And for the cost of one cheap single channel SCSI card I can fit 15 180GB hd's for 2.7Tb of slow but still plenty of data. Or, I can buy 4 IDE cards and get the same.
4 slots or one?
We could spend a little more and get a dual channel SCSI card, 30@180Gb, 5.4Tb of slow storage. Know where I can find a motherboard with 8 PCI slots?
the funny thing is, is if he does sue slashdot, and take his no legal fee's the distance. He could, In theory, sue
Slashdot, for providing the forum for the slander to happen. Every individual who badmouthed the stupid fucker. All the various internet related companies who carried the traffic, from major carriers to the mom & pop ISP's.
You know, if it wasn't for the 100$ adapter price I would be all over this like stank on a monkey. My system is based on a Tyan Thunder K7. with the SCSI. Booting is done off of an 18Gb 15k rpm Cheetah. And mass storage via a 120Gb Maxtor. It'd be nice indeed to keeep the IDE channels for burner and dvd drive. While adding copious ammounts of storage into the 29 available slots on the SCSI.
Let's see, 300$ for a 180Gb, 100$ for the Adaptor. 5.2 Terabytes at the cost of 116k. I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.
Though.. 114$ for a 100Gb, plus adaptor, I could reach a terabyte for a mear 2 grand. As an added feature both 1Tb and 5.2Tb are *without* the addition of extra cards.
What I wouldn't do for a job.
Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard
on
The Last Days at 3dfx
·
· Score: 1
There is also the occasion when something is still on top because no one knows better. If you've owned a mobo based on a via chipset, and a creative card. I bet more often then not you had some issues with it. I own a Gametheater XP, as well as a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both provide the functionality any offering of Creative can. With a hell of a lot fewer compliance issues. I'll admit I have been interested in some of Creatives recent releases, they have a few with an interesting break-out box. But it's still just a different set of knobs on the same broken sound card. I wont purchase another Creative at the present time. I'm quite pleased with Turtle Beach and/or Hercules. But one can't predict the future.
First off, wow, I'm amazed. I posted this ask slashdot not more then two days ago. My first acceptance on slashdot. heh.:)
Secondly, Thanks. This is a load of information. I will certainly look into those links above. As I was doing the random google pick and filling out applications for a few that seemed ineresting enough to dedicate beta testing time to, I did notice a majority of them asked which beta's I've particupated in if any.
And as for you mentioning reporting bugs, with Earth and Beyond I unfortunetly only joined in the end during there stress test. But something is better then nothing.:)
I was wondering where it was my self. It's like the damn submitter thought we would know where to find it at anand tech, and what's this "the folks" Why is it I imagine a bunch of geeks all wearing heard hats of one color with nvidia or ati's logo on it, Being lead around by an older fellow with a diferent color hardhat. Right, a tour group, It was probably just one guy who payed the guard 20$ and a bottle of jack to be let in after hours....
I like Hard|OCP's tour of gainward. They manufacture there video cards two to a PCB and cut them down the middle. That would be cool to build two systems which where connected by the unsevered agp card. Like some freak siamese twin, "And here is Tommy and Timmy, identical twins sharing the same GPU'
What I want to know is, How much for a copy of FreeDOS?
Photomanipulation confusion.
on
New Palm Pictures?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ok, so as I was reading the comments I found various, "It's fake" and this that and the other thing. The one thing that threw me off is mention of a cloud background, I saw absolutely no clouds...
Until I found the OTHER image.
http://members.rogers.com/kawaichan/palm.jpg No cloud. Branding. SN Obscurity.
http://hisham.cc/files/pics/palmaroo.jpg Clouds . REBranding. SN Obscurity redone.
The second one done by daves ipaq is horribly manipulated. It's quite obvious he wanted credit for it, and so modified it to have his cloudy background, removed the other guys branding, and removed the others SN Obscurity. You can tell, because half of the "o" on Oslo is mangled.
Dave, you suck, uninstall photoshop you fool. If you want to zoom in 400X to see if you can detect any l33t choppage to claim your right as mastar-detective, use the first one.
In the United States, the most common keyboard layout for computer keyboards remains the one designed by Christopher Sholes for the original Remington "Type Writer" in 1876. This layout is commonly called QWERTY after the order of the first few letters on its top row. Other layouts exist. I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for about a year now. I like it a lot for my daily work, which involves a lot of typing. I used to feel a numbness of the backs of my hands after a long day with QWERTY, but I don't with Dvorak. And quantified measurements bear out its efficiency relative to QWERTY.
But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing. Could a modern genetic algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better arrangement? I had to give it a try. The results surprised me!
I limited this experiment to the 30 keys under the four fingers of the two hands. They include the 26 letters of the English alphabet and four punctuation symbols (comma, period, quote, and semicolon). (A QWERTY layout typically has the slash in this region instead of quote.) Other punctuation was ignored.
First, I needed a quantifiable metric by which one keyboard layout could be compared to another. I constructed a function the measures the amount of "work" needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout. This function estimates total finger travel, with some extra penalties in some situations and some bonuses in others. Specifically, I simulate the typing of a (single) word with these rules:
All 8 fingers start on the home row. An index finger stretch to the center costs 1 unit. Fingers of the same hand can't be on both the top and bottom row. When a top-row or bottom-row key is to be hit, each finger on the bottom or top row (respectively) moves to the home row, and that costs 1 unit each. After that, if a finger has to move up or down to hit the key, it costs 1 unit. An additional unit is charged to move to the bottom row (except for the index finger in its natural column) or to move an index finger to the top row in its unnatural center column. Furthermore, moving a pinky up or down costs an additional unit. I have weak pinkies. Hitting two distinct keys in succession with the same finger is really bad; 3 more units are charged. An extra unit is assessed when nonadjacent fingers of the same hand are used in succession and they are not both on the home row. But adjacent fingers are charged a unit to hit keys on distinct rows, and one more if there's adjacent movement between the top and bottom rows. When a shift key is used, the fingers of the shifting hand move to the home row for free afterwards.
My work estimation function simulates the typing of words, not simply digraphs and longer sequences. So it captures the effects of fingers being left on whatever keys they are on after they type the letters.
I also needed a corpus of sample text. I collected about 20 megabytes of English from Project Gutenberg. I used the King James Version of the Bible, the complete works of William Shakespeare and (naturally!) Charles Darwin, the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Melville's Moby Dick, the Education of Henry Adams, and other works. To that I added a decade of sent e-mail (bodies only) and about 100,000 lines of C code. This corpus therefore reflects my own typing to some degree by intent and other people would surely observe different results.
The total input size is 4293746 words in 3307922 bytes. There are 88732 distinct words that appear more than once, where a word is defined as a contiguous sequence of characters that can be typed with the thirty central keys. The most frequent words are:
240036 the 140994 of 140641 and 92363 to 69993 in 69255 a 51265 i 50069 that 37358: 37291 is 36819 for 32300 with 30704 he 30079 his 29071 be 28690 as 27130 it 25650 not 22020 this 21603 have 21467 by 21402 but 21241 my 21001 on 20928 was 18867 you 18067 if 17949 from 17483; 17330 are 17058 which 16973 all 16958 they 16587 or 14853 will 14809 at 14768 we 14362 shall 13701 their 12595, 12416 so 11985. 11518 had 11454 an 11307 thou 11037 your 10377 sv 10296 him 10257 when 10155 one
Next, I constructed an evolutionary framework. After trying several, I ended up with a scheme in which a pool of 4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to "type" a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept, and the other half of the layouts are sent to the showers. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor. The mutations are made by permuting keys in the layout, with a 50% chance of swapping two keys, a 25% chance of swapping three, a 12.5% chance of four, and so on.
The evolutionary framework itself had to evolve. It was challenging to find a scheme with sufficient mutation possibilities that would allow a medium-quality layout enough time to improve itself with multiple mutations before getting eliminated. I also learned that it was important to track only distinct layouts, for otherwise a single good one would rapidly fill the pool with identical copies of itself.
When no new best layout has risen to the top of the pool in some number of generations, the round stops. The best layouts are stored away and the pool repopulated with random keyboards. This allows a fresh start after one layout has populated the pool with itself and its mutations.
Last, there is an "all-star" round in which the best survivors from all the rounds compete. The Dvorak and QWERTY layouts get seeded into this round too for fun.
Enough detail on the experimental framework! Once I was happy with the evaluation function and evolutionary framework, I was fascinated to watch it run in real time and see the intermediate results. I kept a running display of the top five layouts in each generation. Usually, layouts with different home row orders will battle it out until one has proven itself superior. It would only take a couple of generations for a round to produce something better than QWERTY. And it quickly became clear that putting the vowels on the home row of the left hand, which is a cornerstone concept of the Dvorak layout, was not seen by the algorithm as optimal.
What came out of the exercise, afterovernight? Here is the winner, which I am using now to type this note, as well as the Dvorak and QWERTY layouts with their scores:
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout a o e u i d h t n s 12189785 ; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing/ a s d f g h j k l ; 25390660 z x c v b n m , . '
. u y p q k l d c g Best evolved layout e a i n w r h t s o 9640479 ' , ; f z j m v b x
The next step was to actually try using the layout. I spent a couple days with it, and learned that my layout evaluation function was just too smart for its own good. Too many words involved complicated patterns using the fingers of the right hand. The word bottom convinced me that Dvorak was on to something when he designed a keyboard that maximized alternation between the hands.
So I updated -- simplified, really -- my evaluation function. Now I charge points when too many keys are hit in succession by fingers of the same hand, with some credits for hitting adjacent keys. Specifically, the new simplified rules are:
Every position has an assigned cost that's looked up from a table. The OEU/HTN positions of Dvorak have no cost. A and S are 1 unit; I and D are two; P and GCR are three; Y and F are four; ", QJK, MWV, and L are five; : and Z are six; and X and B are seven. Using the same finger twice in succession on distinct letters costs 10 units. When two keys in a row are struck with the same hand, it costs two units if they're on different rows or on the bottom row, and one unit if they're not adjacent. If three or more keys are hit in succession by the same hand, one unit is charged for each key after the second. Much simpler! So I ran the experiment again. What did I see?
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout a o e u i d h t n s 32129548 ; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing/ a s d f g h j k l ; 59514344 z x c v b n m , . '
k , u y p w l m f c Best evolved layout o a e i d r n t h s 28281895 q . ' ; z x v g b j
That looks way more usable to me. But (perhaps not surprisingly), it sure looks a lot like Dvorak, too, and is not quantifiably all that much better. Note that the simple goal of hand alternation did bring the vowels all over to the hand opposite the one with the T (which my program automatically places under the right hand). But it pulled U out of the home row so that R could live there.
Other differences from Dvorak are not that profound, and seem to correlate pretty well with a simple letter frequency analysis. I note that H was put where Dvorak has N, perhaps so that SH would be seen as using adjacent fingers. And P and Y swapped places.
Now I'm going to try this second layout for a day or two and see whether it's sufficiently (subjectively) superior to Dvorak to be worth the hassle of switching to it...
I used xkbcomp to remap my keyboard; here is the file if you are crazy enough to want to try it yourself.
In all, this little program required about 500 lines of C.
A better picture of the second layout is here in a PDF file.
If these unidentifiables are the one's I'm thinking of, they must have some great wireless connectivity from all those "It was only a weather balloon(s)" floating around.
One boy in South Dakota crys at the loss. Hilary Rosen decides to use one of her four remaining orgasms to celebrate. Next expect use, 2024. Rest of population, doesn't really give a shit. Grandmother unavailable for comment.
I'm not sure what use this would have in cell phone's kinda silly and pointless... But I do see how this would be great for cars, plains, and other vehicles..
"Hello Charlie, you are not authorized to drive this vehicle at these hours, please contact Bob or Samantha for assistance" Bob and Sam being Mom and Dad... perhaps even automatic radio transmition on detected entry of foreign (No not foreigners...) entry into a plains cock pit. Pilot has 5 minutes to contact ground control to cancel the jets from being scrambled....
I don't need my cell phone telling me hello every time it recognizes me, it's a tool. Let me use it like one.
This should be interesting.. Sure it's pricey, 395$ for one of these bad boys. Hell, if I had the money for one, I'd do it... I'd happily wait the 4-6 weeks of delivery time.
But can you imagine what would happen if this Slashdot article is a success for them? I read the article late and the server was peppy and responsive, so lots of geeks are going to have time to see this.
If things go Right/Wrong for these guys that 4-6 weeks could turn suddenly into 4-6 Months.. Better order yours now;)
...security researchers have discovered that data transmitted through sex and foreplay can be remotely reconstructed from the equipment's moans and grunts. According to experiments, their audio-to-information retrieval method is successful even when the sound is heard 'at a considerable distance' from the source. If you want to prevent people from spying on your data, you may want to ballgag your significant other!
The state of Nevada has agree'd to allow speedpass to incorperate it's hardware methods of paying for bills in one of 13 new themed brothel houses. A reprisentitve from the brothel chain was stated as saying, "We feel that this partnership will allow them a chance to become a Jedi, as well as procure [sex]" Mockups of their flagship brothel house was a mix of modern design a futuristic technology. As simulated, customers will approach the brothel store front, speek there demands and perform "Jedi magic" One geek sweating nervously in the corner was questioned about the prospect of Star Wars themed sex. "I d-d-do believe that it will open a new avenue of adventure, being able to go to a place and say You desire my manhood, and be believed"
For those of you familiar with the [H]ard|OCP forums, I'm sure this will seem familiar to you,
WELCOME TO LAST WEEK
hell, not even a week. This is old news.:-\
I suppose it still fits the bill, News for nerds. But geez, can't we hear about new stuff? Like those spiffy Spir@l water blocks, uNF!
There's still the issue of loading a new CD.
I think it would be easiest to load from a spindle, i.e. take off the wrapper, open the lid, bingo! all set for your next batch of 100.
Suction could be a possability. But without having lego's around to tinker and toy with I'm stuck thinking. That and I can see them getting suctioned on, but not off. Nothing quite like getting sucked off and it never ending:-\
If you wanted to avoid cutting your burner's tray, I can think of a few other methods for offloading the finished cd. But this is simple.:)
Drive's open, flip, and we're done.
I don't mind cutting it either;) i'm nutty like that..
Don't suppose you could send me an email to discuss things?:)
I've been wondering about how to make a duplication machine via. lego's for some time now. (the @neversleeps.org addy will reach my inbox)
I've figured out how you could off load burnt cd's. It would take some warranty voiding but could be done. Just simply cut the end of a tray loading drive out, giving you an open U shape.
then it's just a matter of flipping the cd up and over to what ever you want, I was thinking a dowel rod would work.
the only thing I haven't figured out is how you could load in a new blank cd with out needing to pre-load them into something to make it easy enough. Just right off the spindle.
A terabyte isn't any thing special. But it's cool to see someone doing it. I was bored once one night. For a mere 36K you could, assuming you already own a Thunder K7 w/ the on-board SCSI pluss needed components, put together your self some really big storage. Using those 181GB Seagate SCSI drives.
U160 and all of it churning at 10,000RPM. For a grand total of a few GB short of 5.5 Terabytes.
But assuming you can affoard Thirty 1200$ drives you should be able to spring for a nice U160 SCSI RAID Card with an external connector;p
I couldn't even find a case with enough room for 30 hd's.... and I don't want to even think about cooling.
But I wont have to worry about that. I can't even affoard a 9gb scsi drive at this point.
This gives me another item to tinker with when it comes to building a CD Changer out of Lego's.
My brother has a small cd-r label, and so does a lot of burning. I've been contemplating how I could make a cd-changer to automate the most boring part of it all, changing cd's, one at a time.
So far I've gotton it mostly figured out, except how to load a new cd from a spindle.
It's either figure out the spindle issue, or find some way to preload cd's for easy swapping.
Now, maybe I can have the cd-changer interact with the burning process. woot! "Hey, do I put in a cd now? NO, we're stuck!" at which point I activate some little lego man to wave his arms. heh.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a quick question, What the fuck is Evit?
And for the cost of one cheap single channel SCSI card I can fit 15 180GB hd's for 2.7Tb of slow but still plenty of data.
Or, I can buy 4 IDE cards and get the same.
4 slots or one?
We could spend a little more and get a dual channel SCSI card, 30@180Gb, 5.4Tb of slow storage. Know where I can find a motherboard with 8 PCI slots?
the funny thing is, is if he does sue slashdot, and take his no legal fee's the distance. He could, In theory, sue
Slashdot, for providing the forum for the slander to happen.
Every individual who badmouthed the stupid fucker.
All the various internet related companies who carried the traffic, from major carriers to the mom & pop ISP's.
Hell, Even Al Gore, for making the internet.
You know, if it wasn't for the 100$ adapter price I would be all over this like stank on a monkey.
My system is based on a Tyan Thunder K7. with the SCSI. Booting is done off of an 18Gb 15k rpm Cheetah. And mass storage via a 120Gb Maxtor.
It'd be nice indeed to keeep the IDE channels for burner and dvd drive. While adding copious ammounts of storage into the 29 available slots on the SCSI.
Let's see, 300$ for a 180Gb, 100$ for the Adaptor. 5.2 Terabytes at the cost of 116k.
I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.
Though.. 114$ for a 100Gb, plus adaptor, I could reach a terabyte for a mear 2 grand. As an added feature both 1Tb and 5.2Tb are *without* the addition of extra cards.
What I wouldn't do for a job.
There is also the occasion when something is still on top because no one knows better. If you've owned a mobo based on a via chipset, and a creative card. I bet more often then not you had some issues with it.
I own a Gametheater XP, as well as a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both provide the functionality any offering of Creative can. With a hell of a lot fewer compliance issues.
I'll admit I have been interested in some of Creatives recent releases, they have a few with an interesting break-out box. But it's still just a different set of knobs on the same broken sound card.
I wont purchase another Creative at the present time. I'm quite pleased with Turtle Beach and/or Hercules. But one can't predict the future.
First off, wow, I'm amazed. I posted this ask slashdot not more then two days ago. My first acceptance on slashdot. heh. :)
:)
Secondly, Thanks. This is a load of information. I will certainly look into those links above. As I was doing the random google pick and filling out applications for a few that seemed ineresting enough to dedicate beta testing time to, I did notice a majority of them asked which beta's I've particupated in if any.
And as for you mentioning reporting bugs, with Earth and Beyond I unfortunetly only joined in the end during there stress test. But something is better then nothing.
thanks for your information.
I was wondering where it was my self.
It's like the damn submitter thought we would know where to find it at anand tech, and what's this "the folks" Why is it I imagine a bunch of geeks all wearing heard hats of one color with nvidia or ati's logo on it, Being lead around by an older fellow with a diferent color hardhat.
Right, a tour group, It was probably just one guy who payed the guard 20$ and a bottle of jack to be let in after hours....
I like Hard|OCP's tour of gainward. They manufacture there video cards two to a PCB and cut them down the middle. That would be cool to build two systems which where connected by the unsevered agp card.
Like some freak siamese twin, "And here is Tommy and Timmy, identical twins sharing the same GPU'
What I want to know is, How much for a copy of FreeDOS?
Ok, so as I was reading the comments I found various, "It's fake" and this that and the other thing. The one thing that threw me off is mention of a cloud background, I saw absolutely no clouds...
o cloud. Branding. SN Obscurity.
s . REBranding. SN Obscurity redone.
Until I found the OTHER image.
http://members.rogers.com/kawaichan/palm.jpg
N
http://hisham.cc/files/pics/palmaroo.jpg
Cloud
The second one done by daves ipaq is horribly manipulated. It's quite obvious he wanted credit for it, and so modified it to have his cloudy background, removed the other guys branding, and removed the others SN Obscurity. You can tell, because half of the "o" on Oslo is mangled.
Dave, you suck, uninstall photoshop you fool.
If you want to zoom in 400X to see if you can detect any l33t choppage to claim your right as mastar-detective, use the first one.
In the United States, the most common keyboard layout for computer keyboards remains the one designed by Christopher Sholes for the original Remington "Type Writer" in 1876. This layout is commonly called QWERTY after the order of the first few letters on its top row.
: ; , .
/
/
Other layouts exist. I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for about a year now. I like it a lot for my daily work, which involves a lot of typing. I used to feel a numbness of the backs of my hands after a long day with QWERTY, but I don't with Dvorak. And quantified measurements bear out its efficiency relative to QWERTY.
But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing. Could a modern genetic algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better arrangement? I had to give it a try. The results surprised me!
I limited this experiment to the 30 keys under the four fingers of the two hands. They include the 26 letters of the English alphabet and four punctuation symbols (comma, period, quote, and semicolon). (A QWERTY layout typically has the slash in this region instead of quote.) Other punctuation was ignored.
First, I needed a quantifiable metric by which one keyboard layout could be compared to another. I constructed a function the measures the amount of "work" needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout. This function estimates total finger travel, with some extra penalties in some situations and some bonuses in others. Specifically, I simulate the typing of a (single) word with these rules:
All 8 fingers start on the home row.
An index finger stretch to the center costs 1 unit.
Fingers of the same hand can't be on both the top and bottom row. When a top-row or bottom-row key is to be hit, each finger on the bottom or top row (respectively) moves to the home row, and that costs 1 unit each.
After that, if a finger has to move up or down to hit the key, it costs 1 unit. An additional unit is charged to move to the bottom row (except for the index finger in its natural column) or to move an index finger to the top row in its unnatural center column. Furthermore, moving a pinky up or down costs an additional unit. I have weak pinkies.
Hitting two distinct keys in succession with the same finger is really bad; 3 more units are charged.
An extra unit is assessed when nonadjacent fingers of the same hand are used in succession and they are not both on the home row.
But adjacent fingers are charged a unit to hit keys on distinct rows, and one more if there's adjacent movement between the top and bottom rows.
When a shift key is used, the fingers of the shifting hand move to the home row for free afterwards.
My work estimation function simulates the typing of words, not simply digraphs and longer sequences. So it captures the effects of fingers being left on whatever keys they are on after they type the letters.
I also needed a corpus of sample text. I collected about 20 megabytes of English from Project Gutenberg. I used the King James Version of the Bible, the complete works of William Shakespeare and (naturally!) Charles Darwin, the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Melville's Moby Dick, the Education of Henry Adams, and other works. To that I added a decade of sent e-mail (bodies only) and about 100,000 lines of C code. This corpus therefore reflects my own typing to some degree by intent and other people would surely observe different results.
The total input size is 4293746 words in 3307922 bytes. There are 88732 distinct words that appear more than once, where a word is defined as a contiguous sequence of characters that can be typed with the thirty central keys. The most frequent words are:
240036 the
140994 of
140641 and
92363 to
69993 in
69255 a
51265 i
50069 that
37358
37291 is
36819 for
32300 with
30704 he
30079 his
29071 be
28690 as
27130 it
25650 not
22020 this
21603 have
21467 by
21402 but
21241 my
21001 on
20928 was
18867 you
18067 if
17949 from
17483
17330 are
17058 which
16973 all
16958 they
16587 or
14853 will
14809 at
14768 we
14362 shall
13701 their
12595
12416 so
11985
11518 had
11454 an
11307 thou
11037 your
10377 sv
10296 him
10257 when
10155 one
Next, I constructed an evolutionary framework. After trying several, I ended up with a scheme in which a pool of 4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to "type" a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept, and the other half of the layouts are sent to the showers. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor. The mutations are made by permuting keys in the layout, with a 50% chance of swapping two keys, a 25% chance of swapping three, a 12.5% chance of four, and so on.
The evolutionary framework itself had to evolve. It was challenging to find a scheme with sufficient mutation possibilities that would allow a medium-quality layout enough time to improve itself with multiple mutations before getting eliminated. I also learned that it was important to track only distinct layouts, for otherwise a single good one would rapidly fill the pool with identical copies of itself.
When no new best layout has risen to the top of the pool in some number of generations, the round stops. The best layouts are stored away and the pool repopulated with random keyboards. This allows a fresh start after one layout has populated the pool with itself and its mutations.
Last, there is an "all-star" round in which the best survivors from all the rounds compete. The Dvorak and QWERTY layouts get seeded into this round too for fun.
Enough detail on the experimental framework! Once I was happy with the evaluation function and evolutionary framework, I was fascinated to watch it run in real time and see the intermediate results. I kept a running display of the top five layouts in each generation. Usually, layouts with different home row orders will battle it out until one has proven itself superior. It would only take a couple of generations for a round to produce something better than QWERTY. And it quickly became clear that putting the vowels on the home row of the left hand, which is a cornerstone concept of the Dvorak layout, was not seen by the algorithm as optimal.
What came out of the exercise, afterovernight? Here is the winner, which I am using now to type this note, as well as the Dvorak and QWERTY layouts with their scores:
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout
a o e u i d h t n s 12189785
; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing
a s d f g h j k l ; 25390660
z x c v b n m , . '
. u y p q k l d c g Best evolved layout
e a i n w r h t s o 9640479
' , ; f z j m v b x
The next step was to actually try using the layout. I spent a couple days with it, and learned that my layout evaluation function was just too smart for its own good. Too many words involved complicated patterns using the fingers of the right hand. The word bottom convinced me that Dvorak was on to something when he designed a keyboard that maximized alternation between the hands.
So I updated -- simplified, really -- my evaluation function. Now I charge points when too many keys are hit in succession by fingers of the same hand, with some credits for hitting adjacent keys. Specifically, the new simplified rules are:
Every position has an assigned cost that's looked up from a table. The OEU/HTN positions of Dvorak have no cost. A and S are 1 unit; I and D are two; P and GCR are three; Y and F are four; ", QJK, MWV, and L are five; : and Z are six; and X and B are seven.
Using the same finger twice in succession on distinct letters costs 10 units.
When two keys in a row are struck with the same hand, it costs two units if they're on different rows or on the bottom row, and one unit if they're not adjacent.
If three or more keys are hit in succession by the same hand, one unit is charged for each key after the second.
Much simpler! So I ran the experiment again. What did I see?
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout
a o e u i d h t n s 32129548
; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing
a s d f g h j k l ; 59514344
z x c v b n m , . '
k , u y p w l m f c Best evolved layout
o a e i d r n t h s 28281895
q . ' ; z x v g b j
That looks way more usable to me. But (perhaps not surprisingly), it sure looks a lot like Dvorak, too, and is not quantifiably all that much better. Note that the simple goal of hand alternation did bring the vowels all over to the hand opposite the one with the T (which my program automatically places under the right hand). But it pulled U out of the home row so that R could live there.
Other differences from Dvorak are not that profound, and seem to correlate pretty well with a simple letter frequency analysis. I note that H was put where Dvorak has N, perhaps so that SH would be seen as using adjacent fingers. And P and Y swapped places.
Now I'm going to try this second layout for a day or two and see whether it's sufficiently (subjectively) superior to Dvorak to be worth the hassle of switching to it...
I used xkbcomp to remap my keyboard; here is the file if you are crazy enough to want to try it yourself.
In all, this little program required about 500 lines of C.
A better picture of the second layout is here in a PDF file.
If these unidentifiables are the one's I'm thinking of, they must have some great wireless connectivity from all those "It was only a weather balloon(s)" floating around.
It's a good thing they told me the 4.5 GB Install had to deal with a lot of data.
I might have been worried they where installing 3.5 GB of Pornography on my computer...
What I want to know is, how can we drop her a line? It's just not fair. We're not even given the opportunity to interact here.
How about you drop me a line? Pink Fruit Person...
One boy in South Dakota crys at the loss. Hilary Rosen decides to use one of her four remaining orgasms to celebrate. Next expect use, 2024.
Rest of population, doesn't really give a shit. Grandmother unavailable for comment.
I'm not sure what use this would have in cell phone's kinda silly and pointless... But I do see how this would be great for cars, plains, and other vehicles..
"Hello Charlie, you are not authorized to drive this vehicle at these hours, please contact Bob or Samantha for assistance" Bob and Sam being Mom and Dad... perhaps even automatic radio transmition on detected entry of foreign (No not foreigners...) entry into a plains cock pit. Pilot has 5 minutes to contact ground control to cancel the jets from being scrambled....
I don't need my cell phone telling me hello every time it recognizes me, it's a tool. Let me use it like one.
Screw heatsink shroud. This sounds like a great mobo backing over the pin array on the back. And as a plug filler inbetween sockets.
Sounds like it'd do a wonder for preventing condensation, and helping at the same time for Pelter use..
sissy panzies and there water only setup's.
This should be interesting.. Sure it's pricey, 395$ for one of these bad boys. Hell, if I had the money for one, I'd do it... I'd happily wait the 4-6 weeks of delivery time.
;)
But can you imagine what would happen if this Slashdot article is a success for them? I read the article late and the server was peppy and responsive, so lots of geeks are going to have time to see this.
If things go Right/Wrong for these guys that 4-6 weeks could turn suddenly into 4-6 Months.. Better order yours now
...security researchers have discovered that data transmitted through sex and foreplay can be remotely reconstructed from the equipment's moans and grunts. According to experiments, their audio-to-information retrieval method is successful even when the sound is heard 'at a considerable distance' from the source. If you want to prevent people from spying on your data, you may want to ballgag your significant other!
The state of Nevada has agree'd to allow speedpass to incorperate it's hardware methods of paying for bills in one of 13 new themed brothel houses. A reprisentitve from the brothel chain was stated as saying, "We feel that this partnership will allow them a chance to become a Jedi, as well as procure [sex]"
Mockups of their flagship brothel house was a mix of modern design a futuristic technology. As simulated, customers will approach the brothel store front, speek there demands and perform "Jedi magic"
One geek sweating nervously in the corner was questioned about the prospect of Star Wars themed sex. "I d-d-do believe that it will open a new avenue of adventure, being able to go to a place and say You desire my manhood, and be believed"
For those of you familiar with the [H]ard|OCP forums, I'm sure this will seem familiar to you,
:-\
WELCOME TO LAST WEEK
hell, not even a week. This is old news.
I suppose it still fits the bill, News for nerds. But geez, can't we hear about new stuff? Like those spiffy Spir@l water blocks, uNF!
There's still the issue of loading a new CD.
:-\
:)
;) i'm nutty like that..
I think it would be easiest to load from a spindle, i.e. take off the wrapper, open the lid, bingo! all set for your next batch of 100.
Suction could be a possability. But without having lego's around to tinker and toy with I'm stuck thinking. That and I can see them getting suctioned on, but not off. Nothing quite like getting sucked off and it never ending
If you wanted to avoid cutting your burner's tray, I can think of a few other methods for offloading the finished cd. But this is simple.
Drive's open, flip, and we're done.
I don't mind cutting it either
Don't suppose you could send me an email to discuss things? :)
I've been wondering about how to make a duplication machine via. lego's for some time now. (the @neversleeps.org addy will reach my inbox)
I've figured out how you could off load burnt cd's. It would take some warranty voiding but could be done. Just simply cut the end of a tray loading drive out, giving you an open U shape.
then it's just a matter of flipping the cd up and over to what ever you want, I was thinking a dowel rod would work.
the only thing I haven't figured out is how you could load in a new blank cd with out needing to pre-load them into something to make it easy enough. Just right off the spindle.
A terabyte isn't any thing special. But it's cool to see someone doing it. I was bored once one night. For a mere 36K you could, assuming you already own a Thunder K7 w/ the on-board SCSI pluss needed components, put together your self some really big storage. Using those 181GB Seagate SCSI drives.
;p
U160 and all of it churning at 10,000RPM. For a grand total of a few GB short of 5.5 Terabytes.
But assuming you can affoard Thirty 1200$ drives you should be able to spring for a nice U160 SCSI RAID Card with an external connector
I couldn't even find a case with enough room for 30 hd's.... and I don't want to even think about cooling.
But I wont have to worry about that. I can't even affoard a 9gb scsi drive at this point.
I had just finished the first ISO.
I was about the finish the second ISO (96%)
and I had 3-5% on each of the third and fourth ISO's
and then they release 4.5... damnit...
*deletes 1+ gb of data, and begins again*
And this is all at a top of 15KB/s. And I can assure you it never got that high.
This gives me another item to tinker with when it comes to building a CD Changer out of Lego's.
My brother has a small cd-r label, and so does a lot of burning. I've been contemplating how I could make a cd-changer to automate the most boring part of it all, changing cd's, one at a time.
So far I've gotton it mostly figured out, except how to load a new cd from a spindle.
It's either figure out the spindle issue, or find some way to preload cd's for easy swapping.
Now, maybe I can have the cd-changer interact with the burning process. woot! "Hey, do I put in a cd now? NO, we're stuck!" at which point I activate some little lego man to wave his arms. heh.