My wife and I were vacationing near Lindau-im-Bodensee, in Bavaria just north of Switzerland. I was feeling pretty good about my German (given the fact that I'd had only three semesters, and that 45 years ago); I could talk to the waitress, and understand her, in my German. She could even understand me, or at least she claimed to. Then she turned around and spoke to another customer, someone who was local. I caught not a word. It was German, but definitely not Hoch Deutsch.
That would be one way to brush up on my Spanish/ German/ French before taking a trip. If I had one of these machines (I don't and won't), I might set it to use one of those languages, just for fun.
Better yet it should just carry on a conversation with me, on a topic of my choice in a language of my choice: checking in at the hotel, ordering at a restaurant, getting tickets for some tourist trap, asking directions...
I do have a feel for how hard that sort of thing is. For one, non-native speakers tend to pronounce the foreign language badly, which makes it hard on the machine's ASR system.
@smoot123 and @Immerman, I want to congratulate you on conducting a reasoned, coherent and friendly discussion here on/.. I really wish there were more such discussions!
All the stop lights in NYC turn green (in all four directions) at the same time. Predicted in the early 1960s by Irwin Lewis, "The Day They Invaded New York" (published as short story, later published as book in 1964), along with the counterfeiting of over-sized subway tokens (blocking turnstyles--but now we have electronic ways to do that).
Agreed about Nostalgy, makes it _so_ easy to store stuff (or go to) TBird folders. That said, the last TBird update broke some of Nostalgy's functionality; in particular, you can't save to a recently used folder, you have to re-type enough of the folder name to go to it again. I hope that gets fixed.
Wow, thanks! I didn't realize you could do that. I guess you're referring to the Firefox option under Browsing, check "Search for text when you start typing"? Only that seems to search for all text, not just links. Is there a way to limit it to searching only for links?
Back then, there was a C program that made it possible to use the Wordstar Ctrl-keys for navigation in every program in Windows. I adapted it to my own keystrokes, and use it to this day. (More in a post I made above.)
Umm... I resemble that remark. I once had to unscrew the oil pressure relief valve screw on my Volkswagen Beetle. I had this book https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Vo... (only with a spiral binding, of course; who would want a glued binding that won't lay open??) The screw wouldn't come out no matter what--the driver kept slipping out of the slot when you put a lot of torque on it. The screw head was almost an inch across, so I ground a metal chisel to fit the slot, then drilled a hole in a block of wood big enough to drop the "handle" of the chisel in. Put the block on top of a hydraulic jack, and jacked the block + chisel up into the screw slot until there were perhaps a hundred pounds of weight on it. Put a large wrench on the hexagonal handle, and used a pipe (or was it a hammer?) to get a little more leverage on the wrench. The screw came loose:-).
Like we said in the Navy, if at first you don't succeed, use a bigger hammer.
I do remember the first time I used a tty to write a program. A *paper* terminal, with a 300 baud modem (ok, maybe it was 1200 baud). And I was programming in assembler (for an IBM 370). It was a lot better than punch cards, I have to admit.
IMHO, such keyboard methods ought to exist and be consistent across all apps, and they ought to be accessible from the alphanumeric part of the keyboard, without moving your hand over to the arrow and page up/down etc. keys. (I believe that's true in emacs,but that's not the editor I use.)
Decades ago, when Windows 3.1 came out, someone posted (in the sense of writing an article in a paper magazine, IIRC) a program that would allow you to use control keys for all your cursor movement, across virtually all applications. It interposes itself somewhere between the keyboard input and the keyboard interpreter in each app. I re-wrote it so as to use my own preferred keystrokes: Ctrl-H for left arrow, Ctrl-N for page down, etc. Ctrl-Q toggles select (and cutting or copying a selection turns select off.)
I start it up when Windows boots, and it just works. And to my delight, it continues to work with Windows 10, although inexplicably Firefox treats a couple keystrokes (Ctrl-W and Ctrl-B) differently on my laptop and on my desktop. No idea how that can happen...
It's one thing that keeps me from switching to Linux; I've tried several times to recreate something like it there, but without success.
Slashdot Mirror
Ja wohl!
My wife and I were vacationing near Lindau-im-Bodensee, in Bavaria just north of Switzerland. I was feeling pretty good about my German (given the fact that I'd had only three semesters, and that 45 years ago); I could talk to the waitress, and understand her, in my German. She could even understand me, or at least she claimed to. Then she turned around and spoke to another customer, someone who was local. I caught not a word. It was German, but definitely not Hoch Deutsch.
That would be one way to brush up on my Spanish/ German/ French before taking a trip. If I had one of these machines (I don't and won't), I might set it to use one of those languages, just for fun.
Better yet it should just carry on a conversation with me, on a topic of my choice in a language of my choice: checking in at the hotel, ordering at a restaurant, getting tickets for some tourist trap, asking directions...
I do have a feel for how hard that sort of thing is. For one, non-native speakers tend to pronounce the foreign language badly, which makes it hard on the machine's ASR system.
@smoot123 and @Immerman, I want to congratulate you on conducting a reasoned, coherent and friendly discussion here on /.. I really wish there were more such discussions!
All the stop lights in NYC turn green (in all four directions) at the same time. Predicted in the early 1960s by Irwin Lewis, "The Day They Invaded New York" (published as short story, later published as book in 1964), along with the counterfeiting of over-sized subway tokens (blocking turnstyles--but now we have electronic ways to do that).
https://www.youtube.com/user/H...
Don't forget to set the toggle switches on the panel: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Thanks, perfect! (I didn't even know there *was* a manual...)
AAARG, i3wm.org (my keyboard did this, honest)
I think the right link is i32m.org (no hyphen)
Agreed about Nostalgy, makes it _so_ easy to store stuff (or go to) TBird folders. That said, the last TBird update broke some of Nostalgy's functionality; in particular, you can't save to a recently used folder, you have to re-type enough of the folder name to go to it again. I hope that gets fixed.
Wow, thanks! I didn't realize you could do that. I guess you're referring to the Firefox option under Browsing, check "Search for text when you start typing"? Only that seems to search for all text, not just links. Is there a way to limit it to searching only for links?
What on earth's wrong with a clay tablet and stylus?
Back then, there was a C program that made it possible to use the Wordstar Ctrl-keys for navigation in every program in Windows. I adapted it to my own keystrokes, and use it to this day. (More in a post I made above.)
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
Maybe he gets the on-screen character to do the touching. After all, that character is already on the screen, right?
Umm... I resemble that remark. I once had to unscrew the oil pressure relief valve screw on my Volkswagen Beetle. I had this book :-).
https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Vo...
(only with a spiral binding, of course; who would want a glued binding that won't lay open??) The screw wouldn't come out no matter what--the driver kept slipping out of the slot when you put a lot of torque on it. The screw head was almost an inch across, so I ground a metal chisel to fit the slot, then drilled a hole in a block of wood big enough to drop the "handle" of the chisel in. Put the block on top of a hydraulic jack, and jacked the block + chisel up into the screw slot until there were perhaps a hundred pounds of weight on it. Put a large wrench on the hexagonal handle, and used a pipe (or was it a hammer?) to get a little more leverage on the wrench. The screw came loose
Like we said in the Navy, if at first you don't succeed, use a bigger hammer.
I've also used a hammer and chisel to drive a bolt around, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?... @4:15.
Punch cards.
I do remember the first time I used a tty to write a program. A *paper* terminal, with a 300 baud modem (ok, maybe it was 1200 baud). And I was programming in assembler (for an IBM 370). It was a lot better than punch cards, I have to admit.
IMHO, such keyboard methods ought to exist and be consistent across all apps, and they ought to be accessible from the alphanumeric part of the keyboard, without moving your hand over to the arrow and page up/down etc. keys. (I believe that's true in emacs,but that's not the editor I use.)
Decades ago, when Windows 3.1 came out, someone posted (in the sense of writing an article in a paper magazine, IIRC) a program that would allow you to use control keys for all your cursor movement, across virtually all applications. It interposes itself somewhere between the keyboard input and the keyboard interpreter in each app. I re-wrote it so as to use my own preferred keystrokes: Ctrl-H for left arrow, Ctrl-N for page down, etc. Ctrl-Q toggles select (and cutting or copying a selection turns select off.)
I start it up when Windows boots, and it just works. And to my delight, it continues to work with Windows 10, although inexplicably Firefox treats a couple keystrokes (Ctrl-W and Ctrl-B) differently on my laptop and on my desktop. No idea how that can happen...
It's one thing that keeps me from switching to Linux; I've tried several times to recreate something like it there, but without success.
Guess you totally missed AHuxley's point...
Not to mention the Uighurs, whose plight has gotten some attention recently from the BBC, among others.
Ever hear of encryption?
Just the opposite.
You shouldn't assume that the moon is like your head.
I suspect its carbon and nitrogen were locked in its core. So no. It took the collision to get C and N up to the surface, at least that's the theory.
We're it, or rather the Earth and the Moon are what remain of the two bodies that collided.