Bruce has gotten an amazing amount of exposure lately. Has anyone else noticed that? I can think of half a dozen news stories (on Slashdot and elsewhere) that have born his name as a source, just in the last two weeks. He was even on NPR, being interviewed for one of the countless Napster/MP3 stories, talking about the Street Performer Protocol. I'm a fan of Bruce's well-known crypto book, but I've never heard his name in the mainstream press before August, so it's sort of weird.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
Well, I can type without looking [much], but it's not the traditional touch-typist's method. I'm not a secretary, so I'm not too worried about typing fast/correct enough to transcribe letters for my boss or anything. I do have a "home row" for my right hand, which is the four vi keys (h,j,k,l), but the reason I could never use a "natural" keyboard is that my hands are often literally all over the keyboard... I understand that a Real Touch Typist (tm) would never, for instance, type "t" with their right index finger. My typing style has many such quirks; for instance, I only use left shift and left alt. (Ctrl isn't an issue because my Sun keyboard only has one Ctrl key.) My left hand is much more adept do to often typing one-handed while using the mouse, holding a book, et cetera (no, NOT whacking off. then my right hand does the typing.;-D) I do (more often than I should admit) type for more than eight hours a day, but considering that my current typing skill was developed in ksh, vi, and coding several languages, it's not much of a concern at all, because that's what I do all day.
What's really going to kill me in the future is that I type with the base of my palms on the table/desk. I'm just asking for Carpal Tunnel or something. Perhaps if I were a Real Touch Typist (tm), this wouldn't happen, because my hands would constantly hover an inch in the air? (Yes, I've tried pulling the keyboard to the edge of the desk. I do't like it.)
In conlusion, my typing suits me nicely, and your ability to touch-type doesn't matter much on a resume unless you're a secretary. If you are a secretary, I've been looking for someone to type my long-winded Slashdot posts. Interested?;-)
The one advantage from my standpoint is less typos. I've always heard that Real Touch Typists (tm), in addition to being virile space aliens with life spans of over 150 years and fifteen inch genetalia, also never make typos.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
I usually try and snag the pubes with a pen cap before they fall completely through the cracks. Other hairs, I'm not so careful about... but in the event of my untimely death, I don't want my next of kin to pick up my keyboard and discover a tumbleweed of pubic terror.
Who actually ejaculates on their keyboard, though? That's just sick. I hear stories about people who whack off at the office and have to clean their keyboards, and I don't believe it. If you don't have the foresight to pick up a box of Kleenex from the company store, can't you at least aim at something easier to clean? Like the wall? Show some restraint, gentlemen. If you have to cum on a keyboard, show up at work early and use your neighbor's PC. Or your boss's! Won't that be a nice surprise for him when he arrives? Walks in, sits at desk. Procedes to login. "Hey, what the... that looks sort of like... OH, FUCK!!" Even better than th keyboard, just do it right on his desk. He'll be freaked out for days, and it will make for interesting watercooler chat. "So, did you hear someone blew their load on the boss's desk?" Do it on a morning when you know the boss will be in late, so people get to walk by and see it for a few hours.
Oops, did I just say that out loud?
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
I guess the Options program was discontinued by IBM sometime in the last year.
This explains some things. The keyboard topic comes up on Slashdot about twice a year, and around March someone posted a link to IBM's web store where you could still purchase the clickers, directly from IBM. When I went to buy a new keyboard in July, they were gone. By the time I found them elsewhere, I had already fallen for my current Sun rig.
You really wonder, since so many people love the damned things, that most keyboard makers sell nothing like them. I supposed because all Them Thar Complercated Mechanical Parts And Stuff can't be assembled by twelve-year-old sweatshop workers as easily as a circuitboard and three interlocking pieces of plastic. Oh well, it's their loss, considering how much people are willing to pay for new ones!
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
My current keyboard setup cost me $250; I'm not shitting you. $100 for a new Sun Type 6 UNIX country kit. $150 for the Sun-to-PS2 adapter which allows me to use the keybord and mouse with PC hardware.
My one complaint is that it has the "softest" touch of any keyboard I've ever used. People find that odd, because when I was keyboard-shopping, it was either this or an old-style IBM clicker. But in the end, I prefered the UNIX key layout (with sane positions for Ctrl and ESC) to the tactile feedback. Sure, you can simulate this with xmodmap, but I use NT too, and I've never found a satisfactory method for swapping the keys in NT.
I don't regret the purchase, but I wouldn't make it again. Why? Because of the lack of tactile feedback, and also because now I have a tendancy to smack Capslock when I want Ctrl when using the PCs at work. And I'm *very* paranoid about spilling. It was a really fun purchase, but I've learned that trying to keep a keyboard in perfect condition is like attempting the same with a car: it's impossible unless you never use it.
I would never buy a "Natural" keyboard. I've heard those are excellent if you can touch-type, but this hacker can't. I'd probably snap it over my knee in frustration in less than an hour.
An IBM clicker will definitely be my next keyboard. I can tell my fingers miss the feedback by how I have to attack the keys to get satisfactory noise.
Keyboards are fun.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
MacOS X uses a Mach kernel and is compatible with BSD 2.2.
This is nitpicking, but do you mean FreeBSD 2.2? Because, considering that BSD4.0 was released in the very early Eighties, BSD2.2 is pretty old-tech.;-) FreeBSD 2.2 is not-quite-so-old tech, in that it was developed in an era when PCs existed.;-D
*Sigh*... how I miss using FreeBSD as my main development OS. Java's what's killing it. No Java 2. We bugged Sun for Java 2, no Java 2. We bugged IBM for Java 2, no Java 2. BSDi claimed they would bring Java 2, but no Java 2, too! I'm depressed. I think I'll go to the zoo tomorrow and throw rocks at the penguins.
MacOS X is a big deal for Linux & BSD folks
More nitpicking... GNU/Linux and FreeBSD don't have very much in common, except that they're Unix-workalikes, free, use XFree86, and have a common application userbase. And I'm not being sarcastic. FreeBSD is a direct descendent of BSD, the Unix system which started as a fork of the original AT&T UNIX about twenty years ago, with GNU goodies on top. GNU/Linux is the combination of a SVR4-ish kernel (with failed aspirations of POSIX compliance) implementented by Mr. Torvalds about ten years ago, and the GNU utilities, applications, and libraries that are the fruits of Mr. Stallman's FSF, which was born about fifteen years ago. Apple's choice of FreeBSD as a basis for OS X has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. Stop rejoicing, GNU/Linux users... this is one war you had nothing to do with winning.
BSD v. SVR4 is the stuff of flamewars. Even though Linux isn't really System V, I hate to see you guys getting along like this. I think it's sad that we live in a day in age where hackers don't care what OS they're using, so long as it isn't Windows. Bah. Flamewars aren't what they used to be. Nowadays it's just NT v. UNIX, and those are too easy to win. No offense, astroturfers.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
You're lucky. Due to limitations in the current production Oracle for AIX, I'm stuck with 1.1.8.
Yes, folks, it can always get worse.;-)
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
Re:The /. news item is badly written....
on
Speak To Your Palm
·
· Score: 1
I don't think Rob & crew can be blamed. Surely, they are much too busy with their real jobs to worry about - oops, Slashdot is their real job. In that case, I guess they're too busy counting their millions and playing Diablo 2 on Windows boxen to be worried about anything as trivial as an "editorial policy" or "spell checker".
Seriously, I thought the same thing, Manaz. I suppose we should be lucky that such blunders are usually limited to odd typos and poor/no fact-checking.
It's especially insulting when you consider how little is required of them. For the majority of news items, most or all introductory text is written by the story submitter. I'd love to know just what the fuck Rob does all day. I mean, he doesn't admin the boxes (which are hosted at Exodus and owned by VAndover). The code is hardly ever updated; even if Rob does a lot of tweaking that isn't released as Slash bugfixes, there just isn't that much code to begin with. What do you do, Rob? Today I troubleshooted several iPlanet server issues, wrote 500 lines of Java for an issue-tracking system, wrote a couple pages of design documents, did a few minor HTML fixes, walked someone through an old Perl script, and oggled IBM notebooks for an hour.;-) And today was a fairly slow day. I'd just like to know what keeps Jeff, Rob, and the rest so goddamn busy that they can't be bothered to run a spellcheck on their text and do a little fact-checking before posting something on the main page. With the amount of money this page is making you guys, you have no excuses. And isn't Roblimo supposed to be your editor? Why don't you run everything by him before posting it? Is he to busy fucking your girlfriend to be bothered, Taco?
Okay, that's my rant for the evening. -1 Flamebait, yada yada. I'll probably wake up and find myself bitchslapped.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
You make me sick, Julius. Please take your hate-monging elsewhere. Are you saying that you would refuse to do business with a person, just because his Mac was a different colour than yours? I thought we had evolved past the point where a person's worth is judged by the colour of his Mac, but I guess I was wrong.
I, for one, have a dream... a dream of a time when Macs of all colours can live in peace and harmony, free from the segregated attitudes of people like Julius. I have a dream that green Macs will cluster with blue Macs, and red Macs will swap Zip disks (or whatever those Macs freaks use... Syquest disks or something) with with purple Macs, and beige PCs will telnet to black RS/6000s, and grey Palm pilots will sync with purple E450s. No computer will be shunned, regardless of make. Even your computer, Julius, which refused to share data with Macs of colour, will be accepted and loved as it it were part of the network.
But I also have dreams about fat, greasy, naked clowns with chainsaws, so YMMV.
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JonKatz - if you are the real JonKatz! - if you aren't aware that many of us felt betrayed by that mess, you should stop writing for this site and start reading it. I know I haven't taken you seriously since, and I'm probabably not alone. But maybe it's for the best; no-one should take Slashdot seriously anyway.;-)
Somehow I don't think you are the real JonKatz, because your comment is shorter than 7500 characters and doesn't allude to the disaffected American geek anticulture and its ramifications on emerging technologies and how you molest children.
Quick, someone post a link to that story which summarized how JonKatz raped Slashdot. It was on kuro5hin or Salon or something.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
While you have valid points about Java's performance, mine was that Java does not run "everywhere". Win32 and Solaris, fine. GNU/Linux, AIX, and a few other UNIX/Unix-workalike systems have semi-decent implementations. But that's hardly "everywhere".
I'm not so much a Java zealot that I think it could replace C or C++ (to the contrary, I find the idea laughable. I write in them too, you know), but Java does several things very well. Java has an excellent standard library, is easy/fast to design and program with, and offers much smarter solutions for CGI and database access than even Perl. Java isn't just a programming language; it's a software platorm as well, and its usefulness is far from being completely tapped. True, Java has a long way to go, but where it's gone so far is amazing.
Obviously no-one is going to write a DVD driver with it; if it were even possible, it would still be ridiculous. The original poster was mostly likely trolling us. Or maybe, genuinely ignorant. It's hard to tell sometimes.
In conclusion, while you can't write a device driver in Java, you can't do anything close a Java servlet in C.
- A disgruntled Java programmer, currently struggling with IBM's buggy AIX Java port
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
I would definitely buy one of those. I just don't think we'll ever see one, because it's not marketable. Most people want color, and if I'm in X, I do too. With the push toward "desktop replacement" notebooks these days, we're getting further and further from the bare-bones setup you describe. Hell, you can now buy laptops with TFT screens that reach 1280x1024, have 600MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM, DVD-ROM drives, 10GB disks... it's insane. I think as PCs become a more common "household appliance" type machine, smaller (as in physical size) machines are going to sell even better. Notebooks are now being sold with the intention of being a primary PC, instead of the temporary replacement you take on business trips and to the park on Sundays. IBM, Gateway, and others are shrinking desktop models to Lilliputian proprotians, with integrated LCD screens, that make even iMacs seem bulky. I think the problem you and I have is that we're of the old school, where you have a powerhouse on your desk at home/work, and the laptop is cheap (except not cheap!), portable terminal used for text editing, notetaking, e-mail, et cetera.
Now that I think about it, PDAs have taken over that marketplace, haven't they? Maybe we need to look to the PDA market to fulfill our needs. How about a Palm, with a screen the size of an etch-a-sketch? Give it a decent greyscale LCD screen that can be used, comfortably, in the dark. Give it a PS/2 port to plug in a Happy Hacker keyboard. Give it 32MB RAM, and a 1GB disk. Possibly a USB port, and definitely the ability to use PCMIA. I think an $850-$1000 price tag is not unreasonable for something of that caliber. (You can buy sub-$1k notebooks from HP now. A Palm-on-crack should cost no more.) And it would have to work with a stripped-down GNU/Linux or NetBSD. Would you buy one? I know I would.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
That's really interesting. A few months ago I was looking for a decent, old (~P200) laptop to run GNU/Linux on... just in console mode. I wish they *did* make greyscale notebooks; have you seen how cheap greyscale video is nowadays? I've seen 21" greyscale monitors, new, for $100. I would've readily given up color for a longer battery life.
I do agree with you and FFFish about how absurd battery life is. I just don't see, barring some incredible discoveries in battery or LCD technology, how we could hope to see these low-cost para-notebooks within even the next five years.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
Rob posts the "big bad Sony!" stories and now admits he has a VAIO. He disses Microsoft but keeps a Windows box around for Diablo 2. Slashdot has a memory shorter than Hemos' cock. Just click the links, see the shiny pictures, and ooooh and aaaahhh with the rest of us. Then imagine a Beowulf cluster of them, and ask if they run Linux. All on a day's work.
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... I for one wouldn't purchase one of these if they were 2 for $10
Well, as I've stated before, I would gladly testify against the entire Free Software/Open Source movement for just one Sony VAIO. If they throw in a spare battery, I'll produce photographs of ESR sodomizing that Pepsi girl. I'm cheap! (And more importantly, VAIOs aren't!) Sony, e-mail me!
If this doesn't work, my backup plan is to distract Telsa with candy and take hers.
---------///---------- All generalizations are false.
Slashdot Mirror
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
What's really going to kill me in the future is that I type with the base of my palms on the table/desk. I'm just asking for Carpal Tunnel or something. Perhaps if I were a Real Touch Typist (tm), this wouldn't happen, because my hands would constantly hover an inch in the air? (Yes, I've tried pulling the keyboard to the edge of the desk. I do't like it.)
In conlusion, my typing suits me nicely, and your ability to touch-type doesn't matter much on a resume unless you're a secretary. If you are a secretary, I've been looking for someone to type my long-winded Slashdot posts. Interested? ;-)
The one advantage from my standpoint is less typos. I've always heard that Real Touch Typists (tm), in addition to being virile space aliens with life spans of over 150 years and fifteen inch genetalia, also never make typos.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Who actually ejaculates on their keyboard, though? That's just sick. I hear stories about people who whack off at the office and have to clean their keyboards, and I don't believe it. If you don't have the foresight to pick up a box of Kleenex from the company store, can't you at least aim at something easier to clean? Like the wall? Show some restraint, gentlemen. If you have to cum on a keyboard, show up at work early and use your neighbor's PC. Or your boss's! Won't that be a nice surprise for him when he arrives? Walks in, sits at desk. Procedes to login. "Hey, what the... that looks sort of like... OH, FUCK!!" Even better than th keyboard, just do it right on his desk. He'll be freaked out for days, and it will make for interesting watercooler chat. "So, did you hear someone blew their load on the boss's desk?" Do it on a morning when you know the boss will be in late, so people get to walk by and see it for a few hours.
Oops, did I just say that out loud?
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
This explains some things. The keyboard topic comes up on Slashdot about twice a year, and around March someone posted a link to IBM's web store where you could still purchase the clickers, directly from IBM. When I went to buy a new keyboard in July, they were gone. By the time I found them elsewhere, I had already fallen for my current Sun rig.
You really wonder, since so many people love the damned things, that most keyboard makers sell nothing like them. I supposed because all Them Thar Complercated Mechanical Parts And Stuff can't be assembled by twelve-year-old sweatshop workers as easily as a circuitboard and three interlocking pieces of plastic. Oh well, it's their loss, considering how much people are willing to pay for new ones!
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
My one complaint is that it has the "softest" touch of any keyboard I've ever used. People find that odd, because when I was keyboard-shopping, it was either this or an old-style IBM clicker. But in the end, I prefered the UNIX key layout (with sane positions for Ctrl and ESC) to the tactile feedback. Sure, you can simulate this with xmodmap, but I use NT too, and I've never found a satisfactory method for swapping the keys in NT.
I don't regret the purchase, but I wouldn't make it again. Why? Because of the lack of tactile feedback, and also because now I have a tendancy to smack Capslock when I want Ctrl when using the PCs at work. And I'm *very* paranoid about spilling. It was a really fun purchase, but I've learned that trying to keep a keyboard in perfect condition is like attempting the same with a car: it's impossible unless you never use it.
I would never buy a "Natural" keyboard. I've heard those are excellent if you can touch-type, but this hacker can't. I'd probably snap it over my knee in frustration in less than an hour.
An IBM clicker will definitely be my next keyboard. I can tell my fingers miss the feedback by how I have to attack the keys to get satisfactory noise.
Keyboards are fun.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
This is nitpicking, but do you mean FreeBSD 2.2? Because, considering that BSD4.0 was released in the very early Eighties, BSD2.2 is pretty old-tech. ;-) FreeBSD 2.2 is not-quite-so-old tech, in that it was developed in an era when PCs existed. ;-D
*Sigh*... how I miss using FreeBSD as my main development OS. Java's what's killing it. No Java 2. We bugged Sun for Java 2, no Java 2. We bugged IBM for Java 2, no Java 2. BSDi claimed they would bring Java 2, but no Java 2, too! I'm depressed. I think I'll go to the zoo tomorrow and throw rocks at the penguins.
More nitpicking... GNU/Linux and FreeBSD don't have very much in common, except that they're Unix-workalikes, free, use XFree86, and have a common application userbase. And I'm not being sarcastic. FreeBSD is a direct descendent of BSD, the Unix system which started as a fork of the original AT&T UNIX about twenty years ago, with GNU goodies on top. GNU/Linux is the combination of a SVR4-ish kernel (with failed aspirations of POSIX compliance) implementented by Mr. Torvalds about ten years ago, and the GNU utilities, applications, and libraries that are the fruits of Mr. Stallman's FSF, which was born about fifteen years ago. Apple's choice of FreeBSD as a basis for OS X has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. Stop rejoicing, GNU/Linux users... this is one war you had nothing to do with winning.
BSD v. SVR4 is the stuff of flamewars. Even though Linux isn't really System V, I hate to see you guys getting along like this. I think it's sad that we live in a day in age where hackers don't care what OS they're using, so long as it isn't Windows. Bah. Flamewars aren't what they used to be. Nowadays it's just NT v. UNIX, and those are too easy to win. No offense, astroturfers.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Yes, folks, it can always get worse. ;-)
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All generalizations are false.
Seriously, I thought the same thing, Manaz. I suppose we should be lucky that such blunders are usually limited to odd typos and poor/no fact-checking.
It's especially insulting when you consider how little is required of them. For the majority of news items, most or all introductory text is written by the story submitter. I'd love to know just what the fuck Rob does all day. I mean, he doesn't admin the boxes (which are hosted at Exodus and owned by VAndover). The code is hardly ever updated; even if Rob does a lot of tweaking that isn't released as Slash bugfixes, there just isn't that much code to begin with. What do you do, Rob? Today I troubleshooted several iPlanet server issues, wrote 500 lines of Java for an issue-tracking system, wrote a couple pages of design documents, did a few minor HTML fixes, walked someone through an old Perl script, and oggled IBM notebooks for an hour. ;-) And today was a fairly slow day. I'd just like to know what keeps Jeff, Rob, and the rest so goddamn busy that they can't be bothered to run a spellcheck on their text and do a little fact-checking before posting something on the main page. With the amount of money this page is making you guys, you have no excuses. And isn't Roblimo supposed to be your editor? Why don't you run everything by him before posting it? Is he to busy fucking your girlfriend to be bothered, Taco?
Okay, that's my rant for the evening. -1 Flamebait, yada yada. I'll probably wake up and find myself bitchslapped.
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All generalizations are false.
There's a really dirty joke hiding somewhere in that statement.
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All generalizations are false.
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All generalizations are false.
I, for one, have a dream... a dream of a time when Macs of all colours can live in peace and harmony, free from the segregated attitudes of people like Julius. I have a dream that green Macs will cluster with blue Macs, and red Macs will swap Zip disks (or whatever those Macs freaks use... Syquest disks or something) with with purple Macs, and beige PCs will telnet to black RS/6000s, and grey Palm pilots will sync with purple E450s. No computer will be shunned, regardless of make. Even your computer, Julius, which refused to share data with Macs of colour, will be accepted and loved as it it were part of the network.
But I also have dreams about fat, greasy, naked clowns with chainsaws, so YMMV.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
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All generalizations are false.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Somehow I don't think you are the real JonKatz, because your comment is shorter than 7500 characters and doesn't allude to the disaffected American geek anticulture and its ramifications on emerging technologies and how you molest children.
Quick, someone post a link to that story which summarized how JonKatz raped Slashdot. It was on kuro5hin or Salon or something.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
I'm not so much a Java zealot that I think it could replace C or C++ (to the contrary, I find the idea laughable. I write in them too, you know), but Java does several things very well. Java has an excellent standard library, is easy/fast to design and program with, and offers much smarter solutions for CGI and database access than even Perl. Java isn't just a programming language; it's a software platorm as well, and its usefulness is far from being completely tapped. True, Java has a long way to go, but where it's gone so far is amazing.
Obviously no-one is going to write a DVD driver with it; if it were even possible, it would still be ridiculous. The original poster was mostly likely trolling us. Or maybe, genuinely ignorant. It's hard to tell sometimes.
In conclusion, while you can't write a device driver in Java, you can't do anything close a Java servlet in C.
- A disgruntled Java programmer, currently struggling with IBM's buggy AIX Java port
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All generalizations are false.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
- A disgruntled Java programmer
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All generalizations are false.
Now that I think about it, PDAs have taken over that marketplace, haven't they? Maybe we need to look to the PDA market to fulfill our needs. How about a Palm, with a screen the size of an etch-a-sketch? Give it a decent greyscale LCD screen that can be used, comfortably, in the dark. Give it a PS/2 port to plug in a Happy Hacker keyboard. Give it 32MB RAM, and a 1GB disk. Possibly a USB port, and definitely the ability to use PCMIA. I think an $850-$1000 price tag is not unreasonable for something of that caliber. (You can buy sub-$1k notebooks from HP now. A Palm-on-crack should cost no more.) And it would have to work with a stripped-down GNU/Linux or NetBSD. Would you buy one? I know I would.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
I do agree with you and FFFish about how absurd battery life is. I just don't see, barring some incredible discoveries in battery or LCD technology, how we could hope to see these low-cost para-notebooks within even the next five years.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Actually, even the graphite iBook is a great deal. I'm in the market for a laptop ($1400-$2000), and it looks pretty schweet, but I have two issues:
(http://www.redhatisnotlinux.org)
Anyway, I'm currently leaning towards the IBM i2000 series Thinkpads. Cheap and fast... (if not very good!)
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All generalizations are false.
yet low UID ensures
high moderation.
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All generalizations are false.
This would stop a normal man,
but I'll jump your bones!
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All generalizations are false.
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All generalizations are false.
If this doesn't work, my backup plan is to distract Telsa with candy and take hers.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.