose a weapon launched at an enemy country could arguable be called an export). Of course, this restriction annoyed the heck out of open source developers and researchers, who would resort to ridiculous work-around methods like printing all their source code, mailing it (this was apparently legal), and running OCR on it at the other end.
My co-worker's proposed approach was quite appealing: put your source on floppy disks or similar portable storage, attach them to a model rocket, drive to the border of a country with less restrictive laws, and fire them across. Forget the Internet, trade code by solid rocket engine!
I don't know what kind of hybernation [sic] you've been using, but I guarantee you that not even a Mac blessed by Steve Jobs himself can come out of hibernation (also known as suspend-to-disk) in less than the amount of time necessary to run POST and then read the RAM image off of the hard disk. Granted, that can be pretty fast, but I strongly suspect you're confusing suspend (to RAM) with hibernate.
I have a tablet computer (convertible laptop) with 4GB of RAM but a painfully slow 1.8" hard disk. It takes bloody ages to come out of hibernate, due to its shitty disk I/O rate, but it comes out of sleep (suspend) instantly (before I have the screen tipped back to the viewable position, it'll be at the login screen). It runs Win7 (x64, not that I expect it matters). My other Win7 laptop is nearly as fast. Hell, I've still got a Windows 2000 box around here that comes out of sleep mode in under two seconds.
It's worth noting that on Windows (Vista and up, not something as outdated as XP), you can use "hybrid sleep" where your data is written to disk just in case, but stays in sleep mode for a few hours before powering off entirely. OS X may do this as well; it's possible that you saw a "hibernated" computer recovering from this state and that led to your misconception about their resume speed.
I don't know of anything that does what OnLinve does, although Remote Desktop (tsclient/rdesktop) or Live Mesh (now available for Mac, http://mesh.com/ might work well enough to try. RD can save bandwidth by just sending the draw commands (rather than the rendered frames) over the network, which is a big advantage when working remotely on a slow connection. You actually can use this technique for gaming, but it uses the client's video card, which negates the purpose. For gaming on a fast LAN, though, it might be able to push rendered frames rather than draw commands, using the server's GPU to do the work.
OnLive uses lossy compression to provide the video stream, which of course neither of the services I've mentioned above do (they're designed for working remotely, and having your documents blurred by compression artifacts wouldn't go over well). It would be an interesting project, though.
Joke or not, this is an interesting question. The iPad might actually have sufficient hardware performance (if OnLive ported the client to ARM) but the input would be... awkward. I can't even play real-time games with a digitizer stylus that offers precision, hover, and the ability to right click, while covering less of my screen than a finger. Multi-touch or not, the iPad's input capabilities (excluding bluetooth peripherals that you'd need a desk to use) are utterly inadequate for this type of gaming.
That said, with a mouse and keyboard, the iPad might be able to do this if OnLive could get their client into the store. Of course, a four-year-old laptop could be had for less money that would offer better performance, have a bigger display, include a built-in keyboard, and allow one to use a wired mouse (cheaper, no battery issues). Anybody who would use this service on an iPad almost certainly already has a traditional computer capable of running their client better.
Going by other comments in the thread, it sounds like the stream is bout 1 Mbps (for perspective, that's in the ballpark of a Skype video call on my system). To put it another way, it'll eat a megabyte of cap every 8 seconds, 2 hours and 15 minutes of OnLive gaming will use up just over 1 GB of your bandwidth.
Random anecdotal example: A friend of mine bought a PAX 08-branded Razer Deathadder gaming mouse at (surprise) PAX 08. Turns out these mice had a defect: the scroll wheel doesn't glow! Mind you, I didn't even know it was supposed to (maybe my friend did, not sure) but in any case, Razer immediately apologized for the "defective" batch of mice (that were produced one time, in limited quantity, specifically for one event) and shipped everybody a replacement without the cosmetic defect. Two high-quality, fully functional mice, for the price of one, on a special one-off production run no less.
Why yes, I do recommend buying gaming peripherals from them. Who would have guessed?
Well, for one thing, the Xbox 360 (and Zune/ZuneHD) specifically provides support for homebrew apps (most of which are games, of course). The XNA license could be more open - that is, it's not F/OSS - but it's about what one would expect, not the ridiculous terms found here (not permitted to disclose the license itself ?!?)
I'll grant you that the limitations of XNA (no direct hardware access) mean that the big names in the industry will go on dealing with the full console development kits and all their related costs/restrictions, but on the scale of openness toward developers, Apple falls somewhere between Microsoft (on the more open end, with Linux-based devices much further in that direction) and Nintendo (no homebrew at all, lawsuits, etc.) Grouping those three together seem rather disingenuous to me.
I don't have a DS, but I wasn't under the impression that it has Flash support in web browsing (Flash 10 already exists for Tegra 2, and lots of WinCE-based devices have had Flash capability). That alone is a big plus.
The screens on the DS are *tiny* compared to this. Sure, you mentioned "bigger", but we're talking about several times as much space. DS screens are what, 3" diagonal? This thing has 7" screens, which is more than 4x as much space (assuming similar aspect ratio). You can actually read a book, of view a full web page, in something like this. Can you honestly imagine trying to put together an actual presentation - the kind of thing you might project on a screen at a business meeting - on the screens of a DS? I can't... yet that is one of the capabilities the Courier specifically highlights.
Multi-touch would be very nice. The DS has many more hardware buttons, which have some real advantages, but also have serious disadvantages. They take up more space that could be devoted to display, make the chassis bulkier, are probably more likely to fail in some way (moving parts and all that), and enforce requirements on how you hold the device. With multi-touch, you can have gestures that provide all the same kind of actions - zooming, scrolling, switching interface modes (search, applicaiton switch, that nifty graphical display of your web page favorites, etc.), and of course anything application-specific that a developer might want to implement (see the iPhone and some of the apps coming out for the ZuneHD).
Frankly, cool though the inductive charging would be, that seems the least exciting of the capabilities of this new device. This is the Internet in your pocket, replaces (paper) notebooks and journals, would be perfect for reading books or news, and could conceivably do much, much more (damn near every MS computer-like device, including the classic non-HD Zunes, support third-party software... there's lot sof room on that Apps screen for some really cool stuff).
Even the Xbox 360 (and Zune, which you didn't mention) support homebrew software - mostly, but not entirely, games - via XNA. You're limited to the APIs that XNA provides, but you can compile it for the platform in question, it will run on it. Microsoft even has a supported channel for distribution of XNA games on Xbox Live, although you can also just download the applicaiton off the web (using a PC) and move it to your Xbox 360 or Zune/Zune HD.
Kind of like the way that is Android (the mobile OS) runs on Linux (the kernel), that means that Android IS Linux? I suppose in one sense that's true (the kernel is a core part of an OS), but it's still a stupid claim. We don't refer to operating systems by their kernels, as a general rule. I'm typing this from software running on NT 6.1, but if you asked me what OS I use I'd say Windows 7. One of my other computers use Linux 2.6.something, but if you ask me what OS it runs I'd say OpenSuse 11.2. Some of my friends would answer Ubuntu, or even Gutsy Gibbon or similar. If I asked a Mac-using friend what his computer ran, he wouldn't tell me it was XNU, or even Darwin, he'd say Snow Leopard, or possibly just OS X, or OS X 10.6.
An OS is a lot more than just a kernel, and even then, no version of "Windows Mobile" runs on the version of "Windows CE" under discussion. With the possible exception of the Zune HD, there aren't any released devices in the world that run on this kernel, and there certainly aren't any that run on this particular operating system.
Blizzard has taken a similar, though different, approach to this with WarCraft 3 and StarCraft. The online servers for both games are still active, and both will still check your CD key (meaning you can't hav ea bunch of people using the same copy go online at once) but they patched out the requirement of having the CD in the drive. This has made LAN parties much easier - I've played a ton of SC and WC3 LAN over the last few years - as well as making the games playable on computers without CD-ROM drives. It does make it easier to give your friends a copy of the game, but CD-level anti-copy has never been very effective and the games incorporate no phone-home requirement, so it's not like this was hard to do before. If they want to play online with you (or with others at any time that you might want to go online) they need their own copy, though.
I'm missing something here... why the reference to Windoes Phone 7 (or whatever the hell it's called)? MS has added restrictions to OEMs/distributors, but from the sound of things the owner of the phone can still run just about anything they want on there, MS-approved or not.
FYI, you can write and run your own software on an Xbox 360 (or a Zune, if you're so inclined) using XNA (C# framework for games, although usable for non-games too). It's a high-level language and you only have access to those parts of the system that the framework exposes, but if you can compile it, you're allowed to run it. Microsoft even hosts homebrew Xbox 360 games in an online catalog/store, if their developers choose to pay the $100 fee (much like Apple's dev kit, except the actual SDK is free).
If you want to get a taste of what multi-tasking on a smartphone hardware spec device would be, install Windows 95 on a 600 MHz Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM and a 8 GB hard drive.
Windows 95 would run blazingly fast on that hardware. My Win95 box was a 90 MHz Pentium (1st-gen) with 32 MB of RAM and a hard drive of 1.2GB or so. Running Word and Internet Explorer and Calculator and Explorer all at the same time worked fine, provided we're talking about versions of these programs from 1996 or so.
Disable the swap file.
Why the hell would you do that? There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use some of the iPhones's storage as swap space. Flash will wear out eventually, but it takes a long time with modern chips, and with modern wear-leveling algorithms every time you write to the pagefile it would go someplace else in the physical storage, so no specific cells would wear out particularly fast. That's leaving aside the fact that for the 1995-1998 era, 128MB was a ton of RAM by desktop standards; my RAM plus pagefile *might* have been that big, but probably not (that would be a pagefile 3x the saize of physical RAM on my old Win95 box)
Then install Firefox and a few other small productivity apps and run them at the same time.
Ignoring the fact that Firefox didn't exist back then (and current versions won't run on Win95 anyhow), see my above comment about multitasking on a system with about 1/4 the hardware capabilities. Substitute Netscape for IE, if it makes you feel better. You wouldn't use modern desktop software on an iPhone anyhow (did you think that MS Office Mobile is simply an ARM port of desktop Office?). If I want to have Pandora playing in the background, be browsing RSS feeds in the foreground, and have a couple web pages open for when I'm done with the RSS, then that would be *entirely* within the capability of the iPhone's hardware.
Hell, ever played with a Nokia N8x0? Physically about the size of a first-gen iPhone, 400MHz ARM CPU, not much RAM (96MB?) although it can use a SD card as swap, and it runs Linuk (literally, a modified Debian GNU/Linux called Maemo). Web browsing (with Flash even) while playing music/chatting on Skype and reading a PDF/checking mail all at once, totally possible (although the Flash might drag on the CPU, depening on how demanding it is). The default X window manager only displays one application at a time, but the others are still running and can be switched to with two taps of a finger.
That sounds like a great idea, with one exception: risk of false positives. There are legit things one can do that *look* like an infection, ranging from sending an email BCCed for 103 people to accidentally leaving ping running for an hour or three. Hell, I could (intentionally) be communicating with known botnet servers over IRC - if, for example, I was trying to probe their C&C (doing it directly from my computer might not be a good way to do so, but is a legit activity).
Is there an appeal process, or similar? Alternatively, do you let people know even slightly prior to disconnecting them? Disconnect first and ask questions (or rather, charge money) later might be a good approach in some situations, but I can't imagine the typical univeristy infection event is one of those.
For that matter, how do you disconnect people? Changing a MAC address, putting a router between me and the wall, or using a different network card all seem like reasonable ways to get around MAC filtering. If it's login based, I'd expect people would just use their roommate's credentials...
FYI, the system-wide registry hive (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, or HKLM) is stored in a different file than the per-user registry hives (HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or HKCU, is stored under the user profile directory).
The complaint that each registry hive is all in one file is still somewhat valid (I kind of like having a centralized tool for changing configuration settings, which is a lot easier when you have fewer files containing the settings) but only on Win9x was the entire registry stored in a single location.
Additionally, individual registry keys have their own ACLs. It's actually much finer-grained security than the Unix-like way of doing things. The defaults are that stuff in HKLM is world-readable and Admin-writable, and keys within HKCU are read/write by you (and Admin) only, but it's all configurable.
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You're missing the bit where the other companies (the ones that Nokia charges the RAND rate to) have contributed back to the general body of patents that cover 3G cellular connections. They helped reduce the time, and therefore cost, of R&D, which helped Nokia bring new products to market sooner.
Apple, which does basically jack shit research of any type, let alone in phone technology, decides they want to use 3G tech, but expects to pay only as much as the companies who (through their own work) helped bring that tech to market. IANAL, but as far as I know they have no legal reason to expect this; Nokia can charge them whatever it feels like.
If Apple didn't like Nokia's behavior and thought they had a case in court, they could have sued Nokia for the "right" to pay the same price as another company, regardless of any differences in the value those companies have to Nokia. They might even have won that case. However, to start selling product that is using the patented technology, knowing full well it is patented, and lacking a license to use those patents... well, you don't need to have a degree in law to recognize that as illegal. *Maybe* Nokia will be forced to let Apple license their tech at the same price as LG, but Apple will still owe Nokia an awful lot of money for all those illegally sold iPhones.
The main difference here is that they advertised, quite clearly, what you do or don't get at which prices. This is more like if you paid the full price (that the market would support) for Windows, thinking you were getting the full product, and only after installing did you find out that you only had Home and would need to pay even more (bringing the total cost to above the market price) for the full version.
That said, maybe my view of this is outdated because I don't consider DLC when determining the market price of a game. This is at least partly because I'm still of the mindset that DLC should be free. I expect that expansion sets which greatly increase the scope of a game will cost money, but I don't expect that a handful of multiplayer-only maps that introduce no new game mechanics will cost money. This may be why I have the expansions to both SC and WC3 (and dozens of maps made post-release by Blizzard, not to mention the maps made by community members) but the only song I got from the Rock Band music store was Still Alive... (in case anybody doesn't know, it's the only free song in the store).
Where the *HELL* do people keep getting this "$50 or $60" for each SC2 expansion from? AFAIK Blizzard expansions have never cost anywhere near that even at release ($30 for Frozen Throne, the last one I checked - not a fan of WOW and its pricing model is different anyhow), and they drop off quickly.
Assuming the campaign missions are of roughly equal length and depth to those of SC1, you're getting exactly the same amount of content - about 30 missions plus multiplayer in the first release, and another 30 missions per expansion - for what should be the same price. There are only two differences: the campaigns are re-ordered, and you know from the beginning that there will be expansions. I don't see either of those as being worth crying foul over.
That said, do *not* get me started on their elimination of LAN support. The only reason I ever play DotA anymore is because HoN doesn't support LAN (yet, not sure if it ever will though there's a grayed-out button for it in the beta). If SC2 doesn't get LAN, I might just not buy it - there are lots of other good RTS games, and I spend a lot of time in places without a reliable, fast, cheap, or low-latency Internet connection.
Are you seriously comparing a modern language that supports OOP or procedural code with structured exception handling and runs on a cross-platform garbage-collected type-safe JIT-compiled runtime to
A) A language primarily used to write macros in Excel and becoming obsolete even there,
and
B) A scripting language which is already quite obsolete?
Don't use Java/C#/Python anything unless you hate these kids. I haven't used Java/C#/Python but if they bear any resemblance to K&R C or ADA 83 whatsoever stay far away.
I generally hate this meme, but seriously, fixed that for you. Languages are often a *lot* better than their predecessors, let alone the special-purpose offshoots of said predecessors.
C++ is definitely still a very popular language, but it is losing ground. While I doubt it will ever vanish entirely, I expect that within the next decade it will diminish until it is no longer the most common language for new development, let alone being more popular than the rest put together. JIT-compiled languages like Java and C# are catching up very rapidly. True embedded development will always be in a relatively low-level language, but things like phones are started to expect developers to use Java or C# or sometimes even Python. Finally, don't forget JavaScript - not only is it also becoming a JIT-compiled language on most popular implementations (even IE, whenever 9 comes out), it's used on nearly every PC-like device (smartphones, Internet tablets, handheld gaming consoles, and of course desktops/laptops).
As for C vs. C++, there are definitely some advantages to learning C. One of them is that learning the C++ way of doing things obscures some information from the inexperienced coder - e.g. a lot of people seem to not realize that overloaded operators, such as for cout, are actually procedure calls - and another is that C++ is a much more complex language to learn; C holds your hand less, but learning enough to read other peoples' C code, and write good C code for other people to read, takes less time than the equivalent learning for C++.
As another poster pointed out, your knowledge of Pascal is completely obsolete. In similar vein, I wonder if you've even glanced at a modern BASIC derivative; aside from the generally human-readable syntax, which admittedly constrains one's options slightly in how you write your code (no, for(;;) is not a valid way to write a "forever" or while (true) loop in VB, I'm sorry) it bears almost no resemblance to the BASIC of which Dijkstra spoke. I see more goto in C/C++ than in modern VB (which doesn't even need it for exceptions anymore), it cleanly supports procedural or OOP paradigms, and while it does suffer the "hides what the runtime is doing" somewhat (garbage collection, etc.) it is functionally near-identical to Java.
Python, Java, and VB (one must assume it's VB.NET, and thus has the same libraries as C#) are definitely what I would suggest on the basis of libraries. OK, you can do C++ with the CLR and CLR libraries, but C++ is *not* a good choice for a first language.
There's a lot of hate on /. for VB, perhaps because not many Slashdotters have tried any version of the language from the last 8 years, but it *is* a good first language - static and strong typing (by default now, I believe), either procedural or OOP (full support for inheritance, unlike legacy VB), BASIC-style syntax (intuitive and quick to pick up), fully memory managed (real GC, not just ref-counting), structured exception handling (no, it's not On Error Goto anymore), and all the .NET/Mono libraries available (before you ask, yes Mono has a VB compiler/runtime, and once you compile it all down to CIL the libraries are usable by any language).
Java has about half those advantages plus a lot of silly restrictions (although at least Scanner makes getting keyboard input a lot less retarded than it used to be), but it's still a popular choice for learning a first language, and a practical choice for those who want to make a career of programming (though they should learn multiple languages anyhow). Python is a better choice, and possibly quicker to learn, although I'm not a fan of dynamically typed languages with significant whitespace.
I'm actually somewhat surprised that of the (wide variety of) languages that can run on .NET / Mono, the only major one they're missing is the language that was built for the framework. C# is basically Java with more C-like syntax (namespaces, the use of : for inheritance, etc.), fewer restrictions on what you can do (stack-allocated objects, unsigned types, et.c), fewer stupid restrictions (multiple public classes per file allowed, or one class across multiple files, no requirements of classname = filename or directory structure = namespace structure), fewer legacy hacks (generics, I'm looking at you), and the ability to use pointers if you *REALLY* want to.
VB.NET is typesafe and statically typed (I think you could force VB6 to do the same, not that it matters), and its syntax is, well, BASIC. Love it or hate it, it's undeniably simple and quick to pick up. Although technically proprietary, Mono has a pretty good implementation of the language; aside from a few intrinsic functions carried over from legacy VB (most of which have .NET/Mono library equivalents) it's not that hard to compile or run once you've got a working Common Language Runtime.
For Python, I suppose they probably want the reference implementation (CPython) but IronPython is also quite a good implementation, and has become fairly popular. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the 3rd-most common CLR language after C# and VB, although C++ might have it beat there.
C++ is not a language I would suggest starting on, although it's a valuable one to know. It also makes for pretty seamless interaction between managed and unmanaged code, if you want to link it into the CLR... but for a project like this it's not the right choice, I think. Too much weird syntax, too much potential for obscure error messages, and while you *can* avoid the issue of manual memory management I would not choose C++ as my language of choice if I'm working entirely with memory-managed code.
Hmm... this depends on the implementation that the examiners require. If you're allowed to use any runtime at all, then there are lots of (JIT) compilers for Python - IronPython, Jython, and Unladen Swallow are all reasonably fast (Psyco may be faster; I've never seen it used). However, they all also have slight differences, even if only in what version of the language they support, from the reference implementation.
He could be. They don't market it for the purpose, but you can browse the web on the Kindle. It has a full keyboard too, not large or terribly easy to type on but I'd take it over a touch-screen keyboard that covers much of the viewable area.
Off-topic, but that reminds me of a humorous anecdote from a co-worker who's been in the industry for a while: back in the day when cryptography was classified as a munition and export of it was forbidden, there was a special exemption in the law for missiles (I suppose a weapon launched at an enemy country could arguable be called an export). Of course, this restriction annoyed the heck out of open source developers and researchers, who would resort to ridiculous work-around methods like printing all their source code, mailing it (this was apparently legal), and running OCR on it at the other end.
My co-worker's proposed approach was quite appealing: put your source on floppy disks or similar portable storage, attach them to a model rocket, drive to the border of a country with less restrictive laws, and fire them across. Forget the Internet, trade code by solid rocket engine!
I don't know what kind of hybernation [sic] you've been using, but I guarantee you that not even a Mac blessed by Steve Jobs himself can come out of hibernation (also known as suspend-to-disk) in less than the amount of time necessary to run POST and then read the RAM image off of the hard disk. Granted, that can be pretty fast, but I strongly suspect you're confusing suspend (to RAM) with hibernate.
I have a tablet computer (convertible laptop) with 4GB of RAM but a painfully slow 1.8" hard disk. It takes bloody ages to come out of hibernate, due to its shitty disk I/O rate, but it comes out of sleep (suspend) instantly (before I have the screen tipped back to the viewable position, it'll be at the login screen). It runs Win7 (x64, not that I expect it matters). My other Win7 laptop is nearly as fast. Hell, I've still got a Windows 2000 box around here that comes out of sleep mode in under two seconds.
It's worth noting that on Windows (Vista and up, not something as outdated as XP), you can use "hybrid sleep" where your data is written to disk just in case, but stays in sleep mode for a few hours before powering off entirely. OS X may do this as well; it's possible that you saw a "hibernated" computer recovering from this state and that led to your misconception about their resume speed.
I don't know of anything that does what OnLinve does, although Remote Desktop (tsclient/rdesktop) or Live Mesh (now available for Mac, http://mesh.com/ might work well enough to try. RD can save bandwidth by just sending the draw commands (rather than the rendered frames) over the network, which is a big advantage when working remotely on a slow connection. You actually can use this technique for gaming, but it uses the client's video card, which negates the purpose. For gaming on a fast LAN, though, it might be able to push rendered frames rather than draw commands, using the server's GPU to do the work.
OnLive uses lossy compression to provide the video stream, which of course neither of the services I've mentioned above do (they're designed for working remotely, and having your documents blurred by compression artifacts wouldn't go over well). It would be an interesting project, though.
Joke or not, this is an interesting question. The iPad might actually have sufficient hardware performance (if OnLive ported the client to ARM) but the input would be... awkward. I can't even play real-time games with a digitizer stylus that offers precision, hover, and the ability to right click, while covering less of my screen than a finger. Multi-touch or not, the iPad's input capabilities (excluding bluetooth peripherals that you'd need a desk to use) are utterly inadequate for this type of gaming.
That said, with a mouse and keyboard, the iPad might be able to do this if OnLive could get their client into the store. Of course, a four-year-old laptop could be had for less money that would offer better performance, have a bigger display, include a built-in keyboard, and allow one to use a wired mouse (cheaper, no battery issues). Anybody who would use this service on an iPad almost certainly already has a traditional computer capable of running their client better.
Going by other comments in the thread, it sounds like the stream is bout 1 Mbps (for perspective, that's in the ballpark of a Skype video call on my system). To put it another way, it'll eat a megabyte of cap every 8 seconds, 2 hours and 15 minutes of OnLive gaming will use up just over 1 GB of your bandwidth.
Random anecdotal example: A friend of mine bought a PAX 08-branded Razer Deathadder gaming mouse at (surprise) PAX 08. Turns out these mice had a defect: the scroll wheel doesn't glow! Mind you, I didn't even know it was supposed to (maybe my friend did, not sure) but in any case, Razer immediately apologized for the "defective" batch of mice (that were produced one time, in limited quantity, specifically for one event) and shipped everybody a replacement without the cosmetic defect. Two high-quality, fully functional mice, for the price of one, on a special one-off production run no less.
Why yes, I do recommend buying gaming peripherals from them. Who would have guessed?
Well, for one thing, the Xbox 360 (and Zune/ZuneHD) specifically provides support for homebrew apps (most of which are games, of course). The XNA license could be more open - that is, it's not F/OSS - but it's about what one would expect, not the ridiculous terms found here (not permitted to disclose the license itself ?!?)
I'll grant you that the limitations of XNA (no direct hardware access) mean that the big names in the industry will go on dealing with the full console development kits and all their related costs/restrictions, but on the scale of openness toward developers, Apple falls somewhere between Microsoft (on the more open end, with Linux-based devices much further in that direction) and Nintendo (no homebrew at all, lawsuits, etc.) Grouping those three together seem rather disingenuous to me.
I don't have a DS, but I wasn't under the impression that it has Flash support in web browsing (Flash 10 already exists for Tegra 2, and lots of WinCE-based devices have had Flash capability). That alone is a big plus.
The screens on the DS are *tiny* compared to this. Sure, you mentioned "bigger", but we're talking about several times as much space. DS screens are what, 3" diagonal? This thing has 7" screens, which is more than 4x as much space (assuming similar aspect ratio). You can actually read a book, of view a full web page, in something like this. Can you honestly imagine trying to put together an actual presentation - the kind of thing you might project on a screen at a business meeting - on the screens of a DS? I can't... yet that is one of the capabilities the Courier specifically highlights.
Multi-touch would be very nice. The DS has many more hardware buttons, which have some real advantages, but also have serious disadvantages. They take up more space that could be devoted to display, make the chassis bulkier, are probably more likely to fail in some way (moving parts and all that), and enforce requirements on how you hold the device. With multi-touch, you can have gestures that provide all the same kind of actions - zooming, scrolling, switching interface modes (search, applicaiton switch, that nifty graphical display of your web page favorites, etc.), and of course anything application-specific that a developer might want to implement (see the iPhone and some of the apps coming out for the ZuneHD).
Frankly, cool though the inductive charging would be, that seems the least exciting of the capabilities of this new device. This is the Internet in your pocket, replaces (paper) notebooks and journals, would be perfect for reading books or news, and could conceivably do much, much more (damn near every MS computer-like device, including the classic non-HD Zunes, support third-party software... there's lot sof room on that Apps screen for some really cool stuff).
Even the Xbox 360 (and Zune, which you didn't mention) support homebrew software - mostly, but not entirely, games - via XNA. You're limited to the APIs that XNA provides, but you can compile it for the platform in question, it will run on it. Microsoft even has a supported channel for distribution of XNA games on Xbox Live, although you can also just download the applicaiton off the web (using a PC) and move it to your Xbox 360 or Zune/Zune HD.
Kind of like the way that is Android (the mobile OS) runs on Linux (the kernel), that means that Android IS Linux? I suppose in one sense that's true (the kernel is a core part of an OS), but it's still a stupid claim. We don't refer to operating systems by their kernels, as a general rule. I'm typing this from software running on NT 6.1, but if you asked me what OS I use I'd say Windows 7. One of my other computers use Linux 2.6.something, but if you ask me what OS it runs I'd say OpenSuse 11.2. Some of my friends would answer Ubuntu, or even Gutsy Gibbon or similar. If I asked a Mac-using friend what his computer ran, he wouldn't tell me it was XNU, or even Darwin, he'd say Snow Leopard, or possibly just OS X, or OS X 10.6.
An OS is a lot more than just a kernel, and even then, no version of "Windows Mobile" runs on the version of "Windows CE" under discussion. With the possible exception of the Zune HD, there aren't any released devices in the world that run on this kernel, and there certainly aren't any that run on this particular operating system.
Blizzard has taken a similar, though different, approach to this with WarCraft 3 and StarCraft. The online servers for both games are still active, and both will still check your CD key (meaning you can't hav ea bunch of people using the same copy go online at once) but they patched out the requirement of having the CD in the drive. This has made LAN parties much easier - I've played a ton of SC and WC3 LAN over the last few years - as well as making the games playable on computers without CD-ROM drives. It does make it easier to give your friends a copy of the game, but CD-level anti-copy has never been very effective and the games incorporate no phone-home requirement, so it's not like this was hard to do before. If they want to play online with you (or with others at any time that you might want to go online) they need their own copy, though.
I'm missing something here... why the reference to Windoes Phone 7 (or whatever the hell it's called)? MS has added restrictions to OEMs/distributors, but from the sound of things the owner of the phone can still run just about anything they want on there, MS-approved or not.
FYI, you can write and run your own software on an Xbox 360 (or a Zune, if you're so inclined) using XNA (C# framework for games, although usable for non-games too). It's a high-level language and you only have access to those parts of the system that the framework exposes, but if you can compile it, you're allowed to run it. Microsoft even hosts homebrew Xbox 360 games in an online catalog/store, if their developers choose to pay the $100 fee (much like Apple's dev kit, except the actual SDK is free).
If you want to get a taste of what multi-tasking on a smartphone hardware spec device would be, install Windows 95 on a 600 MHz Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM and a 8 GB hard drive.
Windows 95 would run blazingly fast on that hardware. My Win95 box was a 90 MHz Pentium (1st-gen) with 32 MB of RAM and a hard drive of 1.2GB or so. Running Word and Internet Explorer and Calculator and Explorer all at the same time worked fine, provided we're talking about versions of these programs from 1996 or so.
Disable the swap file.
Why the hell would you do that? There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use some of the iPhones's storage as swap space. Flash will wear out eventually, but it takes a long time with modern chips, and with modern wear-leveling algorithms every time you write to the pagefile it would go someplace else in the physical storage, so no specific cells would wear out particularly fast. That's leaving aside the fact that for the 1995-1998 era, 128MB was a ton of RAM by desktop standards; my RAM plus pagefile *might* have been that big, but probably not (that would be a pagefile 3x the saize of physical RAM on my old Win95 box)
Then install Firefox and a few other small productivity apps and run them at the same time.
Ignoring the fact that Firefox didn't exist back then (and current versions won't run on Win95 anyhow), see my above comment about multitasking on a system with about 1/4 the hardware capabilities. Substitute Netscape for IE, if it makes you feel better. You wouldn't use modern desktop software on an iPhone anyhow (did you think that MS Office Mobile is simply an ARM port of desktop Office?). If I want to have Pandora playing in the background, be browsing RSS feeds in the foreground, and have a couple web pages open for when I'm done with the RSS, then that would be *entirely* within the capability of the iPhone's hardware.
Hell, ever played with a Nokia N8x0? Physically about the size of a first-gen iPhone, 400MHz ARM CPU, not much RAM (96MB?) although it can use a SD card as swap, and it runs Linuk (literally, a modified Debian GNU/Linux called Maemo). Web browsing (with Flash even) while playing music/chatting on Skype and reading a PDF/checking mail all at once, totally possible (although the Flash might drag on the CPU, depening on how demanding it is). The default X window manager only displays one application at a time, but the others are still running and can be switched to with two taps of a finger.
That sounds like a great idea, with one exception: risk of false positives. There are legit things one can do that *look* like an infection, ranging from sending an email BCCed for 103 people to accidentally leaving ping running for an hour or three. Hell, I could (intentionally) be communicating with known botnet servers over IRC - if, for example, I was trying to probe their C&C (doing it directly from my computer might not be a good way to do so, but is a legit activity).
Is there an appeal process, or similar? Alternatively, do you let people know even slightly prior to disconnecting them? Disconnect first and ask questions (or rather, charge money) later might be a good approach in some situations, but I can't imagine the typical univeristy infection event is one of those.
For that matter, how do you disconnect people? Changing a MAC address, putting a router between me and the wall, or using a different network card all seem like reasonable ways to get around MAC filtering. If it's login based, I'd expect people would just use their roommate's credentials...
FYI, the system-wide registry hive (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, or HKLM) is stored in a different file than the per-user registry hives (HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or HKCU, is stored under the user profile directory).
The complaint that each registry hive is all in one file is still somewhat valid (I kind of like having a centralized tool for changing configuration settings, which is a lot easier when you have fewer files containing the settings) but only on Win9x was the entire registry stored in a single location.
Additionally, individual registry keys have their own ACLs. It's actually much finer-grained security than the Unix-like way of doing things. The defaults are that stuff in HKLM is world-readable and Admin-writable, and keys within HKCU are read/write by you (and Admin) only, but it's all configurable.