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User: mdingler

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  1. Re:This first post brought to you buy on Keyboard Layouts for the 21st Century? · · Score: 1

    That's a common misconception. Yes, the hammers of the typing machines did jam, but the solution QWERTY brings to the table is that for common english sentences, you have to alternate between your hands quite often, thus reducing the probability that neighbouring hammers trike in succession.

    Which, incidentally is quite a good way to speed up typing, too. QWERTY might not be the best layout there is, but the differences are marginal. The only study that really rated Dvorak highly was the one done by its inventor. Duh.

  2. Re:Dreamcast - the next Amiga? on Dreamcast Could Pick Up Inferno And Plan 9 · · Score: 1
    Erm, Plan9 isn't actually based around WORM storage. It's just that some capabilities of the whole system are done by special servers. No need to keep several gigs of mass storage in every workstation, just a central file server. (Or SMP workstations, just us a cpu server, etc.)

    Back in the days of yore, a file server with massive storage capacities and good access times meant WORM. Those days have passed...
    To quote Rob Pike, all-around programming god and one of the heads behind Plan 9

    With 82GB IDE drives going for about $300, WORMs aren't worth it.
    Buy a monster disk drive and configure it as your backup device.
    By the time it fills up, buy another; it'll be 500GB for $200 then.

    The Amiga-comparison is a little bit shaky, as it never was meant for networks, which is the prime concept of Plan9 ("Build a Unix out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little Unixes").

    So how does the dreamcast fit in?

    Well, it probably won't replace your main PC, but it'll make some nice terminals...

  3. Arial vs. Helvetica, the battle continues... on Why Netscape shows ? instead of ' · · Score: 1
    Yeah, that's the authors point of view. BTW, the font tag is deprecated in the current standard, so I'd just use style-sheets, but that's not the point.

    We're talking about stupid web authors who think the whole world is ruled by Microsoft and think that 'Arial' has existed since before time began and isn't just a rip-off of Helvetica to circumvent copyright-laws (like the whole True-Type stuff).

    Netscape 3.0 substituted the current proportional font when it did't find the indicated on, but the 4.0 browsers just use Courier. Not quite nice, if you ask me...

    There's got to be a way to tell Netscape what font to use, but I didn't find anything in the Netscape.ad file. I guess you could tell X to map 'Arial' to 'Helvetica', but I seriously don't know how...

  4. Computers that _don't_ run Windows? Go awaaay... on Why Netscape shows ? instead of ' · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that's the nice thing about having almost an monopoly, you can just forget cross-platform compatibility. Forget the fact that you should write your HTML in plain ASCII and escape special characters, surely the viewer has the same codepage... BTW, does someone know how to translate Arial into 'Helvetica' or at least tell Netscape not to use Courier as default font? Gee, it looks like I'd have to install a proxy or true-type server...