I ended up with a Goldtouch [goldtouch.com], which I am very happy with...
I own two of these. I think there's actually better than the Safetype, or any other ergonomic keyboard I've seen.
I don't have any ergo or carpal issues. I bought my first GT because it has a small footprint and because they made some intelligent changes in the standard keyboard layout. But even though I didn't have any problems for the keyboard to cure, I could feel its ergonomic superiority.
Another thing Goldtouch did right was to require the user to fiddle with the keyboard until they arrive at a comfortable level of tilt. Makes more sense than more ambitious one-size-fits-all gimmicks, like vertical keys.
I used the Datahand, or something terribly similar, a few years back. Caused more problems than it solved. When you're forced to change your typing habits so radically you have to unlearn many years of kinesthetic patterning. Probably easier to do if you're younger than I am.
LISP and cobol and fortran have been mercilessly killed,
Not true at all! They don't attract the massive interest they used to, but these languages are hardly dead. LISPlike (there's no one "official" LISP) languages are popular with the AI and functional development crowds -- one is used as a scripting language in GNOME. I've never liked COBOL, but big bureaucratic organizations still use it. And you can't hope to sell a supercomputer if it doesn't have a FORTRAN compiler!
Does the latest FORTRAN standard still allow you to assign to constants (pass "3" to a call-by-value parameter and you risk getting that number redefined!)? I'd think that 50 years is plenty of time to fix that particular design bug, but you never know!
Kind of sad that the hard-wired RAM is only 128K. Presumably they did it to keep the base price down (in particular, the price of the 12-incher down to $999.99) but it's still pretty irritating. You pretty much half to pay for a memory upgrade. And since there's only one memory upgrade slot...
Congratulations, you're now Exhibit A for getting rid of the "troll" mod. I saw your post while metamoderating. Whoever modded you down was probably a Brin fan and didn't like to see Mister Uplift dissed. Quite unfair. It seems obvious to me that you're expressing an honest opinion.
I don't have an opinion on Kiln People because I haven't read it and probably never will. But your review sums up my reaction to the last couple of Brin books I've read. Like many "hard" SF writers, Brin has two nasty flaws: he dreams up INTERESTING IDEAs faster than he can make up actual stories to go with them; and he hates to discard an INTERESTING IDEA once he's put any work into it, no matter how absurd and illogical and just plain stupid the INTERESTING IDEA actually is.
He's not alone in having this problem, of course. Even some of my favorites (Neal Stephenson comes to mind) do it. But Brin's always been worse than anybody, and its finally overwhelmed the positive aspects of his work. So I guess I'll never find out how the Uplift Wars turn out. Oh Well!
IANAL, but it seems to me that the Doctrine of Fair Use (or whatever it is) applies in this case.
Lawyer or not, "one copy, one user" would seem to follow common sense notions of ownership. Problem is, IP law has less and less to do with common sense, and more and more to do with protecting the revenue streams of various media monopolies. The law, alas, is written by those with the money to buy it.
I just thought of a counterexample to the Ford/GM oil filter argument. Ford could certainly put a chip in its cars that would insist that new oil filters "prove" that they're "authorized". Any third-party filter maker that tried to spoof this chip would be in violation of the DMCA.
You're right, talking about SMTP as if it were the whole internet is silly. But...
The primary cause of the modern deluge of spam is unsecured email servers around the world, allowing senders to spoof their identity and auto-email anyone they happen to have an address for.
Spammers don't need unsecured servers. They just make life easier. I'm sure there are people who would willingly forward spam for the right price. Maybe you could blacklist those servers, but I doubt it.
And that's actually a good thing. Blocking email transmission is an ideal tool for censorship. We need a solution that blocks unauthorized email reception.
And no new system, no matter how rigidly secured, will make up for admins who don't do their job; if it did, it would be prohibitively expensive or complicated and thus be impossible to implement as widely as email is now.
You're assuming that the current ad hoc assemblage of email servers is the only kind of infrastructure possible. That's precisely the kind of open-architecture-trust-everybody approach that created our current problems.
Rather than having a separate administered email server for every single domain, the new setup would require relatively few servers, administered by people who sell certified-user email as a product. It wouldn't be free, but economies of scale should make it affordable.
Of course, these vendors are themselves potential censors. Hopefully there will be enough vendors in enough different jurisdictions to prevent this. If not, then SMTP will still be around for unregulated communication.
The writer, Larry Seltzer, complains about spammers abusing his account, and yet his online publisher sticks a link to his email address right at the bottom of everything he writes. I would suggest that if he wants to reduce the flow of junk to his inbox, he start with his own managers.
Please. We all know about email scraping. But the only countermeasure, not broadcasting your address, is a terrible nuisance. It means there can never be an email 411 system. It means using all that weird obfuscation that is a pain to deal with -- and which I suspect spammers will eventually defeat. And if you're a journalist, or a support person, or anybody else who has to trade email with a lot of technically clueless strangers, not broadcasting your email is not even an option.
Really this discussion is about smtp, the design assumptions of which are about 20 years out of date. Perhaps there are other protocols that need to be completely replaced, but none has anything like the problems of smtp.
I've been arguing for years that the only way to fix the spam problem is with some kind of certified-user infrastructure. And I doubt that I'm the first person to see this. Filtering simply does not work, as the current volume of spam (60% of all mail traffic, I'm told) indicates. The only question is, how do you make everybody switch over?
Seltzer's idea of SMTP gateways is ridiculous. Its just another filtering solution. Nor does it make sense to wait for Internet2 to roll out -- that technology will probably exist side-by-side with the current Internet for decades.
Not that I have any better ideas. Perhaps users who go to the new protocol could bounce SMTP email with the appropriate "please change" message. Whatever.
In any case, I don't think the answer will come from the standards wonks. More likely the major ISPs will get together and invent something.
but not all web backends require transactions or even subqueries.
And not all DBMS apps are web backends!;)
But here's what puzzles me: if you don't need complicated queries (and I'm told MySql takes a serious performance hit even with something as simple as multi-field primary keys), why bother with a relational DBMS at all? Why not use a simple indexed record engine, like Berkeley DB?
The NGen had built-in networking, a video interface that supported something other than TV sets, a hard disk. It addressed megabytes of RAM. And it was very expandable. Wasn't even in the same universe as those toy computers.
I don't see Hubert Figuière mentioned anywhere on the Opera web page.
I'm suprised everybody's willing to accept that Figuière's been badly treated. He mentions that he was on probation. His English seems a little weak, but he's gotta know that "probation" does not mean, "we want you to work here forever". And he mentions that he had to commute 500 kilometers every day. I'm guessing that means 2+ hours each way. How much justice could anybody do to their job after spending that much time on the road?
Frankly, I think his whole post shows an excessive sense of entitlement. Come on, Hubert, showing up for work every day isn't something you get a medal for. If you didn't hear anybody tell you that your work wasn't up to snuff, maybe you just weren't listening.
The titles you mention say very little about what "American Publishers" are willing to do. None are published by major players in the biz. Paladin Press has about 25 employees. Firequest isn't even a proper publisher -- they're a shooter's supply outfit that runs off a few DP titles.
By contrast, Hacking the XBox was dropped by John Wiley & Sons, a billion-dollar outfit that does 2000 new titles every year. I don't know how many of these were about illegal weapons retrofitting or burglary how-to. Proably not a large percentage!
Try to find a representative example before you make a categorical statement!
Which series I always assumed was supposed to be an Americanized Alita. Guess not. Anyway, before JA can star in a movie, she's gonna have to take acting lessons. Hot or not, she has all the screen presence of a Shelty on qualudes.
And the ending, as strange as it is, pulls on the fact that her name is the name of a flower.
Not a flower. Kishiro says it's a "nanomachine tree". I admit that it looks like a flower.
And you're assuming Kishiro always intended to end the series this way. In fact, he originally intended to continue the series with Gunnm travelling into space. But for personal reasons he decided to cut the series short. Now he's changed his mind again and has already published a new story line that pretends the confrontation with Melchizidek never happened. There were plans for an English translation, but these seem to be on hold for some reason.
I have to pick a nit with the premise of the series. Much of the action in this series takes place in The Scrapyard, a place that lives on the garbage that falls from the mysterious floating city Tiphares (Salem in the Japanese original). Now, as the story progresses, it's revealed that The Scrapyard is somewhere in the middle of North America (Missouri, I think -- it's been a while) and that Tiphares/Salem floats because it's dangling from an orbital ring.
Except the only place you can have a geosynchronous orbital ring is over the equator! Oh well.
Jeez, get a sense of proportion. The lawlessness in Baghdad is causing human suffering, death, and may yet lead to a real war. The lawlessness in the IP market is leading to lower revenues -- maybe. Only someone who's at the center of their own moral universe would try to compare the two!
A lot of manufacturers, including Apple, seem pretty pretty close-mouthed on the 1.1/2.0 issue. I don't recall ever seeing an ad for a complete system that specified which version of USB the system supports. I guess everbody has an inventory of motherboards with built-in USB 1.1 that they need to use up. Not that big a deal if you've got an extra PCI slot for a $20 USB 2.0 card. But what if you have an iMac or some other system with no "legacy" ports or slots?
You must live in some alternate universe, where people use weird concepts like "common sense" and "reasonable value". Circuit City is selling a similar wired TV for $1K. And that's a clearance sale! Larger flat-panel TVs go for as much as $5K. One doesn't see a lot of movie stars at Circuit City.
Who spends that kind of money for stuff like this? Presumably the same folk who spend $50K for SUVs loaded with off-road features they'll never use.
What drives me crazy is "enqueue". Since "queue" isn't commonly used in the U.S., nobody knows that it's both a noun and a verb. Yeah yeah, I'm the one who rants against prescriptive grammar rules. Still grates on my nerves though.
Personally, I don't care whether a phone's internet or pda features are easy to use. As I said, I'm happy with the PDA I've already got, and don't want them merged with a phone.
The beauty of Bluetooth is that you can just leave the phone in your pocket and access its features using another Bluetooth device. So all I really want is a phone that has Bluetooth and GPRS. If the T68I has a bad UI, then maybe it's not worth looking at. But whatever mistakes T-Mobile and Erricson made designing this phone, they realized that Bluetooth and GPRS are a magic combination. So presumably we'll see this combo in other phones, and soon.
That's my theory anyway. Anybody have any real-world experience with this kind of configuration? As I said, I'm wondering why there isn't more buzz about GPRS.
When cells first came out, a lot of people in the U.S. already had "mobile" telephones. These were basicaly point-to-point radios that tied into the phone network. Expensive, because they tied up a lot of radio spectrum. Obviously, you need a word other than "mobile" to describe the new service.
T-Mobile offers the T68i now. (For some reason, it's not on the T-Mobile web site, but you can buy it from Amazon. Yeah, it's only got a five line screen. But I've already got a PDA, I'd rather have my phone separate. Add a bluetooth interface to my Palm M515 and I've got pretty nice wireless web browsing setup.
The best thing about T-Mobile's data support: it's not a stupid CDMA "cell modem". It's an "always-on" packet protocol, GPRS. Instead of paying for connect time, your pay for the amount of bandwidth you use. If I weren't broke, I'd trash my obsolete, poorly-designed SCH-3500 and get one of these.
Or maybe not. I've been wondering why there hasn't been more buzz about the widespread availability of GPRS. Are there interface issues using it to run a web browser? Or are people just unenthused by the 56K bandwidth? Hey, it's fast enough to access slashdot! What more do you need?!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any ergo or carpal issues. I bought my first GT because it has a small footprint and because they made some intelligent changes in the standard keyboard layout. But even though I didn't have any problems for the keyboard to cure, I could feel its ergonomic superiority.
Another thing Goldtouch did right was to require the user to fiddle with the keyboard until they arrive at a comfortable level of tilt. Makes more sense than more ambitious one-size-fits-all gimmicks, like vertical keys.
I used the Datahand, or something terribly similar, a few years back. Caused more problems than it solved. When you're forced to change your typing habits so radically you have to unlearn many years of kinesthetic patterning. Probably easier to do if you're younger than I am.
Does the latest FORTRAN standard still allow you to assign to constants (pass "3" to a call-by-value parameter and you risk getting that number redefined!)? I'd think that 50 years is plenty of time to fix that particular design bug, but you never know!
Kind of sad that the hard-wired RAM is only 128K. Presumably they did it to keep the base price down (in particular, the price of the 12-incher down to $999.99) but it's still pretty irritating. You pretty much half to pay for a memory upgrade. And since there's only one memory upgrade slot...
Everybody claims to interoperable with Office. If you don't worry about losing formatting, I guess everybody is. Include Vim!
You have a dirty mind. Obviously these guys are Selena fans!
Hey, consider who you're talking to! Certain other languages have a higher priority.
I remember seeing some of my own work translated into Japanese. Can't read a word, but it was still neat to see.
I don't have an opinion on Kiln People because I haven't read it and probably never will. But your review sums up my reaction to the last couple of Brin books I've read. Like many "hard" SF writers, Brin has two nasty flaws: he dreams up INTERESTING IDEAs faster than he can make up actual stories to go with them; and he hates to discard an INTERESTING IDEA once he's put any work into it, no matter how absurd and illogical and just plain stupid the INTERESTING IDEA actually is.
He's not alone in having this problem, of course. Even some of my favorites (Neal Stephenson comes to mind) do it. But Brin's always been worse than anybody, and its finally overwhelmed the positive aspects of his work. So I guess I'll never find out how the Uplift Wars turn out. Oh Well!
I just thought of a counterexample to the Ford/GM oil filter argument. Ford could certainly put a chip in its cars that would insist that new oil filters "prove" that they're "authorized". Any third-party filter maker that tried to spoof this chip would be in violation of the DMCA.
Too weird for real life? Guess again!!!
And that's actually a good thing. Blocking email transmission is an ideal tool for censorship. We need a solution that blocks unauthorized email reception.
You're assuming that the current ad hoc assemblage of email servers is the only kind of infrastructure possible. That's precisely the kind of open-architecture-trust-everybody approach that created our current problems.Rather than having a separate administered email server for every single domain, the new setup would require relatively few servers, administered by people who sell certified-user email as a product. It wouldn't be free, but economies of scale should make it affordable.
Of course, these vendors are themselves potential censors. Hopefully there will be enough vendors in enough different jurisdictions to prevent this. If not, then SMTP will still be around for unregulated communication.
Please. We all know about email scraping. But the only countermeasure, not broadcasting your address, is a terrible nuisance. It means there can never be an email 411 system. It means using all that weird obfuscation that is a pain to deal with -- and which I suspect spammers will eventually defeat. And if you're a journalist, or a support person, or anybody else who has to trade email with a lot of technically clueless strangers, not broadcasting your email is not even an option.I've been arguing for years that the only way to fix the spam problem is with some kind of certified-user infrastructure. And I doubt that I'm the first person to see this. Filtering simply does not work, as the current volume of spam (60% of all mail traffic, I'm told) indicates. The only question is, how do you make everybody switch over?
Seltzer's idea of SMTP gateways is ridiculous. Its just another filtering solution. Nor does it make sense to wait for Internet2 to roll out -- that technology will probably exist side-by-side with the current Internet for decades.
Not that I have any better ideas. Perhaps users who go to the new protocol could bounce SMTP email with the appropriate "please change" message. Whatever.
In any case, I don't think the answer will come from the standards wonks. More likely the major ISPs will get together and invent something.
But here's what puzzles me: if you don't need complicated queries (and I'm told MySql takes a serious performance hit even with something as simple as multi-field primary keys), why bother with a relational DBMS at all? Why not use a simple indexed record engine, like Berkeley DB?
The NGen had built-in networking, a video interface that supported something other than TV sets, a hard disk. It addressed megabytes of RAM. And it was very expandable. Wasn't even in the same universe as those toy computers.
I'm suprised everybody's willing to accept that Figuière's been badly treated. He mentions that he was on probation. His English seems a little weak, but he's gotta know that "probation" does not mean, "we want you to work here forever". And he mentions that he had to commute 500 kilometers every day. I'm guessing that means 2+ hours each way. How much justice could anybody do to their job after spending that much time on the road?
Frankly, I think his whole post shows an excessive sense of entitlement. Come on, Hubert, showing up for work every day isn't something you get a medal for. If you didn't hear anybody tell you that your work wasn't up to snuff, maybe you just weren't listening.
By contrast, Hacking the XBox was dropped by John Wiley & Sons, a billion-dollar outfit that does 2000 new titles every year. I don't know how many of these were about illegal weapons retrofitting or burglary how-to. Proably not a large percentage!
Try to find a representative example before you make a categorical statement!
Which series I always assumed was supposed to be an Americanized Alita. Guess not. Anyway, before JA can star in a movie, she's gonna have to take acting lessons. Hot or not, she has all the screen presence of a Shelty on qualudes.
And you're assuming Kishiro always intended to end the series this way. In fact, he originally intended to continue the series with Gunnm travelling into space. But for personal reasons he decided to cut the series short. Now he's changed his mind again and has already published a new story line that pretends the confrontation with Melchizidek never happened. There were plans for an English translation, but these seem to be on hold for some reason.
I have to pick a nit with the premise of the series. Much of the action in this series takes place in The Scrapyard, a place that lives on the garbage that falls from the mysterious floating city Tiphares (Salem in the Japanese original). Now, as the story progresses, it's revealed that The Scrapyard is somewhere in the middle of North America (Missouri, I think -- it's been a while) and that Tiphares/Salem floats because it's dangling from an orbital ring.
Except the only place you can have a geosynchronous orbital ring is over the equator! Oh well.
Finally! A PC that locates the power supply outside the case. Of course, the NGen did it 20 years ago...
Jeez, get a sense of proportion. The lawlessness in Baghdad is causing human suffering, death, and may yet lead to a real war. The lawlessness in the IP market is leading to lower revenues -- maybe. Only someone who's at the center of their own moral universe would try to compare the two!
A lot of manufacturers, including Apple, seem pretty pretty close-mouthed on the 1.1/2.0 issue. I don't recall ever seeing an ad for a complete system that specified which version of USB the system supports. I guess everbody has an inventory of motherboards with built-in USB 1.1 that they need to use up. Not that big a deal if you've got an extra PCI slot for a $20 USB 2.0 card. But what if you have an iMac or some other system with no "legacy" ports or slots?
Who spends that kind of money for stuff like this? Presumably the same folk who spend $50K for SUVs loaded with off-road features they'll never use.
What drives me crazy is "enqueue". Since "queue" isn't commonly used in the U.S., nobody knows that it's both a noun and a verb. Yeah yeah, I'm the one who rants against prescriptive grammar rules. Still grates on my nerves though.
The beauty of Bluetooth is that you can just leave the phone in your pocket and access its features using another Bluetooth device. So all I really want is a phone that has Bluetooth and GPRS. If the T68I has a bad UI, then maybe it's not worth looking at. But whatever mistakes T-Mobile and Erricson made designing this phone, they realized that Bluetooth and GPRS are a magic combination. So presumably we'll see this combo in other phones, and soon.
That's my theory anyway. Anybody have any real-world experience with this kind of configuration? As I said, I'm wondering why there isn't more buzz about GPRS.
When cells first came out, a lot of people in the U.S. already had "mobile" telephones. These were basicaly point-to-point radios that tied into the phone network. Expensive, because they tied up a lot of radio spectrum. Obviously, you need a word other than "mobile" to describe the new service.
The best thing about T-Mobile's data support: it's not a stupid CDMA "cell modem". It's an "always-on" packet protocol, GPRS. Instead of paying for connect time, your pay for the amount of bandwidth you use. If I weren't broke, I'd trash my obsolete, poorly-designed SCH-3500 and get one of these.
Or maybe not. I've been wondering why there hasn't been more buzz about the widespread availability of GPRS. Are there interface issues using it to run a web browser? Or are people just unenthused by the 56K bandwidth? Hey, it's fast enough to access slashdot! What more do you need?!