After years of toying around the WM:s, I now think that the two most important features in a WM are:
1. Pager, I use 3x3 desks, and four of those. Rarely run out of space, but it happens sometimes. 2. Keyboard shortcuts. Creme de la creme.
Most others are just useless excess. I see no point in having icons, buttons, menus and what-not. Keyboard is faster, and all you need is is enough space. Sticky windows are useful sometimes. But that's about it.
Gkrellm is nice thou. But it's not really a WM feature.
I have a theory: morning people have a 22 hour internal clock. I have a 28 hour internal clock.
This changes w/age. People in their fifties have usually an internal clock of some 24 hrs. Some can have even 30 hours or more at their twenties. Old people can have internal clocks of 19-20 hrs, which is why they tend to get tired early in the evening and then start waking up in the very early morning hours.
Some of us don't think clearly until after the sun has been down a few hours. Some of us have been that way since we were six despite the fact that we were raised by dads who kept us on a military time clock--and it didn't make one damn bit of difference, because we could invert the clock in one day by staying up until morning.
In my case I don't think it's really about my internal clock, as you could really time your clock by me when I was a baby, regarding both sleeping and eating. My folks made me get up at 07:00 every morning in the week for the 17 years I lived w/them. Now I'm soon 34, and I have a day off from work, and I woke up at 13:48. Any why ?
Because it was supposedly so important to watch a few more videos from Beyond Belief 2.0. I went to bed at 05:30 (am), just because I was so darn stubborn to keep on watching the videos about a subject that I found highly interesting. I actually played solitaire for the last few hours just to keep myself active so that I don't get too sleepy.
My theory is that at least some of the so-called night people are just like me: They're too intensive, too driven and too interested in things to let go of the day - it's like every day you go to bed it's a little death. And don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to get there when you're really tired, but the thing is that I still don't want to go to bed at night. I can say that to me going to bed feels like a punishment every and each day, and I drag it off for as long as I just can. If I didn't do this, I'd probably be more effective many days, because I would've slept as much as I really needed, had I gone to bed in good time.
I have a friend who has an intensively driven personality just like me, and he tends to do just the same things - stay awake just for the sake of it, like I guess we did when we were children. It was just so much fun to be able to stay up after your bedtime. Maybe this is in part is an effect of how we're brought up. Some Freudian would surely conclude that I want to stay up every night just to defy my parents who always put me to bed when I was a child.
Only when I got to be an adult did I realize that morning people aren't "faking it". Get this: they are really rather happy its morning! All that "good morning" stuff--its sincere to them. And you have to lie and say "good morning" right back to them or they won't understand you. Well, if I wasn't always tired in the morning w/having to get to work, maybe I'd feel better about mornings, too. As it is, I pay the price for not going to bed in time especially in the mornings.
> Ergo, no experiment we could produce would allow us to discern the reality of the VR machine unless it chose to reveal itself to us.
While this could be true, it also could be otherwise. Assuming that we're being run on a VR machine does not imply that we're necessarily not wanted to figure it out. So it could very well be that there are tests that would reveal to us that we're in a simulation. There's no reason to automagically expect that the VR machine is such that it denies us this information.
Another thing is that even if it tried to do so, maybe it's not that well built and would therefore miss it that we figured it out. It could also be so that while theoretically everything could be taken back, this actually is not so as there are variables there that prevent this. Maybe they need to get the simulation done w/limited resources, and have accepted a tiny risk that we'll figure it out. Maybe it doesn't matter at all if we figure it out, because this simulation is made to test something completely different. Maybe we're just a by-product of a some kind of a test, and they don't care, or even haven't noticed. The possibilites are virtually endless.
The problem is that if it comes w/some Windowzen OS, I wonder if they let me take it back to them just stating that installing debian didn't work. I have an Acer 7003 WSMi that runs debian just fine, but the little I've researched, it seems that for example iBooks are tedious w/Linux. I tried at one point to figure out if the LG bagtops can run Linux, but the answer just wasn't to be had, so I decided to not get one.
So, I want some kind of guarantee. I don't want nor need a laptop that can't run Linux. And I'm not really interested in even trying it myself. I want to know when I'm buying. Of course http://www.linux-laptop.net/ helps.
Anytime you end up arguing something like this, make sure you provide the first working physical solution in the background ASAP. The first one working w/backups and all is the one that gets approved.
IMX, you piss off ppl less, too, when you don't start a verbal nuclear war, but just rather get the job done. That way you can act nice towards the other party while still getting your way. The resentment that this path produces is still less than forcing your will when everyone's dug deep into the trenches.
Yea, the first rule of politics-driven development is to be first w/the actual prototype. That tends to beat the politics, as the ppl making decisions rarely care about anything else than money, and that's why you have to come up w/tangible proof of what you're saying. That's understandable.
I'd say that it's because it has a biological purpose. We find symmetry beautiful in everything, but most importantly of all - in the human body - and face. So I believe that we find this sort of ratio pleasant because it's the pattern we use to choose partners to mate with.
The fact of the matter is that we'd be speaking Russian here w/o the Germans, and very cunning leaders of our own. We do owe the germans big time, in this. Just to give an example, look at this rather famous battle of Tali-Ihantala.
This was a very important battle: "The Battle of Tali-Ihantala, along with other successful Finnish victories achieved during the period, finally convinced the Soviet leadership that conquering Finland was extremely hard, and not worth the cost."
And as it happens, we had probably decisive help from the Germans, in that one, too:
German air unit Gefechtsverband Kuhlmey (Lt. Col. Kurt Kuhlmey) arrived in Finland on June 16. (23-43 Fw-190 A-6/F-8 fighters and ground attack aircraft, 24-30 Ju-87 D Stukas and 1-8 Bf-109 G-8 reconnaissance fighters)
German Sturmgeschütz-Brigade 303 (Cpt. Hans-Wilhelm Cardeneo) arrived in Finland on June 22. (22 StuG III Ausf. G assault guns, 9 StuH 42 assault howitzers)
On a more personal note, I still get to speak the language of my ancestors, and hence it's hard to think too badly of our past German overlords. And this has nothing to do w/nazi sympathies. One of my past relatives even fought the Russians in the German eastern front. Also, some of my now past family lost all of their lands to the Russians, everything. So to many it may seem that the Germans were the Big Evil, but to us it was the Russians. And really, Stalin was a way more accomplished mass-murderer than Hitler, but that's another story entirely.
I've tried a few electrical appliances, and all the stuff sold to the consumers seems to be just pure crap.
I went to get tested by pro equipment a while ago, namely, Inbody 720, and the results were so close to what I could imagine to be true from other hints (weight/height/exercise/waist circumference/way I eat/way I look in the mirror) that I was actually positively surprised how well it seemed to correlate w/what I expected to be my situation. That same day I bought a scale that promised to do the same measurements, tried it, and took it right back to the store, because it was way off. I once had one other electrical body fat measuring tool that you'd hold in your hands, and it was obviously just as bad as the scale, clearly giving wrong values when you tried it on different people.
So, personally, I keep a log of my weight and waist circumference by feeding them on to a php page that dumps them into mysql db, and then draw graphs from the data via gnuplot. And will in the future also go to that Inbody 720 measurement thing every 3 to 6 months.
Also, your waist circumference appears to give a very good approximation regarding the amount of visceral fat, which correlates very well w/health risks regarding being obese. I'd guess that the rule of thumb that was mentioned in another post to this topic was really good - make your waist circumference less than 50% of your height.
I wouldn't be surprised if this issue ending up being so that nobody would sell you a computer before you have signed an agreement stating that you agree w/having Windows etc. in there. Then, if someone took this to court, it would probably end up so that you could get some other OS pre-installed, but w/extra cost, and they could justify this by saying that it causes them extra costs to serve a small group of users having e.g. Linux in there. So, you'd still end up paying the M$ tax in one form or the other. Of course they could sell the computers w/o any OS, but I don't think this is the way it's gonna be, because M$ will use a lot of money and will put a lot of pressure on the hw companies to make it otherwise.
I agree. When you are paid what's the fair price for your skills, that's just fine. I have been happy w/my salary on many occasions, although - not at the moment. But that will change in the near future.
I think that companies often do a bad job in keeping their people paid according to their skills. Too often the salary isn't getting any better w/the same rate as your skills are. If I had a company and wanted to keep the best people, I would make sure every 6 months that they are being paid for what they're worth to not make them want to change jobs after a few years just to get to what they really should be paid for their current skills.
I'd say that in Finland a 30-yo programmer on the private side probably makes some 4000 euros, give or take. On the public side this could be more like 3000e. Then again, 6-7 ke can be earned by true experts. But you have to understand that after taxes: 3000e -> 2000e, 4000e -> 2500e and so forth. Then again, when you are paying your bank what you owe for your apartment, that 500e/month can make a bigger impact on the longer run than one might expect at first glance.
I cannot help myself but comment the statement where you claim that "Simplest solutions are often the most inefficient ones". I know what you mean, and agree, if the amounts of items you are about to manipulate justify choosing the more complex algorithm. I am taking the sentence somewhat out of context, I am aware of that. And I do apologize for doing so.
However, in my experience, the opposite, generally, is true. You do know the KISS principle. The most important thing - of course - is to really understand the problem area thoroughly, and choose the Right solution rather than the fanciest. If a fancier solution is not clearly justified over the simpler one, mostly erring to the side of simplicity yields code that is easier to code, understand, maintain - and on the occasion it needs to be done - refactor.
I would say, from my personal experience, that choosing a solution that fits the problem is very often the simpler rather then the more complex one. Of course, context really settles it, but simplicity is just pure gold, as we're all too bad at programming in the first place. Humans just generally suck at it big time.
That all said, I do most of my coding in C/C++, but I don't shy away from e.g. Python to use it to do a job that it fits well. However, guestimating, it's probably a bad idea to use a big mix of languages in a big project, unless the areas are very well defined. Also, the problem w/many high-level-libraries is that you become entirely clueless to what's happening under the hood, and that can lead you to do very bad choices. So being a bit picky about what libraries to use can be a good choice, indeed. And in the least getting to know what they do, a bit, too. Of course premature optimization is kind of bad, but then again it most often isn't the simplest way either.
All in all, I'm a big believer in the KISS principle, and I tend to think that there's a lot of good reason to be that, too. So choose that array over more sophisticated algorithms, if there is no doubt that you won't have many items anyways. Change it to something fancier, when there is reason to, unless you can see from the beginning that there will be loads of items to deal w/.
Sometimes I feel like people are using more complex algorithms just for the coolness factor. That simply just isn't good design.
If you're about to code the algorithm yourself, by all means - do that as an exercise - to learn ! - and then toss it, and use the array, to remove all the bugs that your own implementation of a complex algorithm would bring about unnecessarily.:)
Actually, I haven't. I effectively never edit anything w/OO, and it was my SO who had the problem w/it. If you knew how many things I need to take care of every day, you wouldn't be asking me to file bug reports in behalf of others about programs that I almost never use.
I almost never use ooffice, and just two days ago I witnessed a problem in an EU project w/word docs. Using anchored tables in the word doc caused compatibility problems w/ooffice. Granted, I heard that using those anchors is evil, but that's somewhat beside the point.
It seems to me that this is the reason why commercials come from many channels at the same time. You change the channel to see the same commercials on another channel.
The problem w/your reasoning is that ppl are social creatures, and peer pressure is a much more effective force than you seem to give it credit. Only friends make friends smoke, and get wasted - and some of us are more at risk of ending up addicted. Genetically, even. AFAIK, alcohol actually is much more harmful for young people than adults, so I would disagree w/your have-a-beer-w/dad-policy. It is well known that the risk of ending up an alcoholic is related to the age of onset of alcohol (ab)use. Possibly it has something to do w/how the brains respond to alcohol and how that gets affected by giving alcohol to children whose brains are still evolving in a lot more significant way than those of adults.
Other than that... yes, I do believe that people are responsible for their actions. It's just that as social creatures we're not really too good at that at all, and tend to make bad decisions to be better accepted by peers. And yes, it's very sad, but this is how it goes. So you cannot solely put blame on just one person, when he or she is just doing what everyone else is doing, because of social/genetic build. We're less able to make our own choices than it may appear at first glance.
Isn't it enough that ppl act in horridly stupid ways - do we also have to create computers that also inherit our bad qualities ?
Somehow I can envision a future where there are computers who have become too lazy to recycle.
Variation in setups and body/mind as a whole
on
Mouse or Trackball?
·
· Score: 1
I use trackball on the left at work, a Logitech that has the ball for the index and middle fingers. As it is symmetrical, I change it to my right hand on the days my left hand is bothering me. At home I have another Logitech, for my right hand w/which the ball is moved w/your thumb. I also use M$ egro-keyboard at work, but a plain old at home. The idea is to get a lot of variation, and not to put too much pressure on any one part of the biomechanical system. I think that it has been somewhat helpful of an approach, I have this nagging structural problem w/my elbows that my nerves are pinched there, and I don't think that I can ever get really a rid of it, but using these measures it's more manageable than it was. At worst it was like a bad tooth-ache. Just at your elbows.
One should also recall that a human being is a very social mind/body creature. It is well known that some RSI troubles come from the social/mind side, so sometimes it's not your mouse that is killing your hands, it can very well be the atmosphere at your work, home, or wherever you are having problems. My blood pressure came down by ten when I changed jobs, w/o any other change. I also think that my RSI bothers me less even if I'm working more, because I'm enjoying what I do, and I feel like I'm valued and respected.
For some of us w/iron will our body is the only thing our mind listens to, and we won't change our habits before the body starts falling apart. That will force change on your pig-headed mind-set, as enough of pain is a great teacher.
Design is a scientific hypothesis that isn't supported by any evidence. If it were, I'm sure we would have heard all about it already. I'm sure it's not the lack of trying that has made the evidence so scarce. It's just that there isn't any.
Slashdot Mirror
After years of toying around the WM:s, I now think that the two most important features in a WM are:
1. Pager, I use 3x3 desks, and four of those. Rarely run out of space, but it happens sometimes.
2. Keyboard shortcuts. Creme de la creme.
Most others are just useless excess. I see no point in having icons, buttons, menus and what-not. Keyboard is faster, and all you need is is enough space. Sticky windows are useful sometimes. But that's about it.
Gkrellm is nice thou. But it's not really a WM feature.
I use fvwm2, btw.
This changes w/age. People in their fifties have usually an internal clock of some 24 hrs. Some can have even 30 hours or more at their twenties. Old people can have internal clocks of 19-20 hrs, which is why they tend to get tired early in the evening and then start waking up in the very early morning hours.
Some of us don't think clearly until after the sun has been down a few hours. Some of us have been that way since we were six despite the fact that we were raised by dads who kept us on a military time clock--and it didn't make one damn bit of difference, because we could invert the clock in one day by staying up until morning.In my case I don't think it's really about my internal clock, as you could really time your clock by me when I was a baby, regarding both sleeping and eating. My folks made me get up at 07:00 every morning in the week for the 17 years I lived w/them. Now I'm soon 34, and I have a day off from work, and I woke up at 13:48. Any why ?
Because it was supposedly so important to watch a few more videos from Beyond Belief 2.0. I went to bed at 05:30 (am), just because I was so darn stubborn to keep on watching the videos about a subject that I found highly interesting. I actually played solitaire for the last few hours just to keep myself active so that I don't get too sleepy.
My theory is that at least some of the so-called night people are just like me: They're too intensive, too driven and too interested in things to let go of the day - it's like every day you go to bed it's a little death. And don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to get there when you're really tired, but the thing is that I still don't want to go to bed at night. I can say that to me going to bed feels like a punishment every and each day, and I drag it off for as long as I just can. If I didn't do this, I'd probably be more effective many days, because I would've slept as much as I really needed, had I gone to bed in good time.
I have a friend who has an intensively driven personality just like me, and he tends to do just the same things - stay awake just for the sake of it, like I guess we did when we were children. It was just so much fun to be able to stay up after your bedtime. Maybe this is in part is an effect of how we're brought up. Some Freudian would surely conclude that I want to stay up every night just to defy my parents who always put me to bed when I was a child.
Only when I got to be an adult did I realize that morning people aren't "faking it". Get this: they are really rather happy its morning! All that "good morning" stuff--its sincere to them. And you have to lie and say "good morning" right back to them or they won't understand you. Well, if I wasn't always tired in the morning w/having to get to work, maybe I'd feel better about mornings, too. As it is, I pay the price for not going to bed in time especially in the mornings....when you got a shitload of geeks writing to a discussion board..
Maybe in America. In Soviet Russia women defy you to carry that phone.
> Ergo, no experiment we could produce would allow us to discern the reality of the VR machine unless it chose to reveal itself to us.
While this could be true, it also could be otherwise. Assuming that we're being run on a VR machine does not imply that we're necessarily not wanted to figure it out. So it could very well be that there are tests that would reveal to us that we're in a simulation. There's no reason to automagically expect that the VR machine is such that it denies us this information.
Another thing is that even if it tried to do so, maybe it's not that well built and would therefore miss it that we figured it out. It could also be so that while theoretically everything could be taken back, this actually is not so as there are variables there that prevent this. Maybe they need to get the simulation done w/limited resources, and have accepted a tiny risk that we'll figure it out. Maybe it doesn't matter at all if we figure it out, because this simulation is made to test something completely different. Maybe we're just a by-product of a some kind of a test, and they don't care, or even haven't noticed. The possibilites are virtually endless.
The problem is that if it comes w/some Windowzen OS, I wonder if they let me take it back to them just stating that installing debian didn't work. I have an Acer 7003 WSMi that runs debian just fine, but the little I've researched, it seems that for example iBooks are tedious w/Linux. I tried at one point to figure out if the LG bagtops can run Linux, but the answer just wasn't to be had, so I decided to not get one.
So, I want some kind of guarantee. I don't want nor need a laptop that can't run Linux. And I'm not really interested in even trying it myself. I want to know when I'm buying. Of course http://www.linux-laptop.net/ helps.
Anytime you end up arguing something like this, make sure you provide the first working physical solution in the background ASAP. The first one working w/backups and all is the one that gets approved. IMX, you piss off ppl less, too, when you don't start a verbal nuclear war, but just rather get the job done. That way you can act nice towards the other party while still getting your way. The resentment that this path produces is still less than forcing your will when everyone's dug deep into the trenches. Yea, the first rule of politics-driven development is to be first w/the actual prototype. That tends to beat the politics, as the ppl making decisions rarely care about anything else than money, and that's why you have to come up w/tangible proof of what you're saying. That's understandable.
I'd say that it's because it has a biological purpose. We find symmetry beautiful in everything, but most importantly of all - in the human body - and face. So I believe that we find this sort of ratio pleasant because it's the pattern we use to choose partners to mate with.
Such a simple pattern can be gotten from like anywhere. That's not a song at all.
The fact of the matter is that we'd be speaking Russian here w/o the Germans, and very cunning leaders of our own. We do owe the germans big time, in this. Just to give an example, look at this rather famous battle of Tali-Ihantala.
This was a very important battle: "The Battle of Tali-Ihantala, along with other successful Finnish victories achieved during the period, finally convinced the Soviet leadership that conquering Finland was extremely hard, and not worth the cost."
And as it happens, we had probably decisive help from the Germans, in that one, too:
On a more personal note, I still get to speak the language of my ancestors, and hence it's hard to think too badly of our past German overlords. And this has nothing to do w/nazi sympathies. One of my past relatives even fought the Russians in the German eastern front. Also, some of my now past family lost all of their lands to the Russians, everything. So to many it may seem that the Germans were the Big Evil, but to us it was the Russians. And really, Stalin was a way more accomplished mass-murderer than Hitler, but that's another story entirely.
I've tried a few electrical appliances, and all the stuff sold to the consumers seems to be just pure crap.
I went to get tested by pro equipment a while ago, namely, Inbody 720, and the results were so close to what I could imagine to be true from other hints (weight/height/exercise/waist circumference/way I eat/way I look in the mirror) that I was actually positively surprised how well it seemed to correlate w/what I expected to be my situation. That same day I bought a scale that promised to do the same measurements, tried it, and took it right back to the store, because it was way off. I once had one other electrical body fat measuring tool that you'd hold in your hands, and it was obviously just as bad as the scale, clearly giving wrong values when you tried it on different people.
So, personally, I keep a log of my weight and waist circumference by feeding them on to a php page that dumps them into mysql db, and then draw graphs from the data via gnuplot. And will in the future also go to that Inbody 720 measurement thing every 3 to 6 months.
Also, your waist circumference appears to give a very good approximation regarding the amount of visceral fat, which correlates very well w/health risks regarding being obese. I'd guess that the rule of thumb that was mentioned in another post to this topic was really good - make your waist circumference less than 50% of your height.
I wouldn't be surprised if this issue ending up being so that nobody would sell you a computer before you have signed an agreement stating that you agree w/having Windows etc. in there. Then, if someone took this to court, it would probably end up so that you could get some other OS pre-installed, but w/extra cost, and they could justify this by saying that it causes them extra costs to serve a small group of users having e.g. Linux in there. So, you'd still end up paying the M$ tax in one form or the other. Of course they could sell the computers w/o any OS, but I don't think this is the way it's gonna be, because M$ will use a lot of money and will put a lot of pressure on the hw companies to make it otherwise.
I agree. When you are paid what's the fair price for your skills, that's just fine. I have been happy w/my salary on many occasions, although - not at the moment. But that will change in the near future.
I think that companies often do a bad job in keeping their people paid according to their skills. Too often the salary isn't getting any better w/the same rate as your skills are. If I had a company and wanted to keep the best people, I would make sure every 6 months that they are being paid for what they're worth to not make them want to change jobs after a few years just to get to what they really should be paid for their current skills.
I'd say that in Finland a 30-yo programmer on the private side probably makes some 4000 euros, give or take. On the public side this could be more like 3000e. Then again, 6-7 ke can be earned by true experts. But you have to understand that after taxes: 3000e -> 2000e, 4000e -> 2500e and so forth. Then again, when you are paying your bank what you owe for your apartment, that 500e/month can make a bigger impact on the longer run than one might expect at first glance.
I cannot help myself but comment the statement where you claim that "Simplest solutions are often the most inefficient ones". I know what you mean, and agree, if the amounts of items you are about to manipulate justify choosing the more complex algorithm. I am taking the sentence somewhat out of context, I am aware of that. And I do apologize for doing so.
:)
However, in my experience, the opposite, generally, is true. You do know the KISS principle. The most important thing - of course - is to really understand the problem area thoroughly, and choose the Right solution rather than the fanciest. If a fancier solution is not clearly justified over the simpler one, mostly erring to the side of simplicity yields code that is easier to code, understand, maintain - and on the occasion it needs to be done - refactor.
I would say, from my personal experience, that choosing a solution that fits the problem is very often the simpler rather then the more complex one. Of course, context really settles it, but simplicity is just pure gold, as we're all too bad at programming in the first place. Humans just generally suck at it big time.
That all said, I do most of my coding in C/C++, but I don't shy away from e.g. Python to use it to do a job that it fits well. However, guestimating, it's probably a bad idea to use a big mix of languages in a big project, unless the areas are very well defined. Also, the problem w/many high-level-libraries is that you become entirely clueless to what's happening under the hood, and that can lead you to do very bad choices. So being a bit picky about what libraries to use can be a good choice, indeed. And in the least getting to know what they do, a bit, too. Of course premature optimization is kind of bad, but then again it most often isn't the simplest way either.
All in all, I'm a big believer in the KISS principle, and I tend to think that there's a lot of good reason to be that, too. So choose that array over more sophisticated algorithms, if there is no doubt that you won't have many items anyways. Change it to something fancier, when there is reason to, unless you can see from the beginning that there will be loads of items to deal w/.
Sometimes I feel like people are using more complex algorithms just for the coolness factor. That simply just isn't good design.
If you're about to code the algorithm yourself, by all means - do that as an exercise - to learn ! - and then toss it, and use the array, to remove all the bugs that your own implementation of a complex algorithm would bring about unnecessarily.
Actually, I haven't. I effectively never edit anything w/OO, and it was my SO who had the problem w/it. If you knew how many things I need to take care of every day, you wouldn't be asking me to file bug reports in behalf of others about programs that I almost never use.
I almost never use ooffice, and just two days ago I witnessed a problem in an EU project w/word docs. Using anchored tables in the word doc caused compatibility problems w/ooffice. Granted, I heard that using those anchors is evil, but that's somewhat beside the point.
It seems to me that this is the reason why commercials come from many channels at the same time. You change the channel to see the same commercials on another channel.
The problem w/your reasoning is that ppl are social creatures, and peer pressure is a much more effective force than you seem to give it credit. Only friends make friends smoke, and get wasted - and some of us are more at risk of ending up addicted. Genetically, even. AFAIK, alcohol actually is much more harmful for young people than adults, so I would disagree w/your have-a-beer-w/dad-policy. It is well known that the risk of ending up an alcoholic is related to the age of onset of alcohol (ab)use. Possibly it has something to do w/how the brains respond to alcohol and how that gets affected by giving alcohol to children whose brains are still evolving in a lot more significant way than those of adults.
Other than that... yes, I do believe that people are responsible for their actions. It's just that as social creatures we're not really too good at that at all, and tend to make bad decisions to be better accepted by peers. And yes, it's very sad, but this is how it goes. So you cannot solely put blame on just one person, when he or she is just doing what everyone else is doing, because of social/genetic build. We're less able to make our own choices than it may appear at first glance.
My thoughts exactly. Terminator 2, anyone ?
Isn't it enough that ppl act in horridly stupid ways - do we also have to create computers that also inherit our bad qualities ?
Somehow I can envision a future where there are computers who have become too lazy to recycle.
I use trackball on the left at work, a Logitech that has the ball for the index and middle fingers. As it is symmetrical, I change it to my right hand on the days my left hand is bothering me. At home I have another Logitech, for my right hand w/which the ball is moved w/your thumb. I also use M$ egro-keyboard at work, but a plain old at home. The idea is to get a lot of variation, and not to put too much pressure on any one part of the biomechanical system. I think that it has been somewhat helpful of an approach, I have this nagging structural problem w/my elbows that my nerves are pinched there, and I don't think that I can ever get really a rid of it, but using these measures it's more manageable than it was. At worst it was like a bad tooth-ache. Just at your elbows.
One should also recall that a human being is a very social mind/body creature. It is well known that some RSI troubles come from the social/mind side, so sometimes it's not your mouse that is killing your hands, it can very well be the atmosphere at your work, home, or wherever you are having problems. My blood pressure came down by ten when I changed jobs, w/o any other change. I also think that my RSI bothers me less even if I'm working more, because I'm enjoying what I do, and I feel like I'm valued and respected.
For some of us w/iron will our body is the only thing our mind listens to, and we won't change our habits before the body starts falling apart. That will force change on your pig-headed mind-set, as enough of pain is a great teacher.
Until, of course, you get the next PM that wants to distance herself from the now new PM... ;)
Well, if you have a room w/one or two ppl working in it, guestimating isn't actually rocket science...
Design is a scientific hypothesis that isn't supported by any evidence. If it were, I'm sure we would have heard all about it already. I'm sure it's not the lack of trying that has made the evidence so scarce. It's just that there isn't any.