I disagree. What storage medium do you have that is free of the ravages of entropy? The best archival storage medium I've heard of is CDR, and it is very good... But even those folks claim it lasts about as long as archival film (B&W or Kodachrome).
I'm not sure where you are going with this. Both would be very difficult. Fiber based B&W prints should keep about as long as a CDR. The negatives should keep about the same amount of time. All of them would need to kept in cool, dry, dark place. After several millennia though, it's hard to imagine what state any of them will be in.
The problem with StarCraft (and WarCraft) is that people play it on the FASTEST setting. They give assorted reasons for doing so, but ultimately it changes the game from developing Strategy as you play, to "decide what strategy to use when you start the game".
It also makes certain powerful and useful units nearly useless. For example, how often do you see a squad of Ghosts turn somebody's mighty armada of Carriers into Wraith fodder? You just can't micromanage the Ghosts successfully when the speed is cranked all the way up.
Fast *Craft games have their place. Kind of like chess: speed chess helps your game, but the highest rated chess games are played slowly and carefully.
If you want to play a good RTS: fire up an online game of StarCraft on low speed and a map that doesn't have 100 mineral patches of 50000 minerals each. Hunters isn't such a bad map. Big Game Hunters isn't such a great strategy map.
I would imagine that to average users, the BSD components are just as important to them as the GNU components. So perhaps it should be called:
GNU/BSD/Linux
Then again, to nearly every user, XFree86 is more important than the GNU tools. So Perhaps:
XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of KDE, and without one of the new cool window managers the whole thing would be significantly less interesting to most users, so maybe a family of OS designations:
KDE/XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
GNOME/XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
Enlightenment/XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
And for the purists:
twm/XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
Being a un*x variant implicitly means you can run all the stuff to the left of Linux. The only thing that makes this un*x distribution different is the choice of Kernel. Anyone who doesn't like the Linux Kernel is free to use GNU/FreeBSD!
The difference is that the black hole list is a list of hosts which you are specifically advised to block.
The "we can't block these people because they took us to court" list is simply a voluntary disclosure. If MAPS is not advocating that they be blocked, it looks to me like they are within their settlement.
The Lawyers can still come back, but at least MAPS would at this point have a chance of having the case dismissed before they had to defend themselves at great expense.
I wondered if we couldn't try something like removing the pro-terrorism government in Afghanistan and then do something to revitalize the nation's economy (sort of a rebuilding of Japan type of thing) and aid them in their drought so that the citizen's of the country don't hold so much animosity towards us.
The winning of hearts and minds thing always sounds good on paper... In reality I don't think there is anything we could do to make those people happy. If we did help them, the other countries around them would declare them an American puppet and probably start sending in suicide bombers.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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Damn straight it wouldn't have happened with Clinton. Look at how Bin Laden associates didn't simultaneously bomb two U.S. Embassies while Clinton was in office.
Clearly terrorists had a better repoire with the previous administration as there were no attempts to disrupt the millennial new year. I keep forgetting that Bin Laden didn't decide that America was the enemy and issue his fatwah until Clinton left office.
If we genocide the Arabs
You know, pundits like you just *love* that genocide word. Every military action is genocide. I wonder how it is that we had a second world war if we genocided all the German people in the first. Has it occurred to you that our target is not every Arab out there? I think the intention is to "genocide" every terrorist out there and "really hurt" any government that harbored them. It's quite tragic that you don't realize that the vast majority of Arab people don't want any part of terrorism, and have no interest in making suicide plane runs into large buildings.
It's a never-ending escalation, until the world is destroyed.
No, it's a never-ending escalation until the world is destroyed, or one side is wiped out, or one side is sufficiently damaged that they choose not to continue. It's simply amazing that you have determined that terrorism represents the force of a super power. Simply amazing.
Myself, I am positive that the media isn't honest with us.
Is that a fancy way of saying "my mind is closed"? You will not accept that the media isn't as dishonest as you say no matter how much evidence you see. Personally, I believe that both world trade centers were rammed with large aircraft. I haven't been to New York to see it myself. I don't know anybody in New York who has seen it. But I'm giving the dishonest media the benefit of the doubt on this one.
But we never see footage of the atrocities we commit in little foreign oil countries, do we? Convenient.
Why don't you go over there and film some of these atrocities? We have free press in this country, it's pretty difficult to believe that such shocking information would find no audience. In this country you can lie about what the government is doing and they don't really have any recourse to stop you. How do I know this? Well, the "moon landings were faked" web sites are rather plentiful, the evil gub'mint has shut them down now have they?
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
I'll ignore for the moment the fact that you are clueless as to what a weapon of mass destruction is and how many orders of magnitude more destructive than a jumbo jet it is.
Make peace. Or you might be dead next.
What kind of clueless idiot are you? Palestinians are dancing in the street upon hearing the news. Why? Because we aren't doing anything to Israel for Israel's actions. They see us as their enemy.
"Make peace" indeed. Make peace with whom? Which side? Inaction angers one side, action will definitely anger one side. Where is your middle ground? If you have all the answers, perhaps you should get a post at the U.N..
Nations cannot operate without infrastructure, but most terrorist organizations can.
Yeah, whatever. Clearly an organization that can simultaneously hijack 4 aircraft has no infrastructure, financial backing, or central leadership. Uh huh. Let's stick to the point... *this* terrorist organization was *very* well organized. And bombing it into oblivion, and sending a very clear and violent message to any government in support of the organization would be an effective deterrent. You don't see Libya downing too many planes anymore, now do you?
What if they aren't really harboring him? Or what if they are?
Let's cut the pointless rhetoric. Either A) They are harboring him, or B) They are lying about it. I believe the intelligence community and the Taliban are telling the truth when they say Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. What did the Taliban spokesman say in their press conference today? It couldn't have been Bin Laden because it was too well organized? That's a lot different than saying "he isn't here".
Do you really think that the rest of the world will stand idly by and watch us annex Afghanistan?
What I think is that Afghanistan has lost any sympathy it had with those countries. Are you trying in the slightest way to imply that the Russians are buddies with Afghanistan?!
The number of Americans that would die in World War III would eclipse the deaths today within weeks.
blah blah blah... And who, might I ask, would be our enemies in a war over this who would have the tactical capability to deliver a weapon of mass destruction onto our soil? You aren't still saying that the Russians so love Afghanistan that they would enter such a conflict, are you? I don't think the Chinese, who are getting extraordinary benefit from the U.S. economy, are going to be real sympathetic to a country harboring someone suspected of an attack that could seriously curtail american imports of Chinese manufactured goods.
If Osama Bin Laden is the one responsible for these attacks, and he has been harbored by the Taliban, then I don't think those countries we would be concerned about are going to shed too many tears if we declare war on Afghanistan and remove the incumbent leadership.
I agree with your first and second points... And your third... aww heck, I agree with all your points.
This sort of thing is an annoying recurring theme in our industry. The fastest G4 based Macs may or may not be faster than the fastest P4 based PCs. But it's impossible to get a good comparison because the Mac addicts keep pointing at photoshop and the PC addicts keep pointing at Quake.
According to the two economists who determined that the Dvorak keyboard is better than the Qwerty keyboard without the burden of scientific research: Java, C and C++ *must* be better than Lisp; or Lisp does not provide significant advantages over Java, C and C++ because if Lisp did, then businesses would adopt it in order to save money.
Just once I'd like to see a really fair comparison based on rigorous effort.
He was comparing apples to oranges near as I can tell. I can't actually read the original paper so it is kind of hard to tell, but the Lisp group was all self selected experts. Read carefully the stated problem and explain to me how anyone could take 63 hours to complete it in Java? The average experience of their Java sample set was 7.7 years!?!!!!!Didn't Java come out in 1995? Where did they find a panel of OAK seed developers? After re-reading that section it looks like he interchanges "years of programming experience" with "years of experience in that language". So why weren't we given the average number of years with experience in that particular language?
Secondly he was using a task which Lisp is very good at, and well optimized for - list processing. People working in Lisp tend to be well exposed to this kind of problem.
That's a good argument I hadn't thought of... I'll add it to my "Reasons Dvorak may be superior but doesn't realistically stand a chance of dethroning Qwerty because:" list.
Good thing I never tried to play NetHack on a Dvorak keyboard... I'd be trying to quaff my armor instead of walking around a sleeping nymph.
I wonder if anybody else sees that if this story (determining statistical probabilities of typed letters based on the time taken between keystrokes) is correct, then the "Dvorak keyboards allow you to type faster is a myth" argument must be wrong.
The study says that it will take you slightly longer to hit keys off the 8 home position keys because your finger requires slightly more time to move to that key. If that is a true statement, then a keyboard which places the most commonly used 8 letters in those positions should result in faster typing speeds since your fingers are not traveling to those commonly typed keys.
As for that myth link:
> Other more recent studies, including one by the General Services
> Administration, have shown there is little or no difference between the
> keyboards in such areas as learning ease, speed and comfort.
Where is this study? Okay, that isn't really important. What is important is the bias of economics presented by the quoted article. It also doesn't state until much later than the study the GSA performed has its own critics.
> The two critics also argue that if the Dvorak keyboard was indeed
> superior, then big corporations -- especially back in the days of huge
> typing pools -- would have grasped the long-term economic benefits of
> paying to switch over to the "better" design.
I think the two critics forget how little people in the typing pools were paid. What's cheaper: Retraining someone already skilled with the qwerty keyboard, or hiring another typist to take up the slack? How much extra would it have cost to order Dvorak keyboards from typewriter companies tooled to produce qwerty keyboards?
What's more, while today's
> personal computers can easily be reprogrammed to the Dvorak layout, few
> people do.
You know slashdot has had this argument before. Most people use keyboards at places other than their own desks. When I go over to help someone else with their code, I don't need to be slowed by hunt-n-peck on a qwerty keyboard because I am accustomed to dvorak. This is the reason most people who try learning the dvorak keyboard give up. Qwerty already has market position. How this escaped the researchers, I do not know.
You pundits just crack me up. You aren't seriously implying that learning vi is as easy as learning Word because they both require some degree of memorization? Yeah, let's use your example... We'll put someone who has never used either VI or Word in front of each and see what happens...
Let's see, person using Word types in "dear mom". Result "dear mom" appears.
Using vi person does the same. Result "r mom" appears.
Person using word eventually figures out to save/print from the file menu. How long does it take for them to figure this out? Depends on the user. But if we're expecting this person is intellectually competent enough that we expect they'd be able to be trained for vi, I'm going to bet learning to use the mouse isn't going to take very long at all.
Person using vi never figures out to hit "ESC:w".
After that, the person wants to make the letter out to dad instead.
In word, they quickly figure out that using the arrow keys and backspace or delete remove the characters "mom" and they can quickly retype "dad".
In vi, the arrow keys work, but they can't seem to delete the characters. Once someone deletes the characters for them, they can't seem to get into insert mode to type in "dad".
How long is it going to be before our hypothetical person can spin out a well written term paper in Word? and vi? How learnable is word campared to vi? How long will it take before the word user figures out ctrl-s is a key shortcut for save because it shows that to you in the menu? If they have trouble making that connection, I find it impossible to believe they would ever learn vi. Perhaps I should have used "vi requires far more memorization" since the amount of "new things unrelated to the users model" in vi is far higher than word or pretty much any newer editor.
I guess few remember the great debates (in good humor) about whether the successor to C would be called D or P. Bjarne Stroustrup managed to appease (and probably get a good chuckle out of) both sides by calling his newly developed language C++... An obvious software engineering in-joke.
In fairness, the comparison of notepad and vi, the vi key sequence should have been ESC-d-d-i, otherwise after the edit operation you are no longer in the same mode you were before.
The non-beauty of VI is that the learning curve is steep. Read any UI design guide and you could probably write another book on what VI did wrong. VI is a hold over from a time when everybody worked on dumb terminal TTYs, and its now archaic interface reflects that.
Why isn't ctrl-s mapped to save in vi? Well, that's because ctrl-s is the TTY suspend flow control character. Why isn't ctrl-z mapped to undo? ctrl-z is usually the process suspend control character. VI worked around the limitations of dumb terminals and met the needs of file editing by implementing its modal editing interface.
How do you delete a word in vi? "dw". How do you delete a line in vi? "dd". I see the pattern, so to delete a character you type d... uh... oh wait, you type "x" with no "d". This is inconsistent interface but was done because deleting one character should not take two keystrokes. What if I want to turn two lines into one by deleting the new line character? That's only one character, can I hit x to delete it? If y means "yank" and d means "delete", what does "$" mean? It means "end of line" except sometimes it means "end of file".
VI is full of issues like this. It is unlikely that any user will find that the interface makes sense. People keep saying "you should learn vi" as if reading a book on vi will solve your difficulties. You don't learn vi, you memorize it. Once you have developed the brain and muscle memory behind things like "yanking" instead of copying and ":8,$/foo/s//bar/g" then I'm sure that vi appears to be "easy".
I've been using vslick for almost 3 years now and have been very satisfied with it. It is a bit pricey, but it is easy to customize and comes with a C-like language for writing custom macros. I've used it mostly for Java development, but it is also the best editor I've used for C and C++. One feature of vslick I have not heard mention is the diff utility. It has the best diff utility I've ever seen. It isn't just a nice GUI diff program - anytime I have to integrate code changes to different code lines or do a 3 way merge between multiple code lines, DIFFzilla is *the* tool to use.
And as the VI pundits like to say, I never have to take my hands off the keyboard when coding in vslick.
I think vslick costs about $200 but in a professional programming environment it pays for itself within a month or two from increased productivity.
Do you have any appreciation for how valuable the fuel in those satellites is? Satellite orbits decay. The cost of fuel for re orbiting a satellite is tens of millions of dollars since it is going to shorten the service life of the satellite by years, and the other side is going to notice. Moving the sat will give you a couple days at most of adjusted intel. If they're paying enough, they'll get the updated orbits within hours.
Now let's look at some alternative mechanisms:
Re-task the satellite to look in from the side. Your pictures aren't as a clear as the overhead ones, but all you have to do is adjust the satellite's stabilization gyro to rotate the camera facing and you're done, the power for this is provided by the solar panels.
Do it the old fashioned way... Use a spy plane. It can fly in at any time and is 5 times closer to what's being photographed than the satellite. You can't use a spy plane over just anywhere (unless they have really good stealth ones these days), but certainly over an adversary such as Iraq you can.
However, what this completely misses is that this notion of amateur astronomers being able to track the sats is nonsense. Wouldn't it make sense for the intel sats to be difficult to spot? Say by making sure that any surface which might reflect sunshine to earth was painted a matte black? I'm sure there are many intelligence sats that are easy to spot, but I am also sure there is a whole constellation of them which are stealthy.
*how* is this flamebait? Apparently somebody thinks being a liability to their company is normal. Business exists to make money
It's pretty clear to me that if your business involves people sitting at a computer for long periods it is in your best interest to ensure that they are not distracted by an uncomfortable seat. Whether or not the Aeron is really comfortable seems debatable.
Never mind that Photoshop is pretty representative
No! That's what started this whole - rather pointless - argument. Photoshop is not representative. Didn't Adobe and Apple work closely so that Photoshop could handle multi processors even when the OS as a whole couldn't? Doesn't this indicate that Adobe and Apple have a legitimate business reason to work together closely to ensure that Photoshop is highly optimized for the Mac?
I'm betting that if Adobe released its Mac and Windows user demographics you'd find that a much smaller percentage of windows Photoshop users are power users who regularly rotate 10 megapixel images.3 degrees. They are spending money on the resources who do that sort of tuning where those resources will do the company the most good - on the Mac where the high end Photoshop users are. If they did the same optimization on Windows, it wouldn't give them the same return on investment. There are good reasons that Photoshop is better optimized on the G4 than the P4, without even considering conspiracy (as I know many of the pro-windows factions are apt to do).
I think the performance argument has said only one thing definitively: if you want the best photoshop performance, get a Mac.
I think all the original aapltalk article said is that for $2500 you can get a Mac that is at least as good as a $2500 PC for running Photoshop.
If someone was trying to convince the public at large that the G4 is faster, well... The same public that finds having two mouse buttons confusing, also finds clock speed an easy value to remember when comparing two computers. If there were some independently administered number representing the relative speed of program execution, the unwashed masses would be just as happy to accept it... But neither the geeks nor the corporate entities not making the chip currently at the top would endorse such a benchmark (see SPECint and SPECfp).
People know that a 1.0GHz PIII is faster than a 500MHz PIII. It fits their world model. Asking them to accept that an 867MHz G4 is faster than a 1800MHz P4 is a good fight, but not one anybody is likely to win.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. What storage medium do you have that is free of the ravages of entropy? The best archival storage medium I've heard of is CDR, and it is very good... But even those folks claim it lasts about as long as archival film (B&W or Kodachrome).
I'm not sure where you are going with this. Both would be very difficult. Fiber based B&W prints should keep about as long as a CDR. The negatives should keep about the same amount of time. All of them would need to kept in cool, dry, dark place. After several millennia though, it's hard to imagine what state any of them will be in.
It also makes certain powerful and useful units nearly useless. For example, how often do you see a squad of Ghosts turn somebody's mighty armada of Carriers into Wraith fodder? You just can't micromanage the Ghosts successfully when the speed is cranked all the way up.
Fast *Craft games have their place. Kind of like chess: speed chess helps your game, but the highest rated chess games are played slowly and carefully.
If you want to play a good RTS: fire up an online game of StarCraft on low speed and a map that doesn't have 100 mineral patches of 50000 minerals each. Hunters isn't such a bad map. Big Game Hunters isn't such a great strategy map.
That isn't the attitude I'd want someone providing my software to take.
GNU/BSD/Linux
Then again, to nearly every user, XFree86 is more important than the GNU tools. So Perhaps:
XFree86/GNU/BSD/Linux
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of KDE, and without one of the new cool window managers the whole thing would be significantly less interesting to most users, so maybe a family of OS designations:
And for the purists:
Being a un*x variant implicitly means you can run all the stuff to the left of Linux. The only thing that makes this un*x distribution different is the choice of Kernel. Anyone who doesn't like the Linux Kernel is free to use GNU/FreeBSD!
The "we can't block these people because they took us to court" list is simply a voluntary disclosure. If MAPS is not advocating that they be blocked, it looks to me like they are within their settlement.
The Lawyers can still come back, but at least MAPS would at this point have a chance of having the case dismissed before they had to defend themselves at great expense.
The winning of hearts and minds thing always sounds good on paper... In reality I don't think there is anything we could do to make those people happy. If we did help them, the other countries around them would declare them an American puppet and probably start sending in suicide bombers.
Clearly terrorists had a better repoire with the previous administration as there were no attempts to disrupt the millennial new year. I keep forgetting that Bin Laden didn't decide that America was the enemy and issue his fatwah until Clinton left office.
If we genocide the Arabs
You know, pundits like you just *love* that genocide word. Every military action is genocide. I wonder how it is that we had a second world war if we genocided all the German people in the first. Has it occurred to you that our target is not every Arab out there? I think the intention is to "genocide" every terrorist out there and "really hurt" any government that harbored them. It's quite tragic that you don't realize that the vast majority of Arab people don't want any part of terrorism, and have no interest in making suicide plane runs into large buildings.
It's a never-ending escalation, until the world is destroyed.
No, it's a never-ending escalation until the world is destroyed, or one side is wiped out, or one side is sufficiently damaged that they choose not to continue. It's simply amazing that you have determined that terrorism represents the force of a super power. Simply amazing.
Myself, I am positive that the media isn't honest with us.
Is that a fancy way of saying "my mind is closed"? You will not accept that the media isn't as dishonest as you say no matter how much evidence you see. Personally, I believe that both world trade centers were rammed with large aircraft. I haven't been to New York to see it myself. I don't know anybody in New York who has seen it. But I'm giving the dishonest media the benefit of the doubt on this one.
But we never see footage of the atrocities we commit in little foreign oil countries, do we? Convenient.
Why don't you go over there and film some of these atrocities? We have free press in this country, it's pretty difficult to believe that such shocking information would find no audience. In this country you can lie about what the government is doing and they don't really have any recourse to stop you. How do I know this? Well, the "moon landings were faked" web sites are rather plentiful, the evil gub'mint has shut them down now have they?
According to Godwin's law, you just lost.
Next time try arguing the point.
Make peace. Or you might be dead next.
What kind of clueless idiot are you? Palestinians are dancing in the street upon hearing the news. Why? Because we aren't doing anything to Israel for Israel's actions. They see us as their enemy.
"Make peace" indeed. Make peace with whom? Which side? Inaction angers one side, action will definitely anger one side. Where is your middle ground? If you have all the answers, perhaps you should get a post at the U.N..
Yeah, whatever. Clearly an organization that can simultaneously hijack 4 aircraft has no infrastructure, financial backing, or central leadership. Uh huh. Let's stick to the point... *this* terrorist organization was *very* well organized. And bombing it into oblivion, and sending a very clear and violent message to any government in support of the organization would be an effective deterrent. You don't see Libya downing too many planes anymore, now do you?
What if they aren't really harboring him? Or what if they are?
Let's cut the pointless rhetoric. Either A) They are harboring him, or B) They are lying about it. I believe the intelligence community and the Taliban are telling the truth when they say Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. What did the Taliban spokesman say in their press conference today? It couldn't have been Bin Laden because it was too well organized? That's a lot different than saying "he isn't here".
Do you really think that the rest of the world will stand idly by and watch us annex Afghanistan?
What I think is that Afghanistan has lost any sympathy it had with those countries. Are you trying in the slightest way to imply that the Russians are buddies with Afghanistan?!
The number of Americans that would die in World War III would eclipse the deaths today within weeks.
blah blah blah... And who, might I ask, would be our enemies in a war over this who would have the tactical capability to deliver a weapon of mass destruction onto our soil? You aren't still saying that the Russians so love Afghanistan that they would enter such a conflict, are you? I don't think the Chinese, who are getting extraordinary benefit from the U.S. economy, are going to be real sympathetic to a country harboring someone suspected of an attack that could seriously curtail american imports of Chinese manufactured goods.
If Osama Bin Laden is the one responsible for these attacks, and he has been harbored by the Taliban, then I don't think those countries we would be concerned about are going to shed too many tears if we declare war on Afghanistan and remove the incumbent leadership.
This sort of thing is an annoying recurring theme in our industry. The fastest G4 based Macs may or may not be faster than the fastest P4 based PCs. But it's impossible to get a good comparison because the Mac addicts keep pointing at photoshop and the PC addicts keep pointing at Quake.
According to the two economists who determined that the Dvorak keyboard is better than the Qwerty keyboard without the burden of scientific research: Java, C and C++ *must* be better than Lisp; or Lisp does not provide significant advantages over Java, C and C++ because if Lisp did, then businesses would adopt it in order to save money.
Just once I'd like to see a really fair comparison based on rigorous effort.
Secondly he was using a task which Lisp is very good at, and well optimized for - list processing. People working in Lisp tend to be well exposed to this kind of problem.
Ahh, the memories.
Good thing I never tried to play NetHack on a Dvorak keyboard... I'd be trying to quaff my armor instead of walking around a sleeping nymph.
The study says that it will take you slightly longer to hit keys off the 8 home position keys because your finger requires slightly more time to move to that key. If that is a true statement, then a keyboard which places the most commonly used 8 letters in those positions should result in faster typing speeds since your fingers are not traveling to those commonly typed keys.
As for that myth link:
> Other more recent studies, including one by the General Services
> Administration, have shown there is little or no difference between the
> keyboards in such areas as learning ease, speed and comfort.
Where is this study? Okay, that isn't really important. What is important is the bias of economics presented by the quoted article. It also doesn't state until much later than the study the GSA performed has its own critics.
> The two critics also argue that if the Dvorak keyboard was indeed
> superior, then big corporations -- especially back in the days of huge
> typing pools -- would have grasped the long-term economic benefits of
> paying to switch over to the "better" design.
I think the two critics forget how little people in the typing pools were paid. What's cheaper: Retraining someone already skilled with the qwerty keyboard, or hiring another typist to take up the slack? How much extra would it have cost to order Dvorak keyboards from typewriter companies tooled to produce qwerty keyboards?
What's more, while today's
> personal computers can easily be reprogrammed to the Dvorak layout, few
> people do.
You know slashdot has had this argument before. Most people use keyboards at places other than their own desks. When I go over to help someone else with their code, I don't need to be slowed by hunt-n-peck on a qwerty keyboard because I am accustomed to dvorak. This is the reason most people who try learning the dvorak keyboard give up. Qwerty already has market position. How this escaped the researchers, I do not know.
You pundits just crack me up. You aren't seriously implying that learning vi is as easy as learning Word because they both require some degree of memorization? Yeah, let's use your example... We'll put someone who has never used either VI or Word in front of each and see what happens...
Let's see, person using Word types in "dear mom". Result "dear mom" appears.
Using vi person does the same. Result "r mom" appears.
Person using word eventually figures out to save/print from the file menu. How long does it take for them to figure this out? Depends on the user. But if we're expecting this person is intellectually competent enough that we expect they'd be able to be trained for vi, I'm going to bet learning to use the mouse isn't going to take very long at all.
Person using vi never figures out to hit "ESC:w".
After that, the person wants to make the letter out to dad instead.
In word, they quickly figure out that using the arrow keys and backspace or delete remove the characters "mom" and they can quickly retype "dad".
In vi, the arrow keys work, but they can't seem to delete the characters. Once someone deletes the characters for them, they can't seem to get into insert mode to type in "dad".
How long is it going to be before our hypothetical person can spin out a well written term paper in Word? and vi? How learnable is word campared to vi? How long will it take before the word user figures out ctrl-s is a key shortcut for save because it shows that to you in the menu? If they have trouble making that connection, I find it impossible to believe they would ever learn vi. Perhaps I should have used "vi requires far more memorization" since the amount of "new things unrelated to the users model" in vi is far higher than word or pretty much any newer editor.
I guess few remember the great debates (in good humor) about whether the successor to C would be called D or P. Bjarne Stroustrup managed to appease (and probably get a good chuckle out of) both sides by calling his newly developed language C++... An obvious software engineering in-joke.
The non-beauty of VI is that the learning curve is steep. Read any UI design guide and you could probably write another book on what VI did wrong. VI is a hold over from a time when everybody worked on dumb terminal TTYs, and its now archaic interface reflects that.
Why isn't ctrl-s mapped to save in vi? Well, that's because ctrl-s is the TTY suspend flow control character. Why isn't ctrl-z mapped to undo? ctrl-z is usually the process suspend control character. VI worked around the limitations of dumb terminals and met the needs of file editing by implementing its modal editing interface.
How do you delete a word in vi? "dw". How do you delete a line in vi? "dd". I see the pattern, so to delete a character you type d... uh... oh wait, you type "x" with no "d". This is inconsistent interface but was done because deleting one character should not take two keystrokes. What if I want to turn two lines into one by deleting the new line character? That's only one character, can I hit x to delete it? If y means "yank" and d means "delete", what does "$" mean? It means "end of line" except sometimes it means "end of file".
VI is full of issues like this. It is unlikely that any user will find that the interface makes sense. People keep saying "you should learn vi" as if reading a book on vi will solve your difficulties. You don't learn vi, you memorize it. Once you have developed the brain and muscle memory behind things like "yanking" instead of copying and ":8,$/foo/s//bar/g" then I'm sure that vi appears to be "easy".
I've been using vslick for almost 3 years now and have been very satisfied with it. It is a bit pricey, but it is easy to customize and comes with a C-like language for writing custom macros. I've used it mostly for Java development, but it is also the best editor I've used for C and C++. One feature of vslick I have not heard mention is the diff utility. It has the best diff utility I've ever seen. It isn't just a nice GUI diff program - anytime I have to integrate code changes to different code lines or do a 3 way merge between multiple code lines, DIFFzilla is *the* tool to use.
And as the VI pundits like to say, I never have to take my hands off the keyboard when coding in vslick.
I think vslick costs about $200 but in a professional programming environment it pays for itself within a month or two from increased productivity.
Now if I could just give a comeuppance to the dumbass moderator who was viewing newest first and modded me down as redundant.
1 frame
.4 seconds
----------- = 2.5fps
or if we're using something closer to your math...
2 frames taking 8/10 of a second, with 2/10 left over.
Each frame takes 4/10 sec to render. 2/10 = x * 4/10. x = 1/2
2 1/2 = 2.5fps
Spy sats change their orbits from time to time.
Do you have any appreciation for how valuable the fuel in those satellites is? Satellite orbits decay. The cost of fuel for re orbiting a satellite is tens of millions of dollars since it is going to shorten the service life of the satellite by years, and the other side is going to notice. Moving the sat will give you a couple days at most of adjusted intel. If they're paying enough, they'll get the updated orbits within hours.
Now let's look at some alternative mechanisms:
However, what this completely misses is that this notion of amateur astronomers being able to track the sats is nonsense. Wouldn't it make sense for the intel sats to be difficult to spot? Say by making sure that any surface which might reflect sunshine to earth was painted a matte black? I'm sure there are many intelligence sats that are easy to spot, but I am also sure there is a whole constellation of them which are stealthy.
It's pretty clear to me that if your business involves people sitting at a computer for long periods it is in your best interest to ensure that they are not distracted by an uncomfortable seat. Whether or not the Aeron is really comfortable seems debatable.
No! That's what started this whole - rather pointless - argument. Photoshop is not representative. Didn't Adobe and Apple work closely so that Photoshop could handle multi processors even when the OS as a whole couldn't? Doesn't this indicate that Adobe and Apple have a legitimate business reason to work together closely to ensure that Photoshop is highly optimized for the Mac?
I'm betting that if Adobe released its Mac and Windows user demographics you'd find that a much smaller percentage of windows Photoshop users are power users who regularly rotate 10 megapixel images .3 degrees. They are spending money on the resources who do that sort of tuning where those resources will do the company the most good - on the Mac where the high end Photoshop users are. If they did the same optimization on Windows, it wouldn't give them the same return on investment. There are good reasons that Photoshop is better optimized on the G4 than the P4, without even considering conspiracy (as I know many of the pro-windows factions are apt to do).
I think the performance argument has said only one thing definitively: if you want the best photoshop performance, get a Mac.
I think all the original aapltalk article said is that for $2500 you can get a Mac that is at least as good as a $2500 PC for running Photoshop.
If someone was trying to convince the public at large that the G4 is faster, well... The same public that finds having two mouse buttons confusing, also finds clock speed an easy value to remember when comparing two computers. If there were some independently administered number representing the relative speed of program execution, the unwashed masses would be just as happy to accept it... But neither the geeks nor the corporate entities not making the chip currently at the top would endorse such a benchmark (see SPECint and SPECfp).
People know that a 1.0GHz PIII is faster than a 500MHz PIII. It fits their world model. Asking them to accept that an 867MHz G4 is faster than a 1800MHz P4 is a good fight, but not one anybody is likely to win.