Simply put, when I'm in a position to hire myself - in the next few years - I'll simply not hire any person who graduated after 2005 unless they've actually got real world experience under their belt and even then they'll have to get technical describing their work, what they did, etc. That, or they went to a top-notch university that I can trust to have avoided such behaviour.
So basically, it will screw all students including the honest ones.
Note that increasing costs in India, etc, mean that outsourcing will get less desirable over time. Of course, if the home-grown talent cheated their way to a degree (and mark my words that each time you hire a graduate and they're rubbish and know nothing, that university will be discarded on future applications) then outsourcing might be the only way to go, even if it's not any cheaper.
So go work for a startup which desires hero developers, doesn't care about business processes and paperwork or project plans, but might have a few late nights. Preferably a startup with decent funding from a parent company. As soon as the timesheet filling requirement arrives, leave.
That's why any software developer/engineer/designer will never describe their role as IT. And I think that's fair enough really.
Mentally, I think business IT - point and click Windows administration, network maintenance, exchange account setup, etc, as tasks that someone can be trained to do. You see adverts for IT training, and that's the type of stuff they're talking about.
So yeah, there's a superiority complex if you actually studied CS, program for a living, know the insides and outsides of Unix and several languages, etc. Of course, you're still creating some internal business application for the most part... Of course it helps if you actually get excited (mildly) by designing things properly, be they databases, program architectures, and so on.
Outside people find it hard to see the difference, it's computers, innit.
Sadly many IT jobs are boring, consisting of pressing F5 repeatedly on various websites throughout the day.
Some jobs within IT are very interesting, because they are creative and require actual brain utility. Programming is the obvious example. Hell, even coming up with good configurations for sysadmin can be interesting. Point-and-clicking windows admin stuff must be dire though, and is probably where this negative image is coming from.
In much the same way as I find car mechanics boring, I can see why some people would find programming boring, because they don't appreciate the creative aspect. However being paid a reasonably good wage in an in-demand industry to sit inside at a computer is pretty damned good, even if you don't get to ride a road crusher or steamroller, or fly fighter jets (which I imagine is pretty boring for the 95% of the time you are on the ground actually).
Oh, and memo to students: Work is that boring thing we'd rather not do that allows us to pay the bills, buy that exciting car, buy that house to do up, eat that thrilling meal with friends and have a great time, etc. Get over it, but if you do stay away, demand will surely mean higher wages for us already in the industry.
The point was that the out of the box configuration is minging and amateurish, even though they've clearly put a lot of work into it overall. SUSE was always a KDE centric distribution, historically, so the review using Gnome was also a bit weird, although good to see that its not a second rate citizen.
I'm starting to think that with Compiz, there shouldn't even need to be menu bars, start buttons, taskbars. Hit the Windows key on the keyboard (yeah, it should be a penguin) and a launcher / taskswitch layer appears like Dashboard on Mac OS X. So you have the complete desktop for your apps, and a full-screen always-available overlay instantly available for launching apps (start menu) with mini-expose integrated (or mini-alt-tab, or a large taskbar area).
Things like the clock and status bar can be relegated to a desktop widget that you can float or put anywhere.
Instead of having the typical top and bottom panel arrangement, OpenSUSE sticks with a single panel along the bottom of the screen, combining the application launcher with the taskbar and notification areas. HURRAH! Finally. I hate that top menu bar in Ubuntu, it looks so amateurish with those Firefox/Mail/Help icons rammed up against each other.
Shame the review didn't use KDE, as that's the good point about SUSE as far as I am concerned.
Unleaded is £1.20 a litre, and Diesel is £1.33 a litre now.
It's been going up by about a penny a week for the past 20 weeks.
However it impact for us in the past year isn't so bad really - it's gone from 90p -> 120p (+33%). For the US its gone from $2 to $4 (+100%), which is probably rather shocking for them, even if they're paying under half of what we pay still. I guess they have larger, more fuel inefficient cars and longer commutes to deal with on average.
Of course because GPUs are actually very programmable now, and ATI's latest card does over a TeraFLOPS of single precision right now (about 4-5x the single precision power of Cell, and probably 4x the single precision power of sixteen Intel cores)
Ah, yes: "Core 2 Quad has a max per cycle of 4 * (4 cores) FLOPS * speed (mhz, we will say 3.33Ghz) = 53.28 * 1,000,000,000 Hz, or 53,280,000,000 FLOPS". Basically, if the raytracing renderer that Intel have implemented on their CPUs was ported to commercially available GPUs today, they would be beating this Intel system, once optimised.
I.e., The GPU is here to stay, even if raytracing comes into vogue. Mixed rendering will likely rule the roost 2010 - 2015 anyway, where raytracing is used for things that would look better for it only.
Since when was the pound sterling a postfix symbol? You don't write 50$ do you? On the other hand, at least Slashdot has recognised your character set encoding...
But yes, 8GB is free with the £45 tariff, and the 16GB is free with the £75 tariff. Still, assuming an 18 month contract, that ain't cheap. £1350:(
The iPhone is moving to carrier subsidisation now that the hardware, software and ecosystem are ready for primetime. You can only get the subsidy if you get the contract. If there's no non-subsidy method of getting the iPhone, then that's just how it is going to be. No different to getting any other subsidised phone.
Even the 16GB iPhone 3G is free in the UK, on the business £75/month tariff. The 8G is free on the £45/month tariff, and £100 on the £30/month tariff.
Wouldn't it be really neat to run some tests before you build it? We're software engineers here... testing is something we do when it screws up during actual deployment!
XBox360 has a tri-core in-order PowerPC - each core is actually very similar to the single general purpose PPU in the PS3's Cell.
Cell in addition has 8 SPUs. 1 is disabled in the PS3 for yield reasons, and another is reserved, so there are 6 available for general purpose computing.
Both run at 3.2GHz. I think Cell has at least 3x the vector/streaming power of the XBox 360 CPU, but only 1/3rd of the general purpose capability. Figures pulled from thin air, etc.
It's an in-order design, but it does have two threads and a full VMX128 vector processing unit.
This means it's probably about as powerful as a 3.2GHz Intel Atom CPU (maybe a bit stronger because it doesn't have that low-power design requirement) - therefore about as powerful as a 2 GHz Intel Dothan (+/- 25% depending on task and effectiveness of the threading capability), with stronger SIMD and 6 extra very powerful but limited co-processors.
Happy birthday and long live x86. Oh dear God, dog, spaghetti monster, allah, etc, NO, please.
For at least 25 of those years it's been kept alive because there was an existing library of software for it. I'm sure there were 68k vs x86 wars back in 1985 which were pretty one-sided because of the cruft of x86 even then.
At least AMD64 has cleaned it up a lot since. And due to the massive investment it has been incredibly powerful for quite a long time now.:(
128 thousand charity ads were substituted with the Phorm Ad Network advertisements Disgusting and immoral.
Either (a) the website isn't getting any advertising revenue because Phorm has STOLEN the advertising - leading to a loss of revenue for the website and eventual closing.
Or (b) The charity has paid money for an advert display, but Phorm has STOLEN that advert opportunity for their own profit. As it's a charity, that means that's the money of the people who have donated to it. This is vile, nasty behaviour.
Simply inserting extra adverts into a page is bad enough, and also I believe is altering a copyrighted work without authorisation.
It's a shame that ethics and morals aren't part of business / management courses, like they are part of many other coursees. There's something sick at the heart of corporatism.
"Comes in" suggests "now", when in fact the dual-core version is not yet available. The dual-core version has an 8W TDP as well. Original post said that Atom is a dual core processor, which is currently not the case.
Intel's Atom is certainly now "old" technology. It's a ground-up redesign for low power.
However it didn't get low enough in power consumption to be used for phones and PDAs, so Intel are busy creating a new small-low-power laptop and computer category where it can be used in.
Just for the record, I looked up VIA's VX800W single-chip chipset, and its TDP was 3.5W.
This is very very low, and I believe that as a platform VIA have something they can win with, if they put some work in and tweak their story to be about platform power consumption and dedicated hardware acceleration.
Whilst it will be a small computer, the 10" screen is making it very close in size to a 12" laptop, which aren't that expensive these days. My old 12" iBook isn't that much larger, and it's probably faster to boot, so there's not much reason to buy this.
The 9" versions are a little more desirable. I wish they'd make them slimmer.
The Diamondville Atoms that this will compete with use 4W though. In addition the Intel chipsets that they have been paired with so far use up to 22W! If VIA have a 10W chipset (VX800) to use with this, they will have the best overall *platform* in terms of power consumption, and performance will be good as well apparently. The TDPs appear to ramp after 1.3GHz, it must be a side effect of the Fujitsu 65nm process.
The Nano has twice the integer performance and 3-4 times the floating point performance of the C7 per clock though. A 500MHz Nano would probably compete very well with a 1GHz C7. It might also have more aggressive idle modes (Nano gets 100mW, don't know about the C7).
2) Intel's desktop Atom (Diamondville) is 4W, not 2.5W.
3) Intel's chipsets are 4x4s in comparison to the moped-like Atom, thus power consumption is widely unbalanced. VIA have a single-chip solution, but I don't know the power consumption.
4) CPUs spend most of their time in idle - Nano uses 100mW here for all but the highest-end Nano.
The songs are not downloadable so they are not useful for portable players or your mobile phone. There is also no ability to play the songs on Internet radio, game console and DVR devices (like Tivo) And not in cars either, or anywhere that can't run the online lala interface. This has "fail" written all over it - in essence it's paying 10 cents to preview an entire song online before putting down another 89 cents to buy it.
It's called that because the music industry keeps putting their fingers in their ears and saying "lalalalalala can't hear you!".
Slashdot Mirror
Simply put, when I'm in a position to hire myself - in the next few years - I'll simply not hire any person who graduated after 2005 unless they've actually got real world experience under their belt and even then they'll have to get technical describing their work, what they did, etc. That, or they went to a top-notch university that I can trust to have avoided such behaviour.
So basically, it will screw all students including the honest ones.
Note that increasing costs in India, etc, mean that outsourcing will get less desirable over time. Of course, if the home-grown talent cheated their way to a degree (and mark my words that each time you hire a graduate and they're rubbish and know nothing, that university will be discarded on future applications) then outsourcing might be the only way to go, even if it's not any cheaper.
I agree totally.
So go work for a startup which desires hero developers, doesn't care about business processes and paperwork or project plans, but might have a few late nights. Preferably a startup with decent funding from a parent company. As soon as the timesheet filling requirement arrives, leave.
That's why any software developer/engineer/designer will never describe their role as IT. And I think that's fair enough really.
Mentally, I think business IT - point and click Windows administration, network maintenance, exchange account setup, etc, as tasks that someone can be trained to do. You see adverts for IT training, and that's the type of stuff they're talking about.
So yeah, there's a superiority complex if you actually studied CS, program for a living, know the insides and outsides of Unix and several languages, etc. Of course, you're still creating some internal business application for the most part ... Of course it helps if you actually get excited (mildly) by designing things properly, be they databases, program architectures, and so on.
Outside people find it hard to see the difference, it's computers, innit.
Sadly many IT jobs are boring, consisting of pressing F5 repeatedly on various websites throughout the day.
Some jobs within IT are very interesting, because they are creative and require actual brain utility. Programming is the obvious example. Hell, even coming up with good configurations for sysadmin can be interesting. Point-and-clicking windows admin stuff must be dire though, and is probably where this negative image is coming from.
In much the same way as I find car mechanics boring, I can see why some people would find programming boring, because they don't appreciate the creative aspect. However being paid a reasonably good wage in an in-demand industry to sit inside at a computer is pretty damned good, even if you don't get to ride a road crusher or steamroller, or fly fighter jets (which I imagine is pretty boring for the 95% of the time you are on the ground actually).
Oh, and memo to students: Work is that boring thing we'd rather not do that allows us to pay the bills, buy that exciting car, buy that house to do up, eat that thrilling meal with friends and have a great time, etc. Get over it, but if you do stay away, demand will surely mean higher wages for us already in the industry.
The point was that the out of the box configuration is minging and amateurish, even though they've clearly put a lot of work into it overall. SUSE was always a KDE centric distribution, historically, so the review using Gnome was also a bit weird, although good to see that its not a second rate citizen.
I'm starting to think that with Compiz, there shouldn't even need to be menu bars, start buttons, taskbars. Hit the Windows key on the keyboard (yeah, it should be a penguin) and a launcher / taskswitch layer appears like Dashboard on Mac OS X. So you have the complete desktop for your apps, and a full-screen always-available overlay instantly available for launching apps (start menu) with mini-expose integrated (or mini-alt-tab, or a large taskbar area).
Things like the clock and status bar can be relegated to a desktop widget that you can float or put anywhere.
Shame the review didn't use KDE, as that's the good point about SUSE as far as I am concerned.
When were you last in the UK?
Unleaded is £1.20 a litre, and Diesel is £1.33 a litre now.
It's been going up by about a penny a week for the past 20 weeks.
However it impact for us in the past year isn't so bad really - it's gone from 90p -> 120p (+33%). For the US its gone from $2 to $4 (+100%), which is probably rather shocking for them, even if they're paying under half of what we pay still. I guess they have larger, more fuel inefficient cars and longer commutes to deal with on average.
The ex-mayor of London's decision to get oil from Venezuela for cheap must be looking really good now. Bet Boris brings a halt to that though. Oh look: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7419227.stm
Of course because GPUs are actually very programmable now, and ATI's latest card does over a TeraFLOPS of single precision right now (about 4-5x the single precision power of Cell, and probably 4x the single precision power of sixteen Intel cores)
Ah, yes: "Core 2 Quad has a max per cycle of 4 * (4 cores) FLOPS * speed (mhz, we will say 3.33Ghz) = 53.28 * 1,000,000,000 Hz, or 53,280,000,000 FLOPS". Basically, if the raytracing renderer that Intel have implemented on their CPUs was ported to commercially available GPUs today, they would be beating this Intel system, once optimised.
I.e., The GPU is here to stay, even if raytracing comes into vogue. Mixed rendering will likely rule the roost 2010 - 2015 anyway, where raytracing is used for things that would look better for it only.
Since when was the pound sterling a postfix symbol? You don't write 50$ do you? On the other hand, at least Slashdot has recognised your character set encoding...
:(
But yes, 8GB is free with the £45 tariff, and the 16GB is free with the £75 tariff. Still, assuming an 18 month contract, that ain't cheap. £1350
The iPhone is moving to carrier subsidisation now that the hardware, software and ecosystem are ready for primetime. You can only get the subsidy if you get the contract. If there's no non-subsidy method of getting the iPhone, then that's just how it is going to be. No different to getting any other subsidised phone.
Even the 16GB iPhone 3G is free in the UK, on the business £75/month tariff. The 8G is free on the £45/month tariff, and £100 on the £30/month tariff.
Ah yes, thanks for the correction. Cell's PPE only includes the 32-register Altivec.
Wouldn't it be really neat to run some tests before you build it? We're software engineers here
XBox360 has a tri-core in-order PowerPC - each core is actually very similar to the single general purpose PPU in the PS3's Cell.
Cell in addition has 8 SPUs. 1 is disabled in the PS3 for yield reasons, and another is reserved, so there are 6 available for general purpose computing.
Both run at 3.2GHz. I think Cell has at least 3x the vector/streaming power of the XBox 360 CPU, but only 1/3rd of the general purpose capability. Figures pulled from thin air, etc.
It's an in-order design, but it does have two threads and a full VMX128 vector processing unit.
This means it's probably about as powerful as a 3.2GHz Intel Atom CPU (maybe a bit stronger because it doesn't have that low-power design requirement) - therefore about as powerful as a 2 GHz Intel Dothan (+/- 25% depending on task and effectiveness of the threading capability), with stronger SIMD and 6 extra very powerful but limited co-processors.
For at least 25 of those years it's been kept alive because there was an existing library of software for it. I'm sure there were 68k vs x86 wars back in 1985 which were pretty one-sided because of the cruft of x86 even then.
At least AMD64 has cleaned it up a lot since. And due to the massive investment it has been incredibly powerful for quite a long time now.
Either (a) the website isn't getting any advertising revenue because Phorm has STOLEN the advertising - leading to a loss of revenue for the website and eventual closing.
Or (b) The charity has paid money for an advert display, but Phorm has STOLEN that advert opportunity for their own profit. As it's a charity, that means that's the money of the people who have donated to it. This is vile, nasty behaviour.
Simply inserting extra adverts into a page is bad enough, and also I believe is altering a copyrighted work without authorisation.
It's a shame that ethics and morals aren't part of business / management courses, like they are part of many other coursees. There's something sick at the heart of corporatism.
"Comes in" suggests "now", when in fact the dual-core version is not yet available. The dual-core version has an 8W TDP as well. Original post said that Atom is a dual core processor, which is currently not the case.
Intel's Atom is certainly now "old" technology. It's a ground-up redesign for low power.
However it didn't get low enough in power consumption to be used for phones and PDAs, so Intel are busy creating a new small-low-power laptop and computer category where it can be used in.
Just for the record, I looked up VIA's VX800W single-chip chipset, and its TDP was 3.5W.
This is very very low, and I believe that as a platform VIA have something they can win with, if they put some work in and tweak their story to be about platform power consumption and dedicated hardware acceleration.
Whilst it will be a small computer, the 10" screen is making it very close in size to a 12" laptop, which aren't that expensive these days. My old 12" iBook isn't that much larger, and it's probably faster to boot, so there's not much reason to buy this.
The 9" versions are a little more desirable. I wish they'd make them slimmer.
Atom is a single core CPU.
It supports two hardware threads on some configurations (not the lowest power versions), in the same way the P4 did.
The Diamondville Atoms that this will compete with use 4W though. In addition the Intel chipsets that they have been paired with so far use up to 22W! If VIA have a 10W chipset (VX800) to use with this, they will have the best overall *platform* in terms of power consumption, and performance will be good as well apparently. The TDPs appear to ramp after 1.3GHz, it must be a side effect of the Fujitsu 65nm process.
The Nano has twice the integer performance and 3-4 times the floating point performance of the C7 per clock though. A 500MHz Nano would probably compete very well with a 1GHz C7. It might also have more aggressive idle modes (Nano gets 100mW, don't know about the C7).
1) Intel specify typical TDP. VIA's is max TDP.
2) Intel's desktop Atom (Diamondville) is 4W, not 2.5W.
3) Intel's chipsets are 4x4s in comparison to the moped-like Atom, thus power consumption is widely unbalanced. VIA have a single-chip solution, but I don't know the power consumption.
4) CPUs spend most of their time in idle - Nano uses 100mW here for all but the highest-end Nano.
5) Nano is more powerful per clock than Atom.
It's called that because the music industry keeps putting their fingers in their ears and saying "lalalalalala can't hear you!".