Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Rendering, Munich, Clones
How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."
Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"
Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."
Offically official.
Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!
One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"
Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."
The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"
Governments are basically corporations nowadays anyway, at least they're being run like them. And if the government can run on something other than Microsoft, other corporations may take notice and give it a shot.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
To get corporations to adopt it, you need to make one of the biggest customers use it. If the government is using Linux with say OpenOffice and they will only deal with companies whose files they can read, well, the companies will either switch to OO or make sure that OO can read their documents.
hmmm... last time i checked, "all the available documentation" did not include any actual evidence (unless you are now under a sco nda?). all the information you could possibly obtain from novell couldn't help you there... it seems a bit strange that you could arrive at such a conclusion without knowing what sco's "proof" is, no matter how good a lawyer you may be. then again i am no lawyer, so what do i know? - cheers!
When I visited Cebit this year in Germany the only linux distro that you would hear about was Suse, which makes sense since Suse is a german company.
Yaknow, it's great that MS lost and all, but when Linux wins for no more reason than jingoism, everyone loses.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To compare the release of a fix for a Mozilla bug in a nightly build of the development trunk to the release of an Explorer patch is an apples and oranges comparison at the least. Post the story when the Mozilla bug fix has been run through a complete test cycle and appears in a stable release. Put another way, if Mozilla had a system designed to drive the fix out to every user including the secretaries and the grandmothers in the nursing home (maybe it has, I don't know), you might have a story if they drove their fix out before Microsoft drives theirs out. To know whether the comparison made today means anything, you'd have to know whether Microsoft has fixed this in their internal nightly builds.
Linux on the enterprise (and government) desktop has only just begun.It is therefore difficult to see the trend if you are unaware what the big conversion projects are doing. In this multi-billion contract with the German government IBM will not only be converting all their desktops to SUSE-Linux but they are also charged with developing all the applications necessary, porting many internal office applications based on M$ access, eXcel, VB, SQLserver to KDE/java/MySQL/DB2 (Maybe the German government has come to the KDE teams rescue with much needed cash injection just in time!). This is why many others are sitting on the fence, they say "Oh, great, it has started, let's get in line to be at the counter when the goods are becoming available".
It took the PC about 15 years to take the entreprise.Things like that don't happen overnight. But there is always a point when the critical mass has been reached and from that point on the trend cannot be stopped anymore. Linux is well positioned to reach that critical mass within a few years if ibm/Suse/kde continue to follow their roadmaps as they have done so far.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Heh...
Anyone else remember the comments about how shitty IE was for having a bug like this?
Zealotry will come and bite ya in the ass. Hehehe...
Alas, RedHat is largely US based.
Alas, Redhat indeed.
As far as I'm concerned RedHat is not ready for prime time - and WON'T be until:
1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.
2) Their quickstart manual includes a clear description (accessable to neophytes - and keystroke-by-keystroke again) of both
* how to install the system (Of particular interest as of 6.x: Tell 'em how to make sane choices for the size of the partitions.) and
* how to obtain and install security upgrades.
3) Their install documentation includes a step-by-step, keystroke-by-kestroke recipe for going:
* from a blank computer and their CDROMs,
* through an intermediate system installed from the CDROM image
* To the SAME system but with the kernel built from the supplied sources.
4) Their in-depth manual includes a section giving a COMPLETE list of the configuration files twiddled by each of the functions of each of the graphic-interface admin tools. (And don't tell me to read the source or look it up on the net. You're a packager. Package it already.)
5) Their quickstart manual tells me how to adjust the screen parameters. (And DON'T tell me to go figure out X. Give a recipe.)
C'mon, guys! Get a tech writer and assign him/her the task with 2), 3), 4), and 5) as the goals.
(And while we're at it, the Gnome and/or KDE crews really ought to do a desktop tool, on the model of Apples', for tuning the screen, and RedHat should have it in the default menus.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Governments are basically corporations nowadays anyway
And Microsoft is basically a government nowadays anyway.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm sure I've seen vim scripts that do exactly this. Try searching for "dvorak vim".
The good news is that Linux doesn't need to win all the battles. In fact, with Microsoft's overwhelming market share we don't hardly need to win any to gain ground.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has to maintain revenue growth if they are going to keep their investors happy. They can't afford to lose any customers, and they either have to actually gain customers, or they have to charge existing customers less. When the economy recovers and it becomes clear that Microsoft is not going to recover along with it then investors will finally see the light and Microsoft's price/earnings ratio will fall from its present near 30 level to much closer to 10. When it becomes clear that Microsoft is vulnerable to Linux then the fun will really begin.
Right now CIOs believe that Microsoft is invincible. Disabuse them of that belief and Linux Total World Domination is inevitable.
You are still assuming that by getting rid of the springs, you reduce the force and work. But the opposite is true: when you type on a surface, your fingers experience more force and you need to perform more work than if you type on a regular computer keyboard.
Again, not to be confrontational, but your concept of what is necessary for typing "zero force" is off. There isn't massive acceleration when your finger hits the pad. This is not the same typing as with a mechanical keyboard, but with no springs. You bearly have to tap the keys on these keyboards.
It's basic physics. Think about it. In order to type quickly, your fingers MUST move faster. This means that if you're typing fast your finger WILL hit the key harder due to the increased speed. This means that the faster you type on a keyboard, the harder your fingers impact the keyboard and the more "damage" you do.
Regular keys effectively act like sponges or airbags absorbing and softening the impact of each stroke. This is not the case of a capacitance keyboard like the Touchstream where each keypress is the equivalent to impacting a wall.
Now you might claim that a light touch can compensate for this, but it seems impossible to me. In order to type fast your fingers MUST impact the keys harder, so it seems to be that on a capacitance keyboard the goals of comfort and fast typing are fundamentally opposed. This has certainly been my experience in the capacitance keyboards I've used.
There is also the issue of "work". In a properly designed keyboard (like the old "clickity" IBM keyboard I'm using right now) has enough force in the springs to physically move the finger up. On mine the springs are powerful enough the the "return" actually lifts the finger up about 1 mm from the key. What this means is that there is little, if any, "work" involved on the "return stroke". In a capacitance keyboard this is not the case, a user must lift his finger himself.
Now you could argue that I'm exaggerating the effect of these "impacts", and they might be less of a problem that I think when compared to the damage caused by the extra "work" of having to press a regular key. Of course, a capacitance user also has the extra work of lifting his fingers. I'm not sure which is worse, but my instinct is that the "impacts" are a bigger problem than the extra work in pressing the keys.
No they *must* not. If you've ever played the piano, you'd know that it is possible to play fast and pianissimo. It may be hard for *you*, but it's rather easy for me and probably others.
Say it with me once again: B-A-S-I-C P-H-Y-S-I-C-S!
If object a is moving at a higher rate of speed than object b when it strikes object c, object a will transfer more energy to object c.
In other words, it will hit harder. This isn't rocket science.
I don't doubt that you can train yourself to play extremely lightly on a piano. However, the situation isn't exactly analogous because you play music at a FIXED METER. You're not trying to bang the keys as quickly as you possibly can, which is exactly what you're trying to do with a keyboard. And when you're trying to move your fingers as fast as you possibly can, you're going to bang.
With training it's possible that you can play fast and pianissimo, but you'll NEVER be able to play as fast as you can banging away because "playing fast" and "playing softly" and fundamentally at odds with one another as I described. For this reason you'll NEVER be able to type as fast with a capacitance keyboard as you can with a conventional keyboard.
If you choose to disbelieve in physics I can't help you.