My biggest gripe with the usual split keyboards is that they assume you exactly cover the left 50% of the keyboard with your left hand, and thus give you no duplicate keys. The way I type looks a bit funny from a classical typing class style, but my left hand is definitely dominant, putting some of that "2% twist" into my typing as I turn my wrist to cover more area...and making me stub my finger against hard plastic any time I try to type a "Y" on a split keyboard.
Imagine this. Just flop your hand in a relaxed position on the desk. If you're at all like me, your hand is slightly bulged, and there's a bit of an open space between your index finger and thumb. The pad is there, just move your index finger around. To click, tap your index finger, or you can use the buttons, which just so happen to be right underneath your thumb and pinky. And your ring finger is over on the edge, which acts as a scroll wheel (actually, all 4 edges act as different scroll wheels).
I think the "just flop your hand on it" description is good for a comfortable pointing device: you should be as relaxed as possible when using your keyboard and pointer. My trackball (Logitech Marble, with the little ball on the left for your thumb) fits very nicely for me; I can relax my whole hand and arm, except my thumb when I'm moving the ball or my fingers while clicking. The buttons are right where I expect from my years of 3-button mouse experience, and the ball moves easily (unless it needs cleaning) and doesn't mis-track even when the rollers are cruddy.
But if I put it or my desktop in a bad spot, I have to hold my arm up funny; that bugs me enough that I can eventually notice it and stop...
If PKZIP can use LW to compress multiple files, why can Gzip only do one at a time?
Because, in accordance with the UNIX philosophy, it is better to write programs that do one thing well because you can hook them together very easily. (Note also that gzip follows compress's syntax very closely, for backward compatibility...)
(yes, i know you can first tar your multiple files and gzip the tar file, but gzip is still only compressing one file, the tar file, and you can't extract the individual original files either...you have to un-gzip and then un-tar everything).
Then use afio, which compresses each file separately (if you ask it to). Generally you should get better compression if you agglomerate first, then compress, because of similarities among the files in the collection, but that does decrease reliability.
I second your recommendation for Plextor, but don't understand your enthusiasm for Adaptec.
Last time anybody tested, Adaptec cards were no faster than the competition (even a hair slower than some). Meanwhile, if you're reading Slashdot, there's no reason to pay almost double for an Adaptec--even if their phone tech support is better than, say, Tekram's, they still won't likely know enough to help you if you have a problem anyway, unless it's a simple mistake...
I like my 53c8xx-based SCSI boards, and my UltraPlex. My Mitsubishi CD-RW was cheap, and functions okay.
Another nice reason to go SCSI, though, is to get a 2-drive external case (plus a quieter fan than the one that came with it), and stick your CD-ROM and CD-RW on your desktop. Much smaller than a minitower, plus I have a full-sized case on the floor I don't have to lean down to...
That only works if the running program image in memory was modified, but wasn't modified to not do your check.
Meanwhile, encrypted code is useless because the program has to start with...a decryptor! This is why, long ago when people compressed and scrambled executables with some PKzip product, it was so easy to decrypt them: to run itself, it needs the key and the decryption code...
Or if the driver's memory needs are not known ahead of time, or are large enough to not be acceptable--especially if they're (relatively) large areas of memory below 16M (for ISA DMA...)?
I just extrapolated what I felt (and wasn't able to feel) when I was younger. What I guessed as to why many geeks are atheists was that they just didn't feel the drive or have the opportunity to find something new to believe in; it took me years as it was.
The last half is just an elaboration on "geeks don't like being told how to do things" in the context of religion.
Alas for you, I'm male and don't think of myself as single anymore. If you want to find more people like me, just look for Pagans, somewhere other than usenet. I think Wicca's combination of do-it-yourself attitude, powerful ritual technology, and good documentation makes it a good fit for the "typical" geek who doesn't require monotheism or Yahweh in his religion, and even non-geek witches tend to be interesting people.
(As for your beautiful draft, stick it on a web page.:-) I personally like Wicca better than Lutheranism for its performance, reliability, and open source traits, but then again I don't have as bad a time with Windows as most/.ers because I don't futz with nasty drivers and don't develop for it.)
If your religion includes idols, does that mean it's object oriented?
People need to be aware that at the point you are taking things on faith, you are getting lazy.
Faith so blind as to constitute laziness is not faith in my book, just unchecked assumptions. If you really have faith in something, you know it's right, you can feel that there's a reason behind it. It needn't be rational, it needn't be something you can articulate or verbalize ("The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao" and so on). But it feels right, so much so that you behave as if it is right, because your heart and your instincts and your feelings all confirm it.
I bet there's a logical reason where the typical liberal/atheist/open minded stereotype got started. It probably has something to do with the ultra-intelligent folks at MIT and Caltech in the late 60's/early 70's.
Liberal: things need fixing, you don't trust the government to fix them, and you know better than to think they'd get better with no government.
Atheist: has found that the local branch of the church he was raised in doesn't meet his spiritual needs, if he thinks he has any, and either hasn't met the right priest/church/religion or can't manage enough suspension of disbelief to get at what he really feels and implement said right religion. Persuit of "logic" and being raised male (if you are) both lead you to underdevelop the "feeling" side, making such matters that much worse.
Open minded: when you're wrong, you'd rather learn from it and be wrong again; a few times around that block, and it turns into a habit...
Religion limits what you can do; it does so for good reasons, but they're limits nonetheless, and I should be able to decide what is right and what is wrong.
I would substitute "organized religion" for "religion" in most or all of what you say. I might even substitute "authority-based religion". It's not the geek accepting the limits of what's right that's the problem, but accepting somebody else's enumeration of what's right and what isn't when that enumeration conflicts with what the geek feels or finds bloody obvious.
From that standpoint, limiting yourself (as best you can) to what you yourself feel is right is much like not writing ugly code or not resorting to nasty kluges without good cause. When you have to, you do something "wrong". But those limits come from, or echo what comes from (if you find a religion/church/priest that fits you) within you. Your sense of right and wrong is no more optional than sexuality (whatever yours is) or bipedalism in meatspace.
I wouldn't knock religion. Some of us like the one we were raised in and find it rewarding; others have to find the right religion, or work out what "right religion" for ourselves then find compatible religious traditions. Some of us don't like what we've had, but don't need religion enough to find another, or don't want to.
For some of us, religion is good; others are plaged with incompatibilities, implementation problems, and even buggy platforms.
(Followups comparing Microsoft to the previous-millenium Roman Catholic Church, and Windows to Christianity, should not appear here but should be posted to a newsgroup I don't read.:-) )
I was raised Lutheran. By my teens I realized that something about regular church Christianity didn't feel right to me, as I extended that geekish desire to know everything into my intuition and sense of what "felt right." Plus, the community my age at my church all went to high school with me, and weren't really socially compatible with me. Not to mention the fact that I didn't get much out of praying to a God who was so unpingable.:-)
Nowadays, my geekish intolerance for mediocrity leads me to a disdain for attending Christian church services, where the priests tend, even when performing the Communion liturgy, to sound and feel like they're just reading the lines off the page, not performing the most fundamental and moving sacrement of a religion that's supposed to be a fundamental and inspiring part of their life. And if they can't get a guy who (after years of training!) looks like he means it during the important part, they can't get stuff that looks like money out of my wallet. Christians in the audience, I hope I just had bad luck and that your priests can make you feel the power of the sacrement before they even finish saying "On the night in which he was betrayed".
However, the sense of the Divine I have found makes me once again a "Jesus freak", in the literal sense though not the idiomatic sense. It's just not organized-church Jesus, nor is it "Yahweh brand" Jesus. Still the same emphasis on compassion and sacrifice, though. Still loving us enough to die for us, that death to be celebrated annually. Bread and wine (or "wine", as desired) at every ritual, even. And of course, a deep certainty that He is there for me when I need Him, that he is as real and vital to me as, say, lunch. If only I didn't start my equivalent of Good Friday in August...
if (malloc returned 0) then do... what? For this particular state of processing on this particular peripheral? How do you back out the part of the activity you've already done in such a way as to minimally impact further processing, when you don't understand the driver?
Just because you can write the error detection into almost any code doesn't mean that you can determine or implement a correct response to that error condition with that same lack of knowlege.
Unless I had a very small, maintainable, perfect program running on top of perfect libraries, I'd hesitate to use threads where they weren't necessary. Threads make everything so much more fragile, and limit your choices (and chances) for error recovery--or even error tracking, as the thread causing the corruption may not be affected by it. At least with separate processes you have a limited section of shared memory, accesses to which you can limit to a fairly small section of code. With threads, if you have a memory corrupting bug and you can't review the entire program to find it (or don't find it when you look), you're pretty much screwed...
Remember, kids, the thread you seg fault may not be your own...
I remember from high school (or was it college?) physics that being in front of a fan cooled you down because stopping the air molecules and making them go around you took energy out of you. I don't remember why the energy came out of you, rather than the air molecule, though...
Also, if you want to be exchanging thermal energy with air, it's best to have a lot of it. Double-pane windows have a little bit of vacuum in the middle because vacuum (the extreme of negative pressure) is such a good thermal insulator.
A lot of times, companies will deliberately hire new graduates and hope they don't screw up too much before they get clued in, rather than looking for people who are already competent or even particularly good. While this saves the company money up front, I think the lost of output and quality of output more than makes this a bad strategy.
Admittedly, competent people are harder to find (if you're willing to wait for graduation times)...but I don't ever want to work in a place where I'm the best they've got by a long shot...
Re:Recruiters can't always see websites
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
Worse, one recruiter I heard from couldn't browse the web because he didn't know how to do it.
You can certainly access multiple CD images simultaneously, even if the server is using IDE. It may not be nearly as fast as SCSI, and if you have a lot of different users (about one per changer, say:-)) it would be best to go SCSI, but IDE disk space is cheap, especially with the new 20-25 gig disks out. And it's certainly tons faster than the changers when two users try to use the same disc, or worse different disks in the same changer, at once...
Some of the things Katz says are wrong, aughably wrong. Internet Access is a "right"??? puh-leeeze! That is the most idiotic thing I've heard today. Internet access is no more a "right" than TV ownership. Sure, if you can afford it there's no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to have it -- but to speak of Internet access as a "right" is to trivialize the liberties uaranteed us by the Constitution in this country: rights to free speech, a free press, etc. It's not a "right". It's an economic good that ought to be as freely available (as distinguished from free) as any other economic good.
Internet access is as much a right as any other form of freedom of assembly. Just because you can't get to a particular gathering doesn't jeopardize your right to attend other gatherings you can reach and afford.
In a command line, you are given no information about what is possible, but all operations are available instantly if you learn their names and options, all without searching the screen with your eyes.
And if you don't know, there's ls, man -k (or man, if you're looking for particular options), and automatic completion (with e.g. tcsh or 4dos)... So there are definitely memory aids in CLIs as well.
So far I like Zope. Python is clean and simple. The database interface is simple and orthogonal: you write SQL "methods" that incorporate the input parameters, controlling optional SQL just like you control optional HTML in the web pages. In the web pages, you can invoke a Python method, database method, or external code with the same syntax; this includes iterating over the results within the HTML page.
I don't miss Perl's regexp engine at all, because I simply don't need to use it under Zope.
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest gripe with the usual split keyboards is that they assume you exactly cover the left 50% of the keyboard with your left hand, and thus give you no duplicate keys. The way I type looks a bit funny from a classical typing class style, but my left hand is definitely dominant, putting some of that "2% twist" into my typing as I turn my wrist to cover more area...and making me stub my finger against hard plastic any time I try to type a "Y" on a split keyboard.
Imagine this. Just flop your hand in a relaxed position on the desk. If you're at all like me, your hand is slightly bulged, and there's a bit of an open space between your index finger and thumb. The pad is there, just move your index finger around. To click, tap your index finger, or you can use the buttons, which just so happen to be right underneath your thumb and pinky. And your ring finger is over on the edge, which acts as a scroll wheel (actually, all 4 edges act as different scroll wheels).
I think the "just flop your hand on it" description is good for a comfortable pointing device: you should be as relaxed as possible when using your keyboard and pointer. My trackball (Logitech Marble, with the little ball on the left for your thumb) fits very nicely for me; I can relax my whole hand and arm, except my thumb when I'm moving the ball or my fingers while clicking. The buttons are right where I expect from my years of 3-button mouse experience, and the ball moves easily (unless it needs cleaning) and doesn't mis-track even when the rollers are cruddy.
But if I put it or my desktop in a bad spot, I have to hold my arm up funny; that bugs me enough that I can eventually notice it and stop...
If PKZIP can use LW to compress multiple files, why can Gzip only do one at a time?
Because, in accordance with the UNIX philosophy, it is better to write programs that do one thing well because you can hook them together very easily. (Note also that gzip follows compress's syntax very closely, for backward compatibility...)
(yes, i know you can first tar your multiple files and gzip the tar file, but gzip is still only compressing one file, the tar file, and you can't extract the individual original files either...you have to un-gzip and then un-tar everything).
Then use afio, which compresses each file separately (if you ask it to). Generally you should get better compression if you agglomerate first, then compress, because of similarities among the files in the collection, but that does decrease reliability.
I second your recommendation for Plextor, but don't understand your enthusiasm for Adaptec.
Last time anybody tested, Adaptec cards were no faster than the competition (even a hair slower than some). Meanwhile, if you're reading Slashdot, there's no reason to pay almost double for an Adaptec--even if their phone tech support is better than, say, Tekram's, they still won't likely know enough to help you if you have a problem anyway, unless it's a simple mistake...
I like my 53c8xx-based SCSI boards, and my UltraPlex. My Mitsubishi CD-RW was cheap, and functions okay.
Another nice reason to go SCSI, though, is to get a 2-drive external case (plus a quieter fan than the one that came with it), and stick your CD-ROM and CD-RW on your desktop. Much smaller than a minitower, plus I have a full-sized case on the floor I don't have to lean down to...
That only works if the running program image in memory was modified, but wasn't modified to not do your check.
Meanwhile, encrypted code is useless because the program has to start with...a decryptor! This is why, long ago when people compressed and scrambled executables with some PKzip product, it was so easy to decrypt them: to run itself, it needs the key and the decryption code...
And if the driver doesn't do this already?
Or if the driver's memory needs are not known ahead of time, or are large enough to not be acceptable--especially if they're (relatively) large areas of memory below 16M (for ISA DMA...)?
One good philosophy class will turn you in to an athiest because you realize that no one can have the right answer.
What made you think there's only one, or even finitely few, right answers?
I just extrapolated what I felt (and wasn't able to feel) when I was younger. What I guessed as to why many geeks are atheists was that they just didn't feel the drive or have the opportunity to find something new to believe in; it took me years as it was.
:-) I personally like Wicca better than Lutheranism for its performance, reliability, and open source traits, but then again I don't have as bad a time with Windows as most /.ers because I don't futz with nasty drivers and don't develop for it.)
The last half is just an elaboration on "geeks don't like being told how to do things" in the context of religion.
Alas for you, I'm male and don't think of myself as single anymore. If you want to find more people like me, just look for Pagans, somewhere other than usenet. I think Wicca's combination of do-it-yourself attitude, powerful ritual technology, and good documentation makes it a good fit for the "typical" geek who doesn't require monotheism or Yahweh in his religion, and even non-geek witches tend to be interesting people.
(As for your beautiful draft, stick it on a web page.
If your religion includes idols, does that mean it's object oriented?
People need to be aware that at the point you are taking things on faith, you are getting lazy.
Faith so blind as to constitute laziness is not faith in my book, just unchecked assumptions. If you really have faith in something, you know it's right, you can feel that there's a reason behind it. It needn't be rational, it needn't be something you can articulate or verbalize ("The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao" and so on). But it feels right, so much so that you behave as if it is right, because your heart and your instincts and your feelings all confirm it.
I bet there's a logical reason where the typical liberal/atheist/open minded stereotype got started. It probably has something to do with the ultra-intelligent folks at MIT and Caltech in the late 60's/early 70's.
:-) )
Liberal: things need fixing, you don't trust the government to fix them, and you know better than to think they'd get better with no government.
Atheist: has found that the local branch of the church he was raised in doesn't meet his spiritual needs, if he thinks he has any, and either hasn't met the right priest/church/religion or can't manage enough suspension of disbelief to get at what he really feels and implement said right religion. Persuit of "logic" and being raised male (if you are) both lead you to underdevelop the "feeling" side, making such matters that much worse.
Open minded: when you're wrong, you'd rather learn from it and be wrong again; a few times around that block, and it turns into a habit...
Religion limits what you can do; it does so for good reasons, but they're limits nonetheless, and I should be able to decide what is right and what is wrong.
I would substitute "organized religion" for "religion" in most or all of what you say. I might even substitute "authority-based religion". It's not the geek accepting the limits of what's right that's the problem, but accepting somebody else's enumeration of what's right and what isn't when that enumeration conflicts with what the geek feels or finds bloody obvious.
From that standpoint, limiting yourself (as best you can) to what you yourself feel is right is much like not writing ugly code or not resorting to nasty kluges without good cause. When you have to, you do something "wrong". But those limits come from, or echo what comes from (if you find a religion/church/priest that fits you) within you. Your sense of right and wrong is no more optional than sexuality (whatever yours is) or bipedalism in meatspace.
I wouldn't knock religion. Some of us like the one we were raised in and find it rewarding; others have to find the right religion, or work out what "right religion" for ourselves then find compatible religious traditions. Some of us don't like what we've had, but don't need religion enough to find another, or don't want to.
For some of us, religion is good; others are plaged with incompatibilities, implementation problems, and even buggy platforms.
(Followups comparing Microsoft to the previous-millenium Roman Catholic Church, and Windows to Christianity, should not appear here but should be posted to a newsgroup I don't read.
I was raised Lutheran. By my teens I realized that something about regular church Christianity didn't feel right to me, as I extended that geekish desire to know everything into my intuition and sense of what "felt right." Plus, the community my age at my church all went to high school with me, and weren't really socially compatible with me. Not to mention the fact that I didn't get much out of praying to a God who was so unpingable. :-)
Nowadays, my geekish intolerance for mediocrity leads me to a disdain for attending Christian church services, where the priests tend, even when performing the Communion liturgy, to sound and feel like they're just reading the lines off the page, not performing the most fundamental and moving sacrement of a religion that's supposed to be a fundamental and inspiring part of their life. And if they can't get a guy who (after years of training!) looks like he means it during the important part, they can't get stuff that looks like money out of my wallet. Christians in the audience, I hope I just had bad luck and that your priests can make you feel the power of the sacrement before they even finish saying "On the night in which he was betrayed".
However, the sense of the Divine I have found makes me once again a "Jesus freak", in the literal sense though not the idiomatic sense. It's just not organized-church Jesus, nor is it "Yahweh brand" Jesus. Still the same emphasis on compassion and sacrifice, though. Still loving us enough to die for us, that death to be celebrated annually. Bread and wine (or "wine", as desired) at every ritual, even. And of course, a deep certainty that He is there for me when I need Him, that he is as real and vital to me as, say, lunch. If only I didn't start my equivalent of Good Friday in August...
if (malloc returned 0) then do ... what? For this particular state of processing on this particular peripheral? How do you back out the part of the activity you've already done in such a way as to minimally impact further processing, when you don't understand the driver?
Just because you can write the error detection into almost any code doesn't mean that you can determine or implement a correct response to that error condition with that same lack of knowlege.
Unless I had a very small, maintainable, perfect program running on top of perfect libraries, I'd hesitate to use threads where they weren't necessary. Threads make everything so much more fragile, and limit your choices (and chances) for error recovery--or even error tracking, as the thread causing the corruption may not be affected by it. At least with separate processes you have a limited section of shared memory, accesses to which you can limit to a fairly small section of code. With threads, if you have a memory corrupting bug and you can't review the entire program to find it (or don't find it when you look), you're pretty much screwed...
Remember, kids, the thread you seg fault may not be your own...
I still don't know if 20 kib/s is kibibits or kibibytes. Ditto for kiB/s, KiB/s, and all other possible capitalizations.
I remember from high school (or was it college?) physics that being in front of a fan cooled you down because stopping the air molecules and making them go around you took energy out of you. I don't remember why the energy came out of you, rather than the air molecule, though...
Also, if you want to be exchanging thermal energy with air, it's best to have a lot of it. Double-pane windows have a little bit of vacuum in the middle because vacuum (the extreme of negative pressure) is such a good thermal insulator.
A lot of times, companies will deliberately hire new graduates and hope they don't screw up too much before they get clued in, rather than looking for people who are already competent or even particularly good. While this saves the company money up front, I think the lost of output and quality of output more than makes this a bad strategy.
Admittedly, competent people are harder to find (if you're willing to wait for graduation times)...but I don't ever want to work in a place where I'm the best they've got by a long shot...
Worse, one recruiter I heard from couldn't browse the web because he didn't know how to do it.
With AOL.
He said he used to be a techie...
You can certainly access multiple CD images simultaneously, even if the server is using IDE. It may not be nearly as fast as SCSI, and if you have a lot of different users (about one per changer, say :-)) it would be best to go SCSI, but IDE disk space is cheap, especially with the new 20-25 gig disks out. And it's certainly tons faster than the changers when two users try to use the same disc, or worse different disks in the same changer, at once...
Well, get a recent gs and gv (ghostscript, ghostview)...
Try using the firewall as a proxy, or ask your network admins what you're supposed to use.
Some of the things Katz says are wrong, aughably wrong. Internet Access is a "right"??? puh-leeeze! That is the most idiotic thing I've heard today. Internet access is no more a "right" than TV ownership. Sure, if you can afford it there's no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to have it -- but to speak of Internet access as a "right" is to trivialize the liberties uaranteed us by the Constitution in this country: rights to free speech, a free press, etc. It's not a "right". It's an economic good that ought to be as freely available (as distinguished from free) as any other economic good.
Internet access is as much a right as any other form of freedom of assembly. Just because you can't get to a particular gathering doesn't jeopardize your right to attend other gatherings you can reach and afford.
Also, make sure your name isn't confusing. Tara Lipinski with a stained dress and Monica Lewinski winning figure skating medals, anyone? (Eew...)
In a command line, you are given no information about what is possible, but all operations are available instantly if you learn their names and options, all without searching the screen with your eyes.
And if you don't know, there's ls, man -k (or man, if you're looking for particular options), and automatic completion (with e.g. tcsh or 4dos)... So there are definitely memory aids in CLIs as well.
...unless they or their web site say they actually have them, since this is a new product.
So far I like Zope. Python is clean and simple. The database interface is simple and orthogonal: you write SQL "methods" that incorporate the input parameters, controlling optional SQL just like you control optional HTML in the web pages. In the web pages, you can invoke a Python method, database method, or external code with the same syntax; this includes iterating over the results within the HTML page.
I don't miss Perl's regexp engine at all, because I simply don't need to use it under Zope.