Touch typing has been an extremely useful skill in my career as a nerd, but I have also had more than my share of tendinitis in my wrists because I learned typing the old-fashioned "right way". In my extremely unscientific survey of my colleagues, those who learned on their own seem to have much healthier wrists than those of us who learned the "right way".
My physical therapist taught me some tricks that have helped a lot:
Keep wrists in neutral position (so fingers do not rest on the "asdf" and "jkl;" line, but rather make more of a V)
Hover over keys, moving hands rather than extending/contorting fingers
hit keys lightly
Use an ergonomic keyboard
Unfortunately they still teach the old contorted wrist, contorted fingers "right way", at least in my kids' middle school. Because of computers, typing is much more a part of life now than it was when I was a kid. We still need to teach typing, but we need to bring typing instruction in line with what is known about ergonomics or else many of today's kids will be crippled in a few decades.
How come none of the small and quiet boxes seem to offer DVI output for their onboard video cards? I drool over small and quiet boxes because I want one near me and want to dump my noisemakers in the basement. And the one near me is the one to which I'll want to attach the LCD display I'm drooling over, which I'll want to attach via DVI. I can't be alone in this, can I? Seems like small, quiet and DVI is a natural combination.
I know it's possible to add a video card to this box, but then we start talking about more heat, more fans and more fan RPMs.
Assuming the web site at wherever.com wants my email address (and also assuming I don't need to hear from them) I just use abuse@wherever.com. That way all the spam they generate goes to the right place!
It looks like the memo also had another section blaming the users for Windows' security problems! He has a point, but that's a little like Ken Lay blaming Enron's problems on Arthur Anderson.
If you decide to teach her Java, you should consider using the BlueJ IDE. It's designed to make it easy to learn Java. You can implement classes and mess with them directly from the IDE; no need for a main() method or i/o. So, for example, her first class could have nothing but a hello() method that returns the string "Hello, world!". And you can visualize the class hierarchy graphically.
It is free but not (yet) open source. It's written in Java so it should run on your platform of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Touch typing has been an extremely useful skill in my career as a nerd, but I have also had more than my share of tendinitis in my wrists because I learned typing the old-fashioned "right way". In my extremely unscientific survey of my colleagues, those who learned on their own seem to have much healthier wrists than those of us who learned the "right way".
My physical therapist taught me some tricks that have helped a lot:
Unfortunately they still teach the old contorted wrist, contorted fingers "right way", at least in my kids' middle school. Because of computers, typing is much more a part of life now than it was when I was a kid. We still need to teach typing, but we need to bring typing instruction in line with what is known about ergonomics or else many of today's kids will be crippled in a few decades.
I know it's possible to add a video card to this box, but then we start talking about more heat, more fans and more fan RPMs.
Assuming the web site at wherever.com wants my email address (and also assuming I don't need to hear from them) I just use abuse@wherever.com. That way all the spam they generate goes to the right place!
Yes, but Microsoft tends to copy more and add less. In "embrace and extend", "embrace" means "copy" and "extend" means "break compatibility".
And sometimes the copies are simply theft. Check out this strategy for innovating in Web search!
It looks like the memo also had another section blaming the users for Windows' security problems! He has a point, but that's a little like Ken Lay blaming Enron's problems on Arthur Anderson.
If you decide to teach her Java, you should consider using the BlueJ IDE. It's designed to make it easy to learn Java. You can implement classes and mess with them directly from the IDE; no need for a main() method or i/o. So, for example, her first class could have nothing but a hello() method that returns the string "Hello, world!". And you can visualize the class hierarchy graphically.
It is free but not (yet) open source. It's written in Java so it should run on your platform of choice.
It was very thoughtful of Ballmer to wait until after he dumped all those shares to send the memo!