Don't require toxic chemicals? Who told you that? It is essentially impossible to manufacture anything without using toxic chemicals somewhere in the supply chain. For example LEDs required use of gallium in their manufacture. The primary source of gallium is as a byproduct of aluminum production. The extraction of gallium involves electrolysis in the form of a mercury-gallium amalgam.
Not much is known about gallium toxicity because it has not been widely tested. However there is some concern because it substitutes for iron in some metabolic pathways, and is known to interfere with normal iron metabolism.
People who claim LEDs have no potential toxicity are not well-informed.
It is true that non-Model M keyboards may make noise when you type on them. This issue is that the noise may not actually correspond with the completion of the keystroke, it may occur before or after making the feedback inaccurate.
The result of this is that the noise can be actually deleterious to fast accurate typing.
I've heard a lot of people on slashdot say the model M is awesome, but why? Supposedly annoyingly loud clicky noises are... good?
I agree with these people. The reasons are:
1. Durability. The keyboard is built using the design principles first worked out during the construction of the pyramids. It contains lots of metal. In a pinch it can be used to deflect RPGs. The key switches do. not. wear. out. ever. because they are based on a mechanical switch with a 10,000,000,000 activation duty cycle where the standard rubber dome design is good for at best 100,000 activations. The standard rubber dome designs also become squishy and unreliable with age. Model M keys work the same way always.
2. Ease of maintenance. Easily disassembled and cleaned of foreign debris. Nose hairs, Cheetos, Pepsi, spray from food fights not a problem. If you should spill Pepsi into it, disassemble and cycle in the dishwasher and you are good to go.
3. Tremendous tactile and auditory feedback. There is no doubt that you have completed a keystroke. Yes, I can see where the person you are sharing your cubical might not like this but that is a sign that you should be working for a company that provides its developers with offices.
4. Keypress distance. All too many modern keyboards have 0.001" keypress distance. This drives me nuts.
5. Full sized. No compromise in key spacing meaning people like me with relatively large hands do not have trouble using these keyboards.
6. No newfangled keys. The good old One True Way ANSI-101 design. No learning bizarre key loacations every tine that new age girly-keyboard needs to be replaced.
7. Chicks can tell you are a real man who will satisfy all their needs if they see you using a Model M keyboard.
Facism? LOL. The distinction between civil and criminal law is an artifact of our legal system. There are many nations that do not make that distinction. Like France. Most would not consider the test of facism to be the existence of this type of legal system. If you want to be taken seriously you cannot include such errors in your argument.
Then there is the little matter of copyright infringement and profits. The distinction you make is very specious. If I were to shoplift a CD this would clearly be theft. When calculating losses associated with the crime, the profits associated with the price of the good are not excluded. Likewise you cannot exclude profits when deciding if copyright infringement is theft or not.
There are many errors in your argument that are counter to law and history. You need to do some reading.
The markets studied in this work are notorious for being driven by short term fads. Online downloads are by predominantly ephemeral pop music, and a study of 14,000 teenagers? These are the people most influenced by peers and the 'so last week' attitude, They haven't had the time to explore and broaden their outlook.
Try getting a more diverse sample and I think that the long tail will look a lot fatter. People in their 30's and up have had time to develop far more diversified tastes and will have much more eclectic buying habits.
Pick a cohort of 14,000 boomers and you will see something very different.
The 15 employee limit is the MIMINUM standard under federal law.
States are free to set lower limits. The state I live in has no lower limit. Since this is being tried under California law the limit is 5 employees.
In the US some one-third of all employees work for companies with less than 100 employees. Your suggestion that the limit be raised to 100 would exempt a large percentage of the US workforce from laws protecting them against workplace discrimination.
Some professions are practiced almost exclusively in small companies.
Very bad idea.
Here is the source for the employee size statistics:
The other 102 employees can practice whatever they want. The point is that the employer does not have the right to force a particular practice on the 103rd employee.
Government has become involved in the workplace because past egregious abuses on the part of employers has shown it to be necessary.
Yes it would be nice if it wasn't needed but history has proven otherwise. Lesser evil and all that.
Over time a body of law has built up in this country protecting employees from certain types of discrimination - gender, race, age and religion are some of the main protected classes. These laws exist because of past abuses that have established that these laws are needed. The religious protection came in as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"The freedoms of religion and association are two of our most important freedoms"
This is exactly why this is so heinous. Employees of this company are being compelled to go through this training as a condition of employment. There is no freedom of religion or association here.
There is no difference between this and an employee's supervisor tell him or her that they will lose their job if they don't provide sexual favors in exchange for continued employment.
The only problem? Their conversion rate seems to be $1 per â1, somewhat less favorable than the current exchange rate, which is roughly $1.40 per â1.
Not a problem for me. 25 years ago I got a bottle of St. Emelion that tasted funny. Paid big money for it too. Later I found out that it was from a vintage that had been doctored.
The French have been keeping the good stuff and exporting the dregs forever.
I'm not too fond of laser printing for archival storage. The thermoplastic tends to stick to opposing pages. The best I have seen is pigment based ink.
A technology that I have used in the past is data encoded by punching holes in paper. No ink to fade. I'd think that would work very well so long as the paper is stored sealed.
C, Java and Python offers a good core suite of tools that cover most problem sets in a Linux environment. I might add a basic familiarization of Perl just because of the immense package library that will come in handy, and shell can be useful (and it doesn't take much learning). Learning shell programming will also make you a stronger Linux user in general.
The claim that copying does not affect content generation because much content was authored before the advent of copyright fails badly on two accounts.
1. The rate of content generation today dwarfs pre-copyright law historic rates. There is a reason we have multiple large industries engaged in content generation. It's called the profit motive.
2. Copyright was a reaction to the reduction in cost of making copies engendered by printing press technologies. Prior to this copyright was not needed because the cost of copying was not scalable and there was no economic gain from making your own copy.
Informational incompleteness is measurable as entropy. So if we extend this a bit it sounds like we could say a complete mathematical system would have a system with zero entropy.
So really this is an application of statistical mechanics from an informational theory point of view. As such it isn't surprising that a quantum mechanical system would yield the results described. I don't think it really says much about the question of why math does such a good job modeling physical phenomena. All of the memes here are purely mathematical; all we have done is find an interesting way of connecting them.
Well actually he is right. There is hard data that store traffic is up this year. However actual spending is down quite a bit. The theory seems to be that people are working harder at chasing bargains, aided somewhat by the recent drop in gasoline prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't require toxic chemicals? Who told you that? It is essentially impossible to manufacture anything without using toxic chemicals somewhere in the supply chain. For example LEDs required use of gallium in their manufacture. The primary source of gallium is as a byproduct of aluminum production. The extraction of gallium involves electrolysis in the form of a mercury-gallium amalgam.
Not much is known about gallium toxicity because it has not been widely tested. However there is some concern because it substitutes for iron in some metabolic pathways, and is known to interfere with normal iron metabolism.
People who claim LEDs have no potential toxicity are not well-informed.
I had a Focus keyboard for a while also. When it died on me it triggered the search that led me to the Model M.
I liked the "Saratoga" style keyboard a lot. I thought it was second only to the Model M. Thanks for the information that it is still available.
It is true that non-Model M keyboards may make noise when you type on them. This issue is that the noise may not actually correspond with the completion of the keystroke, it may occur before or after making the feedback inaccurate.
The result of this is that the noise can be actually deleterious to fast accurate typing.
The model M patent has expired.
http://www.clickykeyboard.com/4118611.pdf
Because there was a alphabetic coding already in use. If you used 789 along the top the alphabetic coding would be scrambled.
I've heard a lot of people on slashdot say the model M is awesome, but why? Supposedly annoyingly loud clicky noises are... good?
I agree with these people. The reasons are:
1. Durability. The keyboard is built using the design principles first worked out during the construction of the pyramids. It contains lots of metal. In a pinch it can be used to deflect RPGs. The key switches do. not. wear. out. ever. because they are based on a mechanical switch with a 10,000,000,000 activation duty cycle where the standard rubber dome design is good for at best 100,000 activations. The standard rubber dome designs also become squishy and unreliable with age. Model M keys work the same way always.
2. Ease of maintenance. Easily disassembled and cleaned of foreign debris. Nose hairs, Cheetos, Pepsi, spray from food fights not a problem. If you should spill Pepsi into it, disassemble and cycle in the dishwasher and you are good to go.
3. Tremendous tactile and auditory feedback. There is no doubt that you have completed a keystroke. Yes, I can see where the person you are sharing your cubical might not like this but that is a sign that you should be working for a company that provides its developers with offices.
4. Keypress distance. All too many modern keyboards have 0.001" keypress distance. This drives me nuts.
5. Full sized. No compromise in key spacing meaning people like me with relatively large hands do not have trouble using these keyboards.
6. No newfangled keys. The good old One True Way ANSI-101 design. No learning bizarre key loacations every tine that new age girly-keyboard needs to be replaced.
7. Chicks can tell you are a real man who will satisfy all their needs if they see you using a Model M keyboard.
Facism? LOL. The distinction between civil and criminal law is an artifact of our legal system. There are many nations that do not make that distinction. Like France. Most would not consider the test of facism to be the existence of this type of legal system. If you want to be taken seriously you cannot include such errors in your argument.
Then there is the little matter of copyright infringement and profits. The distinction you make is very specious. If I were to shoplift a CD this would clearly be theft. When calculating losses associated with the crime, the profits associated with the price of the good are not excluded. Likewise you cannot exclude profits when deciding if copyright infringement is theft or not.
There are many errors in your argument that are counter to law and history. You need to do some reading.
Most places, you are only leasing the land for 99 years.
Define most places. It is certainly not true for my property.
Yes, and get off MY lawn.
It seems to me Ebay would be a good place to study the fatness of the tail.
Sounds like a good way to poison your monitoring database.
The markets studied in this work are notorious for being driven by short term fads. Online downloads are by predominantly ephemeral pop music, and a study of 14,000 teenagers? These are the people most influenced by peers and the 'so last week' attitude, They haven't had the time to explore and broaden their outlook.
Try getting a more diverse sample and I think that the long tail will look a lot fatter. People in their 30's and up have had time to develop far more diversified tastes and will have much more eclectic buying habits.
Pick a cohort of 14,000 boomers and you will see something very different.
The 15 employee limit is the MIMINUM standard under federal law.
States are free to set lower limits. The state I live in has no lower limit. Since this is being tried under California law the limit is 5 employees.
In the US some one-third of all employees work for companies with less than 100 employees. Your suggestion that the limit be raised to 100 would exempt a large percentage of the US workforce from laws protecting them against workplace discrimination.
Some professions are practiced almost exclusively in small companies.
Very bad idea.
Here is the source for the employee size statistics:
http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html
What is the point if they only got one submission for the Hash contest? Doesn't that make it the automatic winner?
Surely you want to do better than have to pick from more than one choice.
And yes it will take years to pick the winner. Duh. You don't want to just throw something out there that will get broken immediately.
The other 102 employees can practice whatever they want. The point is that the employer does not have the right to force a particular practice on the 103rd employee.
Government has become involved in the workplace because past egregious abuses on the part of employers has shown it to be necessary.
Yes it would be nice if it wasn't needed but history has proven otherwise. Lesser evil and all that.
Over time a body of law has built up in this country protecting employees from certain types of discrimination - gender, race, age and religion are some of the main protected classes. These laws exist because of past abuses that have established that these laws are needed. The religious protection came in as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"The freedoms of religion and association are two of our most important freedoms"
This is exactly why this is so heinous. Employees of this company are being compelled to go through this training as a condition of employment. There is no freedom of religion or association here.
There is no difference between this and an employee's supervisor tell him or her that they will lose their job if they don't provide sexual favors in exchange for continued employment.
The only problem? Their conversion rate seems to be $1 per â1, somewhat less favorable than the current exchange rate, which is roughly $1.40 per â1.
Not a problem for me. 25 years ago I got a bottle of St. Emelion that tasted funny. Paid big money for it too. Later I found out that it was from a vintage that had been doctored.
The French have been keeping the good stuff and exporting the dregs forever.
Revenge is sweet.
With a little practice punch cards are human-readable.
Yeah right. I have been kicking whippersnapper butt online ever since the game came out.
The fact that we are being asked to swallow this is disgusting.
Thats what my ex used to say.
I'm not too fond of laser printing for archival storage. The thermoplastic tends to stick to opposing pages. The best I have seen is pigment based ink.
A technology that I have used in the past is data encoded by punching holes in paper. No ink to fade. I'd think that would work very well so long as the paper is stored sealed.
C, Java and Python offers a good core suite of tools that cover most problem sets in a Linux environment. I might add a basic familiarization of Perl just because of the immense package library that will come in handy, and shell can be useful (and it doesn't take much learning). Learning shell programming will also make you a stronger Linux user in general.
The claim that copying does not affect content generation because much content was authored before the advent of copyright fails badly on two accounts.
1. The rate of content generation today dwarfs pre-copyright law historic rates. There is a reason we have multiple large industries engaged in content generation. It's called the profit motive.
2. Copyright was a reaction to the reduction in cost of making copies engendered by printing press technologies. Prior to this copyright was not needed because the cost of copying was not scalable and there was no economic gain from making your own copy.
Informational incompleteness is measurable as entropy. So if we extend this a bit it sounds like we could say a complete mathematical system would have a system with zero entropy.
So really this is an application of statistical mechanics from an informational theory point of view. As such it isn't surprising that a quantum mechanical system would yield the results described. I don't think it really says much about the question of why math does such a good job modeling physical phenomena. All of the memes here are purely mathematical; all we have done is find an interesting way of connecting them.
Well actually he is right. There is hard data that store traffic is up this year. However actual spending is down quite a bit. The theory seems to be that people are working harder at chasing bargains, aided somewhat by the recent drop in gasoline prices.