But QWERTY was adopted BEFORE Dvorak existed, thus QWERTY was already entrenched when Dvorak came around, thus they did not compete fairly, which is the reason that it's not a fable.
The "brain shift" time goes down a lot. I can now type QWERTY as fast as I could before, and I can switch back an forth in however long it takes me to realize that what I'm typing looks like gibberish.
It won't even TRY with my K6-2 300. It says "Oops, check requirements" which list a P166+. Yeah, I can swing that. To the other person, at the bottom of the page is a link to a "Comic Viewer" or something like that.
I doubt Microsoft intended to become a pathetic monopoly, but they did, and it has had bad consequences. Likewise, they might not have designed QWERTY to be inefficient, but it is. One has only to play with an anagram program to see that your fingers have to move more on a QWERTY keyboard than on a Dvorak one. So maybe they didn't intentionally create something that would slow people down, but as I recall, there was a competetion between QWERTY and another keyboard, but the other "keyboard" had pedals, 80 keys (no shift), and was huge. So yes, QWERTY won for its efficiency, but that doesn't mean that it's actually efficient. (and that the letters in typewriter are in the first row is too much to be a coincidenc, and shows that ergonomics and speed were not at the forefront of Mr. Qwerty's (yes, joke) mine).
re-inventing the minidisc
on
IBM and Mp3
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· Score: 1
But that's the same thing that Mp3 does. Well, I guess it does actual compression too, but what you described is its main function.
I understand the convenience of these things. Once they have good contrast, light weight, and good battery life, I would be willing to part with a few (just a few) hundred for one, but how much are the books and how many are there? Since the actual cost of printing a book is trivial compared to the book, I wonder. Then again, there's also shipping and sales, which add to a books costs, whereas an Electronic book could be purchased through automation. Anybody know?
I think this shows something else about opensource development, that isn't talked about as much: you don't want to be embarrased by bad source. When they opened up the source, thy tried to build on that, till the developers said, "Forget that, we're starting over" (which is the reason it's taken so long and it's so much better). Opensource development does not like cruft, and that's why it's taken so long.
I think the title says it all. This guy writes beautifully. I don't know whether he would want the job, but he certainly seems capable.
MUST READ, MUST READ NEAL STEPHENSON!
on
Tuesday Quickies
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· Score: 1
He wrote Diamond Age? Wow, I've just read the first 1/2 of this essay (who are we kidding, this is an online book), and it's spectacular. I had planned on reading Diamond Age a few months ago, but passed. I'm definitely going back to it now!
I have to agree. Not only is this the best history of modern computing that I have ever read, I have laughed outloud at least 10 times since I started, and I'm only a third done.
That was my point before. It's great if that's how it works. It's not great if, after all that, there are 5 "standard" Linux SDK's. If it boils down to 1 or 2 (maybe 3) that'd be fine.
But this isn't an engine (I hope not). only lazy programmers take an engine and make it their own unmodified. "The more the merrier" doesn't really apply so much to high-level device interfaces (which is really what this is). Like DirectX or X or SVGALib. I think those sorts of things should not be too abundant.
According to my physics teacher last semester (head of Duke's physics department, so a pretty bright guy), faster than light "travel" is possible. I put that in quotes because you can't move faster than light, but space can stretch and contract faster than light. In the early moments of the big bang, space expanded faster than light, so that particles were farther apart than light could travel up to that point. The good news? You can expand space behind you and contract space in front of you to "travel" faster than the speed of light. The bad news? You have to annihilate entire galaxies worth of matter/antimatter to be able to do this.
I quote from my recently failed attempt to watch the thing in Linux:
[andrew@fizgig download]$ xanim TFN_TrailerC.mov XAnim Rev 2.70.7.0 by Mark Podlipec (c) 1991-1998 Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18) Audio Codec: QDesign Music Codec (QDMC) not yet supported. Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
Wasn't the Sorenson codec used in the official trailer two?
is that people will let their egos take control and won't combine efforts. It will be fine if all the different SDK's get finished, and one ends up being the true Linux game SDK and it takes all the nice features (and code?) from the other ones. But I don't think it's in our best interest to have to have five different sets of general games libraries. Sure, most of us could hanle it, but one has only to look at the mindnumbing confusion that besets Windows users when they have to figure out the difference between OpenGL, Glide, and Direct3D.
I just checked out the plugin. What they have so far is really impressive. Try viewing the comics. It's a great demonstration. First it loads the text, then image, then color. This is not something that can replace gifs or jpegs, and it's not meant to. What it may and should (with community support) replace is pdf files. Those of you who have problems with the license, TELL THEM ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS. For once a company that is asking for help from the community is asking for our help in determing the terms of our service. This, in my opinion, is nothing but good news.
I've never read so much during a cartoon. So many of those jokes were written down! But my absolute favorite part of the show was that the French people screamed "Seven" in English in the future!
Things just need to settle down.
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
To be fair, that wasn't what they said. They said there's a total market of 10m (which is an overestimate, considering the low hardware that some things run on). They then suggested that 1% of all users would buy a good game (not too unreasonable), leading them to the 100.000 figure for number sold.
Things just need to settle down.
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 3
The author (why not a link?) claims that we just need a good development kit. Those things are in the works. At the low-level side is GGI. Have you guys ever used this stuff? It's incredible. A program written for GGI can run on SVGAlib or X or FB console without recompiling all as fast as it would have been if it had just been written for SVGAlib. There's also ClanLib, which is an LGPL'd SDK, just like DirectX. True, it's not quite ready yet, but we need more people to put effort into these things rather than creating a new "standard". It's unfortunate that Loki has resorted to using SciTech's libraries to make their games, but nothing else is ready. Don't make it happen for their next game! On another note, I saw a message on linuxgames.com that was saying that there are 10m Linux users, 1% of whom would buy a game, so that's 100,000 copies that a developer could sell if they made a Linux game. That's making a lot of assumptions, though, the most important being that all 10m of those machines have monitors and aren't 386s!
"Creative Labs was talking to me but then stopped. If you want me to finish my driver, then instead of asking me "what's going on with DVD?" (I get a lot of these;-) please do me a favor and email them at devsupport@creativelabs.com, asking them to help me (or write their own driver, which they are for some peripherals now). I can only do so much with one voice. While I have a number of updates and have some various info on the Ziva now past what is given below, I no longer wish to work blind, and neither do I have the time to reverse engineer every detail. "
Are you trying to block things that interfere with your network (a poorly configured, interfering server) or things that are just for their own good? If the latter, I say leave them to themselves. It's not the University's responsibility to make sure people don't have BackOrifice on their machines, neithr should it be their problem if someone has a null root password. An interfering machine, though, could be a problem. I hate those stupid Invalid ICMP Packet messages. I know how to get rid of it, but they shoudn't be there anyway.
I know RMS has isssues with Linux (or GNU/Linux, take your pick) in general (some of which I have to agree with), and in this article Linus seems to ignore the importance of all the utilities GNU provided, but the kicker is Linus's quote "I think that all the other projects from the GNU group are for Linux insignificant in comparison. GCC is the only one that I really care about. A number of them I hate with a passion; the Emacs editor is horrible, for example." OUCH!
Slashdot Mirror
But QWERTY was adopted BEFORE Dvorak existed, thus QWERTY was already entrenched when Dvorak came around, thus they did not compete fairly, which is the reason that it's not a fable.
The "brain shift" time goes down a lot. I can now type QWERTY as fast as I could before, and I can switch back an forth in however long it takes me to realize that what I'm typing looks like gibberish.
It won't even TRY with my K6-2 300. It says "Oops, check requirements" which list a P166+. Yeah, I can swing that. To the other person, at the bottom of the page is a link to a "Comic Viewer" or something like that.
I doubt Microsoft intended to become a pathetic monopoly, but they did, and it has had bad consequences. Likewise, they might not have designed QWERTY to be inefficient, but it is. One has only to play with an anagram program to see that your fingers have to move more on a QWERTY keyboard than on a Dvorak one. So maybe they didn't intentionally create something that would slow people down, but as I recall, there was a competetion between QWERTY and another keyboard, but the other "keyboard" had pedals, 80 keys (no shift), and was huge. So yes, QWERTY won for its efficiency, but that doesn't mean that it's actually efficient. (and that the letters in typewriter are in the first row is too much to be a coincidenc, and shows that ergonomics and speed were not at the forefront of Mr. Qwerty's (yes, joke) mine).
But that's the same thing that Mp3 does. Well, I guess it does actual compression too, but what you described is its main function.
I understand the convenience of these things. Once they have good contrast, light weight, and good battery life, I would be willing to part with a few (just a few) hundred for one, but how much are the books and how many are there? Since the actual cost of printing a book is trivial compared to the book, I wonder. Then again, there's also shipping and sales, which add to a books costs, whereas an Electronic book could be purchased through automation. Anybody know?
True, but since I had to read the third to get to the fourth, it was worth it!
I think this shows something else about opensource development, that isn't talked about as much: you don't want to be embarrased by bad source. When they opened up the source, thy tried to build on that, till the developers said, "Forget that, we're starting over" (which is the reason it's taken so long and it's so much better). Opensource development does not like cruft, and that's why it's taken so long.
I think the title says it all. This guy writes beautifully. I don't know whether he would want the job, but he certainly seems capable.
He wrote Diamond Age? Wow, I've just read the first 1/2 of this essay (who are we kidding, this is an online book), and it's spectacular. I had planned on reading Diamond Age a few months ago, but passed. I'm definitely going back to it now!
I have to agree. Not only is this the best history of modern computing that I have ever read, I have laughed outloud at least 10 times since I started, and I'm only a third done.
That was my point before. It's great if that's how it works. It's not great if, after all that, there are 5 "standard" Linux SDK's. If it boils down to 1 or 2 (maybe 3) that'd be fine.
But this isn't an engine (I hope not). only lazy programmers take an engine and make it their own unmodified. "The more the merrier" doesn't really apply so much to high-level device interfaces (which is really what this is). Like DirectX or X or SVGALib. I think those sorts of things should not be too abundant.
According to my physics teacher last semester (head of Duke's physics department, so a pretty bright guy), faster than light "travel" is possible. I put that in quotes because you can't move faster than light, but space can stretch and contract faster than light. In the early moments of the big bang, space expanded faster than light, so that particles were farther apart than light could travel up to that point. The good news? You can expand space behind you and contract space in front of you to "travel" faster than the speed of light. The bad news? You have to annihilate entire galaxies worth of matter/antimatter to be able to do this.
I quote from my recently failed attempt to watch the thing in Linux:
[andrew@fizgig download]$ xanim TFN_TrailerC.mov
XAnim Rev 2.70.7.0 by Mark Podlipec (c) 1991-1998
Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18)
Audio Codec: QDesign Music Codec (QDMC) not yet supported.
Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
Wasn't the Sorenson codec used in the official trailer two?
What DVD's have you been looking at?
is that people will let their egos take control and won't combine efforts. It will be fine if all the different SDK's get finished, and one ends up being the true Linux game SDK and it takes all the nice features (and code?) from the other ones. But I don't think it's in our best interest to have to have five different sets of general games libraries. Sure, most of us could hanle it, but one has only to look at the mindnumbing confusion that besets Windows users when they have to figure out the difference between OpenGL, Glide, and Direct3D.
Well, for one, these look better. For another, they're about 1/10th the size.
I just checked out the plugin. What they have so far is really impressive. Try viewing the comics. It's a great demonstration. First it loads the text, then image, then color. This is not something that can replace gifs or jpegs, and it's not meant to. What it may and should (with community support) replace is pdf files. Those of you who have problems with the license, TELL THEM ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS. For once a company that is asking for help from the community is asking for our help in determing the terms of our service. This, in my opinion, is nothing but good news.
I've never read so much during a cartoon. So many of those jokes were written down! But my absolute favorite part of the show was that the French people screamed "Seven" in English in the future!
To be fair, that wasn't what they said. They said there's a total market of 10m (which is an overestimate, considering the low hardware that some things run on). They then suggested that 1% of all users would buy a good game (not too unreasonable), leading them to the 100.000 figure for number sold.
The author (why not a link?) claims that we just need a good development kit. Those things are in the works. At the low-level side is GGI. Have you guys ever used this stuff? It's incredible. A program written for GGI can run on SVGAlib or X or FB console without recompiling all as fast as it would have been if it had just been written for SVGAlib.
There's also ClanLib, which is an LGPL'd SDK, just like DirectX. True, it's not quite ready yet, but we need more people to put effort into these things rather than creating a new "standard". It's unfortunate that Loki has resorted to using SciTech's libraries to make their games, but nothing else is ready. Don't make it happen for their next game!
On another note, I saw a message on linuxgames.com that was saying that there are 10m Linux users, 1% of whom would buy a game, so that's 100,000 copies that a developer could sell if they made a Linux game. That's making a lot of assumptions, though, the most important being that all 10m of those machines have monitors and aren't 386s!
From http://www.rpi.edu/~veliaa/linux-dvd/
;-) please do me a favor and email them at devsupport@creativelabs.com, asking them to help me (or write their own driver, which they are for some peripherals now). I can only do so much with one voice. While I have a number of updates and have some various info on the Ziva now past what is given below, I no longer wish to work blind, and neither do I have the time to reverse engineer every detail. "
"Creative Labs was talking to me but then stopped. If you want me to finish my driver, then instead of asking me "what's going on with DVD?" (I get a lot of these
Are you trying to block things that interfere with your network (a poorly configured, interfering server) or things that are just for their own good? If the latter, I say leave them to themselves. It's not the University's responsibility to make sure people don't have BackOrifice on their machines, neithr should it be their problem if someone has a null root password. An interfering machine, though, could be a problem. I hate those stupid Invalid ICMP Packet messages. I know how to get rid of it, but they shoudn't be there anyway.
I know RMS has isssues with Linux (or GNU/Linux, take your pick) in general (some of which I have to agree with), and in this article Linus seems to ignore the importance of all the utilities GNU provided, but the kicker is Linus's quote "I think that all the other projects from the GNU group are for Linux insignificant in comparison. GCC is the only one that I really care about. A number of them I hate with a passion; the Emacs editor is horrible, for example." OUCH!