If you are giving more than one person a flash drive like this then the thing to do is to pick software according to their tastes and then enhance it with some extras appropriate for the software.
Are they a budding graphic designer, or are they someone who likes doodling? If that was the case i would support the idea of getting them Inkscape, but I would add some extras to go with it. Download a sequence of tutorials or worked example videos for example, so they can start using it and have fun at the same time.
Have they commented about wanting to learn to program? Python, plus downloads or the examples and exercises from a tutorial course so that they don't have to do all that themselves.
In essence I would take a single program for each recipient and "boost" it with some selected extras.
As someone who uses a Linux desktop at work essentially non-stop the great thing about the "old" GNOME 2.x interface was how powerful the keyboard access was. The HI Guidelines did a fine job of making sure I only needed to touch my mouse for certain positioning operations and object selections in a few apps. Navigation through the system didn't need me to move my fingers away from the keyboard.
To date, though I'm still practicing, I can barely launch applications from the keyboard. It used to be [Alt]+[F1]+[arrow keys through categorized menus]. Now it seems to be [Alt]+[F1]+[guess the name of the application]. I can't seem to browse categories the way I used to.
Tabbing now seems to be between applications rather than between windows in an application so I have to reach for the mouse to select a window. I never needed the mouse to select a window before. Am I missing something?
There used to be a geometric layout of desktops. I bound semantics to my layout for really fast mental switching. Now there is only a growable, linear list of desktops. How is this linearity an improvement? (If you are interested my approach is to have two rows. The upper row is for running applications and the lower row is for support activity: browser windows at docs, terminals set for screen capture etc. Each column - and I have six on the fly by default - is for a separate activity.)
The comments on touch suggest to be that the designers of GNOME 3 have fixated on a single user group: the light-weight occasional user. They seem to have screwed the heavyweight user in the process, though.
Note that there's a lot of "seems" in the text above. Another annoying shortcoming of GNOME 3 is the lack of documentation about keyboard shortcuts. Is there a definitive list of all of them anywhere? I searched the GNOME website but came up empty. Perhaps "keyboard" is the wrong term to use.
This is mainly reiterating what has gone before, but I would advise that you buy a desktop computer rather than a laptop. Take lecture notes with paper, though not at the cost of listening to the lecturer. As soon as possible after the lecture transcribe your notes to your computer. The act of transcribing them forces you to reread and think about them while the lecture is still fresh in your mind.
Partying advice: Alternate soft and alcoholic drinks. Always have at least one drink fewer than the person you are trying to chat up. Party with as many different people and in as many different styles as you can over the course of the year. Never worry about not being cool enough to go to any particular party; it's staying in your room that's not cool.
Security: As has been said, always lock your door and make sure everything is insured.
But there are lots more things to do in an orbital habitat.
R&D into the manufacturing uses of zero-g might fund one orbital habitat. Can we grow crystals with fewer impurities in zero-g than in g? We've got very good at doing it on earth. It's worth doing the experiments. (Have they been tried on shuttle missions?)
Now let's get imaginative. How much would the first zero-g movie cost to make? Apollo 13 had its zero-g scenes shot in the Vomit Comet. How much more could be done with an entire set in zero-g? "Die Hard in Space", anyone?
Once you have a station in LEO how much would an orbital transfer vehicle cost to run? Would an OTV capable of reaching geostationary earth orbit make for cheaper launching of communications satellites? Would launch be cheaper if components were launched and fitted together in orbit? There might be savings if the initial launch could be made cheaper at the cost of a higher failure rate because the failed components wouldn't be used in the final satellite constructions.
Could an orbital repair station be of use? Many satellites have failed because of a a few critical components failing. Is there a repair market? Hell, if these are light enough and you have an OTV, put a habitat in GEO. Repair and refuel satellites in situ.
Those are just off the top of my head and are probably my personal pipe dreams but I think if some imagination is used you'll find there's lots more to it than sex. Bit like the WWW, really.
If BSODs are independent of one another (a huge and certainly false assumption) then the distribution of the number of crashes per day is given by the Poisson distribution where the probability of there being n crashes in one day is given by P(n) = exp(-M)M^n/n! where M is the mean number of crashes on one day, x^y means x raised to the power of y and x! means "x factorial".
So, if the probability of two crashes per day is 0.05 I estimate M as being approximately 0.4. This makes the probability of a machine crashing once per day as 0.27!
NB: Take all this with a huge pinch of salt. Windows crashes are certainly NOT independently distributed.
I'll leave the discussion about whether or not possession of kiddie porn should be a crime for the other thread. I want to remark on the comment made that when someone came across some KP he immediately deleted his news group cache.
This is insufficient.
When the UK police (in Cambridgeshire at least) seize a computer they use a package called EnCase to pull data off the drive. This includes unallocated blocks of data that had previously held the images. These recovered blocks, in the absence of their filesystem metadata, still constitute evidence.
Deleting files is not enough. You need to scrub the data blocks.
I strongly recommend that you take paper notes at the lectures and then find the time to type them in. The act of writng them once in class starts the process of understanding them and the act of then having to reread your notes and enter them into another medium reinforces that. Don't just copy; read, interpret and then type. You may want a simple graphics package for the diagrams. In the worst case, redraw your diagrams neatly and take them to the library scanner.
As for "what computer", first find out if your college has a policy. If not, take whatever can support the O/S you are most familiar with using. Finally, spend as much money as you can afford to futureproof your investment as well as possible. If your college has wireless setup definitely exploit it.
I would also recommend blank paper rather than lined paper for lectures. It just seems easier to add in additional notes in arbitrary locations as the lecturer wanders randomly around the subject.
These guidelines served me well in a three year undergraduate and a one year postgraduate course. Of course, the computer then was a serial terminal to the IBM mainframe, but the principle applies. I studied maths and converting notes into TeX taught me clarity, TeX, brevity, the editor and how to make friends on the computer. Slashdotters should have no problem with the last bit of that. 8-)
Something that is not being mentioned by the proponents of the various networked file systems is the set of file system facilities provided to the client.
I currently use a GNU/Linux system with home directories provided by NCPFS (Novell Netware) because I have no choice. We've done a fair amount of work but the loss of some semantics really bites. Hard links are used for locking by quite a few apps. Open Office uses shared memory mmap() calls for internal communication via a file in the home directory. These aren't supported either. We have had to do a fair amount of work working around these (and other) short-comings.
I know that NFS provides me with the file system semantics I need for most of what I do. Could the proponents of AFS, SMB, Coda, etc. let us know how close to local file system semantics we get with home directories mounted via their various file systems?
UK law regarding child pornography is so broken as to be seriously unfunny. The police are currently interpreting the law in such a way that if the police can find five images of child pornography on your hard drive, by any means, then you are guilty. Almost uniquely in non-negligence law there is no need to prove intent. As a result it is an easy means for them to get their statistics up so it is zealously persued.
Now consider the "by any means" bit. As far as I can tell they do a block-by-block analysis of the hard drive. So deleted files, swap and linked files are all identified. So if you use your web browser to read your email and you are sent an email with five indecent images then you're toast. Deleting the mail message doesn't help because the downloaded images still live in your cache. Purging your cache or letting it time out doesn't help unless the blocks get overwritten by other data. If you try to explain this to the police man/woman you will be told that your questioner doesn't use the net so they can't understand what you're talking about.
(Incidentally, none of this is hypothetical. I have a friend going through this hell right now.)
As for the list of credit cards, the confusion within the British Parliament beggars belief. One rabid member of parliament was on TV describing how they could still prosecute paedophiles from the credit card trail even if no images could be found on their computers. At the same time a minister in the Department of Trade and Industry was describing how terrible a problem identity theft was!
Incidentally, under UK law it appears that you are not allowed to challenge the alleged ages of children in pornographic images with a medical expert witness.
Put bluntly, the UK law on child porn sucks. The law has all the hallmarks of legislation brought in in a state of panic.
One response would be to turn this round and use the tactics against them. Next time you are discussing a server room with anyone political ask them what the M$ boxes do. All we need are some good answers ready:
Exchange? How many messages per second can this take before you'll have to upgrade the hardware or buy more servers? What's your backup/recovery procedure if a single, important message gets deleted accidentally. How many clients can it support?
IIS? How much downtime do you need on the server to install the patches? What's your regular patch cycle? What is your procedure for emergency downtime for critical patches? Oh? Haven't you heard about the security problems?
File-serving? How many clients can you support before you have to buy new hardware?
If META tag spamming is so much an issue then there are algorithms that might help. A simple one would be for the "value" of a particular META keyword to be reduced according to the number of keywords provided.
So, in a page with a single META keyword "sex" the sex would count as value1.00. In a page with META keywords "sex, drugs, rock-n-roll" the keyword "sex" would have value0.33.
Frequency of use of modifier keys?
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
The author refers to the relative size and location of various modifier keys (shift, control, meta etc.) applying Fitt's law that the further away they are the larger they need to be for constant ease of use/access. But, does anyone have hard stats on how often the various modifier keys are actually used?
The obvious approach I suppose would then be to have some module that records the frequency of all key strokes. Does anyone know of such?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are giving more than one person a flash drive like this then the thing to do is to pick software according to their tastes and then enhance it with some extras appropriate for the software.
Are they a budding graphic designer, or are they someone who likes doodling? If that was the case i would support the idea of getting them Inkscape, but I would add some extras to go with it. Download a sequence of tutorials or worked example videos for example, so they can start using it and have fun at the same time.
Have they commented about wanting to learn to program? Python, plus downloads or the examples and exercises from a tutorial course so that they don't have to do all that themselves.
In essence I would take a single program for each recipient and "boost" it with some selected extras.
As someone who uses a Linux desktop at work essentially non-stop the great thing about the "old" GNOME 2.x interface was how powerful the keyboard access was. The HI Guidelines did a fine job of making sure I only needed to touch my mouse for certain positioning operations and object selections in a few apps. Navigation through the system didn't need me to move my fingers away from the keyboard.
To date, though I'm still practicing, I can barely launch applications from the keyboard. It used to be [Alt]+[F1]+[arrow keys through categorized menus]. Now it seems to be [Alt]+[F1]+[guess the name of the application]. I can't seem to browse categories the way I used to.
Tabbing now seems to be between applications rather than between windows in an application so I have to reach for the mouse to select a window. I never needed the mouse to select a window before. Am I missing something?
There used to be a geometric layout of desktops. I bound semantics to my layout for really fast mental switching. Now there is only a growable, linear list of desktops. How is this linearity an improvement? (If you are interested my approach is to have two rows. The upper row is for running applications and the lower row is for support activity: browser windows at docs, terminals set for screen capture etc. Each column - and I have six on the fly by default - is for a separate activity.)
The comments on touch suggest to be that the designers of GNOME 3 have fixated on a single user group: the light-weight occasional user. They seem to have screwed the heavyweight user in the process, though.
Note that there's a lot of "seems" in the text above. Another annoying shortcoming of GNOME 3 is the lack of documentation about keyboard shortcuts. Is there a definitive list of all of them anywhere? I searched the GNOME website but came up empty. Perhaps "keyboard" is the wrong term to use.
This is mainly reiterating what has gone before, but I would advise that you buy a desktop computer rather than a laptop. Take lecture notes with paper, though not at the cost of listening to the lecturer. As soon as possible after the lecture transcribe your notes to your computer. The act of transcribing them forces you to reread and think about them while the lecture is still fresh in your mind.
Partying advice: Alternate soft and alcoholic drinks. Always have at least one drink fewer than the person you are trying to chat up. Party with as many different people and in as many different styles as you can over the course of the year. Never worry about not being cool enough to go to any particular party; it's staying in your room that's not cool.
Security: As has been said, always lock your door and make sure everything is insured.
There have been lots of jokes about zero-g sex.
But there are lots more things to do in an orbital habitat.
R&D into the manufacturing uses of zero-g might fund one orbital habitat. Can we grow crystals with fewer impurities in zero-g than in g? We've got very good at doing it on earth. It's worth doing the experiments. (Have they been tried on shuttle missions?)
Now let's get imaginative. How much would the first zero-g movie cost to make? Apollo 13 had its zero-g scenes shot in the Vomit Comet. How much more could be done with an entire set in zero-g? "Die Hard in Space", anyone?
Once you have a station in LEO how much would an orbital transfer vehicle cost to run? Would an OTV capable of reaching geostationary earth orbit make for cheaper launching of communications satellites? Would launch be cheaper if components were launched and fitted together in orbit? There might be savings if the initial launch could be made cheaper at the cost of a higher failure rate because the failed components wouldn't be used in the final satellite constructions.
Could an orbital repair station be of use? Many satellites have failed because of a a few critical components failing. Is there a repair market? Hell, if these are light enough and you have an OTV, put a habitat in GEO. Repair and refuel satellites in situ.
Those are just off the top of my head and are probably my personal pipe dreams but I think if some imagination is used you'll find there's lots more to it than sex. Bit like the WWW, really.
- Bob Dowling
Dvorak's stats stink.
If BSODs are independent of one another (a huge and certainly false assumption) then the distribution of the number of crashes per day is given by the Poisson distribution where the probability of there being n crashes in one day is given by P(n) = exp(-M)M^n/n! where M is the mean number of crashes on one day, x^y means x raised to the power of y and x! means "x factorial".
So, if the probability of two crashes per day is 0.05 I estimate M as being approximately 0.4. This makes the probability of a machine crashing once per day as 0.27!
NB: Take all this with a huge pinch of salt. Windows crashes are certainly NOT independently distributed.
I'll leave the discussion about whether or not possession of kiddie porn should be a crime for the other thread. I want to remark on the comment made that when someone came across some KP he immediately deleted his news group cache.
This is insufficient.
When the UK police (in Cambridgeshire at least) seize a computer they use a package called EnCase to pull data off the drive. This includes unallocated blocks of data that had previously held the images. These recovered blocks, in the absence of their filesystem metadata, still constitute evidence.
Deleting files is not enough. You need to scrub the data blocks.
I strongly recommend that you take paper notes at the lectures and then find the time to type them in. The act of writng them once in class starts the process of understanding them and the act of then having to reread your notes and enter them into another medium reinforces that. Don't just copy; read, interpret and then type. You may want a simple graphics package for the diagrams. In the worst case, redraw your diagrams neatly and take them to the library scanner.
As for "what computer", first find out if your college has a policy. If not, take whatever can support the O/S you are most familiar with using. Finally, spend as much money as you can afford to futureproof your investment as well as possible. If your college has wireless setup definitely exploit it.
I would also recommend blank paper rather than lined paper for lectures. It just seems easier to add in additional notes in arbitrary locations as the lecturer wanders randomly around the subject.
These guidelines served me well in a three year undergraduate and a one year postgraduate course. Of course, the computer then was a serial terminal to the IBM mainframe, but the principle applies. I studied maths and converting notes into TeX taught me clarity, TeX, brevity, the editor and how to make friends on the computer. Slashdotters should have no problem with the last bit of that. 8-)
Something that is not being mentioned by the proponents of the various networked file systems is the set of file system facilities provided to the client.
I currently use a GNU/Linux system with home directories provided by NCPFS (Novell Netware) because I have no choice. We've done a fair amount of work but the loss of some semantics really bites. Hard links are used for locking by quite a few apps. Open Office uses shared memory mmap() calls for internal communication via a file in the home directory. These aren't supported either. We have had to do a fair amount of work working around these (and other) short-comings.
I know that NFS provides me with the file system semantics I need for most of what I do. Could the proponents of AFS, SMB, Coda, etc. let us know how close to local file system semantics we get with home directories mounted via their various file systems?
UK law regarding child pornography is so broken as to be seriously unfunny. The police are currently interpreting the law in such a way that if the police can find five images of child pornography on your hard drive, by any means, then you are guilty. Almost uniquely in non-negligence law there is no need to prove intent. As a result it is an easy means for them to get their statistics up so it is zealously persued.
Now consider the "by any means" bit. As far as I can tell they do a block-by-block analysis of the hard drive. So deleted files, swap and linked files are all identified. So if you use your web browser to read your email and you are sent an email with five indecent images then you're toast. Deleting the mail message doesn't help because the downloaded images still live in your cache. Purging your cache or letting it time out doesn't help unless the blocks get overwritten by other data. If you try to explain this to the police man/woman you will be told that your questioner doesn't use the net so they can't understand what you're talking about.
(Incidentally, none of this is hypothetical. I have a friend going through this hell right now.)
As for the list of credit cards, the confusion within the British Parliament beggars belief. One rabid member of parliament was on TV describing how they could still prosecute paedophiles from the credit card trail even if no images could be found on their computers. At the same time a minister in the Department of Trade and Industry was describing how terrible a problem identity theft was!
Incidentally, under UK law it appears that you are not allowed to challenge the alleged ages of children in pornographic images with a medical expert witness.
Put bluntly, the UK law on child porn sucks. The law has all the hallmarks of legislation brought in in a state of panic.
One response would be to turn this round and use the tactics against them. Next time you are discussing a server room with anyone political ask them what the M$ boxes do. All we need are some good answers ready:
Exchange? How many messages per second can this take before you'll have to upgrade the hardware or buy more servers? What's your backup/recovery procedure if a single, important message gets deleted accidentally. How many clients can it support?
IIS? How much downtime do you need on the server to install the patches? What's your regular patch cycle? What is your procedure for emergency downtime for critical patches? Oh? Haven't you heard about the security problems?
File-serving? How many clients can you support before you have to buy new hardware?
Then hit them with Exim+IMAPD/Apache/Samba.
Bob.
The site requires JavaScript enabled. If it is not enabled it says that you should be running with Frames enabled. (D'oh!)
This URL (http://ag.idaprog.org/Indis35prod/doc/333) seems to have the fundamental page.
If META tag spamming is so much an issue then there are algorithms that might help. A simple one would be for the "value" of a particular META keyword to be reduced according to the number of keywords provided.
So, in a page with a single META keyword "sex" the sex would count as value1.00. In a page with META keywords "sex, drugs, rock-n-roll" the keyword "sex" would have value0.33.
The author refers to the relative size and location of various modifier keys (shift, control, meta etc.) applying Fitt's law that the further away they are the larger they need to be for constant ease of use/access. But, does anyone have hard stats on how often the various modifier keys are actually used?
The obvious approach I suppose would then be to have some module that records the frequency of all key strokes. Does anyone know of such?