Indeed. When I left one company a while back that was an AIX shop, I made sure I took with me five keyboards just so I would make sure I had a lifetime supply.:)
Heck, just shell out the few extra bucks and get a natural kb.
Maybe if/when IBM makes a split keyboard I'll consider it, but I can't use anything less than an IBM keyboard with those oh-so-wonderful keys. I think I get at least another 20% speed just because of the key feel.
Say what you want about IBM, but they are the keyboard king. Everything else is cheap crap in comparison. Unfortunately, I don't think they make the really indestructable, old-school I-can-kill-you-with-this-steel-case-keyboard anymore. On the other hand, the plastic ones are virtually indestructable, but it would be harder to kill someone.:) [would probably take several blows]
And, as a bonus, this is who to learn to type fast as well. Three rules:
1. Don't look at your fingers.
2. Look at the screen, not your fingers.
3. DAMMIT DON'T LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS, LOOK AT THE SCREEN!!
Put a box over your hands if you have to, but DON'T LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS. In two weeks, you will be typing twice as fast as you do now.
Hell, here's another typing tip. I'm convinced this is how to eliminate wrist problems. The typing books always show the wrists turned, and then the hands being perpendicular to the keys. Don't do this. Instead, hold your hands the way you would on a "natural" keyboard where it's split. In other words, keep your wrists totally straight with your hands at about a 30 degree angle to the keys. You can type just as fast, and I'll bet you'll have far fewer carpel tunnel problems. At least, I've never had them and I've been typing really fast for 20 years (on regular keyboards). Your mileage may vary, but it seems like it makes sense.
--
Re:Not to be nitpicking or anything...
on
E=MC
·
· Score: 1
Oops... right. One should never post on Slashdot when one is not feeling well.:)
--
Costantly use a conversion table?
on
E=MC
·
· Score: 2
Ahem, a pound = 2.2 Kg. Why would you have to constantly refer back to the conversion table after the first time? It's a little more than doubled. You can't double a number in your head?
Now, if it was Fahrenheit to Celsius conversions, I could understand... that's a little trickier.
But still, why do you even need to know the exact measurement? The book is not a reference book. All you need to know is that "5000 pounds" is a lot of weight. Why would it matter exactly how much it is?
The problem was caused the way the deregulation was structured by the politicians.
I agree. I should have phrased it a bit differently: "the problem isn't with deregulation, the problem was that it wasn't deregulated enough." But you'll note that there are a whole lot of fruits falling from the trees screaming that this proves that deregulation doesn't work, and the only solution is more government control.
There is one reason, and one reason alone for the power shortages: lack of power. We knew that we needed to build more power plants years ago, but the government totally screwed it up.
And now they blame deregulation! It's just incredible gall, when the problem began way before deregulation.
And no, conservation is not the answer. Not in the past, not now, and never will be. The pie is not limited, and doesn't have to be. More technology is the answer to the problems of technology. We are not going to return to the caves, so I hope people will just deal with the fact that most people like civilization.
Of course the United States is not going to be as aggressive as European countries on this issue, because the US is the home of freedom. Freedom of speech cuts in a lot of directions, from the right to send you advertisements in your mailbox (which is why spam will never go away) to the right of someone to repeat information that is known about someone else.
You can't have freedom's upside without freedom's downside. For every instance that socialistic countries crack down on something you like (privacy regulation), there are a hundred ways they crack down on something you won't like (France's anti-nazi nonsense).
--
Re:I don't understand this pacifist bleating
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 2
What if George W. Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Ronald Reagan?
I don't know about GWB, but if Reagan had been President, they wouldn't have tried it in the first place, because he was perceived by the Soviets as a strong leader. We had the problem precisely because Kennedy was a weak leader.
Fortunately, he managed to stumble his way through it, but it was a clear case of getting lucky.
Even more interesting is this version in the Seattle Times. It looks like someone decided to change "5:45" to "6:45" and "6pm" to "7pm". Given that change, it makes me wonder how much else of the letter was changed (as Barnicle claims).
You beat me to it. Absolutely, positively, DO NOT use MySQL for financial transactions. MySQL is fine for a lot of tasks, but not ones where data integrity is critical. Not only the lack of transactions, but also the lack of foreign keys/referential integrity.
And please, to all of you who are about to post "hey, I process 2 million financial transactions a day at a major bank using MySQL, and it works fine", please spare us. The issue is not how good is it when everything is working well, the issue is how good is it when you get a massive hardware failure.
To all of you who are giving knee-jerk "why should genes be patented?" reaction, remember why patents exist in the first place. It's to foster innovation, not to retard it. The point is to allow people to spend a lot of money developing something, without the danger of having it immediately stolen.
Think about it. Why would a drug company spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, identifying a gene for a disease, developing a cure, and then the day after they ship the drug, it's immediately mass produced by every other drug company? Hey, that'd be a great business -- simply wait for drug companies to develop cures, and then mass produce their labor.
You have to give companies the ability to recoup their expenses in developing these things, or they are simply not going to spend the money to develop them.
considering one of the primary goals of freenet is anonimity (sp?) id ont think that the www and encryption cover that.
What I meant is that the usual reason for anonymity is political persecution. Strong encryption pretty much solves that problem, a lot easier than Freenet. All you need is a "freedom web site" where you accept submissions from anyone and post them. Boom! You're done. The only thing Freenet gives you over this solution is that if the US (for example) suddenly became a fascist state and seized the Freedom Web Site, then it's gone. Freenet, being distributed, wouldn't suffer this problem.
But again, you have to be sufficiently paranoid to believe the US is going to go that direction, and there just isn't going to be enough people that believe that to make Freenet viable.
What will ultimately kill Freenet is not ease of use, lack of searching, or technical problems, although these problems are certainly significant and potential killers. What will ultimately doom it is lack of interest.
For Freenet to be really successful, it must have a critical mass of servers to store and distribute the load. But this requires popularity, and Freenet is just not going to be that interesting to the average person.
For a software system (whatever it is) to become very popular, it must fill an untapped need. Consider Napster -- Napster became popular not because it had a good interface (it doesn't), or that it's great software engineering (it isn't), but because it fulfilled a burning need: A source for MP3 files.
What need does Freenet fulfill? Primary a perceived need on the part of the engineers for privacy and anonymity. Now, this is probably a significant need for places like China, but this is exactly the place where Freenet is not going to get a lot of servers. In places like the US, the vast majority of people do not perceive a need for Freenet.
In other words, the intensity of the need is inversely proportional to the ability to provide server space and bandwidth.
I understand Freenet's purpose, but I personally have zero interest in contributing. And I think Freenet is going to find that there are lot less paranoids out there than they think. The fact is, strong encryption and the WWW filfills 99.9% of Freenet's goals.
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature.
Well, the "invention" of fire was a refinement of something that existed in nature, but I think most agree it was pretty significant.
Besides, "inspired by" is far away from "existed". The cockleburrs were not used for a velcro purpose before velcro.
Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Not the same. Velcro can do what a zipper does, but the opposite is not true. Velcro is a lot more general purpose than a zipper.
The greatest, single most important invention in all the history of mankind was the invention of railroads, some 150 years ago.
I have to disagree with you on that. While the railroads are unquestionably a watershed event in human history, I have to say that the invention of the printing press has to take the award for "most important".
Nothing really significant was invented after 1950...
Velcro.:) Think about it -- what was velcro a refinement of? There were absolutely no temporary fasteners like it, short of tying two strings together.
This is just silly. I don't think anyone would argue that the pace of innovation has increased the last 50 years. But how do you compare relative importance? Answer: you can't, and this is why.
Which is more important: the invention of fire or iron tools? Clearly the answer is fire, not only because it is clearly more important, but that you can't have iron tools without fire. This is a simple example, but take any innovation today and you can trace back to an innovation before it. This means (by definition) the innovation before it is more important because you need it to bootstrap the later innovation.
Therefore, by definition, all earlier innovations are more important than later innovations, and thus comparing eras is meaningless.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't compare individual innovations, just not eras.
There's a simple solution that Linux advocates use to give themselves perfect security: They just chant "security through obscurity is bad" over and over, and then they are magically secure!
I'm always astounded when the anti-school choice crowd calls giving parents more freedom through more education options "jamming it down everyone's throats".
If you want to send you kids to public schools, then fine. But it's mighty arrogant of you to make that decision for poor and middle class parents everywhere, particularly ones in inner cities where the schools are atrocious.
and i swear i can type a lot more accurately with it with close to 140+ wpm when my mind can keep up...
What bullshit. There are lies, damn lies, and then there are claims of typing speed.
The world record for typing speed is 150 WPM, sustained. Interestingly, she prefers the Dvorak keyboard and can sustain 170 WPM. Doesn't suprise me; I'm sure a more efficient layout pays dividends at the very high end where finger efficiency is really going to pay a price.
Anyway, just wanted to call bullshit when I see it.
Slashdot Mirror
It comes with RS6K systems
Indeed. When I left one company a while back that was an AIX shop, I made sure I took with me five keyboards just so I would make sure I had a lifetime supply. :)
--
Heck, just shell out the few extra bucks and get a natural kb.
Maybe if/when IBM makes a split keyboard I'll consider it, but I can't use anything less than an IBM keyboard with those oh-so-wonderful keys. I think I get at least another 20% speed just because of the key feel.
Say what you want about IBM, but they are the keyboard king. Everything else is cheap crap in comparison. Unfortunately, I don't think they make the really indestructable, old-school I-can-kill-you-with-this-steel-case-keyboard anymore. On the other hand, the plastic ones are virtually indestructable, but it would be harder to kill someone. :) [would probably take several blows]
--
And, as a bonus, this is who to learn to type fast as well. Three rules:
1. Don't look at your fingers.
2. Look at the screen, not your fingers.
3. DAMMIT DON'T LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS, LOOK AT THE SCREEN!!
Put a box over your hands if you have to, but DON'T LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS. In two weeks, you will be typing twice as fast as you do now.
Hell, here's another typing tip. I'm convinced this is how to eliminate wrist problems. The typing books always show the wrists turned, and then the hands being perpendicular to the keys. Don't do this. Instead, hold your hands the way you would on a "natural" keyboard where it's split. In other words, keep your wrists totally straight with your hands at about a 30 degree angle to the keys. You can type just as fast, and I'll bet you'll have far fewer carpel tunnel problems. At least, I've never had them and I've been typing really fast for 20 years (on regular keyboards). Your mileage may vary, but it seems like it makes sense.
--
Oops... right. One should never post on Slashdot when one is not feeling well. :)
--
Ahem, a pound = 2.2 Kg. Why would you have to constantly refer back to the conversion table after the first time? It's a little more than doubled. You can't double a number in your head?
Now, if it was Fahrenheit to Celsius conversions, I could understand... that's a little trickier.
But still, why do you even need to know the exact measurement? The book is not a reference book. All you need to know is that "5000 pounds" is a lot of weight. Why would it matter exactly how much it is?
--
The problem was caused the way the deregulation was structured by the politicians.
I agree. I should have phrased it a bit differently: "the problem isn't with deregulation, the problem was that it wasn't deregulated enough." But you'll note that there are a whole lot of fruits falling from the trees screaming that this proves that deregulation doesn't work, and the only solution is more government control.
--
There is one reason, and one reason alone for the power shortages: lack of power. We knew that we needed to build more power plants years ago, but the government totally screwed it up.
And now they blame deregulation! It's just incredible gall, when the problem began way before deregulation.
And no, conservation is not the answer. Not in the past, not now, and never will be. The pie is not limited, and doesn't have to be. More technology is the answer to the problems of technology. We are not going to return to the caves, so I hope people will just deal with the fact that most people like civilization.
--
Versus Clinton, who used the FBI to gather dirt on his enemies? Come on.
--
Of course the United States is not going to be as aggressive as European countries on this issue, because the US is the home of freedom. Freedom of speech cuts in a lot of directions, from the right to send you advertisements in your mailbox (which is why spam will never go away) to the right of someone to repeat information that is known about someone else.
You can't have freedom's upside without freedom's downside. For every instance that socialistic countries crack down on something you like (privacy regulation), there are a hundred ways they crack down on something you won't like (France's anti-nazi nonsense).
--
What if George W. Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Ronald Reagan?
I don't know about GWB, but if Reagan had been President, they wouldn't have tried it in the first place, because he was perceived by the Soviets as a strong leader. We had the problem precisely because Kennedy was a weak leader.
Fortunately, he managed to stumble his way through it, but it was a clear case of getting lucky.
--
Even more interesting is this version in the Seattle Times. It looks like someone decided to change "5:45" to "6:45" and "6pm" to "7pm". Given that change, it makes me wonder how much else of the letter was changed (as Barnicle claims).
--
But it wasn't Slashdot, that was a quote from the submitter. That's why it's in italics.
I realize that. My point is that most Linux people (like the submitter) are no better than "an army of thoughtless marketing droids."
--
The last thing we need is an army of thoughtless marketing droids.
You mean things like this? "The best Linux distro out there has just released a new version"
I'm always glad I can come to Slashdot for "valid, insightful opinions about features and technolology, rather than roboticly mouthing a party line."
--
You beat me to it. Absolutely, positively, DO NOT use MySQL for financial transactions. MySQL is fine for a lot of tasks, but not ones where data integrity is critical. Not only the lack of transactions, but also the lack of foreign keys/referential integrity.
And please, to all of you who are about to post "hey, I process 2 million financial transactions a day at a major bank using MySQL, and it works fine", please spare us. The issue is not how good is it when everything is working well, the issue is how good is it when you get a massive hardware failure.
--
To all of you who are giving knee-jerk "why should genes be patented?" reaction, remember why patents exist in the first place. It's to foster innovation, not to retard it. The point is to allow people to spend a lot of money developing something, without the danger of having it immediately stolen.
Think about it. Why would a drug company spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, identifying a gene for a disease, developing a cure, and then the day after they ship the drug, it's immediately mass produced by every other drug company? Hey, that'd be a great business -- simply wait for drug companies to develop cures, and then mass produce their labor.
You have to give companies the ability to recoup their expenses in developing these things, or they are simply not going to spend the money to develop them.
--
considering one of the primary goals of freenet is anonimity (sp?) id ont think that the www and encryption cover that.
What I meant is that the usual reason for anonymity is political persecution. Strong encryption pretty much solves that problem, a lot easier than Freenet. All you need is a "freedom web site" where you accept submissions from anyone and post them. Boom! You're done. The only thing Freenet gives you over this solution is that if the US (for example) suddenly became a fascist state and seized the Freedom Web Site, then it's gone. Freenet, being distributed, wouldn't suffer this problem.
But again, you have to be sufficiently paranoid to believe the US is going to go that direction, and there just isn't going to be enough people that believe that to make Freenet viable.
--
What will ultimately kill Freenet is not ease of use, lack of searching, or technical problems, although these problems are certainly significant and potential killers. What will ultimately doom it is lack of interest.
For Freenet to be really successful, it must have a critical mass of servers to store and distribute the load. But this requires popularity, and Freenet is just not going to be that interesting to the average person.
For a software system (whatever it is) to become very popular, it must fill an untapped need. Consider Napster -- Napster became popular not because it had a good interface (it doesn't), or that it's great software engineering (it isn't), but because it fulfilled a burning need: A source for MP3 files.
What need does Freenet fulfill? Primary a perceived need on the part of the engineers for privacy and anonymity. Now, this is probably a significant need for places like China, but this is exactly the place where Freenet is not going to get a lot of servers. In places like the US, the vast majority of people do not perceive a need for Freenet.
In other words, the intensity of the need is inversely proportional to the ability to provide server space and bandwidth.
I understand Freenet's purpose, but I personally have zero interest in contributing. And I think Freenet is going to find that there are lot less paranoids out there than they think. The fact is, strong encryption and the WWW filfills 99.9% of Freenet's goals.
--
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature.
Well, the "invention" of fire was a refinement of something that existed in nature, but I think most agree it was pretty significant.
Besides, "inspired by" is far away from "existed". The cockleburrs were not used for a velcro purpose before velcro.
Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Not the same. Velcro can do what a zipper does, but the opposite is not true. Velcro is a lot more general purpose than a zipper.
--
The greatest, single most important invention in all the history of mankind was the invention of railroads, some 150 years ago.
I have to disagree with you on that. While the railroads are unquestionably a watershed event in human history, I have to say that the invention of the printing press has to take the award for "most important".
Nothing really significant was invented after 1950...
Velcro. :) Think about it -- what was velcro a refinement of? There were absolutely no temporary fasteners like it, short of tying two strings together.
--
This is just silly. I don't think anyone would argue that the pace of innovation has increased the last 50 years. But how do you compare relative importance? Answer: you can't, and this is why.
Which is more important: the invention of fire or iron tools? Clearly the answer is fire, not only because it is clearly more important, but that you can't have iron tools without fire. This is a simple example, but take any innovation today and you can trace back to an innovation before it. This means (by definition) the innovation before it is more important because you need it to bootstrap the later innovation.
Therefore, by definition, all earlier innovations are more important than later innovations, and thus comparing eras is meaningless.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't compare individual innovations, just not eras.
--
There's a simple solution that Linux advocates use to give themselves perfect security: They just chant "security through obscurity is bad" over and over, and then they are magically secure!
--
I'm always astounded when the anti-school choice crowd calls giving parents more freedom through more education options "jamming it down everyone's throats".
If you want to send you kids to public schools, then fine. But it's mighty arrogant of you to make that decision for poor and middle class parents everywhere, particularly ones in inner cities where the schools are atrocious.
--
and i swear i can type a lot more accurately with it with close to 140+ wpm when my mind can keep up...
What bullshit. There are lies, damn lies, and then there are claims of typing speed.
The world record for typing speed is 150 WPM, sustained. Interestingly, she prefers the Dvorak keyboard and can sustain 170 WPM. Doesn't suprise me; I'm sure a more efficient layout pays dividends at the very high end where finger efficiency is really going to pay a price.
Anyway, just wanted to call bullshit when I see it.
--
The Dvorak keyboard study was a hoax. There are no advantages to the Dvorak keyboard.
--
The QWERTY keyboard was not designed for inefficiency, and the Dvorak keyboard is not clearly superior.
The myth of the Dvorak keyboard will probably outlive us all, but ya gotta keep trying.
--