Man, all you did was throw red meat to the dogs. Customer service departments exist because all your most well-intentioned communication can do give angry people a chance to exact revenge for your company's perceived slights against them by attacking you. At long last, someone they can blame. You really need to let your customer service dept. handle this.
That's often true, but so far most of the responses to him here have been fairly civilized.
* N-key rollover that actually works, solid tactile (mechanical) response. I can type at 80+ WPM again.
When I was in college, after years of using the cheap keyboard my Dell came with, and then using the shoddy Ultrix machines in the Unix lab, I stepped into the SGI lab which had a number of high-end SGI graphics workstations and some nice SGI keyboards. Mostly I was there to test the file system browser SGI had shown off in Jurassic Park. It sucked. But still I was amazed. Amazed at how fast I could type! Amazed that the keyboard mattered that much with my typing speed. It would have been a misuse of those high-end workstations, but I wanted to do all of my programming homework in there.
Now that I'm older, I've noticed my WPM goes waaaay down on the cold nights when my fingers are stiff.
My first Razer mouse was a Lachesis. What a complete waste of money that was. After a bunch of headaches, it finally just broke not that long after the original purchase.
Against my better judgement, I got a Razer Deathadder. Results have been... mixed, per my comments above
I have a Razer DeathAdder and... well the Linux support is not great. The mouse gets detected perfectly fast under Windows, but on Linux there's always an eight-second delay and when it finally gets added, it always sends a tiny bit of "noise." If I have vi up, I'll notice the cursor moved down several lines when the mouse is finally added, if I was pressing control at the time, it switches workspaces. I've never had another mouse that does this, and it makes switching back and forth on a KVM a pain in the ass.
Not to mention that the buttons aren't 'buttons' but are presented as a programmable keyboard. A keyboard you have to program using the windows-only Razer driver, as the bindings are stored in memory on the mouse hardware. But the buttons feel -really- nice, as does the scroll wheel. Those are usually the downsides of many mice: buttons that take too much effort to press, a wheel that takes too much (or too little!) effort to roll, or is hard to "click" (since it's a middle mouse button too) without accidentally causing a scroll event too. The Deathadder seems to get all of that right. I just wish its programming methods weren't so kludgy.
I first grabbed a computer mouse in 1984 and I've been using them ever since, without hand pain. How long to I have to wait to find out?
Of course it also depends on the tasks that you use a mouse for. I didn't have much mouse-caused hand pain until I became a Diablo II addict, with its "hold down left-click to run" movement paradigm. What ended up helping was switching to using the mouse with my left hand, even though I'm right-handed. Problem mostly solved.
Not if it's symmetric. But a side button for the thumb would suck on an asymmetric mouse.
I use a right-handed mouse with my left hand, the Logitech Mouseman Optical (URL is a picture of the thing). It has a thumb button which I click with my ring finger of pinkie finger, and I love this setup by far over any other, at least for office work.
The problem I have with their methodology performance is that it seems like they came to a conclusion first, then wrote a test that would support that conclusion. We might roll our eyes and move on, but that's a poor way to conduct biology and chemistry research as well.
I'm actually happy this story was posted to Slashdot, because it has the side effect of illustrating a number of cautionary tales about how to do things, which I don't think the submitter or editor had in mind when approving it.
Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.
Yes, but we're talking new programmers here. At least in C, you're forced to have to explicitly write inefficient code. New programmers know what malloc does (if they don't, they're behind in their classes). In Java and Python, things are done for you. That can be good! It frees you from a bit of micromanagement. But again, for a new programmer, it's not apparent that they're doing something especially inefficient because the work happens invisibly. It's obvious when you have to malloc() a whole new string buffer in C every time you append to a string. It's less obvious in Java when you just append and the runtime ends up creating a new buffer on the heap for you. ASM is perhaps a bit TOO low-level and weird to start a new programmer on, but I think a full OOP language like Java or scripting language like Python might be too high-level and encourage bad habits to develop. In my CS classes, C hit a pretty good sweet spot.
Then again, you can program badly in any language, and C has its own perils.
Probably not, and sadly this is the problem with current CS tracks in colleges.
Zero education on hardware gives us CS grads that are inept.
It's not necessarily that -- I think there's a third layer that doesn't get the attention deserved while people work on end-user applications or tinker building hardware. There's not much attention on operating system design and fundamentals. Your code will usually be dealing with an OS and rarely with the bare hardware, so I'm surprised there's as little attention about operating systems principles and design.
Good for training young raw talent in Pixar's pipeline. Not so good for most other people.
Well, good for training young raw talent in the effects industry in general, really. Photorealistic Renderman was THE standard in big-budget movie effects, and it's only very recently that other renderers have make real in-roads.
So you want everyone to respect the GPL but you don't want to respect other licenses? Really? If you are using it for commercial purposes then you can afford to pony up the cash.
He didn't say that he was pirating it, just that the restrictions on the free version greatly limited its usefulness. I'm not sure how you jump from that to him not respecting the license.
Actually, if by 'spoils' you mean we took it from them because we won, you're wrong. The US paid Mexico $24M for the south-western states (in 1800's money value). I wouldn't call land that the US purchased for money, 'spoils of war'.
Well. You're both right. The Americans paid for it, but it was a war treaty to stop the Mexican - American War. Mexico wasn't willing to sell before then. The US had offered over double that amount for the land purchase years earlier, but Mexico refused. Texas declared its independence, there was a dispute over what were the correct borders, and the US's annexation of that state was proceeded by full war.
Nah, the wars in the Middle East were never done for oil, no matter what catchy slogans the Left in the US liked to say.
First, as long as there is an Israel in the Middle East, there will be wars in the Middle East that the US will be involved in. I can't see that changing in my lifetime. Because of that the US can't just pull out and say it's not their problem, like they somewhat ignore Africa. While Africans butcher each other, they rarely spawn terrorism outside of their borders, so their conflicts aren't a US threat either. As detestable as Boko Haram is, they aren't an immediate US threat.
Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet
It's a funny line, but probably one of the most accurate looks at science fiction. Ships staffed by people who aren't very good at their jobs, using devices that are cheap and poorly designed, helmed by overlords (both Dark Helmet and President Scroob) who are as concerned about not looking like an idiot in front of their employees as they are about getting anything done.
It doesn't help that in the US, most of the third parties are even more batshit-crazy than the Democrats or Republicans, or so single-issue-focused that they don't deserve any sort of broad office. I almost never get excited by any of the Ds or Rs on my ballots, but I don't very much get excited by folks from any other parties either. Usually the most interesting candidates are true independent rather than third-party.
Preferential voting gets some strange results, we have it here in Oz and it is not uncommon to see someone get into the senate who had less that 5% of the primary vote
I guess the question is... if Candidate A is no one's first choice, but everyone's second choice, should we choose the person with the highest (small) amount of first votes, or the highest (huge) amount of secondary votes? Sure, it might elect a guy who only had 5% of the "primary vote," but if you're just counting first-choice votes, you're looking at it the wrong way, and that's why it seems so strange. You're trying to guage a multi-choice vote system using single-vote-only mechanics, of course it would look weird.
Compulsory voting doesn't bring good governance (as the current mod proves on a daily basis)
I think compulsory voting would be a disaster in the US. Ugh.
They don't have to follow popular vote, and many times the way it works out even though popular vote won, someone else was elected
There are a few rules that complicate this. First, first and foremost, it is a mistake to think that the President is elected by a single election of all eligible voters across the nation. It is a mistake to think of that, because it is a mistake to think of the USA as a singular, monolithic country. It is not, and never was intended to be. The nation is a collection of individual states, each state which chooses how it votes for a presidential candidate. These days it seems kids learn about the primacy of the federal government, and that states are unimportant, but it is the wrong, wrong way to think about things in the US, and such an attitude will make plenty of rules seem archaic. Therefore, the popular vote summed up across the entire country... doesn't matter. That's right, doesn't, and shouldn't matter. What matters most is the popular vote across a state, and across districts.
It's nowhere near as bad as, say, France. But there's a fair amount of antagonism. Remember all the furor about putting a mosque... a MOSQUE just two blocks away from the former World Trade Center? A majority of Americans polled believed it would be inappropriate to build an interfaith Islamic community center in the area. We had actual federal legislators saying things like "It is about... territorial conquest. This mosque is a Martyr–Marker honoring the terrorists." Newt Gingrich even said the Muslim center "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum." Over and over the comparison was made, conflating Islam and Muslims in general with terrorists.
It's terrorism when they don't win against oppressors. First they're terrorists, then they're partisans, then they're revolutionaries and "freedom fighters," Reagans description of bin Laden's group.
IIRC, the TiVo hole is one example of where software that is (was) open source can be made un-free, due to patents
While they're concerned about patents as well, the TiVo hole was where hardware would accept free software, but only if it came from a specific source (IE, TiVo). GPL3 is mostly about ensuring that not only do you have the right to modify and distribute code, but that the underlying hardware needs to allow modified code to be run.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, all you did was throw red meat to the dogs. Customer service departments exist because all your most well-intentioned communication can do give angry people a chance to exact revenge for your company's perceived slights against them by attacking you. At long last, someone they can blame. You really need to let your customer service dept. handle this.
That's often true, but so far most of the responses to him here have been fairly civilized.
* N-key rollover that actually works, solid tactile (mechanical) response. I can type at 80+ WPM again.
When I was in college, after years of using the cheap keyboard my Dell came with, and then using the shoddy Ultrix machines in the Unix lab, I stepped into the SGI lab which had a number of high-end SGI graphics workstations and some nice SGI keyboards. Mostly I was there to test the file system browser SGI had shown off in Jurassic Park. It sucked. But still I was amazed. Amazed at how fast I could type! Amazed that the keyboard mattered that much with my typing speed. It would have been a misuse of those high-end workstations, but I wanted to do all of my programming homework in there.
Now that I'm older, I've noticed my WPM goes waaaay down on the cold nights when my fingers are stiff.
My first Razer mouse was a Lachesis. What a complete waste of money that was. After a bunch of headaches, it finally just broke not that long after the original purchase.
Against my better judgement, I got a Razer Deathadder. Results have been... mixed, per my comments above
I have a Razer DeathAdder and... well the Linux support is not great. The mouse gets detected perfectly fast under Windows, but on Linux there's always an eight-second delay and when it finally gets added, it always sends a tiny bit of "noise." If I have vi up, I'll notice the cursor moved down several lines when the mouse is finally added, if I was pressing control at the time, it switches workspaces. I've never had another mouse that does this, and it makes switching back and forth on a KVM a pain in the ass.
Not to mention that the buttons aren't 'buttons' but are presented as a programmable keyboard. A keyboard you have to program using the windows-only Razer driver, as the bindings are stored in memory on the mouse hardware. But the buttons feel -really- nice, as does the scroll wheel. Those are usually the downsides of many mice: buttons that take too much effort to press, a wheel that takes too much (or too little!) effort to roll, or is hard to "click" (since it's a middle mouse button too) without accidentally causing a scroll event too. The Deathadder seems to get all of that right. I just wish its programming methods weren't so kludgy.
Apparently you were playing them wrong.
I first grabbed a computer mouse in 1984 and I've been using them ever since, without hand pain. How long to I have to wait to find out?
Of course it also depends on the tasks that you use a mouse for. I didn't have much mouse-caused hand pain until I became a Diablo II addict, with its "hold down left-click to run" movement paradigm. What ended up helping was switching to using the mouse with my left hand, even though I'm right-handed. Problem mostly solved.
Not if it's symmetric. But a side button for the thumb would suck on an asymmetric mouse.
I use a right-handed mouse with my left hand, the Logitech Mouseman Optical (URL is a picture of the thing). It has a thumb button which I click with my ring finger of pinkie finger, and I love this setup by far over any other, at least for office work.
For more than 10 years now, both the CIA and Mossad will tell you flat-out that Iran has no nuclear weapons program
Boy, I would love a trustworthy source for such a claim.
The problem I have with their methodology performance is that it seems like they came to a conclusion first, then wrote a test that would support that conclusion. We might roll our eyes and move on, but that's a poor way to conduct biology and chemistry research as well.
I'm actually happy this story was posted to Slashdot, because it has the side effect of illustrating a number of cautionary tales about how to do things, which I don't think the submitter or editor had in mind when approving it.
Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.
Yes, but we're talking new programmers here. At least in C, you're forced to have to explicitly write inefficient code. New programmers know what malloc does (if they don't, they're behind in their classes). In Java and Python, things are done for you. That can be good! It frees you from a bit of micromanagement. But again, for a new programmer, it's not apparent that they're doing something especially inefficient because the work happens invisibly. It's obvious when you have to malloc() a whole new string buffer in C every time you append to a string. It's less obvious in Java when you just append and the runtime ends up creating a new buffer on the heap for you. ASM is perhaps a bit TOO low-level and weird to start a new programmer on, but I think a full OOP language like Java or scripting language like Python might be too high-level and encourage bad habits to develop. In my CS classes, C hit a pretty good sweet spot.
Then again, you can program badly in any language, and C has its own perils.
Probably not, and sadly this is the problem with current CS tracks in colleges.
Zero education on hardware gives us CS grads that are inept.
It's not necessarily that -- I think there's a third layer that doesn't get the attention deserved while people work on end-user applications or tinker building hardware. There's not much attention on operating system design and fundamentals. Your code will usually be dealing with an OS and rarely with the bare hardware, so I'm surprised there's as little attention about operating systems principles and design.
Sounds like you have a tool that's too difficult to use effectively.
The amount of stalking you do is truly creepy. Do you copy all of apk's schticks?
Good for training young raw talent in Pixar's pipeline. Not so good for most other people.
Well, good for training young raw talent in the effects industry in general, really. Photorealistic Renderman was THE standard in big-budget movie effects, and it's only very recently that other renderers have make real in-roads.
So you want everyone to respect the GPL but you don't want to respect other licenses? Really? If you are using it for commercial purposes then you can afford to pony up the cash.
He didn't say that he was pirating it, just that the restrictions on the free version greatly limited its usefulness. I'm not sure how you jump from that to him not respecting the license.
Actually, if by 'spoils' you mean we took it from them because we won, you're wrong. The US paid Mexico $24M for the south-western states (in 1800's money value). I wouldn't call land that the US purchased for money, 'spoils of war'.
Well. You're both right. The Americans paid for it, but it was a war treaty to stop the Mexican - American War. Mexico wasn't willing to sell before then. The US had offered over double that amount for the land purchase years earlier, but Mexico refused. Texas declared its independence, there was a dispute over what were the correct borders, and the US's annexation of that state was proceeded by full war.
Not to mention no wars to pay in the middle east.
Nah, the wars in the Middle East were never done for oil, no matter what catchy slogans the Left in the US liked to say.
First, as long as there is an Israel in the Middle East, there will be wars in the Middle East that the US will be involved in. I can't see that changing in my lifetime. Because of that the US can't just pull out and say it's not their problem, like they somewhat ignore Africa. While Africans butcher each other, they rarely spawn terrorism outside of their borders, so their conflicts aren't a US threat either. As detestable as Boko Haram is, they aren't an immediate US threat.
Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet
It's a funny line, but probably one of the most accurate looks at science fiction. Ships staffed by people who aren't very good at their jobs, using devices that are cheap and poorly designed, helmed by overlords (both Dark Helmet and President Scroob) who are as concerned about not looking like an idiot in front of their employees as they are about getting anything done.
While lots of other parties are allowed, it's difficult for them to succeed. Here's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_(United_States)#Barriers_to_third_party_success
It doesn't help that in the US, most of the third parties are even more batshit-crazy than the Democrats or Republicans, or so single-issue-focused that they don't deserve any sort of broad office. I almost never get excited by any of the Ds or Rs on my ballots, but I don't very much get excited by folks from any other parties either. Usually the most interesting candidates are true independent rather than third-party.
Preferential voting gets some strange results, we have it here in Oz and it is not uncommon to see someone get into the senate who had less that 5% of the primary vote
I guess the question is... if Candidate A is no one's first choice, but everyone's second choice, should we choose the person with the highest (small) amount of first votes, or the highest (huge) amount of secondary votes? Sure, it might elect a guy who only had 5% of the "primary vote," but if you're just counting first-choice votes, you're looking at it the wrong way, and that's why it seems so strange. You're trying to guage a multi-choice vote system using single-vote-only mechanics, of course it would look weird.
Compulsory voting doesn't bring good governance (as the current mod proves on a daily basis)
I think compulsory voting would be a disaster in the US. Ugh.
They don't have to follow popular vote, and many times the way it works out even though popular vote won, someone else was elected
There are a few rules that complicate this. First, first and foremost, it is a mistake to think that the President is elected by a single election of all eligible voters across the nation. It is a mistake to think of that, because it is a mistake to think of the USA as a singular, monolithic country. It is not, and never was intended to be. The nation is a collection of individual states, each state which chooses how it votes for a presidential candidate. These days it seems kids learn about the primacy of the federal government, and that states are unimportant, but it is the wrong, wrong way to think about things in the US, and such an attitude will make plenty of rules seem archaic. Therefore, the popular vote summed up across the entire country... doesn't matter. That's right, doesn't, and shouldn't matter. What matters most is the popular vote across a state, and across districts.
It's nowhere near as bad as, say, France. But there's a fair amount of antagonism. Remember all the furor about putting a mosque... a MOSQUE just two blocks away from the former World Trade Center? A majority of Americans polled believed it would be inappropriate to build an interfaith Islamic community center in the area. We had actual federal legislators saying things like "It is about ... territorial conquest. This mosque is a Martyr–Marker honoring the terrorists." Newt Gingrich even said the Muslim center "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum." Over and over the comparison was made, conflating Islam and Muslims in general with terrorists.
It's terrorism when they don't win against oppressors. First they're terrorists, then they're partisans, then they're revolutionaries and "freedom fighters," Reagans description of bin Laden's group.
IIRC, the TiVo hole is one example of where software that is (was) open source can be made un-free, due to patents
While they're concerned about patents as well, the TiVo hole was where hardware would accept free software, but only if it came from a specific source (IE, TiVo). GPL3 is mostly about ensuring that not only do you have the right to modify and distribute code, but that the underlying hardware needs to allow modified code to be run.
I don't think there's any need to prepare for a post-scarcity society, because there will never be such a thing as post-scarcity society.