How do you use Firefox with a trackball?
on
Top Mice Compared
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· Score: 1
With a gel wrist pad, your arm only moves when you want it to, and there's no RSI or other nerve damage.And you can use it on any surface, since it doesn't move.
I've been using trackballs for about 10 years now, can't stand regular mice anymore.
How on earth do you use Firefox with a trackball? There are no "trackball gestures".
But seriously, I haven't used a trackball in years, mainly because I always thought they sucked. They would get "stuck" and wouldn't move. Maybe they have improved them since then. But mice have been great for me. I have a Fellowes gel wristpad for my keyboard and mouse, and the only time I have ever had any wrist pain was when using a keyboard/mouse for a long period of time without them. I don't understand why people don't invest in these things, they are essential.
I have seen people who use trackballs, and it always seems like they are doing more work to get the cursor to move. It seems to me that their thumbs flail around quite a bit. With my mouse, my wrist stays in one place, and I basically move the mouse around with my fingers. The only time I really have to get the mouse going is if I am playing a game or something. I do have to do the "pick up and shuffle" on occasion, but only because I have a dual 20" monitor setup, and moving things from monitor to monitor sometimes takes a little extra effort. But that would be no different with a trackball.
I just found trackballs to be much less precise for my taste.
SQL, on the other hand:
1) Reasonably simple API
2) Scales to very large databsaes
3) Cross-platform/architecture
4) Performs very well.
I am proof that SQL will be around for a while. When I first saw Unix back in the late 80s, I thought "this is too hard to use, why would anyone need this?" I have been a Unix/Linux user since about '92.
When I took my first SQL class, I thought "these queries are very cumbersome. SQL is stupid." I still use it today.
In '93 I heard about this thing called the World Wide Web, and thought "This is unnecessary. I can find whatever I need on gopher and ftp sites. Why would I want a gui thrown on top of it?"
Making the texts searchable - provided they only show a small snippet and a reference to the book for the rest - sounds EXACTLY like fair use to me.
Not to mention that Google sells nice targeted ads, such that if you like what you read, a few clicks will let you order the book. Perhaps it would generate more sales? The only contention is that they are scanning the entire work, and they are afraid that people will be able to get the whole thing for free. Google should be able to quell these fears.
All they have to do is integrate MSN search, maps, etc. into the core operating system.
Yeah, THAT should speed up their delivery of new services.
Re:Most typical line ever
on
Layoffs at OSDL
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· Score: 2, Informative
This has to be the most used line ever when talking about layoffs. One day I want to see a press release about layoffs from some company "Eh...we laidoff people just for the hell of it...we're perfectly structured we just wanted to shake things up a bit. To keep our employees on their toes."
Actually, sometimes it actually IS restructuring. Maybe it is too expensive to do your own customer service, so you hire a customer service company to do it for you. What to do with your current employees in that area? Maybe you are getting out of direct sales and going fully to a partnership model. Bye-bye direct sales people. Or maybe you are moving part of your business to another country, and nobody wants to relocate.
I am all for eliminating double-speak, but companies do re-structure.
It is stupid posts like yours why the real veterans are no longer respected. With people like you making this type of sick joke, it is no wonder our civilisation is on the fast track to the gutter. You are part of the problem, not the solution.
No, the real reason that veterans aren't getting respect is because they aren't fighting respectable battles anymore. They are sent to battle over a personal vendetta that our under-educated, egomaniacal leader had with another leader over something that happened to his daddy. They should not be the targets of disrespect, yet every day I see stickers on cars that say "support our troops" and "Bush 04". THAT is disrespectful of our troops. They should only be sent into harms way for a good cause, and how many have died now in Iraq? Forget the smokescreens that the Bush administration has put up over that war, and ask why they were sent there. Ask why they are STILL there. There are no good reasons. How about a bumper sticker that says "Bring our troops home, assface". If our civilization is on the fast track to the gutter, it is because of ex-smackhead drunks who send in kids to be killed, yet preaches family values. It is because our leader has done things that our children and grandchildren will be paying for. It will take generations to repair what he has f'd up. That is disgusting to me.
So why relevant? Nurses, teachers, etc have a healthier attitude about sex. More likely the women are on top (or at least have a varied sex life). Girl wins.
Engineers are more conservative, so more likely to be on top. Boy wins.
Woman with a healty attitude towards sex - husband wins.:)
Seriously, I think this "study" is to science what E! is to journalism. So what happens when an engineer marries a teacher? What about women engineers? Male teachers?
Imagine if civil engineers started doing the same with buildings and bridges.
Imagine if software developers were held to the same standards as engineers.
I get tired people comparing software development to real engineering when developers refuse to follow the same rigorous standards that engineering disciplines have to follow. There are some software engineers out there, but most of the people with that title are simply software developers. Not that every piece of software needs to be engineered, but way too many "software engineers" have no business using the word engineer when they refuse to follow any type of rigorous process around software development.
Again - most software doesn't need to be engineered, but some does. The term "software engineer" is grossly misued most of the time.
I am not quite sure why IT is equated to e-commerce. They are two different things. If anything, I think e-commerce has a very stable future, and has matured greatly over the last few years. The bubble wasn't all about e-commerce, it was about e-everything (and e-nothing). It was a frenzy that we have hopefully learned our lesson from, because a lot of it just made no sense. IT != e-commerce.
As for this being less than honorable, that's the eye of the beholder. It's like the VCR, guns, or deep fryers. They can all be used for good or for evil. Just because they can be used for evil doesn't obviate they're good potential, nor should we ban them because of their potential for abuse.
Your argument would have been a bit stronger if you would have said knives instead of guns. Guns are designed to kill - period. Now they might be used for hunting, but guns have evolved so far away from being hunting tools that they barely resemble their origins. I am not against guns, I grew up around them (hunting and non-hunting purposes). But if I HAD to choose sides, I would choose the anti-gun side. Simply because I know how dangerous they are and think that their danger outweighs their benefit. Not to mention that people are idiots and idiots and guns don't mix well. But in all honesty I know it is just a pontification, because there is no way to put Pandora back in the box.
Mapquest, Babelfish and Pubmed are still synonomous with the services they provide, the way Google is with web searching.
Google Maps kicks the pants off of Mapquest. I use it exclusively now.
OK, I still use babelfish. But just to try it out, the Google translator gave the identical translation that babelfish did (in my very limited experiment)
Never heard of Pubmed. Seriously.
Here is the thing though - Google is becoming a brand. It isn't just for searching web pages anymore. If people start figuring out that they can go to Google for other things, they will. Because they are used to Google's offerings being good and useful.
(and I can't believe the original poster didn't mention gmail)
But for flat pages or pictures, Opera (most of the time) takes everyone else to the cleaners.
FYI, if you are on Windows, use Irfanview for pictures. It is the best example I can think of where a piece of software is awesome, closed-source, non-evil, and has no equal. If only it were available on Linux. I haven't found anything that comes close.
I used to be an Opera user, and there are still things that Opera does better than FF (zoom, tabs, and mouse gestures) but OVERALL I like FF better.
No. They are just creating a policy for how government buys software. They aren't disallowing any Chinese businesses or people from buying US or other software. I can't see how this affects the economy at all. The Chinese government big enough.
Law #2 - Chinese citizens and businesses may only buy their software from the Chinese government.
Even if they do this (which wouldn't surprise me) it isn't any of our business. Now all of a sudden, when it might affect US dollars, we are interested in China?
Software engineering has matured a lot since that book was published.
I call bullshit. Software engineering has improved somewhat, but very little. The problem is, lots of places call what they do "software engineering" when all they are doing is coding. I have heard developers bitch that software doesn't get the respect that other engineering disciplines get. That is precisely because software development is not a discipline. Not that much software is "engineered", it is thrown together with very little methodology and forethought.
But having said that, I am not saying it is a bad thing. Sometimes software doesn't NEED to be engineered. But not all software developers are software engineers.
Software languages, tools, and methodologies have grown and died since that book was published - but matured is a stretch. I think a lot of the fundamental problems with software development still exist.
In other words, while the cost for fixing bugs in earlier phases is low, the probability of detecting a bugs in earlier phases is also low.
How is that supposed to be addressed?
Diligence and communication. Not to mention that many times bugs are uncovered and fixed, and most people won't even realize that they just uncovered a bug.
And the key is balance. You can't spend ALL your time uncovering every bug in the requirements phase (or any subsequent phase). But you need to at least make an attempt. Too many times, people involved early on in the process rely on the later phases to "deal with the issues" instead of addressing them early. If that is a conscious decision, with full understanding that it could jeopardize the project and delivery dates, OK. But most times it is not.
I disagree. It's much harder to clean the code after it's already implemented and integrated. Do it right the first time and you don't have to worry about it later. In the mean time, you have a stable, secure product that people can rely on, even if they don't have the latest and greatest features.
Actually, it is 40 to 1000 times more costly to fix a bug once the code goes to production. There is a famous chart showing this by Barry Boehm in Software Engineering Economics. The relative cost to fix a defect found in each phase goes something like:
requirements - 1
design - 3 to 6
coding - 10
development testing - 15 to 40
acceptance testing - 30 to 70
operation - 40 to 1000
And yes, these numbers came from data not just out of thin air. And you have to remember, what could be a one line code change COSTS a lot more to fix. In my 12 years experience in software QA and testing, these numbers are accurate. In the end, it is ultimately a balancing act between the risk of the defect manifesting itself and the business benefit of getting the product to market.
What bugs me is paying permium fees and getting all that. It's one thing to be handed the package and knowing I'm on my own. It's another thing to be paying good money for "support" only to still find out I'm on my own.
Where I work, we paid for a software package (proprietary) that did what we wanted. We incorporated it into our product, and all was good. Then a year or so later we decided to expand on the functionality that the software offered, and found a critical bug. We couldn't get it to do what we wanted, and we really needed it. So we tried to contact the company, and it was gone. (sound of crickets)
Up until that point, the software had functioned very well for us. But now we were screwed because we couldn't get past this bug, and it would be major work to replace this stuff with something else - if we could even find a suitable replacement. There was much scrambling and chaos. We eventually worked it all out, but it wasn't fun at all.
I believe that this is one reason that people go with Open Source, and ironically the same reason people go with large companies that produce proprietary software.
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How on earth do you use Firefox with a trackball? There are no "trackball gestures".
But seriously, I haven't used a trackball in years, mainly because I always thought they sucked. They would get "stuck" and wouldn't move. Maybe they have improved them since then. But mice have been great for me. I have a Fellowes gel wristpad for my keyboard and mouse, and the only time I have ever had any wrist pain was when using a keyboard/mouse for a long period of time without them. I don't understand why people don't invest in these things, they are essential.
I have seen people who use trackballs, and it always seems like they are doing more work to get the cursor to move. It seems to me that their thumbs flail around quite a bit. With my mouse, my wrist stays in one place, and I basically move the mouse around with my fingers. The only time I really have to get the mouse going is if I am playing a game or something. I do have to do the "pick up and shuffle" on occasion, but only because I have a dual 20" monitor setup, and moving things from monitor to monitor sometimes takes a little extra effort. But that would be no different with a trackball.
I just found trackballs to be much less precise for my taste.
1) Reasonably simple API
2) Scales to very large databsaes
3) Cross-platform/architecture
4) Performs very well.
I am proof that SQL will be around for a while. When I first saw Unix back in the late 80s, I thought "this is too hard to use, why would anyone need this?" I have been a Unix/Linux user since about '92.
When I took my first SQL class, I thought "these queries are very cumbersome. SQL is stupid." I still use it today.
In '93 I heard about this thing called the World Wide Web, and thought "This is unnecessary. I can find whatever I need on gopher and ftp sites. Why would I want a gui thrown on top of it?"
As you can see, I am quite the visionary.
Not to mention that Google sells nice targeted ads, such that if you like what you read, a few clicks will let you order the book. Perhaps it would generate more sales? The only contention is that they are scanning the entire work, and they are afraid that people will be able to get the whole thing for free. Google should be able to quell these fears.
Yeah, THAT should speed up their delivery of new services.
Actually, sometimes it actually IS restructuring. Maybe it is too expensive to do your own customer service, so you hire a customer service company to do it for you. What to do with your current employees in that area? Maybe you are getting out of direct sales and going fully to a partnership model. Bye-bye direct sales people. Or maybe you are moving part of your business to another country, and nobody wants to relocate.
I am all for eliminating double-speak, but companies do re-structure.
No, the real reason that veterans aren't getting respect is because they aren't fighting respectable battles anymore. They are sent to battle over a personal vendetta that our under-educated, egomaniacal leader had with another leader over something that happened to his daddy. They should not be the targets of disrespect, yet every day I see stickers on cars that say "support our troops" and "Bush 04". THAT is disrespectful of our troops. They should only be sent into harms way for a good cause, and how many have died now in Iraq? Forget the smokescreens that the Bush administration has put up over that war, and ask why they were sent there. Ask why they are STILL there. There are no good reasons. How about a bumper sticker that says "Bring our troops home, assface". If our civilization is on the fast track to the gutter, it is because of ex-smackhead drunks who send in kids to be killed, yet preaches family values. It is because our leader has done things that our children and grandchildren will be paying for. It will take generations to repair what he has f'd up. That is disgusting to me.
I think I quite understand what it means, and you do not.
(think it is obvious yet?)
Yeah, it can't be because conservatives shit all over women and their rights.
Woman with a healty attitude towards sex - husband wins. :)
Seriously, I think this "study" is to science what E! is to journalism. So what happens when an engineer marries a teacher? What about women engineers? Male teachers?
A troll is a troll, regardless of if the guy copy/pasted it or not. It only existed to get people to respond to it. A troll. You responded.
Please, do not feed the trolls.
Does anyone really care about this "war"?
I had both my arms blown off in Nam, you insensitive clod!
Imagine if software developers were held to the same standards as engineers.
I get tired people comparing software development to real engineering when developers refuse to follow the same rigorous standards that engineering disciplines have to follow. There are some software engineers out there, but most of the people with that title are simply software developers. Not that every piece of software needs to be engineered, but way too many "software engineers" have no business using the word engineer when they refuse to follow any type of rigorous process around software development.
Again - most software doesn't need to be engineered, but some does. The term "software engineer" is grossly misued most of the time.
I am not quite sure why IT is equated to e-commerce. They are two different things. If anything, I think e-commerce has a very stable future, and has matured greatly over the last few years. The bubble wasn't all about e-commerce, it was about e-everything (and e-nothing). It was a frenzy that we have hopefully learned our lesson from, because a lot of it just made no sense. IT != e-commerce.
Your argument would have been a bit stronger if you would have said knives instead of guns. Guns are designed to kill - period. Now they might be used for hunting, but guns have evolved so far away from being hunting tools that they barely resemble their origins. I am not against guns, I grew up around them (hunting and non-hunting purposes). But if I HAD to choose sides, I would choose the anti-gun side. Simply because I know how dangerous they are and think that their danger outweighs their benefit. Not to mention that people are idiots and idiots and guns don't mix well. But in all honesty I know it is just a pontification, because there is no way to put Pandora back in the box.
Google Maps kicks the pants off of Mapquest. I use it exclusively now.
OK, I still use babelfish. But just to try it out, the Google translator gave the identical translation that babelfish did (in my very limited experiment)
Never heard of Pubmed. Seriously.
Here is the thing though - Google is becoming a brand. It isn't just for searching web pages anymore. If people start figuring out that they can go to Google for other things, they will. Because they are used to Google's offerings being good and useful.
(and I can't believe the original poster didn't mention gmail)
FYI, if you are on Windows, use Irfanview for pictures. It is the best example I can think of where a piece of software is awesome, closed-source, non-evil, and has no equal. If only it were available on Linux. I haven't found anything that comes close.
I used to be an Opera user, and there are still things that Opera does better than FF (zoom, tabs, and mouse gestures) but OVERALL I like FF better.
Law #2 - Chinese citizens and businesses may only buy their software from the Chinese government.
Even if they do this (which wouldn't surprise me) it isn't any of our business. Now all of a sudden, when it might affect US dollars, we are interested in China?
Here is your answer: For the most part, Mac people don't even know what the heck a kernel is. Linux people are nearly required to.
I call bullshit. Software engineering has improved somewhat, but very little. The problem is, lots of places call what they do "software engineering" when all they are doing is coding. I have heard developers bitch that software doesn't get the respect that other engineering disciplines get. That is precisely because software development is not a discipline. Not that much software is "engineered", it is thrown together with very little methodology and forethought.
But having said that, I am not saying it is a bad thing. Sometimes software doesn't NEED to be engineered. But not all software developers are software engineers.
Software languages, tools, and methodologies have grown and died since that book was published - but matured is a stretch. I think a lot of the fundamental problems with software development still exist.
Diligence and communication. Not to mention that many times bugs are uncovered and fixed, and most people won't even realize that they just uncovered a bug.
And the key is balance. You can't spend ALL your time uncovering every bug in the requirements phase (or any subsequent phase). But you need to at least make an attempt. Too many times, people involved early on in the process rely on the later phases to "deal with the issues" instead of addressing them early. If that is a conscious decision, with full understanding that it could jeopardize the project and delivery dates, OK. But most times it is not.
I don't see how the two are connected.
Actually, it is 40 to 1000 times more costly to fix a bug once the code goes to production. There is a famous chart showing this by Barry Boehm in Software Engineering Economics. The relative cost to fix a defect found in each phase goes something like:
requirements - 1
design - 3 to 6
coding - 10
development testing - 15 to 40
acceptance testing - 30 to 70
operation - 40 to 1000
And yes, these numbers came from data not just out of thin air. And you have to remember, what could be a one line code change COSTS a lot more to fix. In my 12 years experience in software QA and testing, these numbers are accurate. In the end, it is ultimately a balancing act between the risk of the defect manifesting itself and the business benefit of getting the product to market.
Where I work, we paid for a software package (proprietary) that did what we wanted. We incorporated it into our product, and all was good. Then a year or so later we decided to expand on the functionality that the software offered, and found a critical bug. We couldn't get it to do what we wanted, and we really needed it. So we tried to contact the company, and it was gone. (sound of crickets)
Up until that point, the software had functioned very well for us. But now we were screwed because we couldn't get past this bug, and it would be major work to replace this stuff with something else - if we could even find a suitable replacement. There was much scrambling and chaos. We eventually worked it all out, but it wasn't fun at all.
I believe that this is one reason that people go with Open Source, and ironically the same reason people go with large companies that produce proprietary software.