learning a new language is trivial, so long as it is based on one or more that you alrealdy know. Like after learning C, Pascal, and Basic, Perl took me a week, because it was a conglamaration of the concepts in the languages I alrealdy knew. If you cannot pick up new languages quickly, I suggest you find some an practice. It is a good skill to have.
why do we need manned missions? Computers can do most of what a human can, and better, Without oxygen, sleep, food, messy by-products, etc... Spaceships become much cheaper when leaveing it in space is an option. Humans are much better for PR, but you really have to factor that in. Is PR worth the extra xkilos of oxygen/food/waste disposal/return system/safty systems? Not to mention that humans are a huge PR liability if something goes wrong and they croak.
I thought that moderation was a pretty good idea at first, so that people of the herd mentality wouldn't be bothered by the oddballs. I quitely set my threshold to -1 and happily kept reading. The problem was the trolls who sprung up. Now I have to filter a bunch of crap at -1
First off, I think that small arms should be leagal (within reason, of course) for the same reasons I think that pot should be illegal, stopping it is more trouble than it's worth
But guns are irrelivant to a struggle to overthrow our goverment. a couple of whackos with hunting rifles will do nothing against a well-trained, well-armed army. If anything, haveing guns would hurt your cause. Do you think the american people would have tolarated the waco massacre if the people where unarmed? probably not, but because they had guns, the goverment's murder of those people is deemed acceptable.
Personally, I'm sick of manager types who can draw pictures, but cannot relate it to reality (code) they keep telling me I need to think at a higher level. Well, a higher level is total bullshit if it is not grounded in code. If you write even a moderate-sized program in C, you really do need to know tree traversal, unless you want a really crappy program.
Fuel cells fit the bill... It's old technology... hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells powered the early spacecraft, but they arn't economical at the moment. until they are, i think that if fuel prices keep going up, hybred vehicles, such as that dinky honda (I forget the model) are the future. Power is really only needed when accelerateing. Holding speed only takes enough power to overcome any friction. A dinky little 3 cylender engine can hold a rather large vehicle at any given speed, but badly needs the electric assist while accelerateing. as for your gas, fur, meat comment, I'm wondering why the animal rights people are so rabbid about fur, but dont seem to have any problems with leather? what, cows arn't cute enough for them to care?
as an employee, you have a responsability to do what your boss says. If your boss has more than 2 brain cells, he will listen to your ideas. Mine pretty much leaves me alone, 'cause he doesnt understand what I do enough to do anything but ask stupid questions that take forever to answer. (you ever try to explain a binary tree to a MBA? shit, it's like trying to teach a 2 year old quantum physics) every month or two, he makes me convert my HTML documentation to microsoft word so he can email it to people (He hasn't figured out how to edit and re-email HTML)
If your boss insists on micromanageing you, I suggest you find a new job. Right now, the market is really awsome.
you cant honestly be that stupid. Compuserve and AOL createing the internet? You need to find your crack dealer and shoot him. He must have sold you some bad shit.
ARPAnet was started in 1969 by the military with the help of universities. This was the beginning of the internet. It switched to TCP/IP in 1983. CompuServe and AOL have never been that significant in provideing backbone. They pretty much just provide a cheap and easy way for people to connect.
Did you say netscape created the internet? dude, do you realize that netscape is a BROWSER, mearly sending http commands and parseing the resulting HTML? something I can do with a telnet client with a scrollback buffer, albeit quite a bit slower? The internet was created on a bunch of PDP-11's. Way before sun, Cisco, or the totally irrelivant Microsoft. Sun and Cisco have made a good portion of the hardware running the internet now,but microsoft is not a significant player in any market but the client (browser... like i said, most people with a ref book and 2 brain cells can do it with a telnet client, if they wanted to.) The founders of sun and Cisco would be nothing if not for acidemia. If it wasn't for BSD, solaris wouldn't be here. and the freaking cisco routers where created at a university! Gah. DARPA (the military) funded the implamentation of TCP/IP in BSD (at a university), that was later taken by SUN, and pretty much everyone else. TCP/IP is a DARPA protocoll. the goverment has fucked up some shit, but give credit where credit is due. they made the internet, long before Sun, Microsoft, Netscape,Cisco, or even myself was even a glimmer in somone's eye. get _your_ facts straight, redneck.
umm, so in this free state with a bunch of cowboys running around with AK-47's what's to prevent a couple of people from busting out with a better wepon, or organizeing a large number of people to impose totalitarianism?
I think one constant is that people are baisically evil. This is what makes the free market system work better than communisem. The free market system relies on everyone takeing everything they can, and communisemn assumes that people will work for the good of all.
The problem is that when you get a bunch of guys in one place, without any power checks other than eachother, they tend to look for other, weaker bunches of people to beat/kill/rape/harass/etc... The clan movement is a good example of this. On a much smaller scale, this can be observed on any grammer school playground. How often does the bully get his ass kicked? not real often. What about the class nerd? every other day. The nice and/or nonviolent guy always gets reamed in this situation. Hard. I know. I used to be the nice guy. I'm not anymore. This is the problem with the pack. They only attack those who can not or will not fight back effectively, exactly the people who do should be protected, and usually loose interest at the first sign that their target is capable of inflicting even minor bodily damage in return, unless they are angry, or drunk, or otherwise inebreated.
first off, VB and C are aimed at 2 totally different markets. VB is for designing quick and dirty frontends, or uncomplicated programs where reliability and speed dont matter, sort of a really crappy perl for dummys that runs on windows. C is for real programs that matter. When was the last time you saw a production HTTP server written in VB? It could be done, but it would suck ass. And codeing GUI's in C is a royal pain in the arse, unless you want some guibuilder that builds in a bunch of problems, just like vb, only not quite as bad.
C is hard to learn, and takes brainpower to code in, but you end up with a much better product than VB. I agree vb is better for your normal Luser wanting a semi-working database interface on a 'doze box, and who doesnt want to pay for or put up with a real hacker, but it's not a real language. It's a toy for acidemics, lusers and other morons.
Perl has often been described as a VB for unix. I think this is a somewhat accurate comparison, I mean aside from the fact that perl is much more stable, and faster, it's still a normal guys version of c (and if you cant learn perl, you are terminally stupid. It's even easier than VB. I've coded in both.)
umm, Beta tapes have (had, I dono if new advances in vhs tapes have happened or what) better quality, but the reason they lost out is that they are shorter. You usually had to rent 2 beta tapes for a 2 hour movie vs. one vhs. Consumers are normal people, and therefore, morons. However, standards groups are usually suits, and therefore also morons. Personally, I dont really give a shit who creates the standard, so long as its open. (chk out OpenSRS.org $10 domains, and you have direct access to your corenic account. )
dude, we give money to the poor to keep 'em from rioting. plain and simple. It's really the cheapest way to keep 'em under controll. However, It in no way stops an enterpriseing poor person from becomeing not-poor, in fact, an extra bit of cash helps, I'm sure.
So yes, we do give 'em welfare to "keep 'em down" in that we wish to quell any rebellions by keeping the lazy people glued to the idiot box, but I dont see how it hampers those who are really determined to do something, good or bad. Really, I think it's a fine system. It keeps the lazy people from getting overly violent, and doesn't have all that much effect on the ambitus few, other than expanding customer base.
the welfare system is working fine. Dont fuck with it.
<rant> whats wrong with normal people? normal people are fscking morons. I lost count of the number of times I was canned/beaten in jr.high/highschool because I was a geek. Now that I have become fairly skilled in the science of inflicting pain, (and now that I'm out of highschool) the normal people have formed an unspoken truce: you stay away from me, and I stay away from you. By showing up here, in a geek form, you are violateing that truce. I hate you, now leave Luser. I had to deal with you in my years of tech support. I've paid my dues. The only terminally stupid (average) person I have to deal with on a day-to day basis is my boss, and the pizza delivery guy. and dont call me 31337. I gave up that script kiddie shit when I gave up basic, when i was 13.
all you normal people are always whineing about how the "technocrats" are elitest bastards. Well I am, and unlike most elitest bastarts, I'm actually better than you, 'cause I'm smarter. It has almost nothing to do with economic class, and everything to do with brains an passion. My best friend grew up in a trailer park. He is almost as big of a geek as me, although he took the mac-windows route, and I went the bsd- linux path. For a short while, during the tail end of highschool, he even had a better job than me, him working at MS while I was still a helpdesk grunt.
Besides, I have worked hard to get where i'm at. Sure, I'm makeing more at 19 than the average american family, by a good %30 or so, but I sacrificed my childhood to this. Instead of getting drunk on weekends, like my classmates, I stayed home and read tech books that ate up most of my meager income.
Yes, I think I'm better than you. I am.
It's not so much the inteligence level of normal people that bothers me so much as the fact that they refuse to even try to help themselves when it comes to a computer problem. The other day, my boss made me setup outlook express on his laptop, for a vacation. I'm a unix programmer. fscking moron. >
I have always read at -1, (I started reading slashdot 'round the time moderation started) and it used to be pretty good... lately the trolls have been acting up, mostly because of stupid moderators. Trolls used to be funny, at least some of the time. Now they have started this flooding crap.
While I dont agree with the methods of the trolls, I agree with their ideas. The moderators are morons. However, before the trolls started flooding, I could just speed read at -1, and I got all of the good stuff, and spent minimal time on the crap. Lately, though, that stratigy isn't working as well, but even browseing at 0 or 1 won't help anymore, being as the trolls have destroyed the moderation system. I could browse at 2 or 3, but then I would miss nearly all the decent posts.
Note to the moderators: Dont moderate anything down 'cept trolls/floods.
Note to trolls: slashdot has started down the path of moderation, and nothing can stop that. You have the power to make slashdot unuseable, but not the power to end moderation.
ha. Yea. I dont even try with a gui on anything 17" monitor. The whole point of a gui is multaple terminal windows. Right now, I own a palmV, and while it looks cool, the handwriteing interface just doesnt work real well for me. Graffiti is cool, I mean I'm almost twice as fast useing graffiti as I am with normal writeing, but it is still really really slow compared to a keyboard. That, and I have to whip it out of it's holser (yea I got one of them geeky hip holsters) every time I need to write something down. Next time I upgrade, I am upgradeing to a full wearable unit. If I can hold off long enough I will get a glasses mounted display (I've seen cool, unobtrusive ones that look like a small lump on the side of the frame of your glasses, but last time I checked, they wern't retail yet) if not, I'll go for something like the Liquid Image M1. Looks a bit more borgish, but in a way, that's kinda cool. I ordered a twiddeler the other day, it is my hope that it turns out to be an input system that rivals the keyboard. Anyhow, I think an always running computer in my backpack, with a keyboard strapped to my hand (twiddler) and a hmd (m1 or something cooler) would be the next logical step. This eleminates the tiny display problem, as well as the delay it takes to fish your pda out of your pocket, holster, whatever.
Right now, my real problem is where to get the processing unit. At first, I can use my old p120 IBM ThinkPad, but it is unnessacarly bulky due to the desktop perifierals (keybord and LCD) and it has really crappy battery life (2 hrs, if I'm lucky) So, I've been shopping around for a small, cheap, low-power consumeing cpu unit, with a serial, keyboard, vga, and PCMCIA capabilities. I alrealdy have a modem and either PCMCIA cards for my laptop. Anyhow, I've never seen anything like this except for with x86 processors. I'd buy one of these things if I could get the vga out and pcmcia (preferably with no screen)
I would go completely nuts if I coudn't use a computer for a week. I just switch off chairs every couple of hours- . First, I use one of those ergonomic kneeling chair thingies, with the keyboard on a tray, (this is best for deathmatching, or really intense codeing) but it's just not a real relaxing pose. As I get more tired, I switch to my hippy rope chair (its this funkey chair with a wooden frame, and the chair part is made out of rope, kinda like a tight hammoc) and put the keyboard on my lap. I've never had much trouble with my wrists, so long as I brake every 10 hours or so. and I've been typeing pretty much non-stop for the last 5 years or so, but then, I'm 19, so mayby it's just an age thing.
heh. that sounds cool.. but it might get infected and/or what if you want to change watches? It's easier/safer/more flexable to slap a watch face on with gum arabic (skin glue) that way when you get tired of it, you can remove it.
It's not as cool, though.
Really, what I want is a high speed input device that doesnt use speetch or my hands (I.e something I can use while driveing and talking)
actually, last night after reading this article I went out (or rather stayed up) and did some reasearch. The M1 personal viewer is down to $500. (it's a monicle display) One of those things, a twiddeler($200), and my thinkpad in my backpack, and I can use my computer all the time, in any position, for a meager $700. I need to find a smaller controll computer, though, lugging around a 3 year old thinkpad can get heavy.
That's what I call adapting my computer to me:)
I guess I was refering to the mouse under quake... keyboard/mouse make a pretty cool combo.
touch sensitive screens? unless you wash your hands ever 2 minunites, your screen is going to get pretty nasty during a normal days useage, unless you are speaking of a pen input system, like the palm. Fingers are also a bit to big to pick small things, but the pen solves that, as well. I have 2 issues with it. First off, I have a 19" monitor, and I like to recline in my char. right now I'm leaning back with my keybord on my lap (with a trackpoint, for quake and X). I use the trackpoint because reaching to the mouse is to much trouble. It would be quite annoying to have to sit up everytime I needed to hit a link. Even at work, I don't sit close enough to my monitor to comfortably use a touch screen. Didn't IBM try this on the EGA alrealdy, with the light pen?
The other thing is gameing. I just dont think quake would be as cool if you just touched your oponents to splatter them.
keyboardless/touch monitors my have a chance in clueless newbie/ocasional useage/wearable/pda markets, but as for me, I need a decent interface that is comfortable to use for extended periods of time.
Really, the future of voice controll is wearable computers. I would love to have an earbud w/ microphone hooked up to my pda and cellphone. I would wear it all the time, and could plan my code on my way to work, or while running errands. It wouldnt be much use for codeing until I got a good glasses mounted disply. I've seen these really cool mono displays that clip onto normal eyeglasses/sunglasses. I forget the link, but they are only selling to schools and the gvmnt for reasarch. I can type faster than I can talk, but it's hard to carry a keyboard. I guess there are twiddelers, but those have a bit of a learning curve.
Actually, if I could find a cheap (sub 1k) and not hugely bulky text only head mounted display, i'd setup a wearable with a twiddler, my thinkpad, a backpack and whatever hmd I can find.
As for desktop/laptop pointing/input devices, I prefer the ibm TrackPoint keyboards (the one with the little pointing nub between the g and h keys) and those ancient IBM AT keyboards (the ones with metal springs, that make such a racket) for my console-only systems. The trackpoint is really cool for the occasional mouse user like myself, because it is really close to my keyboard. I just need to move one finger, and it's there. But for longer mouse activities, like quake, a joystick or normal mouse might be a bit better. after a good 2-3 hour quake run my finger is pretty sore. But then when I used to use a normal mouse, my wrist hurt.
Maybe I'm on crack here, but i thought that "microsoft" hardware was hardware that a another company made, and paid royalties to microsoft for the use of the name.
Delphi is decent. Pascal is pretty clean. But Ada is where it's at. I used to code in delphi, but I no longer have any windows boxen, so I have switched to C and am learning ADA. Really, if you are conserned with straight up speed &power stick with c. If you want a clean, well implamented object oriented language, go with ADA. C++ sucks, though, I agree. BTW, anyone know when borland/interprise plans to release Delphi for Linux? the guibuilder is rather cool. Oh, and are you refering to the obsfucated perl contest? Well written perl is easier to read than english, but it is so loosly typed that you can write really crapy perl code that is almost as bad as visual basic. My suggestion is "use strict" on anything longer than one screen. oh and as for macros- macros are fast. Macros are cool. Don't mess with macros. If you are mearly chaseing after the "most object oriented" language, Ada kicks Delphi's ass. If you are going for speed, go with C. if you are going for speed of development, use perl. Delphi does have a kick-ass guibuilder, though.
umm, they can watch where I go, that is if I dont bother to spoof (I don't, mostly because I dont have much to hide. If you are spying on me, you have way to much time on your hands.) but as for watching me, that would require hardware, and phat bandwith.
_I_ controll my hardware. Not the goverment, or anyone else.
If you really wanted, you could park a tempest box in a truck in front of my house, but if I was that concerned with others viewing my monitor, shielding is a rather simple matter.
Also: the open nature of the internet means that it is really easy/cheap to put up your own media stream. even the cost of running a site as huge as slashdot is tiny in comparison to the smallest tv station, and the fact that it is easy to filter ads without interupting content on the internet allows you to controll what propiganda you wish to view.
umm... The guy meant in our community, the open source geek/hacker community. In here, linux is most certanly "in", even if windows is not commercially dead.
I agree, windows is most certanly not dead in the desktop market. However, the refusal to support anything but x86 in windows 2000 is baisically microsoft surrendering in the mid to high end server market, but then, they never really had a foothold there.
I have been out of contact with "normal" people for far to long to speculate on the future of windows on the "normal" persons desktop.
As for credit cards/ cars, I agree. I'm makeing 38K and driveing a 94 geo metro, and saveing for a better car. But how 'bout buying a house rather than renting? Borrowing cash to buy a house is, I believe, much better than renting. Personally, I think debit is not nessacarly evil, just dangerous. Much like firearms, it is easy to get carried away and get hurt rather badly, but used carfully both can be valuable tools.
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learning a new language is trivial, so long as it is based on one or more that you alrealdy know. Like after learning C, Pascal, and Basic, Perl took me a week, because it was a conglamaration of the concepts in the languages I alrealdy knew. If you cannot pick up new languages quickly, I suggest you find some an practice. It is a good skill to have.
why do we need manned missions? Computers can do most of what a human can, and better, Without oxygen, sleep, food, messy by-products, etc... Spaceships become much cheaper when leaveing it in space is an option. Humans are much better for PR, but you really have to factor that in. Is PR worth the extra xkilos of oxygen/food/waste disposal/return system/safty systems? Not to mention that humans are a huge PR liability if something goes wrong and they croak.
umm, yes, I would, if the product was significantly better than the compititon. That, and i usually refrain from asking stupid questions.
I thought that moderation was a pretty good idea at first, so that people of the herd mentality wouldn't be bothered by the oddballs. I quitely set my threshold to -1 and happily kept reading. The problem was the trolls who sprung up. Now I have to filter a bunch of crap at -1
But guns are irrelivant to a struggle to overthrow our goverment. a couple of whackos with hunting rifles will do nothing against a well-trained, well-armed army. If anything, haveing guns would hurt your cause. Do you think the american people would have tolarated the waco massacre if the people where unarmed? probably not, but because they had guns, the goverment's murder of those people is deemed acceptable.
Personally, I'm sick of manager types who can draw pictures, but cannot relate it to reality (code) they keep telling me I need to think at a higher level. Well, a higher level is total bullshit if it is not grounded in code. If you write even a moderate-sized program in C, you really do need to know tree traversal, unless you want a really crappy program.
Fuel cells fit the bill... It's old technology... hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells powered the early spacecraft, but they arn't economical at the moment. until they are, i think that if fuel prices keep going up, hybred vehicles, such as that dinky honda (I forget the model) are the future. Power is really only needed when accelerateing. Holding speed only takes enough power to overcome any friction. A dinky little 3 cylender engine can hold a rather large vehicle at any given speed, but badly needs the electric assist while accelerateing. as for your gas, fur, meat comment, I'm wondering why the animal rights people are so rabbid about fur, but dont seem to have any problems with leather? what, cows arn't cute enough for them to care?
If your boss insists on micromanageing you, I suggest you find a new job. Right now, the market is really awsome.
you cant honestly be that stupid. Compuserve and AOL createing the internet? You need to find your crack dealer and shoot him. He must have sold you some bad shit.
ARPAnet was started in 1969 by the military with the help of universities. This was the beginning of the internet. It switched to TCP/IP in 1983. CompuServe and AOL have never been that significant in provideing backbone. They pretty much just provide a cheap and easy way for people to connect.
Did you say netscape created the internet? dude, do you realize that netscape is a BROWSER, mearly sending http commands and parseing the resulting HTML? something I can do with a telnet client with a scrollback buffer, albeit quite a bit slower? The internet was created on a bunch of PDP-11's. Way before sun, Cisco, or the totally irrelivant Microsoft. Sun and Cisco have made a good portion of the hardware running the internet now,but microsoft is not a significant player in any market but the client (browser... like i said, most people with a ref book and 2 brain cells can do it with a telnet client, if they wanted to.) The founders of sun and Cisco would be nothing if not for acidemia. If it wasn't for BSD, solaris wouldn't be here. and the freaking cisco routers where created at a university! Gah. DARPA (the military) funded the implamentation of TCP/IP in BSD (at a university), that was later taken by SUN, and pretty much everyone else. TCP/IP is a DARPA protocoll. the goverment has fucked up some shit, but give credit where credit is due. they made the internet, long before Sun, Microsoft, Netscape,Cisco, or even myself was even a glimmer in somone's eye. get _your_ facts straight, redneck.
I think one constant is that people are baisically evil. This is what makes the free market system work better than communisem. The free market system relies on everyone takeing everything they can, and communisemn assumes that people will work for the good of all.
The problem is that when you get a bunch of guys in one place, without any power checks other than eachother, they tend to look for other, weaker bunches of people to beat/kill/rape/harass/etc... The clan movement is a good example of this. On a much smaller scale, this can be observed on any grammer school playground. How often does the bully get his ass kicked? not real often. What about the class nerd? every other day. The nice and/or nonviolent guy always gets reamed in this situation. Hard. I know. I used to be the nice guy. I'm not anymore. This is the problem with the pack. They only attack those who can not or will not fight back effectively, exactly the people who do should be protected, and usually loose interest at the first sign that their target is capable of inflicting even minor bodily damage in return, unless they are angry, or drunk, or otherwise inebreated.
C is hard to learn, and takes brainpower to code in, but you end up with a much better product than VB. I agree vb is better for your normal Luser wanting a semi-working database interface on a 'doze box, and who doesnt want to pay for or put up with a real hacker, but it's not a real language. It's a toy for acidemics, lusers and other morons.
Perl has often been described as a VB for unix. I think this is a somewhat accurate comparison, I mean aside from the fact that perl is much more stable, and faster, it's still a normal guys version of c (and if you cant learn perl, you are terminally stupid. It's even easier than VB. I've coded in both.)
umm, Beta tapes have (had, I dono if new advances in vhs tapes have happened or what) better quality, but the reason they lost out is that they are shorter. You usually had to rent 2 beta tapes for a 2 hour movie vs. one vhs. Consumers are normal people, and therefore, morons. However, standards groups are usually suits, and therefore also morons. Personally, I dont really give a shit who creates the standard, so long as its open. (chk out OpenSRS.org $10 domains, and you have direct access to your corenic account. )
So yes, we do give 'em welfare to "keep 'em down" in that we wish to quell any rebellions by keeping the lazy people glued to the idiot box, but I dont see how it hampers those who are really determined to do something, good or bad. Really, I think it's a fine system. It keeps the lazy people from getting overly violent, and doesn't have all that much effect on the ambitus few, other than expanding customer base.
the welfare system is working fine. Dont fuck with it.
all you normal people are always whineing about how the "technocrats" are elitest bastards. Well I am, and unlike most elitest bastarts, I'm actually better than you, 'cause I'm smarter. It has almost nothing to do with economic class, and everything to do with brains an passion. My best friend grew up in a trailer park. He is almost as big of a geek as me, although he took the mac-windows route, and I went the bsd- linux path. For a short while, during the tail end of highschool, he even had a better job than me, him working at MS while I was still a helpdesk grunt.
Besides, I have worked hard to get where i'm at. Sure, I'm makeing more at 19 than the average american family, by a good %30 or so, but I sacrificed my childhood to this. Instead of getting drunk on weekends, like my classmates, I stayed home and read tech books that ate up most of my meager income.
Yes, I think I'm better than you. I am.
It's not so much the inteligence level of normal people that bothers me so much as the fact that they refuse to even try to help themselves when it comes to a computer problem. The other day, my boss made me setup outlook express on his laptop, for a vacation. I'm a unix programmer. fscking moron. >
I have always read at -1, (I started reading slashdot 'round the time moderation started) and it used to be pretty good... lately the trolls have been acting up, mostly because of stupid moderators. Trolls used to be funny, at least some of the time. Now they have started this flooding crap.
While I dont agree with the methods of the trolls, I agree with their ideas. The moderators are morons. However, before the trolls started flooding, I could just speed read at -1, and I got all of the good stuff, and spent minimal time on the crap. Lately, though, that stratigy isn't working as well, but even browseing at 0 or 1 won't help anymore, being as the trolls have destroyed the moderation system. I could browse at 2 or 3, but then I would miss nearly all the decent posts.
Note to the moderators: Dont moderate anything down 'cept trolls/floods.
Note to trolls: slashdot has started down the path of moderation, and nothing can stop that. You have the power to make slashdot unuseable, but not the power to end moderation.
Right now, my real problem is where to get the processing unit. At first, I can use my old p120 IBM ThinkPad, but it is unnessacarly bulky due to the desktop perifierals (keybord and LCD) and it has really crappy battery life (2 hrs, if I'm lucky) So, I've been shopping around for a small, cheap, low-power consumeing cpu unit, with a serial, keyboard, vga, and PCMCIA capabilities. I alrealdy have a modem and either PCMCIA cards for my laptop. Anyhow, I've never seen anything like this except for with x86 processors. I'd buy one of these things if I could get the vga out and pcmcia (preferably with no screen)
I would go completely nuts if I coudn't use a computer for a week. I just switch off chairs every couple of hours- . First, I use one of those ergonomic kneeling chair thingies, with the keyboard on a tray, (this is best for deathmatching, or really intense codeing) but it's just not a real relaxing pose. As I get more tired, I switch to my hippy rope chair (its this funkey chair with a wooden frame, and the chair part is made out of rope, kinda like a tight hammoc) and put the keyboard on my lap. I've never had much trouble with my wrists, so long as I brake every 10 hours or so. and I've been typeing pretty much non-stop for the last 5 years or so, but then, I'm 19, so mayby it's just an age thing.
It's not as cool, though.
Really, what I want is a high speed input device that doesnt use speetch or my hands (I.e something I can use while driveing and talking)
That's what I call adapting my computer to me:)
I guess I was refering to the mouse under quake... keyboard/mouse make a pretty cool combo.
umm, most _people_ cannot do that.
The other thing is gameing. I just dont think quake would be as cool if you just touched your oponents to splatter them.
keyboardless/touch monitors my have a chance in clueless newbie/ocasional useage/wearable/pda markets, but as for me, I need a decent interface that is comfortable to use for extended periods of time.
Actually, if I could find a cheap (sub 1k) and not hugely bulky text only head mounted display, i'd setup a wearable with a twiddler, my thinkpad, a backpack and whatever hmd I can find.
As for desktop/laptop pointing/input devices, I prefer the ibm TrackPoint keyboards (the one with the little pointing nub between the g and h keys) and those ancient IBM AT keyboards (the ones with metal springs, that make such a racket) for my console-only systems. The trackpoint is really cool for the occasional mouse user like myself, because it is really close to my keyboard. I just need to move one finger, and it's there. But for longer mouse activities, like quake, a joystick or normal mouse might be a bit better. after a good 2-3 hour quake run my finger is pretty sore. But then when I used to use a normal mouse, my wrist hurt.
Maybe I'm on crack here, but i thought that "microsoft" hardware was hardware that a another company made, and paid royalties to microsoft for the use of the name.
Delphi is decent. Pascal is pretty clean. But Ada is where it's at. I used to code in delphi, but I no longer have any windows boxen, so I have switched to C and am learning ADA. Really, if you are conserned with straight up speed &power stick with c. If you want a clean, well implamented object oriented language, go with ADA. C++ sucks, though, I agree. BTW, anyone know when borland/interprise plans to release Delphi for Linux? the guibuilder is rather cool. Oh, and are you refering to the obsfucated perl contest? Well written perl is easier to read than english, but it is so loosly typed that you can write really crapy perl code that is almost as bad as visual basic. My suggestion is "use strict" on anything longer than one screen. oh and as for macros- macros are fast. Macros are cool. Don't mess with macros. If you are mearly chaseing after the "most object oriented" language, Ada kicks Delphi's ass. If you are going for speed, go with C. if you are going for speed of development, use perl. Delphi does have a kick-ass guibuilder, though.
_I_ controll my hardware. Not the goverment, or anyone else.
If you really wanted, you could park a tempest box in a truck in front of my house, but if I was that concerned with others viewing my monitor, shielding is a rather simple matter.
Also: the open nature of the internet means that it is really easy/cheap to put up your own media stream. even the cost of running a site as huge as slashdot is tiny in comparison to the smallest tv station, and the fact that it is easy to filter ads without interupting content on the internet allows you to controll what propiganda you wish to view.
I agree, windows is most certanly not dead in the desktop market. However, the refusal to support anything but x86 in windows 2000 is baisically microsoft surrendering in the mid to high end server market, but then, they never really had a foothold there.
I have been out of contact with "normal" people for far to long to speculate on the future of windows on the "normal" persons desktop.
As for credit cards/ cars, I agree. I'm makeing 38K and driveing a 94 geo metro, and saveing for a better car. But how 'bout buying a house rather than renting? Borrowing cash to buy a house is, I believe, much better than renting. Personally, I think debit is not nessacarly evil, just dangerous. Much like firearms, it is easy to get carried away and get hurt rather badly, but used carfully both can be valuable tools.