It insults the blind, I can hear some poor politically-correct type say. I hate this kind of P.C., fwiw. Nevertheless, M$'s visual stuff is probably useless for the blind and nearly so. I do sympathize with them. For reasons not important here, I use Lynx only, although my vision is quite good. I constantly send messages to webmasters telling them their sites are broken for Lynx. (Heck even/. is NG for changing your password from the default, using Lynx, or was!) What really frosts my feathers almost to absolute zero is to spend 15 minutes carefully filling out a form, then try to submit the data, only to see "No form action defined!". Sorry to wander so far off topic.
Pann McCuaig (wonderful name) wrote an especially clear procedure for installing the [hamm] release of Debian. Imho, it's a fine example of the way an HOW-TO should be written. Here's where to find it: Pann's Debian install How-To
Several reasons why. For one, curiosity is systematically destroyed so kids won't ask embarrassing questions that teachers can't answer. (I'm referring to that subset of teachers who got the lowest SAT scores in their class, before choosing teaching as a career. After all, every society needs a repository for its least competent. Some teachers are wonderful; let's not forget that.) Second, as a nation, our society has developed to the degree that almost everybody can get by (and have fun) while knowing very little about anything. We no longer oil ar grease squeaking mechanisms; it's un-American! We don't know which way is south at noon on a sunny day. In preceding centuries, lots of practical knowledge was required in order to survive. No longer. Third, there's a strong anti-intellectual streak in our society. Fourth, there's apparently a strong prejudice against taking things apart to find out how they work (although, much of what counts in a computer doesn't yield to that approach. I'm really talking about a mindset.) (See first item.) Fifth, science and technology are rarely taught to the general public, with the result that the average American is as stupid as a rock about how things work. (See second item.) However, none of these factors is closely involved with computer interface design, other than the inability to do creative and clear thinking, as Jef Raskin could do. The problem is not stupid users, though. The problem is poor interface design, for the most part, as I see it. {I've written better, but not in the not-so-wee hours!}
It was a long time ago (in computer time) when Jef (not "Jeff") Raskin developed the Swyftcard for the Apple ][, and used the same design ideas for an obscure computer, the Canon Cat. The Cat was exceptionally robust, and extremely easy to use. It was horribly mis-marketed, and disappeared.
I think you're worried a bit much. Do you panic when you get scanned at a supermarket checkout counter? I can say from experience that you shouldn't place an eye where two scan stripes intersect. Minor retinal burns healed in a few weeks. However: 1) Laser light is light, and by no means as harmful as ionizing roadiation; its danger is (ordinarily) that lasers are extremely bright. Apparently even a modest laser pointer has a brightness about equal to the sun. 2) Low-cost solid lasers have a peak wavelength that is already fairly well down on the eye's spectral sensitivity curve; they are, in a manner of speaking, so extremely red that they don't seem as bright as they actually are. CD player lasers are an extreme example; their subjective brightnesss is downright dim, because they are just barely within the visible spectrum, so to speak.
It's really encouraging to hear of major developments for the handicapped, such as these. Just kidding: I assume it was a human reagent, not a chemical reagent. You must have meant "regent".
...and it might sell. There must be a few executives who finally have to use keyboards for the first times in their lives. Let them learn on a Dvorak letter layout. Add prestige-- Think creative marketing!
Kernel modules are a new idea to me, and I was glad to read what he said.// I used to be an editor some time ago (Electronic Design). The content and style are great; I do agree that calling other ways "stupid" and such is a bit strong, but it *is* concise, and he doesn't seem to be personal when he says it, just to the point. HOWever... If this is the actual text that appears in the book, shame on them! It's not the best copy editing. Linus does fine with English (try some Finnish, if you doubt me), but a courteous square-bracketed word or two would help in a few spots. Also: There are some typos and/or detailed editing errors that shouldn't get into an O'Reilly book. I expect better of them. (If this is still a draft, fine). (Fwiw, this msg. is no great piece of writing/editing, either.)
How about a *musical* keyboard that rolls up? Would be nice if it had a good feel, and was touch-responsive. I thought about that, back around 1965 or so, back in the days of analog synths.
I see lots of comment about, and provision for, installing into systems with only limited RAM (such as 4 MB), but surprisingly little about installing onto HDs that have limited space. The small distribs., true, do take up minimal space, but when you want to roll your own, more or less, it seems that the big emphasis is on accommodating minimal RAM, forgetting about minimal HD space. Or, am I confusen?
Maybe it's a good thing that you choose to remain anonymous. I think it's sad that you should choose to reveal so much about yourself that seems to be hateful and disrespectful, and probably misogynistic. Do we call this an ad feminem attack? I welcome more women in technical fields; I have enough self-confidence to do so. Perhaps those who don't welcome women lack self-confidence. I do hope Rebecca isn't put off by such ill manners. I value civilization; I'm not sure everybody does.
I'm not well-informed about either. However, if one believes that *only* the rational is valid, one's outlook is very limited, indeed. Quantum mechanics, for one, is certainly far from rational in a traditional sense, as i see it, but it is consistent and valid. Don't be in a hurry to put down that which you dislike or distrust. Be open-minded. See also ESR's writings about theophany if you want something to think about! Imho, he has it better than 99% of the clerics, who lost it, many generations back, in general. There are important matters in life that are beyond the ordinary rational.
Partly for the heck of it, and partly to try to learn how, so I might be better prepared to get Linux going on legacy machines, I decided to try to get a minimal Debian running on my legacy Vectra (386/16N, 8/52 MB). With only 52 MB of HD space to play with, and wanting to keep a minimal DOS partition going, I allocated 36 MB + 4 MB swap to Linux. // I have a shell account, which meant I could do away with almost everything related to networking and PPP; planned to use minicom. Anyhow, cleaned house in the DOS partition, backed up, defragged, and used (iirc) FIPS to keep DOS and create new partitions. FIPS has great docs, as I recall. Used DOS telecomm to d/l Debian Base images, and their root.bin and drivers disk images, and maybe their boot disk image as well. Lesson #1: Even though the sizes of the disk images seem to fit onto a floppy, *Don't* use DOS xcopy to transfer from HD to floppy! You *must* use a RaWrite! (RaWrite 3.0 didn't work on mine; there are several.) I think I kept the big Base file on HD, btw. Followed the Debian installation instructions, and used dselect to remove and add things I wanted. dselect is a pain; also really slow on a 16MHz 386. Try to use apt (?), a new Debian installer. Nevertheless, dselect had one redeeming feature (no, not a bug): It keeps track of all dependencies: What you else you must get but don't have. Well, give it another pat on its huge back: It can actually find the packages you're looking for, even though you had to squeeze the devil out of the original filenames for the packages. Seems that keeping ".deb" will do it, and anything reasonable is OK if it fits the MS-DOS 8.3 format. (I tried to keep key letters as well as all digits if possible; also, of course, delete all dots except that before.deb). Had an exhaustive look at the files (recommended!), and found what I had. I'd recommend installing Midnight Commander immediately, at this stage. Found tons of all-but-useless files in the localization area, some even in triplicate, more or less! Think I also reluctantly ditched all the man pages, saving those in.gz form. (Later, found that to read them with any degree of convenience (from mc), I had to load the whole groff package; rm'd almost all of the groff fonts and tmac (for my purposes!).) Others to remove are many keytables, variants of joe. You need to keep/devascii/ in Fonts to let mc show you [man.gz] pages. No point in trying to remove/proc/kcore; for one, you can't do it (easily, if at all); and two, it isn't taking up any HD (or RAM?) space. It's something clever to learn about. You must keep base-files, findutils, mawk, and diff, apparently. To get color ls, I snooped around and found the necessary stuff in root's.bashrc, iirc; copying it to the user's.bashrc seemed to work, but there are probably better ways! I was booting from floppy, and wanted to try to rearrange matters for a dual boot. Debian apparently omitted the support code/files for vga=ask, which I found to be a Big Drag, because I really like 50-line VGA; I can see more at once. 25-line displays are great for 6 people at once, but I'm a loner. Had an exhaustive look at the console fonts, and got rid of those that I didn't want. Found that resizecons didn't work, because the necessary videomode files were missing, but setfont could give me more lines; mc still gave me a full screen's window, as did joe. Needed to do a ^L to clean house fairly often, but that was worth the extra lines. Also (eventually) had good luck with gpm (mouse) and zgv, the image viewer. Didn't get minicom going yet...// Also use a Dvorak layout, normally in DOS via the MS GA0650.EXE package, an excellent piece of work; bug-free if the apps. programmers do things normally. Linux supported Dvorak very nicely. Created a set of aliases to mount and unmount my DOS partition and floppies, also "mkext2fs" on a floppy. Well, I got overzealous in my pruning, thinking that/libs/modules/2.0.34/ (iirc) had stuff I could delete, based on its names. Yikes! Good way to *fatally cripple* Linux! At about this time, I also installed a used '387... Anyhow, my Linux partitions are now almost useless. (I allowed a measly 4 MB for swap, figuring that was better than none.) Tomsrtbt, the Debian rescue disk, the Debian boot disk, and attempts to reinstall Debian all seem to find the existing Linux, and get stuck toward the end of the boot sequence at "INIT: version 2.xx booting". Hangs forever. I might need to redo from scratch, although pruning and reconfig. would take a while. Now that I've unwittingly sabotaged my Linux partition(s), it's really nice to know there's lread, a DOS/Win pgm. (Linuxberg): Speaks ext2fs. It lists ext2 dirs; can also read files from them into DOS (but watch long filenames!), and even write from DOS to ext2 files. Unfortunately, I probably don't have the specific files in DOS file format to fix my Linux.
I wish people would get equally riled up about kids with guns killing others who were born some time ago. Is sanctity of human life restricted to the time before birth? (I don't think so, nor do I think most anti-abortionists think so, either.)
Slashdot Mirror
Logitech has a version of the Marble that is usable with either hand. It has a bigger marble, and a bridge over the top. iirc.
It insults the blind, I can hear some poor politically-correct type say. /. is NG for changing your password from the default, using Lynx, or was!)
I hate this kind of P.C., fwiw. Nevertheless, M$'s visual stuff is probably useless for the blind and nearly so. I do sympathize with them. For reasons not important here, I use Lynx only, although my vision is quite good. I constantly send messages to webmasters telling them their sites are broken for Lynx. (Heck even
What really frosts my feathers almost to absolute zero is to spend 15 minutes carefully filling out a form, then try to submit the data, only to see "No form action defined!".
Sorry to wander so far off topic.
Doesn't the iMac mouse have two colors, one per hemisphere? :)
At least, that way, you get one count per half-revolution
I'm amazed at how few no-ball (computer) mice I find in our local computer stores, but, then, I don't exactly live in them.
Seems to me that if they're to be taken seriously, the new Amigas should have at least this level of graphics performance.
Pann McCuaig (wonderful name) wrote an especially clear procedure for installing the [hamm] release of Debian. Imho, it's a fine example of the way an HOW-TO should be written. Here's where to find it: Pann's Debian install How-To
Several reasons why. For one, curiosity is systematically destroyed so kids won't ask embarrassing questions that teachers can't answer. (I'm referring to that subset of teachers who got the lowest SAT scores in their class, before choosing teaching as a career. After all, every society needs a repository for its least competent. Some teachers are wonderful; let's not forget that.)
Second, as a nation, our society has developed to the degree that almost everybody can get by (and have fun) while knowing very little about anything. We no longer oil ar grease squeaking mechanisms; it's un-American! We don't know which way is south at noon on a sunny day. In preceding centuries, lots of practical knowledge was required in order to survive. No longer.
Third, there's a strong anti-intellectual streak in our society.
Fourth, there's apparently a strong prejudice against taking things apart to find out how they work (although, much of what counts in a computer doesn't yield to that approach. I'm really talking about a mindset.) (See first item.)
Fifth, science and technology are rarely taught to the general public, with the result that the average American is as stupid as a rock about how things work. (See second item.)
However, none of these factors is closely involved with computer interface design, other than the inability to do creative and clear thinking, as Jef Raskin could do.
The problem is not stupid users, though. The problem is poor interface design, for the most part, as I see it.
{I've written better, but not in the not-so-wee hours!}
It was a long time ago (in computer time) when Jef (not "Jeff") Raskin developed the Swyftcard for the Apple ][, and used the same design ideas for an obscure computer, the Canon Cat.
The Cat was exceptionally robust, and extremely easy to use. It was horribly mis-marketed, and disappeared.
I think you're worried a bit much. Do you panic
when you get scanned at a supermarket checkout counter? I can say from experience that you shouldn't place an eye where two scan stripes intersect. Minor retinal burns healed in a few weeks.
However: 1) Laser light is light, and by no means as harmful as ionizing roadiation; its danger is (ordinarily) that lasers are extremely bright. Apparently even a modest laser pointer has a brightness about equal to the sun.
2) Low-cost solid lasers have a peak wavelength that is already fairly well down on the eye's spectral sensitivity curve; they are, in a manner of speaking, so extremely red that they don't seem as bright as they actually are. CD player lasers are an extreme example; their subjective brightnesss is downright dim, because they are just barely within the visible spectrum, so to speak.
It's really encouraging to hear of major developments for the handicapped, such as these.
Just kidding: I assume it was a human reagent, not a chemical reagent.
You must have meant "regent".
...and it might sell. There must be a few executives who finally have to use keyboards for the first times in their lives. Let them learn on a Dvorak letter layout. Add prestige-- Think creative marketing!
In Sholes' improved layout, where is the Z?
Saw somewhere a long while ago that the keyboard developer and the composer are distant cousins. Dunno about John C.
Kernel modules are a new idea to me, and I was glad to read what he said. // I used to be an editor some time ago (Electronic Design). /editing, either.)
The content and style are great; I do agree that
calling other ways "stupid" and such is a bit strong, but it *is* concise, and he doesn't seem to be personal when he says it, just to the point.
HOWever... If this is the actual text that appears in the book, shame on them! It's not the best copy editing. Linus does fine with English (try some Finnish, if you doubt me), but a courteous square-bracketed word or two would help in a few spots.
Also: There are some typos and/or detailed editing errors that shouldn't get into an O'Reilly book. I expect better of them. (If this is still a draft, fine).
(Fwiw, this msg. is no great piece of writing
How about a *musical* keyboard that rolls up?
Would be nice if it had a good feel, and was
touch-responsive. I thought about that, back around
1965 or so, back in the days of analog synths.
How about a *musical* keyboard that rolls up?
Would be nice if it had a good feel, and was
touch-responsive.
I see lots of comment about, and provision for, installing into systems with only limited RAM (such as 4 MB), but surprisingly little about installing onto HDs that have limited space. The small distribs., true, do take up minimal space, but when you want to roll your own, more or less, it seems that the big emphasis is on accommodating minimal RAM, forgetting about minimal HD space. Or, am I confusen?
Maybe it's a good thing that you choose to remain anonymous.
I think it's sad that you should choose to reveal so much about yourself that seems to be hateful and disrespectful, and probably misogynistic.
Do we call this an ad feminem attack?
I welcome more women in technical fields; I have enough self-confidence to do so. Perhaps those who don't welcome women lack self-confidence.
I do hope Rebecca isn't put off by such ill manners. I value civilization; I'm not sure everybody does.
I'm not well-informed about either. However, if one
believes that *only* the rational is valid, one's
outlook is very limited, indeed. Quantum mechanics, for one, is
certainly far from rational in a traditional sense, as i see it, but it is consistent and valid. Don't be in a hurry to put down that which you dislike or distrust. Be open-minded.
See also ESR's writings about theophany if you want something to think about! Imho, he has it better than 99% of the clerics, who lost it, many generations back, in general.
There are important matters in life that are beyond the ordinary rational.
Partly for the heck of it, and partly to try to learn how, so I might be better prepared to get Linux going on legacy machines, I decided to try to get a minimal Debian running on my legacy Vectra (386/16N, 8/52 MB). With only 52 MB of HD space to play with, and wanting to keep a minimal DOS partition going, I allocated 36 MB + 4 MB swap to Linux. .deb). .gz form. (Later, found that to read them with any degree of convenience (from mc), I had to load the whole groff package; rm'd almost all of the groff fonts and tmac (for my purposes!).) Others to remove are many keytables, variants of joe. You need to keep /devascii/ in Fonts to let mc show you [man.gz] pages. No point in trying to remove /proc/kcore; for one, you can't do it (easily, if at all); and two, it isn't taking up any HD (or RAM?) space. It's something clever to learn about. You must keep base-files, findutils, mawk, and diff, apparently. .bashrc, iirc; copying it to the user's .bashrc seemed to work, but there are probably better ways! I was booting from floppy, and wanted to try to rearrange matters for a dual boot. // Also use a Dvorak layout, normally in DOS via the MS GA0650.EXE package, an excellent piece of work; bug-free if the apps. programmers do things normally. Linux supported Dvorak very nicely. Created a set of aliases to mount and unmount my DOS partition and floppies, also "mkext2fs" on a floppy. /libs/modules/2.0.34/ (iirc) had stuff I could delete, based on its names. Yikes! Good way to *fatally cripple* Linux! At about this time, I also installed a used '387... Anyhow, my Linux partitions are now almost useless. (I allowed a measly 4 MB for swap, figuring that was better than none.) Tomsrtbt, the Debian rescue disk, the Debian boot disk, and attempts to reinstall Debian all seem to find the existing Linux, and get stuck toward the end of the boot sequence at "INIT: version 2.xx booting". Hangs forever. I might need to redo from scratch, although pruning and reconfig. would take a while. Now that I've unwittingly sabotaged my Linux partition(s), it's really nice to know there's lread, a DOS/Win pgm. (Linuxberg): Speaks ext2fs. It lists ext2 dirs; can also read files from them into DOS (but watch long filenames!), and even write from DOS to ext2 files. Unfortunately, I probably don't have the specific files in DOS file format to fix my Linux.
// I have a shell account, which meant I could do away with almost everything related to networking and PPP; planned to use minicom. Anyhow, cleaned house in the DOS partition, backed up, defragged, and used (iirc) FIPS to keep DOS and create new partitions. FIPS has great docs, as I recall. Used DOS telecomm to d/l Debian Base images, and their root.bin and drivers disk images, and maybe their boot disk image as well. Lesson #1: Even though the sizes of the disk images seem to fit onto a floppy, *Don't* use DOS xcopy to transfer from HD to floppy! You *must* use a RaWrite! (RaWrite 3.0 didn't work on mine; there are several.) I think I kept the big Base file on HD, btw.
Followed the Debian installation instructions, and used dselect to remove and add things I wanted. dselect is a pain; also really slow on a 16MHz 386. Try to use apt (?), a new Debian installer. Nevertheless, dselect had one redeeming feature (no, not a bug): It keeps track of all dependencies: What you else you must get but don't have. Well, give it another pat on its huge back: It can actually find the packages you're looking for, even though you had to squeeze the devil out of the original filenames for the packages. Seems that keeping ".deb" will do it, and anything reasonable is OK if it fits the MS-DOS 8.3 format. (I tried to keep key letters as well as all digits if possible; also, of course, delete all dots except that before
Had an exhaustive look at the files (recommended!), and found what I had. I'd recommend installing Midnight Commander immediately, at this stage. Found tons of all-but-useless files in the localization area, some even in triplicate, more or less! Think I also reluctantly ditched all the man pages, saving those in
To get color ls, I snooped around and found the necessary stuff in root's
Debian apparently omitted the support code/files for vga=ask, which I found to be a Big Drag, because I really like 50-line VGA; I can see more at once. 25-line displays are great for 6 people at once, but I'm a loner. Had an exhaustive look at the console fonts, and got rid of those that I didn't want. Found that resizecons didn't work, because the necessary videomode files were missing, but setfont could give me more lines; mc still gave me a full screen's window, as did joe. Needed to do a ^L to clean house fairly often, but that was worth the extra lines.
Also (eventually) had good luck with gpm (mouse) and zgv, the image viewer. Didn't get minicom going yet...
Well, I got overzealous in my pruning, thinking that
That site was a sight.
I wish people would get equally riled up about kids with guns
killing others who were born some time ago. Is
sanctity of human life restricted to the time
before birth? (I don't think so, nor do I think
most anti-abortionists think so, either.)
Anyone who studies Russian knows that it's
"Toys Ya Us"!