From the people I've talked to about ergonomic keyboards, Kinesis always seems to come up as the keyboard to get. They're quite expensive, but hopefully you've got a company to buy it for you. They make them with QWERTY layout, Dvorak, and even dual-legend switchable QWERTY/Dvorak layouts. I haven't tried them yet, but they do offer a 30- or 60-day money-back guarantee if I recall correctly. I'm sure a Kinesis owner will chime in on this thread and let us all know how great they are.
Well, I'm going to setup as many email accounts as I can on the various free email services and put those email addresses everywhere for the spambots. Then I'll just start suing. Judging by the amount of spam I get now, I could retire in a few years.
It appears they're just writing a new file manager/explorer type application for GNOME and releasing it under the GPL. I don't see a way for them to make money doing this (after all, neither support nor documentation should be an issue for something like a file manager).
I think Rob will continue to do the right thing. He's on *our* side here, remember that. For the amount of shit he puts up with from the "release slash" trolls, the "you didn't accept my submission" trolls, the "first post morons", and everything else, it's a wonder he's even still at it.
I don't know Rob from anyone, but from what I do know about him, he doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'd compromise his reputation to bow down to the almighty corporation. Has VA ever fucked up? I actually can't think of a time where they did. If they do in the future, I trust Rob would post it. But from the VA track record and what they've given to the community and what they continue to do for us (SourceForge is so cool) I don't think we've got much to worry about.
Give Rob a chance, flame him later if he screws up, but I don't think he will.
I personally have had five Western Digital IDE drives go bad, especially that one series (1.2 GB or 1.6 GB?) that Western Digital couldn't make reliable to save their life.
To their credit, they replaced all of the drives I've had go bad (one even went bad in the first six months). But I don't even use the replacements, one of them is still ni shrink wrap even, because I don't trust my data on a Western Digital drive.
...the leading rumor is a VLIW processor which will be demonstrated in some sort of PDA or Handheld running Linux...
A PDA or handheld running Linux? Can you think of the numbers of geeks who're going to buy these? That just sounds too cool. If it's got enough power to run Emacs and gcc, I wouldn't have to lug around this Dell Inspiron anymore.:-)
I started using a computer at home in around first grade. It was a TRS-80 my dad brought home from the office. You could just flip it on and it was instantly working, ready for your BASIC programs to be written. Shortly later, we got a C-64 which was even better. All I ever did was fool with this things, and I had a great time. I credit those machines with my career today at the age of 23.
I loved to figure out how the operating systems on those machines worked. I read all of the low level stuff I could get my hands on. I learned assembly language around fourth or fifth grade. I remember writing programs on graph paper in class, hand assembling them to opcodes and running home to type them in. It was fun.
Now, computers are everywhere. Few families don't have them. But look what they do with them. Surfing the web and playing games, that's about it. I feel _sorry_ for kids these days who don't have the advantages I had of what now seems like a crappy computer. I learned logic and programming skills from those original computers and they sparked my interest. If I were a kid today and had a Wintel box, I don't know if it would have inspired me the way those machines did so long ago.
The USB support seems to really be coming along these days. You can see it in action (to some extent) in the 2.3.x series. It sounds like it's going to definitely be included in 2.4.
Amazon.com censors some comments which are posted. For example, one book Amazon.com was selling was priced at $34 despite the fact that the list price is $24.95. I've tried twice to post a comment to tell people to try Fatbrain.com instead since Amazon.com's price was above the list price. My comments have never appeared.
RMS says that authors of books should post a comment regarding boycotting Amazon.com. Certainly, if my comment didn't make it past their censors, the authors' comments wouldn't either!
TeX is very well documented, especially its line breaking algorithms. I'd almost bet money there are some commercial systems which use TeX's excellent algorithm. (However, I can assure you that MS Word doesn't.)
I use TeX for everything I write, and I used it throughout college. I find it far easier to use than programs like FrameMaker.
But I'd rather acknowledge Knuth's rigorous study of algorithms over his (still amazing) TeX.
Does anyone have any experience with the Kinesis keyboards? I currently use one of the old style Microsoft ergo keyboards, but the control key is killing me and the ESC key is too far away. Emacs likes the CTRL and ESC keys and I need them closer to home. I find myself constantly pivoting my left hand to do common actions like C-x C-f... that's not good.
There must be 1,000's of people like me who would run around like a maniac doing things we're "not supposed to" but that aren't illegal just to make security freak out. It'd only be a matter of time before there are enough false alarms that they take the system out.
As much as I respect RMS for what he's done for the free software community, every time I hear that free software song, I do laugh. But it's a mean kind of laugh---I'm laughing _at_ him. That song is really ridiculous.
At the end, people clap for him, so I assume this was a live "performance". Where was this song originally sang?
We used it to port a relatively large (~300,000 lines of source) Windows app to four flavors of UNIX. MainWin is quirky at best, but did allow us to ship said product on those platforms and customers seemed happy. I personally found the apps to be considerably more memory hungry and far slower than a native X11 app, but that's to be expected.
At the time, the licensing fees were somewhat high (approx $4,000-$5,000/year for one platform, additional platforms were cheaper).
I was always surprised that they didn't have Linux support, but that seems to be changing. All in all, it's still far better to be a Good Programmer (tm) and separate your GUI from your core code and allow yourself to "change with the times" and rewrite only the GUI portion when porting to new platforms. Toolkits like this are usually for programs which are inherently tied to the Windows platform either because of poor programming ability or lack of foresight about where the system would end up.
Having used Linux for about six years, it's always been on the Intel platform. For my next computer, I'd like to switch to something non-Intel, perhaps the PowerPC.
Does anyone have a good collection of hardware vendors which actively support (possibly even ship) Linux on PowerPC machines? I wouldn't mind a nice 2 processor SMP PowerPC-based machine, but I don't know where to go to get it.
Also, my Intel machines in the past have been relatively backwards compatible. Do the typical PowerPC architectures typically maintain backwards compatibility?
If you look at Cerent last year, they only sold about 10 million. They were about to go under had it not been for Mr. Dell (of Dell computers) having invested 25 million. They couldn't even afford the payroll not too long ago.
Now, for some reason, Cisco feels they're worth 7 billion.
Kind of odd, I think. There are some happy people in California right now.
Sure, the batteries hold more juice, but now everyone will just produce laptops with even more ridiculous hardware than ever before. 15" screens, DVD drives, 256 MB of RAM,... Call me cynical, but it's just like bloated software: We have 500 MHz machines which run about the same speed with today's software as my 486 ran years ago with that software---and I still accomplish the same tasks. Heh.
My "old" computer gets lots of use
on
High Tech Junk
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· Score: 2
My "crappy, old, outdated" PC (a 233MMX w/64 MB of RAM) gets lots of use. It does everything I need it to do (programming w/XEmacs/gcc, writing papers with LaTeX, surfing the web, burning CDs, IRC, email, etc.). I feel no need to upgrade it at all, I only got it because it was a cheap, good deal. It replaced my Pentium 75 w/32 MB of RAM.
I find that real "power users" (like most Linux and FreeBSD users) usually have what others would consider "old" machines.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with having a shiny new fast machine if you so desire. But with relatively efficient OSes like Linux and FreeBSD, even a "lowly" Pentium 75 is enough for a lot of tasks. Some people think a Pentium 400 w/64 MB of RAM is the minimum for email (with programs like Micro$oft LookOut) but even a 386 does a fine job with pine or mutt.
Oh, well, let them keep buying their expensive machines. That just makes Celerons and PIII's even cheaper. Maybe I'll buy one of those one day.
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From the people I've talked to about ergonomic keyboards, Kinesis always seems to come up as the keyboard to get. They're quite expensive, but hopefully you've got a company to buy it for you. They make them with QWERTY layout, Dvorak, and even dual-legend switchable QWERTY/Dvorak layouts. I haven't tried them yet, but they do offer a 30- or 60-day money-back guarantee if I recall correctly. I'm sure a Kinesis owner will chime in on this thread and let us all know how great they are.
Well, I'm going to setup as many email accounts as I can on the various free email services and put those email addresses everywhere for the spambots. Then I'll just start suing. Judging by the amount of spam I get now, I could retire in a few years.
It appears they're just writing a new file manager/explorer type application for GNOME and releasing it under the GPL. I don't see a way for them to make money doing this (after all, neither support nor documentation should be an issue for something like a file manager).
How do they expect to make money?
I think Rob will continue to do the right thing. He's on *our* side here, remember that. For the amount of shit he puts up with from the "release slash" trolls, the "you didn't accept my submission" trolls, the "first post morons", and everything else, it's a wonder he's even still at it.
I don't know Rob from anyone, but from what I do know about him, he doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'd compromise his reputation to bow down to the almighty corporation. Has VA ever fucked up? I actually can't think of a time where they did. If they do in the future, I trust Rob would post it. But from the VA track record and what they've given to the community and what they continue to do for us (SourceForge is so cool) I don't think we've got much to worry about.
Give Rob a chance, flame him later if he screws up, but I don't think he will.
That link shows that a DVD drive is available with the laptop that ships with Linux. I wonder if it ships with DeCCS? :-)
I've used filerunner a bit---it's quite good, too. Check it out here.
Here's a Linux Journal article about the post office and optical character recognition.
I personally have had five Western Digital IDE drives go bad, especially that one series (1.2 GB or 1.6 GB?) that Western Digital couldn't make reliable to save their life.
To their credit, they replaced all of the drives I've had go bad (one even went bad in the first six months). But I don't even use the replacements, one of them is still ni shrink wrap even, because I don't trust my data on a Western Digital drive.
A PDA or handheld running Linux? Can you think of the numbers of geeks who're going to buy these? That just sounds too cool. If it's got enough power to run Emacs and gcc, I wouldn't have to lug around this Dell Inspiron anymore. :-)
IBM just contributed patches to the kernel to run on the S/390 hardware. That counts for something, doesn't it?
See what they've done before berating them saying they're "just going to make a quick buck".
I started using a computer at home in around first grade. It was a TRS-80 my dad brought home from the office. You could just flip it on and it was instantly working, ready for your BASIC programs to be written. Shortly later, we got a C-64 which was even better. All I ever did was fool with this things, and I had a great time. I credit those machines with my career today at the age of 23.
I loved to figure out how the operating systems on those machines worked. I read all of the low level stuff I could get my hands on. I learned assembly language around fourth or fifth grade. I remember writing programs on graph paper in class, hand assembling them to opcodes and running home to type them in. It was fun.
Now, computers are everywhere. Few families don't have them. But look what they do with them. Surfing the web and playing games, that's about it. I feel _sorry_ for kids these days who don't have the advantages I had of what now seems like a crappy computer. I learned logic and programming skills from those original computers and they sparked my interest. If I were a kid today and had a Wintel box, I don't know if it would have inspired me the way those machines did so long ago.
The USB support seems to really be coming along these days. You can see it in action (to some extent) in the 2.3.x series. It sounds like it's going to definitely be included in 2.4.
Amazon.com censors some comments which are posted. For example, one book Amazon.com was selling was priced at $34 despite the fact that the list price is $24.95. I've tried twice to post a comment to tell people to try Fatbrain.com instead since Amazon.com's price was above the list price. My comments have never appeared.
RMS says that authors of books should post a comment regarding boycotting Amazon.com. Certainly, if my comment didn't make it past their censors, the authors' comments wouldn't either!
TeX is very well documented, especially its line breaking algorithms. I'd almost bet money there are some commercial systems which use TeX's excellent algorithm. (However, I can assure you that MS Word doesn't.)
I use TeX for everything I write, and I used it throughout college. I find it far easier to use than programs like FrameMaker.
But I'd rather acknowledge Knuth's rigorous study of algorithms over his (still amazing) TeX.
Does anyone have any experience with the Kinesis keyboards? I currently use one of the old style Microsoft ergo keyboards, but the control key is killing me and the ESC key is too far away. Emacs likes the CTRL and ESC keys and I need them closer to home. I find myself constantly pivoting my left hand to do common actions like C-x C-f... that's not good.
Anyone want to comment on the Kinesis keyboards?
There must be 1,000's of people like me who would run around like a maniac doing things we're "not supposed to" but that aren't illegal just to make security freak out. It'd only be a matter of time before there are enough false alarms that they take the system out.
As much as I respect RMS for what he's done for the free software community, every time I hear that free software song, I do laugh. But it's a mean kind of laugh---I'm laughing _at_ him. That song is really ridiculous.
At the end, people clap for him, so I assume this was a live "performance". Where was this song originally sang?
Emacs is great fun! M-x tetris RET, M-x blackbox RET, M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead RET, the list goes on and on...
We used it to port a relatively large (~300,000 lines of source) Windows app to four flavors of UNIX. MainWin is quirky at best, but did allow us to ship said product on those platforms and customers seemed happy. I personally found the apps to be considerably more memory hungry and far slower than a native X11 app, but that's to be expected.
At the time, the licensing fees were somewhat high (approx $4,000-$5,000/year for one platform, additional platforms were cheaper).
I was always surprised that they didn't have Linux support, but that seems to be changing. All in all, it's still far better to be a Good Programmer (tm) and separate your GUI from your core code and allow yourself to "change with the times" and rewrite only the GUI portion when porting to new platforms. Toolkits like this are usually for programs which are inherently tied to the Windows platform either because of poor programming ability or lack of foresight about where the system would end up.
Having used Linux for about six years, it's always been on the Intel platform. For my next computer, I'd like to switch to something non-Intel, perhaps the PowerPC.
Does anyone have a good collection of hardware vendors which actively support (possibly even ship) Linux on PowerPC machines? I wouldn't mind a nice 2 processor SMP PowerPC-based machine, but I don't know where to go to get it.
Also, my Intel machines in the past have been relatively backwards compatible. Do the typical PowerPC architectures typically maintain backwards compatibility?
Thanks for any info.
I would expect a true hacker to submit an obfuscated Perl script resembling line noise that cleverly outputs his Q&A session as HTML.
Or something.
But not MS Word. That's no fun.
If you look at Cerent last year, they only sold about 10 million. They were about to go under had it not been for Mr. Dell (of Dell computers) having invested 25 million. They couldn't even afford the payroll not too long ago.
Now, for some reason, Cisco feels they're worth 7 billion.
Kind of odd, I think. There are some happy people in California right now.
Hasn't Linux been 64-bit ready for years now?
Sure, the batteries hold more juice, but now everyone will just produce laptops with even more ridiculous hardware than ever before. 15" screens, DVD drives, 256 MB of RAM, ... Call me cynical, but it's just like bloated software: We have 500 MHz machines which run about the same speed with today's software as my 486 ran years ago with that software---and I still accomplish the same tasks. Heh.
My "crappy, old, outdated" PC (a 233MMX w/64 MB of RAM) gets lots of use. It does everything I need it to do (programming w/XEmacs/gcc, writing papers with LaTeX, surfing the web, burning CDs, IRC, email, etc.). I feel no need to upgrade it at all, I only got it because it was a cheap, good deal. It replaced my Pentium 75 w/32 MB of RAM.
I find that real "power users" (like most Linux and FreeBSD users) usually have what others would consider "old" machines.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with having a shiny new fast machine if you so desire. But with relatively efficient OSes like Linux and FreeBSD, even a "lowly" Pentium 75 is enough for a lot of tasks. Some people think a Pentium 400 w/64 MB of RAM is the minimum for email (with programs like Micro$oft LookOut) but even a 386 does a fine job with pine or mutt.
Oh, well, let them keep buying their expensive machines. That just makes Celerons and PIII's even cheaper. Maybe I'll buy one of those one day.