Wow, i didn't think anyone used Dvorak anymore. I've been using it for years and i agree with other people here that it's not particularly great for coding. The right hand pinky gets nearly as much of a workout in Dvorak as it does in QWERTY.
If you're having pinky problems, you should try a Kinesis keyboard, specifically one of the contoured models with some memory for reprogramming a few keys (the idiot Caps Lock key next to the A can do anything you want it to, I suggest making it an additional ESC).
The Kinesis puts all of the heavy keys under your thumbs, including "Ctrl" and "Alt".
This is highly recommended for the serious programmer, particularly if you're an emacs
abuser such as myself.
It's not perfect --
The key click feel could be better, the outward tilt should probably be a little more extreme --
but overall it's the best keyboard I've come across. (Maltron sucks, by the way.)
As I remember it, it has some features to let you toggle between Dvorak and Qwerty (key caps are not
so easily switched, of course), but I've always stuck with Qwerty myself -- as I understand it the
superiority of the Dvorak layout has always been something of an urban myth.
Will webapps replace my "desktop" apps? Well, no. I don't trust some other site
to do a good job with my stuff, because I understand that those sites are administered
by idiots like me.
And as for "big corporations gooood! trust big corporations!", I got over that one a long time ago.
(I put desktop in quotes, because I tend to read mail using emacs with the MH-E package,
over a ssh terminal when necessary. One of these days I suppose I'll install a webmail
package of some sort, but...)
As opposed to right-wing people who are the soul of reason and are always welcoming of dissenting opinions.
That's generally been my experience, yes.
You know what I see time and again? I see the right taking great
moral stances on matters of Very Important Principles, and then I
see those principles tossed out the window when the shoe's on the
other foot. (E.g. Republicans get very interested in "fiscal
responsibility" when Democrats are in control of the purse
strings.)
I'm not really referring to politicians, and it's really no
suprise that a politician would be a hypocrite. It's kind of in
the job description, whether you're a republican or a democrat.
And the last time you were listening to Limbaugh, were you struck
by what a great job he did of taking callers expressing contrary
viewpoints?
Or could it be that when you claim that conservatives are the soul
of reason, you're just selecting the data points that fit your
thesis?
So yeah: any moderation system is going to seem biased against
you, from your point of view, because the moderators are
reflecting something like a consensus view, and you are way off
in right field.
It's biased, unfair and anti-intellectual regardless of what your
point of view is.
Bullshit. You're grossly over-stating the problem.
You won't win every courtcase, it doesn't mean the legal system
should be abandoned. The right person doesn't always win the
election, that doesn't mean democracy is a bad idea.
If the shoe were on the other foot, you would be the first person
to start talking about "trade-offs", and "being realistic about
living in an imperfect world" and so on. Oh and I forgot:
"Stop whining!"
(The other day, I got modded down for saying something sarcastic
about George Bush. So?)
Wouldn't anything do line wrapping better? I was just talking
to a Thunderbird user who was complaining that she had upgraded and
line wrapping was broken now. She keeps accidentally posting
messages to usenet that break the 80 column barrier (which, say
what you will for Netscape, there's no way jwz code would let you
do something that bone-head).
Not that I know anything about it first hand, I use mh under emacs (via MH-E) myself, and I actually can't really figure out why it's taken
people so long to realize that all this "Web 2.0" buzz involves trusting a hell of a lot of your stuff to other people's machines.
On the one hand, I have always felt that anonymity on the Internet was over-rated. In real life, most of the theoretical advantages -- particularly in the areas of political free speech and whistle blowing -- don't add up to much in practice, because the authorities can often track down the author of a comment if they are willing to try hard enough. On the other hand, we see widespread examples of pseudo-anonymity being abused every day: spammers, phishing e-mails, breaking privacy/defamation/data protection laws causing anything from personal distress to huge financial losses, even first-posters and trolls on Slashdot.
Very good... but I think there are some other angles on the problem that's only beginning to sink in. People obssess about the highly visible things like "vandals" and "anonymous death threats", but they don't really matter all that much because they're highly visible, these people really want you to see what they're doing.
The real trouble with "anonymity", it seems to me, is the shield it provides to people who want to operate in the shadows... the rover boys, the guerilla marketers, and so on. When you start getting near hot political issues, you start getting these odd characters coming out of the woodwork repeating the same talking points over and over even when they don't seem to apply... and they have trouble following the argument if it goes too far off-script.
Myself I don't think there's any question this poses some problems for an open, democratic society ("Hey, have you heard that John Kerry didn't really deserve his purple heart? He just got some scratches running off in the jungle and came back with some story about being in a fight.").
Question: how would the slashdot moderation system stand up to a dozen hired operatives running a few hundred accounts, using them to cross-moderate each other? And what does that do to wikipedia's neutral "consensus"?
It is not only desirable but essential that anonymous posting be allowed. It represents protected political speech. Had the revolutionary treasonous personages that founded the United States not been able to publish under pseudonyms then we would likely have been under British rule for a while longer than we were. It was essential to preserver in day to day life while propagating the injustices of each locality to the whole of the advent nation.
And how can you expect the Pentagon 'Media War' Unit to "set the record straight" if they can't post anonymously? Asto-turfing is the American way of life! The internet promises to be a bold new frontier for bogus grass-roots movements, and these people want to nip it in the bud by prohibiting anonymity!
Oh wait: but they're not really prohibiting anonymity. They're just demanding a "valid email address". Oh well, never mind.
I've seen plenty of services that already require that (or if you give a.hotmail address, they then require you to also supply some sort of credit card information so they can verify who you are).
Such as (I can't think of any)?
Yeah, my thought exactly. I knew of one or two a long time ago, but that went by the wayside when nearly everyone started using webmail services.
Allow me to ask the question though: what if you really, really wanted to know you have
a real person on the other end of the wire. How would verify that?
I think the only thing we've got these days is credit card numbers, but I'd like to
be wrong about that (you don't want to beg for a credit card number unless you're planning on charging money -- no one is going to believe you).
So, the reason why Slashdot's system is biased towards leftists is simple: leftists like to silence people who hold non-leftist ideas (you could replace leftist with liberal if you wanted to, I'm not sure if it makes any difference). I've personally seen it happen time and time again in various places on the Web, and read countless reports of similiar behavior in the media, government and academia.
As opposed to right-wing people who are the soul of reason and are always welcoming of dissenting opinions.
You know what I see time and again? I see the right taking great moral stances on matters of Very Important Principles, and then I see those principles tossed out the window when the shoe's on the other foot. (E.g. Republicans get very interested in "fiscal responsibility" when Democrats are in control of the purse strings.)
And if you will please forgive some blatant editorializing: The Right has, in recent years, had it's brain eaten by crazed weasels from hell, whereas The Left, in it's time out of power, has gotten over it's Political Correctness fetish and it's rabid fear of capitalism. You need to consider the possibility that "The Right" has become a bunch of crazed extremists and "The Left" is now the New Moderates.
So yeah: any moderation system is going to seem biased against you, from your point of view, because the moderators are reflecting something like a consensus view, and you are way off in right field.
I thought this was funny, cause even after reading his bio I still have no clue who the guy is.
He got rich writing lisp code. You don't think that's an impressive trick? Try it sometime.
The trouble -- in my opinion -- is that he got rich at his second job, which means he doesn't
really have a very wide experience. He's always happy to give you advice on how to become rich
exactly the way he did, but doesn't seem to be even conscious of possibilities like (a) maybe a lot
of his success was luck, finding an angel to sell out to (yahoo) in the middle of Bubble 1.0 and
(b) maybe some of us don't particularly care about getting rich. Some of my heroes are rich guys,
but on the other hand I wouldn't object to be being "successful" like Richard Stallman or Tim Berners-Lee.
A free press is not something that the government is very fond of, and they're going to do everything to try to stop that. And it's time for us to realize how important it is for the free flow of information, because news is what you don't -- what people don't want you to know. Everything else is PR.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to explain, you were protected by the California journalist shield law, but we don't have a federal journalist shield law. And because -- at least the argument the US attorney used, because there was some money that went into the buying of the police car that they say there was an alleged arson against, then that put you in a different category?
JOSH WOLF: Right, it's not exactly that it put me in a different category. That's what allowed the federal government to get involved, because the 14th Amendment says that there are certain things that are the state's matter of order, and there are certain things that are within federal limits. And this shouldn't have been able to even be accessible by the federal government. They basically used this whole "well, there's some money in the police department" as a crux to get their hands into the situation and to circumvent the California State shield law. So that further shows why we need a federal shield law. If it's protected in forty-nine states and the federal government can just make an inroad around the federal shield law, then this can affect independent journalists like myself, but also mainstream media just as equally. In fact, the argument that I wasn't a journalist, which the US attorney tried to put forward, didn't even come about until after I had been incarcerated.
Ah thanks... I hadn't checked in some time, and you're right,/lib/modules now contains a directory with version info, that's very cool.
But I'm not sure I agree that they've got the case covered with/etc. You might want to use a different list of modules in/etc/modules for different kernels. For example, once I was experimenting with using a scsi driver as a module, vs. compiling it into the kernel. In that case (if I remember right) I was getting an errors from trying to load a module that conflicted with stuff already compiled in.
There's a great typo in the article: "Dr Campbell said that unlike silicone-based solar cells, the dye- based cells are still able to operate in low-light conditions, making them ideal for cloudy climates."
For some reason, the summary didn't contain the typo. I'm disappointed.
Slashdot has very quietly started doing real copy-editing... the story summaries have much fewer embarassing gaffs than they used to have: this sort of mistake is the price you pay for having copy-editors fixing the real mistakes.
(Yes it is a mistake: if it exists in the original, they should've stuck a [sic] on it, and not corrected it.)
I swear I saw couple of these posts by slashdot this year. By this time, solar power should cost similar to toilet paper.
Proof positive the there's a conspiracy to supress them.
However, given that we live in the states, anything that is big and heavy and fragile will cost a lot even the material is free.
No way man, solar cells are magic: They don't cost anything to make, the manufacturing process doesn't produce any waste products, they never need to be replaced, and nothing nasty ever leaks out of them on to the roof of your house.
In practice, you can boot up to a different machine with Linux if you just replace/lib/modules and the kernel.
A question I've never had an answer to: with a boot loader like grub or lilo, you can easily choose which of several linux kernels you will boot with. But you always get the same/lib/modules and/etc, don't you? So that limits the range of choices of kernels you can boot with, correct?
I don't understand why they didn't work out versioning for modules and etc as well as the kernel.
Sadly they also make a solid product. Painful, archaic, requiring a lot of support work, but solid. The alternatives are what: Microsoft (far more evil), and PgSQL (not there yet, but coming along).
Postgresql is perhaps not yet at the point where I would tell an Oracle installation they needed to drop
what they're doing and switch, but Postgresql is definitely far enough along that there's no way that any
one should set-up a new system using Oracle -- which is to say that Oracle is already a legacy product.
Whatever advantages the Oracle world may have over Postgresql, there's no way they're worth paying the
licensing fees.
Laugh if you like, but you can actually do this trick the other way around, if you like:
There's a project called "dbilink" that uses the fact that you can run perl inside of postgresql to use DBI to talk to other databases. You can use tables from a mysql database inside of a postgres database...
Under Bush II, US forces have been behaving like villains in cold war melodramas:
they engage in kidnapping and torture, and have a positive contempt of warrants
and due process.
Is this trolling? I have trouble imagining why it's even controversial at this point,
it's just the truth.
From Graham's article, Might there not be an alternate route to innovation that goes through obedience and cooperation instead of individualism?
In my opinion there is. After all the Cold War was a competition between the two different ideologies, and no matter what you might think, Soviet Union did not lack innovation.
Yes, and George Bush has learned a lot from the KGB's example.
Seriously, what kind of innovation are you talking about? Sputnik seemed like a big deal at the time, but
in retrospect it looks like a very tiny stunt compared to the panic it induced.
It's long been known that Russia [wired.com], the Ukraine [slashdot.org], Poland, etc. contain a vast wealth of programming talent. Look at the rankings of the world wide programming contests [slashdot.org]. Unfortunately, with their dismal economies, these talents are often used for ill rather than good [slashdot.org]. I, myself, have two anecdotal stories of my friend's user accounts being hacked by unknown parties in the Ukraine. All in the name of 50 USD.
Why?
Surely, I reasoned, with the amount of time they took to set up that scam and avoid authorities, they could have gotten a job like I have and done something good for even more cash--but, that's my naïve American attitude for you. The job market probably doesn't exist there where they live.
Because they automated the process and did it 10,000 times, and your friend is one of the few who noticed the $50 missing,
and just like everyone else who noticed, he figured it wasn't a big enough problem to hassle with going after someone in the Ukraine.
And the bank knows all about it, but they've forgotten to notify the 9997 people who didn't notice. Oops.
But don't mind me, some people think I'm paranoid.
As I see it, the problem started with CDs. The record companies want to push CD singles, but no one wanted to play three times the price for two tracks, so the format largely died.
This left DJs as the only people buying singles, so we had charted suddenly dominated by techno dance anthems that probably sound fantastic if you're off your head on a dance floor in Ibiza, but are kind of insane when played on breakfast radio as you're getting ready for work.
You missed one source of the problem: CDs have nearly double the capacity of LPs, and to make people feel like they're
"getting their money's worth" bands resorted to recording many slight variations of what's essentially the same song:
listening to a CD straight-through is almost always really samey, if not tedious. It's a long play format that no one
wants to play for very long -- they work pretty well if you've got a five-CD shuffle deck, but otherwise...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see, it was merely an also ran.
But they praise it for doing so much to "enliven" our PCs...
Yes, inane videocy was just what the web needed. Good going Macromedia.
We can only hope Adobe is about to run it into the ground with insane adware and DRM schemes.
And what about Flash?
I'm getting tired of "mashups". Can't we do some "mashdowns" for once? Or how about a "mosh between"? Or maybe a few "mash reruns"?
I think it's time for another "bubble over", myself.
(where's the "-1 Not Actually Funny" rating?)
If you're having pinky problems, you should try a Kinesis keyboard, specifically one of the contoured models with some memory for reprogramming a few keys (the idiot Caps Lock key next to the A can do anything you want it to, I suggest making it an additional ESC).
The Kinesis puts all of the heavy keys under your thumbs, including "Ctrl" and "Alt". This is highly recommended for the serious programmer, particularly if you're an emacs abuser such as myself.
It's not perfect -- The key click feel could be better, the outward tilt should probably be a little more extreme -- but overall it's the best keyboard I've come across. (Maltron sucks, by the way.)
As I remember it, it has some features to let you toggle between Dvorak and Qwerty (key caps are not so easily switched, of course), but I've always stuck with Qwerty myself -- as I understand it the superiority of the Dvorak layout has always been something of an urban myth.
Will webapps replace my "desktop" apps? Well, no. I don't trust some other site to do a good job with my stuff, because I understand that those sites are administered by idiots like me.
And as for "big corporations gooood! trust big corporations!", I got over that one a long time ago.
(I put desktop in quotes, because I tend to read mail using emacs with the MH-E package, over a ssh terminal when necessary. One of these days I suppose I'll install a webmail package of some sort, but...)
Das Modell wrote:
And the last time you were listening to Limbaugh, were you struck by what a great job he did of taking callers expressing contrary viewpoints?Or could it be that when you claim that conservatives are the soul of reason, you're just selecting the data points that fit your thesis?
Bullshit. You're grossly over-stating the problem.
You won't win every courtcase, it doesn't mean the legal system should be abandoned. The right person doesn't always win the election, that doesn't mean democracy is a bad idea.
If the shoe were on the other foot, you would be the first person to start talking about "trade-offs", and "being realistic about living in an imperfect world" and so on. Oh and I forgot: "Stop whining!"
(The other day, I got modded down for saying something sarcastic about George Bush. So?)
Wouldn't anything do line wrapping better? I was just talking to a Thunderbird user who was complaining that she had upgraded and line wrapping was broken now. She keeps accidentally posting messages to usenet that break the 80 column barrier (which, say what you will for Netscape, there's no way jwz code would let you do something that bone-head).
Not that I know anything about it first hand, I use mh under emacs (via MH-E) myself, and I actually can't really figure out why it's taken people so long to realize that all this "Web 2.0" buzz involves trusting a hell of a lot of your stuff to other people's machines.
Very good... but I think there are some other angles on the problem that's only beginning to sink in. People obssess about the highly visible things like "vandals" and "anonymous death threats", but they don't really matter all that much because they're highly visible, these people really want you to see what they're doing.
The real trouble with "anonymity", it seems to me, is the shield it provides to people who want to operate in the shadows... the rover boys, the guerilla marketers, and so on. When you start getting near hot political issues, you start getting these odd characters coming out of the woodwork repeating the same talking points over and over even when they don't seem to apply... and they have trouble following the argument if it goes too far off-script.
Myself I don't think there's any question this poses some problems for an open, democratic society ("Hey, have you heard that John Kerry didn't really deserve his purple heart? He just got some scratches running off in the jungle and came back with some story about being in a fight.").
Question: how would the slashdot moderation system stand up to a dozen hired operatives running a few hundred accounts, using them to cross-moderate each other? And what does that do to wikipedia's neutral "consensus"?
Tjp($)pjT wrote:
And how can you expect the Pentagon 'Media War' Unit to "set the record straight" if they can't post anonymously? Asto-turfing is the American way of life! The internet promises to be a bold new frontier for bogus grass-roots movements, and these people want to nip it in the bud by prohibiting anonymity!
Oh wait: but they're not really prohibiting anonymity. They're just demanding a "valid email address". Oh well, never mind.
(Perhaps they've never heard of yahoo mail?).
Ash-Fox wrote:
Yeah, my thought exactly. I knew of one or two a long time ago, but that went by the wayside when nearly everyone started using webmail services.
Allow me to ask the question though: what if you really, really wanted to know you have a real person on the other end of the wire. How would verify that?
I think the only thing we've got these days is credit card numbers, but I'd like to be wrong about that (you don't want to beg for a credit card number unless you're planning on charging money -- no one is going to believe you).
Das Modell wrote:
As opposed to right-wing people who are the soul of reason and are always welcoming of dissenting opinions.
You know what I see time and again? I see the right taking great moral stances on matters of Very Important Principles, and then I see those principles tossed out the window when the shoe's on the other foot. (E.g. Republicans get very interested in "fiscal responsibility" when Democrats are in control of the purse strings.)
And if you will please forgive some blatant editorializing: The Right has, in recent years, had it's brain eaten by crazed weasels from hell, whereas The Left, in it's time out of power, has gotten over it's Political Correctness fetish and it's rabid fear of capitalism. You need to consider the possibility that "The Right" has become a bunch of crazed extremists and "The Left" is now the New Moderates.
So yeah: any moderation system is going to seem biased against you, from your point of view, because the moderators are reflecting something like a consensus view, and you are way off in right field.
He got rich writing lisp code. You don't think that's an impressive trick? Try it sometime.
The trouble -- in my opinion -- is that he got rich at his second job, which means he doesn't really have a very wide experience. He's always happy to give you advice on how to become rich exactly the way he did, but doesn't seem to be even conscious of possibilities like (a) maybe a lot of his success was luck, finding an angel to sell out to (yahoo) in the middle of Bubble 1.0 and (b) maybe some of us don't particularly care about getting rich. Some of my heroes are rich guys, but on the other hand I wouldn't object to be being "successful" like Richard Stallman or Tim Berners-Lee.
I like this quote, too:
But I'm not sure I agree that they've got the case covered with /etc. You might want to use a different list of modules in /etc/modules for different kernels. For example, once I was experimenting with using a scsi driver as a module, vs. compiling it into the kernel. In that case (if I remember right) I was getting an errors from trying to load a module that conflicted with stuff already compiled in.
Slashdot has very quietly started doing real copy-editing... the story summaries have much fewer embarassing gaffs than they used to have: this sort of mistake is the price you pay for having copy-editors fixing the real mistakes.
(Yes it is a mistake: if it exists in the original, they should've stuck a [sic] on it, and not corrected it.)
Type-E wrote:
Proof positive the there's a conspiracy to supress them.
No way man, solar cells are magic: They don't cost anything to make, the manufacturing process doesn't produce any waste products, they never need to be replaced, and nothing nasty ever leaks out of them on to the roof of your house.
A question I've never had an answer to: with a boot loader like grub or lilo, you can easily choose which of several linux kernels you will boot with. But you always get the same /lib/modules and /etc, don't you? So that limits the range of choices of kernels you can boot with, correct?
I don't understand why they didn't work out versioning for modules and etc as well as the kernel.
Postgresql is perhaps not yet at the point where I would tell an Oracle installation they needed to drop what they're doing and switch, but Postgresql is definitely far enough along that there's no way that any one should set-up a new system using Oracle -- which is to say that Oracle is already a legacy product.
Whatever advantages the Oracle world may have over Postgresql, there's no way they're worth paying the licensing fees.
There's a project called "dbilink" that uses the fact that you can run perl inside of postgresql to use DBI to talk to other databases. You can use tables from a mysql database inside of a postgres database...
Well okay, fair enough. But was it "innovative"? The shock involved was "Oh my god, they can launch big missles just like we can".
Under Bush II, US forces have been behaving like villains in cold war melodramas: they engage in kidnapping and torture, and have a positive contempt of warrants and due process.
Is this trolling? I have trouble imagining why it's even controversial at this point, it's just the truth.
igny wrote:
Yes, and George Bush has learned a lot from the KGB's example.
Seriously, what kind of innovation are you talking about? Sputnik seemed like a big deal at the time, but in retrospect it looks like a very tiny stunt compared to the panic it induced.
Because they automated the process and did it 10,000 times, and your friend is one of the few who noticed the $50 missing, and just like everyone else who noticed, he figured it wasn't a big enough problem to hassle with going after someone in the Ukraine.
And the bank knows all about it, but they've forgotten to notify the 9997 people who didn't notice. Oops.
But don't mind me, some people think I'm paranoid.
NickFortune wrote:
You missed one source of the problem: CDs have nearly double the capacity of LPs, and to make people feel like they're "getting their money's worth" bands resorted to recording many slight variations of what's essentially the same song: listening to a CD straight-through is almost always really samey, if not tedious. It's a long play format that no one wants to play for very long -- they work pretty well if you've got a five-CD shuffle deck, but otherwise...