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?"
No suprise they choose SuSE... SuSE just dominates the market place over there with Mandrake coming in second. Alas, RedHat is largely US based.
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Free your mind.
While I'm glad to see M$ go down and lose revenue just as much as anyone else, I really feel that we should be more focused on corporate adaptation of Linux in Germany, instead of trying to win the GNU/M$ battle through government intervention.
... the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo ...
IIRC, the Raelians' symbol used to be a Star of David with a Swastika inside. They changed it a few years ago to the swirly thing. Anyone else remember this?
no, I feel the pain for the over 300 dollars deficit in my wallet for such a keyboard.
Seriously though - I would LOVE to try one, but affordability is definitely not one of its good traits. Anybody knows a place where you can rent one for a week? in japan, possibly?
otoh, while not having had any touchstream experience, I can speak from the perspective of a dvorak user - which is the pain of having to resort back to qwerty anywhere else. Not so much a problem for me now, but if you work in IT and needs to troubleshoot people's computers - forget it. (I read stuff like "after you learn dvorak you can revert back to qwerty and be fluent in both" which I am finding out is total bullshit - as much as I like the dvorak layout - switching to qwerty on the fly is not easy)
Not to mention in places such as BIOS and the such, you don't even have the OPTION to configure a dvorak keyboard...
Similar things I predict for touchstream users - you will go to another computer and wave your hand jedi-like and nothing happens and it will cause a ton of frustration. Heck, just imagine going between work and home. Having big trouble affording one, No way in a billion years I can afford two... I will wait for neurological interfaces instead - well, if we are not already batteries / control modules inside the matrix already.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
No stock, but one of my best T-shirts was a "Caldera" T-shirt. I'll miss it....
-Derek
I've been using the Touchstream since Xmas. My typing has improved a lot since starting but I still think there are improvements that could be made (slight ridges that give better location feel of keys, for example). Hand position is critical when starting long text entries. Nonetheless, I like it a lot, the gestures are a huge improvement to stopping, moving your hand, setting up the mouse, deleting (or whatever), moving your hand back, and typing. I use a bunch of features constantly like magnifying my browser view for certain websites, opening apps, closing apps, saving, etc. And I use it at work while I have an old Darwin Smartboard at home. The transition is a little funny but just emphasizes how much I dislike having to go to my trackball for window movement.
Want logic games?
Try some of the games in Mame (also available for Linux/Unix) such as: Boxy Boy, Chicken Shift, Logic Pro, Logic Pro 2, Phozon, Pushman, and Wise Guy.
Some of these can are real real brain-busters.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
off topic, but what the hell
Do you even think of your passwords as symbols? To me it's sort of abstract and it looks rather weird when I accidentally type one where I can read it (as opposed to seeing *'s). My fingers just do the typing, and even if I had to spell it out loud, I probably couldn't.
Last time I heard, TechTV is owned in part by Paul Allen. Is it just possible that this whole brewhaha is nothing more than a charade designed to get us to say "X-box" all the time? Oh no... it's working. No thanks. I'll keep my $24.99-20%+shipping and spend it on beer or something.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
i agree. that was the most difficult thing to get used to. I didn't have so much problem because i used the cursor keys (yes yes, not *true* geek, fine).
but in other apps cut/paste etc would fudge one over too (for example ctrl-c / ctrl-v are mapped to ctrl-i and ctrl-. respectively).
You can train yourself to get past it, but not the easiest.
I have been convincing myself to re-learn qwerty by doing "float-typing" (don't know what's you'd call that), i.e. don't give a damn about the homerow, and the thumb-only-hits-space typing methodology that I think is holding everyone back.
The "home-row" would roughly become (from left pinky to right pinky)
a/s, e, r, t, b/space [left-hand]
n/space, h, u, i, o/p [right-hand]
the homerow roughly corresponds to the dvorak homerow, but stuff that has consecutive s and a, or o and p, would require finger shifts. almost like a piano, i guess.
we'll see. that may turn out to be the ultimate solution in the end. or neurological interface
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Zero force typing is a myth. When you type, whether on a flat surface or a keyboard, your fingers at some point need to change directions (move up/down, etc.). The forces to bring that about either come from your own muscles or from the keyboard.
Normal keyboards are carefully designed to cushion the strike and let you recover energy to make your finger go up again after going down. That's what all those little springs, levers, and rubber pads are for in your keyboard. A flat surface has none of those.
The difference is similar to jumping barefoot on concrete vs. jumping barefoot on a trampoline. Which would you rather do? Keyboards basically give you a carefully designed trampoline for each finger, and that's good.
Just to be argumenative I'll say that the main problem with RedHat (and Linux) recently is the effort to dumb it down for the folks out there who can't do anything but run Minesweeper on their XP box.
:)
Linux should not be Windows or MacOS. If users want a dumbed down OS let them use Windows or MacOS. At most let them use a retarded distro like Lindows. Playing copycat you can never be the best. KDE and Gnome have both driven me away as a user as they have become more bloated and dumbed down.
The same with support. Once the machine is booted to your desktop you have what you paid for. That support is more than what you'll get from Microsoft. If you want more then pay for it or learn to use the community support Linux offers. Linux is a community as much as software. You have to accept both to appreciate either.
Installing is about as easy as to keep pressing 'next' so I don't really know what more you need help with. Again I find it easier than the Windows install or the last MacOS I installed (ver 9).
Keystroke by keystroke guides suck because few computers are likely to be the same. People will need to learn to think a little bit if they want their computer to work well for them. This is especially true when it comes to compiling software.
Your fourth demand is actually reasonable I think. Maybe don't give a full guide to all configuration files but a quick overview of what the files are would be a nice touch. The only obvious problem with this is that there is no way a newbie will comprehend even the descriptions of these files. It'd be confusing to them.
In Linux you seldom need to adjust your screen parameters. Maybe they need to add a note about CTRL-ALT-+ so that users will know how to shift between the available settings easily. There is really no need to tweak X settings directly as a user.
I would like to see RedHat include Ximian's Red Carpet in their default installs. I think it would make it easier for users to learn to add/remove/update packages. IMO Red Carpet is just better than any of RedHat's own tools for this job.
If you really want a no brainer distro for newbies then try Knoppix. You don't need to install it, recompile anything, or configure anything. For the most part 'it just works'. It could always be better though.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I would take a look at freedroid, which is an excellent SDL based clone of paradroid. Very playable and nice!
Check it out, IMHO it is a bit better than nighthawk.
Moritz