Capacitive touch screens tend not to have the precision I'm looking for. But I gather they are a lot cheaper than the more responsive Wacom tablets.
There are a few laptops that have Wacom-grade screens (Lenovo sells a few, and they fold up so they can be used as a tablet, but they're also heavy-duty beasts and rather heavy. They're really designed as heavy, large-battery laptop systems that happen to fold... although they can, technically, act as tablets, their weight makes them not really practical in this role.
Is it just a finger-grade touchscreen? Or can I get the kind of precision needed for serious artwork? I'm thinking of a Wacom screen with a stylus here.
The ASUS Transformer TF101, which I have, has an app for backing up apps, but it seems to crash whenever I use it. It looks as if I'll have to root my machine before I can do a backup with a normal Linux tool. And the root methid has to not destroy my file system.
Alternative: keep nothing I really need to keep on the tablet.
The biggest mistake designers usually make is to prefer graphics and graphical layout to legible text. They like to de-emphasize text by making it small. Perhaps graphic designers all have better eyesight than us ordinary screen readers.
Ant the browser manufacturers haven't helped by scaling the minimum-size graphics at the same time as the text. So if you want the text to be larger, you inevitably end up with lines that are too wide for the page.
Agree! And there are *still* some very good newsreaders available. I have more choice in newsreaders than I have choice in web-based interfaces, so I can choose what works for me.
What I'd like is an interface where most of the text is light on a dark background.
Thanks. That's the first straightforward explanation I've seen. Most explanations I've seen consist of acronym soup.
There are presumably well-known, generic applications in the prepackaged ERP systems, and they have enough hooks that it's possible to add code that changes their sources of data, their results, and enables you to write completely new applications that use their output and provide their input.
There was a paper presented at a Lisp/Scheme - related conference a few years ago about how someone managed to wrestle an ERP system (whatever that was) into submission.
It started out as hundreds of thousands of lines in C or C++ (I forget which). They decided they wanted to add a scripting language to it. They picked Gambit/C, an implementation of Scheme that can be compiled to C, and can also be interpreted.
Gradually, when they had trouble with particular parts of their huge system, they discovered it was often easier to rewrite them in the scripting language than to fix the C code. Gradually, over a few years, hundreds of thousands of lines of C code were replaced by about 30,000 lines of Gambit. And it ran faster in the scripting language (which could be compiled, after all) than it had formerly run in C. And it had more features.
If you can accomplish a major rewrite an improvement incrementally, you can probably achieve continuity of operation that would be difficult any other way.
Now I don't know how Gambit would link with Microsoft's BASIC. But there's probably a way, and perhaps you should look into it.
You might want to communicate with Marc Feely, the Gambit/C author about the possibilities.
I use xcfe. Select and middle click for cut and paste works for some programs; not for others. I'm guessing that the programs that it doesn't work with are the ones written with the gnome toolkit.
Thus not only are users that avoid using the gnome desktop still stuck with this stupid convention, but they have do deal wiith an intermittent user interface. They have to learn which programs use it and which don't.
Yes, of course Bittorrent is at a different layer, and it's not all that suited to streams of data, which TCP handles (or have I missed something?) But it's capable of handling multiple connections more or less as a side effect of it being a protocol between multiple hosts.
In the original ARPAnet, though, didn't packets wander through the net more or less on their own? I suspect that gave the effect of ganging several TCP streams together. But those were simpler days, with a smaller net that had smaller routing problems.
Try monotone. (http://www.monotone.ca/) It works on Windows too. You might need custom merge scripts to handle compressed files (such as word-processor files), though.
Sycing monotone between machines is easy. You use the sync command and everything is copied back and forth. Yes, it will distinguish the changed from the original version, and it will *not* copy the wrong way.
You don't need to merge before syncing. You don't have to sync all projects. But if you do, everything will automatically be backed up on your multiple machines.
One review of monotone (I forget where) said "It gets the user story right."
I use it to maintain projects in mulitplicate between my desktop machines and my laptop.
FLOSS projects need new developers from time to time to remain viable. The issues for user documentation apply to developer documentation, too. New developers need to be taught the structure and conventions of a project so that they can find their way into it.
Slashdot Mirror
And those Lenovo machines have power-hungry intel processors, as far aas I know, so they need the heavy batteries.
Capacitive touch screens tend not to have the precision I'm looking for. But I gather they are a lot cheaper than the more responsive Wacom tablets.
There are a few laptops that have Wacom-grade screens (Lenovo sells a few, and they fold up so they can be used as a tablet, but they're also heavy-duty beasts and rather heavy. They're really designed as heavy, large-battery laptop systems that happen to fold ... although they can, technically, act as tablets, their weight makes them not really practical in this role.
Is it just a finger-grade touchscreen? Or can I get the kind of precision needed for serious artwork? I'm thinking of a Wacom screen with a stylus here.
Will it run the Crunchyroll appat reasonable speed?
The ASUS Transformer TF101, which I have, has an app for backing up apps, but it seems to crash whenever I use it. It looks as if I'll have to root my machine before I can do a backup with a normal Linux tool. And the root methid has to not destroy my file system.
Alternative: keep nothing I really need to keep on the tablet.
-- hendrik
Why did you buy a wide display? So that you can read slashdot on he side while your code s compiling on the rest of the screen,
Assuming your device allows you to back it up.
Ten years ago? When the world was created onoly 5 seconds ago?
-- hendrik
The biggest mistake designers usually make is to prefer graphics and graphical layout to legible text.
They like to de-emphasize text by making it small. Perhaps graphic designers all have better eyesight than us ordinary screen readers.
Ant the browser manufacturers haven't helped by scaling the minimum-size graphics at the same time as the text. So if you want the text to be larger, you inevitably end up with lines that are too wide for the page.
-- hendrik
Agree! And there are *still* some very good newsreaders available. I have more choice in newsreaders than I have choice in web-based interfaces, so I can choose what works for me.
What I'd like is an interface where most of the text is light on a dark background.
-- hendrik
Thanks for the update. I stend corrected. Maybe the typo in the subject "successfuk" for "successful" wasn't all that wrong.
-- hendrik
Thanks. That's the first straightforward explanation I've seen. Most explanations I've seen consist of acronym soup.
There are presumably well-known, generic applications in the prepackaged ERP systems, and they have enough hooks that it's possible to add code that changes their sources of data, their results, and enables you to write completely new applications that use their output and provide their input.
-- hendrik
There was a paper presented at a Lisp/Scheme - related conference a few years ago about how someone managed to wrestle an ERP system (whatever that was) into submission.
It started out as hundreds of thousands of lines in C or C++ (I forget which).
They decided they wanted to add a scripting language to it.
They picked Gambit/C, an implementation of Scheme that can be compiled to C, and can also be interpreted.
Gradually, when they had trouble with particular parts of their huge system, they discovered it was often easier to rewrite them in the scripting language than to fix the C code. Gradually, over a few years, hundreds of thousands of lines of C code were replaced by about 30,000 lines of Gambit. And it ran faster in the scripting language (which could be compiled, after all) than it had formerly run in C. And it had more features.
If you can accomplish a major rewrite an improvement incrementally, you can probably achieve continuity of operation that would be difficult any other way.
Now I don't know how Gambit would link with Microsoft's BASIC. But there's probably a way, and perhaps you should look into it.
You might want to communicate with Marc Feely, the Gambit/C author about the possibilities.
The Gambit/C mailing list is at https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
Yes, there's a server misconfiguration that may prompt your browser to give scary messages, but that's the URL.
The main page of the Gambit wiki is at http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
-- hendrik
Let me ask it here -- just what is an ERP supposed to do?
-- hendrik
I use xcfe. Select and middle click for cut and paste works for some programs; not for others. I'm guessing that the programs that it doesn't work with are the ones written with the gnome toolkit.
Thus not only are users that avoid using the gnome desktop still stuck with this stupid convention, but they have do deal wiith an intermittent user interface. They have to learn which programs use it and which don't.
-- hendrik
Yeah, we all die. But not necessarily all at once.
Yes, of course Bittorrent is at a different layer, and it's not all that suited to streams of data, which TCP handles (or have I missed something?) But it's capable of handling multiple connections more or less as a side effect of it being a protocol between multiple hosts.
In the original ARPAnet, though, didn't packets wander through the net more or less on their own? I suspect that gave the effect of ganging several TCP streams together. But those were simpler days, with a smaller net that had smaller routing problems.
-- hendrik
Anybody know if IPv6 is any better in this regard?
-- hendrik
Bittorrent could do use muultiple paths, even if the other end(s) weren't specially rigged for it.
The others would just see you as several bittorrent sites.
-- hendrik
White, if it existed. Black. otherwise.
You'd want to be able to save them for a week so you can retransmit if one of them gets lost in the mail.
-- hendrik
Try monotone. (http://www.monotone.ca/) It works on Windows too. You might need custom merge scripts to handle compressed files (such as word-processor files), though.
Sycing monotone between machines is easy. You use the sync command and everything is copied back and forth. Yes, it will distinguish the changed from the original version, and it will *not* copy the wrong way.
You don't need to merge before syncing. You don't have to sync all projects. But if you do, everything will automatically be backed up on your multiple machines.
One review of monotone (I forget where) said "It gets the user story right."
I use it to maintain projects in mulitplicate between my desktop machines and my laptop.
Will it erase all the floppy disks and audio tapes in the house?
Actually, he pointed out in a Turing lecture that he *could* have done it, but didn't say whether he actually had.
--hendrik
FLOSS projects need new developers from time to time to remain viable. The issues for user documentation apply to developer documentation, too. New developers need to be taught the structure and conventions of a project so that they can find their way into it.
-- hendrik