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  • Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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  • Migrating XenServer VMs from Intel to AMD servers

    - by John Smith
    I need to replace my XenServer 6.1 resource pool hardware. I currently run Intel hardware and I have to move to AMD hardware (corporate politics and budget stuff, blah blah blah). I have downtime available so I can use cold migration - live migration is not required. I will also have the new hardware (AMD) alongside the old hardware (Intel). The XenServer docs say there may be problems exporting from one arch and importing to another "may not work" - http://docs.vmd.citrix.com/XenServer/6.1.0/1.0/en_gb/guest.html#importing_vms - but mentions nothing about simply turning off the VM on one arch and then powering it back on new arch. VMs are a mix of OS - some Windows, some Linux, multiple versions. Is this something that can be done with no problems, or are there problems I need to be aware of?

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  • Teaching logical/analytical thinking

    - by Joshua
    I have been trial running a club in which I teach programming for the past year and while they have progressed what they really lack is the most fundamental concept to programming, analytical thinking. As I now approach the second year of teaching to the children (aged 12 - 14) I am now realising that before I begin teaching them the syntax and how to actually program an app (or what they would rather, a game) I need to introduce them to analytical thinking first. I have already found Scratch and similar things such as Light-Bot and will most certainly be using the, to teach them how to implement their logical thinking but what I really need are some tips or articles on how to teach analytical thinking itself to children aged 12 - 14. What I'm looking for are some ideas on how to teach the kind of thinking that these kids will need in order to get them into programming, whether that be analytical, logical or critical. How and what should I teach them relating to the way their minds need to be wired when programming solutions to problems?

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  • Math questions at a programmer interview?

    - by anon
    So I went to an interview at Samsung here in Dallas, Texas. The way the recruiter described the job, he didn't make it sound like it was too math-oriented. The job basically involved graphics programming and C++. Yes, math is implied in graphics programming, especially shaders, but I still wasn't expecting this... The whole interview lasted about an hour and a half and they asked me nothing but math-related questions. They didn't ask me a single programming question, which I found odd. About all they did was ask me how to write certain math routines as a C++ function, but that's about it. What about programming philosophy questions? Design patterns? Code-correctness? Constness? Exception safety? Thread safety? There are a zillion topics that they could have covered. But they didn't. The main concern I have is that they didn't ask any programming questions. This basically implies to me that any programmer who is good at math can get a job here, but they might put out terrible code. Of course, I think I bombed the interview because I haven't used any sort of linear algebra in about a year and I forget math easily if I haven't used it in practice for a while. Are any of my other fellow programmers out there this way? I'm a game programmer too, so this seems especially odd. The more I learn, the more old knowledge that gets "popped" out of my "stack" (memory). My question is: Does this interview seem suspicious? Is this a typical interview that large corporations have? During the interview they told me that Google's interview process is similar. They have multiple, consecutive interviews where the math problems get more advanced.

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  • Identifying Hard Drive as performance bottleneck for desktop machines

    - by Programming Hero
    I'm working in a development team where we all use laptops so we can work in multiple locations. These laptops are proving notoriously slow for development work, but at a glance they all look to have the specification for a much faster experience: CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 Memory - 2GB of RAM We all experience the biggest delays when the hard-drives are being accessed, particularly when swap-files are being thrashed. After doing a little bit of profile, a colleague discovered that our HDDs are seeing Read/Write speeds of about 10MB/sec. This seems abnormally low and we believe it the cause of the problem. Sensibly (though somewhat annoyingly) our business wont blow money on faster drives just to see if it fixes the problem; we need to illustrate this is definitely the problem and that buying some solid-state drives will make it go away. I need some way of showing how 90% of the system resources aren't being used over the course of a day, and that whenever there is utilization, it's all in HDD reads or writes. Are there any tools I could use to provide this information? Does it seem likely the problem is going to be fixed by a faster drive? Should I be looking for alternatives?

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  • From physics to Java programmer?

    - by inovaovao
    I'm a physics phd with little actual programming experience. I've always liked programming and played around with Basic and Pascal (also VB and Delphi) as a teen, but the largest actual project I completed was an assignement for the introductory computer science class in university where I wrote a nice little program (about 1500 lines of pascal) to display functions of 2 variables in 3D. I've had also a couple other projects of a few hundred lines range, but during my phd I didn't have (or take) the time to program more (string theory is hard guys!), beside playing around with ruby. Now I've decided that I'm more interested in programming than in physics and started to learn Java (hoping to pass the certification exam next week) and OO design. Still, I have trouble deciding on what to focus next (Java EE? Web development? algorithms and C programming?) in order to maximize my employement chances. Bear in mind that I'm aiming (mostly) at the swedish job market and that I'm 30 years old. So for the questions: Do you think that I have any chances to start and make a career in IT and programming coming from physics? What would be the best strategy to maximize my value in the field? Do you have suggestions as to where my physics background might be useful?

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  • How to design application for scaling the application?

    - by Muhammad
    I have one application which handles hardware events connected on the same computer's PCIe slots. The maximum number of PCIe slots on motherboard are two. I have utilized both slots. Now for scaling the application I need either more PCIe slots in same computer or I use another computer. So consider I am using another computer with same application and hardware connected on the PCIe Slots. Now my problem is that I want to design application over it which can access both computers hardware devices and does the process on it. The processed data should be send back to the respective PC's hardware. Please refer the attached diagram for expansion.

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  • How to manage a developer who has poor communication skills

    - by djcredo
    I manage a small team of developers on an application which is in the mid-point of its lifecycle, within a big firm. This unfortunately means there is commonly a 30/70 split of Programming tasks to "other technical work". This work includes: Working with DBA / Unix / Network / Loadbalancer teams on various tasks Placing & managing orders for hardware or infrastructure in different regions Running tests that have not yet been migrated to CI Analysis Support / Investigation Its fair to say that the Developers would all prefer to be coding, rather than doing these more mundane tasks, so I try to hand out the fun programming jobs evenly amongst the team. Most of the team was hired because, though they may not have the elite programming skills to write their own compiler / game engine / high-frequency trading system etc., they are good communicators who "can get stuff done", work with other teams, and somewhat navigate the complex beaurocracy here. They are good developers, but they are also good all-round technical staff. However, one member of the team probably has above-average coding skills, but below-average communication skills. Traditionally, the previous Development Manager tended to give him the Programming tasks and not the more mundane tasks listed above. However, I don't feel that this is fair to the rest of the team, who have shown an aptitute for developing a well-rounded skillset that is commonly required in a big-business IT department. What should I do in this situation? If I continue to give him more programming work, I know that it will be done faster (and conversly, I would expect him to complete the other work slower). But it goes against my principles, and promotes the idea that you can carve out a "comfortable niche" for yourself simply by being bad at the tasks you don't like.

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  • Oracle and Cavium to work together on Java SE 8 on 64-bit ARMv8

    - by Henrik Stahl
    We have been working for some time on a standard Oracle JDK 8 port to the upcoming introduction of 64-bit servers based on the new ARMv8 micro architecture. At ARM TechCon 2013 in Santa Clara, California, we announced a roadmap with an expected GA in 2015. This project is going very well and is ahead of schedule. We will soon be at the point where we will make binaries available outside of Oracle - first in a managed beta program with select customers/partners, and sometime during the fall of 2014 as a public early access program. Unless something changes, we are looking at a early 2015 GA. We should be able to share a detailed ramp down and GA plan by JavaOne 2014. One of the things we (obviously) need to produce a high-quality port is hardware for development and QA. We are therefore happy to announce that we will be collaborating with Cavium on this project. Cavium has been a supporter of the Java ecosystem for a long time and we have numerous joint customers running various Java versions on Cavium MIPS and ARM-based hardware. Cavium has now agreed to provide us with development hardware and engineering resources so that we can certify and optimize the initial Oracle JDK 8 release on Cavium's ThunderX hardware. This is expected to improve quality and performance of JDK 8 on ARMv8 in general, as well as on Cavium's hardware. For more information: Cavium announcement on the ThunderX product family Cavium announcement on Oracle collaboration As a reminder, we plan to release the Oracle JDK 8 port to 64-bit ARMv8 under the royalty-free (for general purpose servers etc) Binary Code License, but we have no current plans to open source it.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Math questions at a programmer interview?

    - by anon
    So I went to an interview at Samsung here in Dallas, Texas. The way the recruiter described the job, he didn't make it sound like it was too math-oriented. The job basically involved graphics programming and C++. Yes, math is implied in graphics programming, especially shaders, but I still wasn't expecting this... The whole interview lasted about an hour and a half and they asked me nothing but math-related questions. They didn't ask me a single programming question, which I found odd. About all they did was ask me how to write certain math routines as a C++ function, but that's about it. What about programming philosophy questions? Design patterns? Code-correctness? Constness? Exception safety? Thread safety? There are a zillion topics that they could have covered. But they didn't. The main concern I have is that they didn't ask any programming questions. This basically implies to me that any programmer who is good at math can get a job here, but they might put out terrible code. Of course, I think I bombed the interview because I haven't used any sort of linear algebra in about a year and I forget math easily if I haven't used it in practice for a while. Are any of my other fellow programmers out there this way? I'm a game programmer too, so this seems especially odd. The more I learn, the more old knowledge that gets "popped" out of my "stack" (memory). My question is: Does this interview seem suspicious? Is this a typical interview that large corporations have? During the interview they told me that Google's interview process is similar. They have multiple, consecutive interviews where the math problems get more advanced.

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  • What are the benefits of PHP?

    - by acme
    Everybody knows that people that have prejudices against certain programming languages. Especially PHP seems to suffer from problems of its past and some other things (like loose types) and is often called a non-serious programming language that should not be used for professional applications. In that special case PHP: How do you argue using PHP as your chosen programming language for web applications? What are the benefits, where is PHP better than ColdFusion, Java, etc.?

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  • HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

    - by darrenm
    Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway).  I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'.  We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11.  One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.  The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE.  However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine  using only a single process and thread.  $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

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  • When would I use pseudocode instead of flowchart?

    - by user1276078
    I'm a student working with various techniques of programming, and I've come across pseudocode and flowchart. I know that these are both used in order to think through the problem before actually programming, but I have a few questions with this. When would I use pseudocode to plan out and when would I use flowcharts? Or is it better to do both before actually programming. Particularly for a small arcade sort of game in JAVA since that is my next project. I've noticed that pseudocode is very similar to the actual code rather than flowcharts. Would this make pseudocoding better because you essentially copy/paste the pseudocode into your program (of course, you have to change it to fit the language. I understand that part). Is it practical to use both of these while programming? Particularly the same game mentioned earlier. Thanks.

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  • I need advice on laptop purchase for university [closed]

    - by Systemic33
    I'm currently in University studying Computer Science/IT/Information Technology. And this first year i've managed to do with the laptop I had; an ASUS Eee PC 1000H with a 10.1" screen. But this is getting way too underpowered and small for programming more than just quick programming introduction excercises. So I'm looking to buy a more suitable laptop. It's not supposed to be a desktop replacement though, since I've got a pretty good desktop already with a 24" monitor. So the kinda laptop I want to buy is one suited for university. If this bears any significance, I'm working in Java atm, but I will likely work with lots of other things incl. web development. I'm looking to spend about $1700 plus/minus. And it should be powerful/big enough for working on programming projects as well as the usual university stuff like MATLAB, Maple, etc out "in the field", and sometimes for maybe a week when visiting my parents. What I'm looking at right now is the ASUS Zenbook UX31A with the 1920 x 1080 resolution on 13.3" IPS display. But I'm kinda nervous that this will be too petite for programming. In essence i'm looking for a powerfull computer, that has good enough battery, and looks good. I would love suggestions or any type of feedback, either with maybe a better choice, or input on how its like programming on 13" laptops. Very much thanks in advance for anyone who even went through all that! PS. I don't want a mac, or my inner karma would commit Seppuku xD But experiences from working on the 13" Macbook Air would kinda be equivalent to the Zenbook i'm considering, so I would love to hear that. tl;dr The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ;)

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  • Big Data – Buzz Words: What is HDFS – Day 8 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is MapReduce. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – HDFS. What is HDFS ? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System and it is a primary storage system used by Hadoop. It provides high performance access to data across Hadoop clusters. It is usually deployed on low-cost commodity hardware. In commodity hardware deployment server failures are very common. Due to the same reason HDFS is built to have high fault tolerance. The data transfer rate between compute nodes in HDFS is very high, which leads to reduced risk of failure. HDFS creates smaller pieces of the big data and distributes it on different nodes. It also copies each smaller piece to multiple times on different nodes. Hence when any node with the data crashes the system is automatically able to use the data from a different node and continue the process. This is the key feature of the HDFS system. Architecture of HDFS The architecture of the HDFS is master/slave architecture. An HDFS cluster always consists of single NameNode. This single NameNode is a master server and it manages the file system as well regulates access to various files. In additional to NameNode there are multiple DataNodes. There is always one DataNode for each data server. In HDFS a big file is split into one or more blocks and those blocks are stored in a set of DataNodes. The primary task of the NameNode is to open, close or rename files and directory and regulate access to the file system, whereas the primary task of the DataNode is read and write to the file systems. DataNode is also responsible for the creation, deletion or replication of the data based on the instruction from NameNode. In reality, NameNode and DataNode are software designed to run on commodity machine build in Java language. Visual Representation of HDFS Architecture Let us understand how HDFS works with the help of the diagram. Client APP or HDFS Client connects to NameSpace as well as DataNode. Client App access to the DataNode is regulated by NameSpace Node. NameSpace Node allows Client App to connect to the DataNode based by allowing the connection to the DataNode directly. A big data file is divided into multiple data blocks (let us assume that those data chunks are A,B,C and D. Client App will later on write data blocks directly to the DataNode. Client App does not have to directly write to all the node. It just has to write to any one of the node and NameNode will decide on which other DataNode it will have to replicate the data. In our example Client App directly writes to DataNode 1 and detained 3. However, data chunks are automatically replicated to other nodes. All the information like in which DataNode which data block is placed is written back to NameNode. High Availability During Disaster Now as multiple DataNode have same data blocks in the case of any DataNode which faces the disaster, the entire process will continue as other DataNode will assume the role to serve the specific data block which was on the failed node. This system provides very high tolerance to disaster and provides high availability. If you notice there is only single NameNode in our architecture. If that node fails our entire Hadoop Application will stop performing as it is a single node where we store all the metadata. As this node is very critical, it is usually replicated on another clustered as well as on another data rack. Though, that replicated node is not operational in architecture, it has all the necessary data to perform the task of the NameNode in the case of the NameNode fails. The entire Hadoop architecture is built to function smoothly even there are node failures or hardware malfunction. It is built on the simple concept that data is so big it is impossible to have come up with a single piece of the hardware which can manage it properly. We need lots of commodity (cheap) hardware to manage our big data and hardware failure is part of the commodity servers. To reduce the impact of hardware failure Hadoop architecture is built to overcome the limitation of the non-functioning hardware. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss the importance of the relational database in Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • lirc_zilog IR transmission no longer working with HD-PVR on 12.04

    - by johnf
    I have been running a ubuntu 10.04 with a patched version of lirc_zilog for two years. I upgraded to 12.04 and lirc_zilog is no longer working with my HD-PVR. The MythTV wiki reports that it did work out of the box with 11.04. The error message I get on irsend is as follows: johnf@carbon:~$ /usr/local/bin/irsend SEND_ONCE blaster 0_130_KEY_POWER irsend: command failed: SEND_ONCE blaster 0_130_KEY_POWER irsend: hardware does not support sending The lircd daemon, run interactively, reports the following: lircd: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd lircd: could not get hardware features lircd: this device driver does not support the LIRC ioctl interface lircd: major number of /dev/lirc0 is 250 lircd: LIRC major number is 61 lircd: check if /dev/lirc0 is a LIRC device lircd: WARNING: Failed to initialize hardware lircd: error processing command: SEND_ONCE blaster 0_130_KEY_POWER lircd: hardware does not support sending lircd: removed client Checking dmesg seems to indicate that the kernel module is loading properly: [56497.730743] lirc_zilog: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned. [56497.730999] lirc_zilog: Zilog/Hauppauge IR driver initializing [56497.732484] lirc_zilog: ir_probe: ir_rx_z8f0811_hdpvr on i2c-0 (Hauppage HD PVR I2C), client addr=0x71 [56497.732493] lirc_zilog: ir_probe: ir_tx_z8f0811_hdpvr on i2c-0 (Hauppage HD PVR I2C), client addr=0x70 [56497.732496] lirc_zilog: probing IR Tx on Hauppage HD PVR I2C (i2c-0) [56497.756822] lirc_zilog: firmware of size 302355 loaded [56497.756945] lirc_zilog: 743 IR blaster codesets loaded [56497.757030] i2c i2c-0: lirc_dev: driver lirc_zilog registered at minor = 0 [56497.757033] lirc_zilog: IR unit on Hauppage HD PVR I2C (i2c-0) registered as lirc0 and ready [56497.757035] lirc_zilog: probe of IR Tx on Hauppage HD PVR I2C (i2c-0) done [56497.757056] lirc_zilog: initialization complete Here is my /etc/lirc/hardware.conf #Chosen IR Transmitter TRANSMITTER="HD-PVR" TRANSMITTER_MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_zilog" TRANSMITTER_DRIVER="" TRANSMITTER_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0" TRANSMITTER_SOCKET="" TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF="" TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS="" My lircd.conf is a copy of the recommended one. Examination of the kernel source seems to indicate that the lirc_zilog module should support transmission, it's newer than the patched version I was manually compiling on 10.04. I was previously using a manually built version of lirc 0.8.7 and not the packaged one. I'm now running the packaged version 9.0. I can provide any additional information required and will perform tests quickly. I'm very eager to get this issue resolved.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • What are the benefits of PHP?

    - by acme
    Everybody knows that people that have prejudices against certain programming languages. Especially PHP seems to suffer from problems of its past and some other things (like loose types) and is often called a non-serious programming language that should not be used for professional applications. In that special case PHP: How do you argue using PHP as your chosen programming language for web applications? What are the benefits, where is PHP better than ColdFusion, Java, etc.?

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