Air compressors are very helpful, but ultimately you have to get into the nooks and crannies with a Q-tip or something and that is a time-consuming chore. Of course on laptop keyboards, it's way to easy to knock keys loose and depending on how the little plastic apparatus disconnects from the key cap, you can have all kinds of fun attaching the thing again.
I got one of those silicone roll-up keyboards a few years ago. I actually liked using it. Ergonomically, it worked well for me in terms of layout and feel of the keys. The downside is that it stopped working after a couple of months. I haven't tried another, but a keyboard you can simply wash with soap and water is a great thing.
I find it completely amusing not that this is a security bug that lets someone compromise your computer, but that it's the "Graphics Rendering Engine". I wonder how good it is for doing things like, you know, rendering graphics.
Like I said once years ago, if edlin were written today, it would have direct access to kernel-level functions through scripting and be a vector for both viruses and remote exploits.
Believe it or not, there is more to being educated than taking technical courses. If we computer nerds are so well-educated then why is the spelling and grammar of a typical/. posting at about a 4th grade level (on a good day)? Outside of a very narrow range of technical fields, many posters on/. are extremely ignorant and poorly educated and unable to communicate or reason well... and once you look at the general population, you mostly have the same thing minus the technical expertise.
I hate to break it to you, but very few people in the overall college population are taking multivariable calculus or adveanced engineering. I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 1%. How many people do you know with "communications" degrees or "business" degrees who couldn't think or communicate their way out of a wet paper bag? I have a degree in CS from 1987, and I became convinced at the time that you could bluff your way to a Bachelor's in CS without any real programming knowledge or skill if you were willing to set your scruples aside. I had to write maybe 4 papers in the course of my undergraduate degree. In my opinion, this is laughable and goes a long way to explain why your average college-educated "computer nerd" often has the literacy level of Homer Simpson. From what I've heard, many CS programs today are more just training programs for things like Java than an actual education in the "science" part of computer science.
How many software developers have you met or heard of whose resumes are totally in contradiction with the fact they have no real knowledge outside of cookbook coding (if even that)? I've been told many times over my career that my resume was a liability because I can actually back up everything I claim 100% and don't do things like list myself as a Perl programmer because I modified some Perl scripts back around 1997. And in the past 5 years, it's become even worse given that Human Resources people (and exactly what kind of education could they possibly have given the horrendous incompetence of most HR departments?) use a selection process based almost entirely on keyword searches of resumes*. So any ability to effectively communicate in a resume is totally lost, and I don't think anyone around here would not be aware of the awful effects of that.
So, yes, I stand by my assertion that a college education today is in most ways the equivalent of a high school education from 50 years ago.
* As a recent hire of AOL (doing Web infrastructure stuff), I can tell you that there are some really sharp people there, and every one of them was hired by completely circumventing HR. Having worked mostly for start-ups over the years it was amazing to me how HR is an extremely effective filter against good candidates.
Which one is the cause and which the effect? I think your scenario is plausible, but you can objectively compare contemporary education material to that of 50 or 100 years ago and will see that for the most part, the modern stuff is easier for the same level (i.e. high school grade-level, undergraduate, etc).
I think it's now 20 years (up from 17) from when the patent was applied for, which was, I think, actually in the 90's, even though it was "invented" (if you can call it that) around 1981.
Re:Bill Gates, prognosticator
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Hey, Windows meets Government security standards... if you unplug it from the network.
(Seriously, you could get NT 4.0 to the C2 standard... but I don't think anyone tried using metafiles with that version.)
Re:Bill Gates, prognosticator
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Ironically, to get such legislation passed he would have to buy himself more than a few congressmen.
Eliminating corrupt doesn't require changing the laws, just enforcing them. Of course, there's also the route MS took... if they find you guilty, let them give you a slap on the wrist, promise to be good and pretend it never happened.
After all, if MS was _really_ a monopoly, the government would have punished them. Despite the finding that MS did some monopolistic things, I don't recall any punishment, ergo... were they really guilty?
Fify years ago I'll bet you the percentage of unskilled labor was much higher in the US than it is now.
I wouldn't bet that. I'd bet that the so-called "unskilled laborer" of 50 years ago was better educated than the typical burger-flipper, low-level corporate or government bureaucrat, first-teir tech support or Congressman is today.
Have you ever heard of "College education today is like high school education of 50 years ago?" Well, people have been saying that for at least 50 years and there's a lot of truth to it.
It's probably as simple as: In the circle of business newspeak this guys runs with, talks to, or hears from every day, the word "use" has simply been replaced by "leverage".
I'm sure a time will come, if it hasn't already, when all those perfectly normal words that are replaced by multi-syllabic, often ungrammatical, usually awkward and always trendy buzzwords by the marketing types and other suits will simply cause the simple, clearer, and more precise words to simply fall out of use.
My biggest reason for leaving Outlook was when I switched from OE and Outlook couldn't import c. 2GB of mail without losing half of it. That and the fact that its performance slowed geometrically with relation to folder size, something that DIDN'T happen in OE. After about 2 months, I moved to TB 0.4 (or so) and never looked back.
One thing I don't recall being a big issue was importing the Outlook mail in TB as I now have all my e-mail archives in TB.
Re:I'm a C++ coder and I hate it too
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 1
You're absolutely right, and after 13 years of C++, that's exactly what I do. Actually I'm doing mostly Tcl work now with some C, it's my first non-Windows job since 1990 and my first non-C++ work since '93. It's an interesting change. Tcl is a neat language although its capabilities for handling data structures leave a lot to be desired.
I'm convinced, as I said elsewhere, in this thread, that there is the perfect language hiding (mostly) inside C++ struggling to get out. Of course, the prospects of what will actually come out from C++0x actually scare me, but that's because I find things like STL obfuscating and wholly contrary to OOP and I think, in part, they are running the language off the rails by focussing attention on its more hideous bits. But it could be worse, they could be adopting MS's "managed" C++ with all their non-standard extensions.
Of course, at the end of the day, the language almost doesn't matter. It's the libraries that come with the language that make all the difference in productivity, which I see has been recognized by the C++0x folks as a very important aspect of the new standard. This is, in my opinion, why Java sucks for UI. It might be platform-independent, but it looks bad and works clumsily on all platforms. I found it wholly unusable as a solution for developing meaningful and non-hideous GUI's back in 2000 when asked to investigate. Although it seems better now based on some Java apps I actually use, some people who claim to know better argue that it really isn't.
As a long-time Windows developer, I always thought MFC was a good first cut and once it was fleshed out a little more and the developer was hidden 80% of the underlying Windows minutia (as opposed to 20% or so) that it could be really great. It begain to utilize the great power of C++, but because of horrible trade-offs made in the Windows 3.1 on 10MHz 286 days, there were so many legacy malfeatures that would never go away. Little did I realize that in the 10 years I used it that no significant improvements would ever be made, as MS focussed on other (equally underdeveloped) tools instead.
A good class library should make easy things clean and simple and hard things clean and simple. MS libraries, in particular has always made easy things messy, and hard things sometimes so much trouble that rewriting functionality from scratch is often a viable alternative. And in MS terms "easy things" is so narrowly defined as to be almost useless. It's like a car that is supposedly easy to maintain, but you have to remove the engine to upgrade the tires, and you have to upgrade the tires before you can use the Reverse gear.
This is story moderation, something people have been clamoring for for years. I think it's a good idea since there are always a ton of things that people spend far too much time complaining about. I don't mind dupes since I often miss stories the first time around. Other people who hover over "F5" all day wouldn't want them.
I for one would just love to see front page article descriptions that are all at least in the same area code as good grammar and spelling. But there's nothing going on (including digg.com) that is making me not want to continue using/. after 7-8 years.
Re:I'm a C++ coder and I hate it too
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, C++ isn't so bad until you start considering templates. Templates are what makes it such a blarggy language, and these days, it seem severyone is keen on showing how clever they are by abusing templates to the nth degree (template metaprogramming? Yeah, maybe for Letterman's "Stupid Compiler Tricks", but I'd probably fire someone who tried that in the real world). Of course there are too many useful things you can do with templates, now that they are actually standardized, but this only reflects flaws in the rest of the language and violate C++'s OO-ness.
So in that respect, C++ is like Perl, but if you are calm and rational, C++ can be elegent, reasonably efficient and maintainable.
There's a language out there, maybe "C*=3" that will solve the hideous of needing templates in C++ with the superior OO features of Java and C#, but still allows you to do all the good things you can do with C++ now, and doesn't give you the overhead of a VM or the next-to-worthless libraries that killed Java or the lock-in and overhead required by C-Pound.
I, and probably every other Futurama fan, have nothing against football. Fox could show 23 hours of football a day for all I care. But they should not be scheduling a first-run TV show to run at time when it's usually the middle of the third quarter. Fox programming schedulers are either evil or idiots. Probably both. They were probably punishing Matt Groening for being smarter than all Fox management put together, even though Fox would have died in the late 80's without him (and "Married with Children").
However, I can also say that the NFL and Fox have gone out of their way to make a game with 60 minutes of play time stretch to something like 3 or 4 hours of clock time. I'm sure I can speak for many football fans when I suggest that they could try to speed up the game a little bit. Of course, they will have to get used to the idea of having a signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., actual-clock-ticking-down time to lame-car-commercials-and-inane-banter time) something bigger than 1 to 4.
Really. Can't you AC's distinguish disagreeing with grenade-tossing. This is why I find/. the worst place for politics discussion. So many people here think political discussion is the same thing as name-calling, ad hominem attacks and generally being an ass.
"Contractors" are usually hired with the expectation that they are qualified for the job.
Of course, a lot of these problems stem from HR departments. I'm a contractor from AOL, and here the HR department is worse than useless. They actually prevent qualified candidates from being hired. When a friend of mine finally got on board someone saw his resume and pointed out how perfect he was for the job, but HR never recignized this from his resume. I dealt with them on numerous occasions and every time it was like I'd never talked to them before, and when I did interview, no one contacted me back or even returned my calls. I finally got in because of the friend above... they had to end run around HR in order to get me in otherwise it would have never happened. From everything I've seen, if it were up to HR here, qualified people would never get in the door.
It seems to me that you really don't pay your employees peanuts, (which I applaud).
However, you are deluding yourself if you think that this isn't a real problem. Without paying a decent salary, you aren't going to get good help, which you personally can see because your good employees earn huge bonuses.
However, you get what you pay for, which is something that tends to be forgotten in the American corporate rush to commoditize employees (outsourcing, switching to temp workers and lowering salaries in general).
A further effect, something I doubt is a problem for you, is the lack of loyalty. Commoditized employees will have no loyalty, because none is shown to them. I think this is a much bigger effect than many people will realize or admit. If you treat people poorly, they will treat you in kind.
I'm sure you, dada21, don't experience this because you seem to understand how to treat an employee well and attract employees that are a good investment, but there are a lot of companies, particularly large ones, that see their workforce on a level somewhere near office furniture and the coffee machine.
These are the people that will lose out to companies in places like the Pacific Rim. Those smart enough to nurture their workforce and invest in them... and remember they are people and not mindless headcount... will continue the American tradition of world leadership. Of course, the employees have an equal responsibility as well, but if they are cared for, feel they matter, and have a stake in the outcome, responsibility will flourish.
(In fact, my personal loyalty towards an employee is earned in mostly those intangible ways. I've worked the hardest in the past 8 years or so for the company that actually paid me the lowest, for other reasons I described above. So while salary is important, it isn't the be-all/end-all for good employees. There are many more important things an employer must do as well.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone got any good tips for cleaning a keyboard?
Air compressors are very helpful, but ultimately you have to get into the nooks and crannies with a Q-tip or something and that is a time-consuming chore. Of course on laptop keyboards, it's way to easy to knock keys loose and depending on how the little plastic apparatus disconnects from the key cap, you can have all kinds of fun attaching the thing again.
I got one of those silicone roll-up keyboards a few years ago. I actually liked using it. Ergonomically, it worked well for me in terms of layout and feel of the keys. The downside is that it stopped working after a couple of months. I haven't tried another, but a keyboard you can simply wash with soap and water is a great thing.
and English incompetence isn't a communication barrier?
/.
Doesn't seem to be a problem on
I find it completely amusing not that this is a security bug that lets someone compromise your computer, but that it's the "Graphics Rendering Engine". I wonder how good it is for doing things like, you know, rendering graphics.
Like I said once years ago, if edlin were written today, it would have direct access to kernel-level functions through scripting and be a vector for both viruses and remote exploits.
Believe it or not, there is more to being educated than taking technical courses. If we computer nerds are so well-educated then why is the spelling and grammar of a typical /. posting at about a 4th grade level (on a good day)? Outside of a very narrow range of technical fields, many posters on /. are extremely ignorant and poorly educated and unable to communicate or reason well... and once you look at the general population, you mostly have the same thing minus the technical expertise.
I hate to break it to you, but very few people in the overall college population are taking multivariable calculus or adveanced engineering. I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 1%. How many people do you know with "communications" degrees or "business" degrees who couldn't think or communicate their way out of a wet paper bag? I have a degree in CS from 1987, and I became convinced at the time that you could bluff your way to a Bachelor's in CS without any real programming knowledge or skill if you were willing to set your scruples aside. I had to write maybe 4 papers in the course of my undergraduate degree. In my opinion, this is laughable and goes a long way to explain why your average college-educated "computer nerd" often has the literacy level of Homer Simpson. From what I've heard, many CS programs today are more just training programs for things like Java than an actual education in the "science" part of computer science.
How many software developers have you met or heard of whose resumes are totally in contradiction with the fact they have no real knowledge outside of cookbook coding (if even that)? I've been told many times over my career that my resume was a liability because I can actually back up everything I claim 100% and don't do things like list myself as a Perl programmer because I modified some Perl scripts back around 1997. And in the past 5 years, it's become even worse given that Human Resources people (and exactly what kind of education could they possibly have given the horrendous incompetence of most HR departments?) use a selection process based almost entirely on keyword searches of resumes*. So any ability to effectively communicate in a resume is totally lost, and I don't think anyone around here would not be aware of the awful effects of that.
So, yes, I stand by my assertion that a college education today is in most ways the equivalent of a high school education from 50 years ago.
* As a recent hire of AOL (doing Web infrastructure stuff), I can tell you that there are some really sharp people there, and every one of them was hired by completely circumventing HR. Having worked mostly for start-ups over the years it was amazing to me how HR is an extremely effective filter against good candidates.
Which one is the cause and which the effect? I think your scenario is plausible, but you can objectively compare contemporary education material to that of 50 or 100 years ago and will see that for the most part, the modern stuff is easier for the same level (i.e. high school grade-level, undergraduate, etc).
I think it's now 20 years (up from 17) from when the patent was applied for, which was, I think, actually in the 90's, even though it was "invented" (if you can call it that) around 1981.
Hey, Windows meets Government security standards... if you unplug it from the network.
(Seriously, you could get NT 4.0 to the C2 standard... but I don't think anyone tried using metafiles with that version.)
Ironically, to get such legislation passed he would have to buy himself more than a few congressmen.
Eliminating corrupt doesn't require changing the laws, just enforcing them. Of course, there's also the route MS took... if they find you guilty, let them give you a slap on the wrist, promise to be good and pretend it never happened.
After all, if MS was _really_ a monopoly, the government would have punished them. Despite the finding that MS did some monopolistic things, I don't recall any punishment, ergo... were they really guilty?
Fify years ago I'll bet you the percentage of unskilled labor was much higher in the US than it is now.
I wouldn't bet that. I'd bet that the so-called "unskilled laborer" of 50 years ago was better educated than the typical burger-flipper, low-level corporate or government bureaucrat, first-teir tech support or Congressman is today.
Have you ever heard of "College education today is like high school education of 50 years ago?" Well, people have been saying that for at least 50 years and there's a lot of truth to it.
It's probably as simple as: In the circle of business newspeak this guys runs with, talks to, or hears from every day, the word "use" has simply been replaced by "leverage".
I'm sure a time will come, if it hasn't already, when all those perfectly normal words that are replaced by multi-syllabic, often ungrammatical, usually awkward and always trendy buzzwords by the marketing types and other suits will simply cause the simple, clearer, and more precise words to simply fall out of use.
How's that for a new paradigm?
Yeah, the concept of evil was disproved in the 1960's. We all know that no one is responsible for his actions...
So Gates declared war on spam 2 years ago. Well, he declared war on Windows security problems 5 years ago.
Given this track record, I expect he will next claim that he will eliminate corruption in Congress.
My biggest reason for leaving Outlook was when I switched from OE and Outlook couldn't import c. 2GB of mail without losing half of it. That and the fact that its performance slowed geometrically with relation to folder size, something that DIDN'T happen in OE. After about 2 months, I moved to TB 0.4 (or so) and never looked back.
One thing I don't recall being a big issue was importing the Outlook mail in TB as I now have all my e-mail archives in TB.
You're absolutely right, and after 13 years of C++, that's exactly what I do. Actually I'm doing mostly Tcl work now with some C, it's my first non-Windows job since 1990 and my first non-C++ work since '93. It's an interesting change. Tcl is a neat language although its capabilities for handling data structures leave a lot to be desired.
I'm convinced, as I said elsewhere, in this thread, that there is the perfect language hiding (mostly) inside C++ struggling to get out. Of course, the prospects of what will actually come out from C++0x actually scare me, but that's because I find things like STL obfuscating and wholly contrary to OOP and I think, in part, they are running the language off the rails by focussing attention on its more hideous bits. But it could be worse, they could be adopting MS's "managed" C++ with all their non-standard extensions.
Of course, at the end of the day, the language almost doesn't matter. It's the libraries that come with the language that make all the difference in productivity, which I see has been recognized by the C++0x folks as a very important aspect of the new standard. This is, in my opinion, why Java sucks for UI. It might be platform-independent, but it looks bad and works clumsily on all platforms. I found it wholly unusable as a solution for developing meaningful and non-hideous GUI's back in 2000 when asked to investigate. Although it seems better now based on some Java apps I actually use, some people who claim to know better argue that it really isn't.
As a long-time Windows developer, I always thought MFC was a good first cut and once it was fleshed out a little more and the developer was hidden 80% of the underlying Windows minutia (as opposed to 20% or so) that it could be really great. It begain to utilize the great power of C++, but because of horrible trade-offs made in the Windows 3.1 on 10MHz 286 days, there were so many legacy malfeatures that would never go away. Little did I realize that in the 10 years I used it that no significant improvements would ever be made, as MS focussed on other (equally underdeveloped) tools instead.
A good class library should make easy things clean and simple and hard things clean and simple. MS libraries, in particular has always made easy things messy, and hard things sometimes so much trouble that rewriting functionality from scratch is often a viable alternative. And in MS terms "easy things" is so narrowly defined as to be almost useless. It's like a car that is supposedly easy to maintain, but you have to remove the engine to upgrade the tires, and you have to upgrade the tires before you can use the Reverse gear.
Oh well.
Since FAT has been around for 25 years, how is that MS has a patent on it that hasn't expired?!
Maybe EA sees itself as the new Shodan, commanding an army of helpless cybernetic slaves to do its bidding.
You know, you're right. But then again so is trolling as an AC, and that hasn't stopped anything around here.
This is story moderation, something people have been clamoring for for years. I think it's a good idea since there are always a ton of things that people spend far too much time complaining about. I don't mind dupes since I often miss stories the first time around. Other people who hover over "F5" all day wouldn't want them.
/. after 7-8 years.
I for one would just love to see front page article descriptions that are all at least in the same area code as good grammar and spelling. But there's nothing going on (including digg.com) that is making me not want to continue using
Actually, C++ isn't so bad until you start considering templates. Templates are what makes it such a blarggy language, and these days, it seem severyone is keen on showing how clever they are by abusing templates to the nth degree (template metaprogramming? Yeah, maybe for Letterman's "Stupid Compiler Tricks", but I'd probably fire someone who tried that in the real world). Of course there are too many useful things you can do with templates, now that they are actually standardized, but this only reflects flaws in the rest of the language and violate C++'s OO-ness.
So in that respect, C++ is like Perl, but if you are calm and rational, C++ can be elegent, reasonably efficient and maintainable.
There's a language out there, maybe "C*=3" that will solve the hideous of needing templates in C++ with the superior OO features of Java and C#, but still allows you to do all the good things you can do with C++ now, and doesn't give you the overhead of a VM or the next-to-worthless libraries that killed Java or the lock-in and overhead required by C-Pound.
I wish I could invent it.
I, and probably every other Futurama fan, have nothing against football. Fox could show 23 hours of football a day for all I care. But they should not be scheduling a first-run TV show to run at time when it's usually the middle of the third quarter. Fox programming schedulers are either evil or idiots. Probably both. They were probably punishing Matt Groening for being smarter than all Fox management put together, even though Fox would have died in the late 80's without him (and "Married with Children").
However, I can also say that the NFL and Fox have gone out of their way to make a game with 60 minutes of play time stretch to something like 3 or 4 hours of clock time. I'm sure I can speak for many football fans when I suggest that they could try to speed up the game a little bit. Of course, they will have to get used to the idea of having a signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., actual-clock-ticking-down time to lame-car-commercials-and-inane-banter time) something bigger than 1 to 4.
That doesn't mean it wasn't flame-bait.
/. the worst place for politics discussion. So many people here think political discussion is the same thing as name-calling, ad hominem attacks and generally being an ass.
Really. Can't you AC's distinguish disagreeing with grenade-tossing. This is why I find
Yeah, just like those folks in Chicago who voted for Kennedy.
Try this book out:
? v=glance&s=books/systemsinternals
http://www.sysinternals.com/WindowsInternals.html
I read a good chunk of it and it gets down and dirty... and yes, you're right. It's not really stuff that is useful for an application developer.
"Contractors" are usually hired with the expectation that they are qualified for the job.
Of course, a lot of these problems stem from HR departments. I'm a contractor from AOL, and here the HR department is worse than useless. They actually prevent qualified candidates from being hired. When a friend of mine finally got on board someone saw his resume and pointed out how perfect he was for the job, but HR never recignized this from his resume. I dealt with them on numerous occasions and every time it was like I'd never talked to them before, and when I did interview, no one contacted me back or even returned my calls. I finally got in because of the friend above... they had to end run around HR in order to get me in otherwise it would have never happened. From everything I've seen, if it were up to HR here, qualified people would never get in the door.
It seems to me that you really don't pay your employees peanuts, (which I applaud).
However, you are deluding yourself if you think that this isn't a real problem. Without paying a decent salary, you aren't going to get good help, which you personally can see because your good employees earn huge bonuses.
However, you get what you pay for, which is something that tends to be forgotten in the American corporate rush to commoditize employees (outsourcing, switching to temp workers and lowering salaries in general).
A further effect, something I doubt is a problem for you, is the lack of loyalty. Commoditized employees will have no loyalty, because none is shown to them. I think this is a much bigger effect than many people will realize or admit. If you treat people poorly, they will treat you in kind.
I'm sure you, dada21, don't experience this because you seem to understand how to treat an employee well and attract employees that are a good investment, but there are a lot of companies, particularly large ones, that see their workforce on a level somewhere near office furniture and the coffee machine.
These are the people that will lose out to companies in places like the Pacific Rim. Those smart enough to nurture their workforce and invest in them... and remember they are people and not mindless headcount... will continue the American tradition of world leadership. Of course, the employees have an equal responsibility as well, but if they are cared for, feel they matter, and have a stake in the outcome, responsibility will flourish.
(In fact, my personal loyalty towards an employee is earned in mostly those intangible ways. I've worked the hardest in the past 8 years or so for the company that actually paid me the lowest, for other reasons I described above. So while salary is important, it isn't the be-all/end-all for good employees. There are many more important things an employer must do as well.)