After sufficiently long, it is likely you will be more concerned about switching the *OS* back and forth than switching the way you type.
I've used Dvorak almost exclusively for the last 12 or so years. Before that, I'd used QWERTY for about 10 or so years.
Dvorak is faster and, somehow, feels tremendously "smoother" as the pace of keystrokes is more regular. If you start, and get used to it, you won't want to go back.
There *is* a price in terms of the cost of switching back-and-forth. In the beginning I could easily switch back. At some point it became very unpleasant and slow to use QWERTY. If I have to use it for a while -- hours to days -- the memory does come back and I become a decent QWERTY typist again, but I am left consciously missing Dvorak. Fortunately it's easy to switch the OS -- even on Windows it no longer requires a reboot.
Did you even bother to look at the link before posting? The patent is not "IBMs patent". It's very obviously a quack patent by "Pear, Inc.". It is really unfair to IBM to associate it with them just because it's in their database.
Applicant(s): Pear, Inc., St. Paul, MN
If article posts could be moderated, this one would be moderated down as far as possible. As far as mind reading and perpetual motion patents go, this is one of the more obviously rediculous. It is an example of the allowance of pretty much any "explanatory" content in the specification (in this case pseudo-QM) no matter how little sense it makes.
If "the matrix" is an adjacentcy matrix, just consider an edge between any two nodes. For a graph that would still be connected without the edge, the average shortest distance between nodes for the graph with the edge is bounded above by that for the graph without the edge, but, as the length of that edge goes to infinity, your sum of matrix elements diverges.
Is there something more about graph, such as a space in which it can be embedded?
I hope that this was not this guy's [other] issue with the competition.
This is true. I am really disappointed. For some reason, I really did not expect to see the Mozilla front end on the commercial Netscape release (even though I knew better, given the integration of and investement in the xpfe). That front end is fine for me, but of the 100M web users, virtually no one will adopt it as it is. I am surprised that they didn't at least do their own skin to provide a more native-looking interface.
There is a huge improvement in functionality over earlier Mozilla releases, but, if they don't adopt native or native-looking widgets for the Windows release, Explorer will bury Communicator.
There is little or no chance that some third party will be able to fork Mozilla, put on a native UI, and market it successfully against IE.
The message to Netscape(AOL): Please fix it quick, even if the entire Mozilla.org team needs to work on the commercial version for a while, and keep balance, standards compliance, and competition in the marketplace.
The alpha/x86 competition is fictional; these processors just serve different markets today. If memory serves, Intel manufactures the alphas that Compaq designs.
Their direct support of Linux can only be a good thing. This is [almost certainly] not about the development of a proprietary driver, but the distribution of a useful kernel config for their users (along with a complete distribution for those who want that part). Their HPT366 DMA/66 hardware is already very well supported and integrated into the kernel by the Andre Hedrick's IDE drivers (thanks Andre). There's even a mini-howto now and Highpoint Tech actually advertises their linux compatibility on their web site. I have an ABIT BE6 from with two DMA/33 channels and two HPT366 channels (one of which I boot linux from). In this context, if ABIT wants to make Linux users happy, this is a GOOD THING.
for posterity (or if it matters to you), get the patches from, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedr ick/ I use the "boot off-board chipsets first" kernel config option and put "pci=reverse", among other things, in lilo.conf. See the HPT366 and Ultra-DMA mini-howtos.
This is especially true since Mozilla does not include SSL or S/MIME capabilities.
I imagine that as Mozilla achieves "dogfood" status, this will dampen the effectiveness of AOL/Netscape's open-source strategy (relative to its potential). Presumably, many potential contributors would like, if they are to contribute, to be able to patch the source and then produce a binary that they can legally use and redistribute in the US. For many people, a browser must have SSL to be useful, and, of course, at least until September, a third party needs a very expensive license from RSA to add SSL (with RSA).
Thus far, as other posts have noted, Netscape's stated reason for not including cryptographic capabilities in Mozilla are export restrictions and intellectual property considerations (e.g. they use code that they don't own the copyright on to make their cryptographic module). I would expect, however, that Netscape could legally release a redistributable stand-alone executable that would serve as a special purpose local proxy to provide, perhaps through a socket, the cryptographic functionality implied by the stubs already visible in the mozilla source; for example, they could (1) take their existing proprietary module and make it into a stand-alone, attaching an interface between its native API (presumably represented by the existing stubs in the source) and an interprocess communication means (e.g. a socket), and (2) build a open-source dummy replacement for that proprietary module that would talk to the stand-alone.
Would a solution such as this be worth it to Netscape? That is, would any of you be more likely to contribute to Mozilla if you could build, use, and distribute a version with cryptographic capabilities?
I've been looking for a name myself. It's actually quite difficult to find a meaningful single word name that you can append a ".com" to.
A month or so ago, I ran/usr/dict/words through Network Solution's whois for fun. Out of 45k words, only about 4k got "no match" (some of which are registered with other registrars). Needless to say, the ones that are left are not that great (actually, a lot of the ones that are taken are not that great). For the 38k words for which I grabbed creation dates, I made the following table:
Slashdot Mirror
After sufficiently long, it is likely you will be more concerned about switching the *OS* back and forth than switching the way you type.
I've used Dvorak almost exclusively for the last 12 or so years. Before that, I'd used QWERTY for about 10 or so years.
Dvorak is faster and, somehow, feels tremendously "smoother" as the pace of keystrokes is more regular. If you start, and get used to it, you won't want to go back.
There *is* a price in terms of the cost of switching back-and-forth. In the beginning I could easily switch back. At some point it became very unpleasant and slow to use QWERTY. If I have to use it for a while -- hours to days -- the memory does come back and I become a decent QWERTY typist again, but I am left consciously missing Dvorak. Fortunately it's easy to switch the OS -- even on Windows it no longer requires a reboot.
Seth
The patent is not "IBMs patent". It's very obviously a quack patent by "Pear, Inc.".
It is really unfair to IBM to associate it with them just because it's in their database.
Applicant(s): Pear, Inc., St. Paul, MN
If article posts could be moderated, this one would be moderated down as far as possible. As far as mind reading and perpetual motion patents go, this is one of the more obviously rediculous. It is an example of the allowance of pretty much any "explanatory" content in the specification (in this case pseudo-QM) no matter how little sense it makes.
If "the matrix" is an adjacentcy matrix, just consider an edge between any two nodes. For a graph that would still be connected without the edge, the average shortest distance between nodes for the graph with the edge is bounded above by that for the graph without the edge, but, as the length of that edge goes to infinity, your sum of matrix elements diverges.
Is there something more about graph, such as a space in which it can be embedded?
I hope that this was not this guy's [other] issue with the competition.
For some reason, I really did not expect to see the Mozilla front end on the commercial Netscape release (even though I knew better, given the integration of and investement in the xpfe). That front end is fine for me, but of the 100M web users, virtually no one will adopt it as it is. I am surprised that they didn't at least do their own skin to provide a more native-looking interface.
There is a huge improvement in functionality over earlier Mozilla releases, but, if they don't adopt native or native-looking widgets for the Windows release, Explorer will bury Communicator.
There is little or no chance that some third party will be able to fork Mozilla, put on a native UI, and market it successfully against IE.
The message to Netscape(AOL): Please fix it quick, even if the entire Mozilla.org team needs to work on the commercial version for a while, and keep balance, standards compliance, and competition in the marketplace.
The alpha/x86 competition is fictional; these processors just serve different markets today.
If memory serves, Intel manufactures the alphas that Compaq designs.
See the old intel press release.
for posterity (or if it matters to you), get the patches from,r ick/
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hed
I use the "boot off-board chipsets first" kernel config option and put "pci=reverse", among other things, in lilo.conf. See the HPT366 and Ultra-DMA mini-howtos.
I imagine that as Mozilla achieves "dogfood" status, this will dampen the effectiveness of AOL/Netscape's open-source strategy (relative to its potential). Presumably, many potential contributors would like, if they are to contribute, to be able to patch the source and then produce a binary that they can legally use and redistribute in the US. For many people, a browser must have SSL to be useful, and, of course, at least until September, a third party needs a very expensive license from RSA to add SSL (with RSA).
Thus far, as other posts have noted, Netscape's stated reason for not including cryptographic capabilities in Mozilla are export restrictions and intellectual property considerations (e.g. they use code that they don't own the copyright on to make their cryptographic module). I would expect, however, that Netscape could legally release a redistributable stand-alone executable that would serve as a special purpose local proxy to provide, perhaps through a socket, the cryptographic functionality implied by the stubs already visible in the mozilla source; for example, they could (1) take their existing proprietary module and make it into a stand-alone, attaching an interface between its native API (presumably represented by the existing stubs in the source) and an interprocess communication means (e.g. a socket), and (2) build a open-source dummy replacement for that proprietary module that would talk to the stand-alone.
Would a solution such as this be worth it to Netscape? That is, would any of you be more likely to contribute to Mozilla if you could build, use, and distribute a version with cryptographic capabilities?
A month or so ago, I ran /usr/dict/words through Network Solution's whois for fun. Out of 45k words, only about 4k got "no match" (some of which are registered with other registrars). Needless to say, the ones that are left are not that great (actually, a lot of the ones that are taken are not that great). For the 38k words for which I grabbed creation dates, I made the following table:
Year / #Words
1985 / 4 (e.g. think.com, dec.com)
1986 / 15 (e.g. adobe.com, sun.com)
1987 / 11
1988 / 22
1989 / 40
1990 / 77
1991 / 130
1992 / 209
1993 / 464
1994 / 1666
1995 / 5180
1996 / 5637
1997 / 6004
1998 / 7000
1999 / 12330 (e.g. abortively.com, tenseness.com, Yoknapatawpha.com)