Ok, so i'll start the emacs versus vi flamewar right now. I just like vi's interface: it's like a stick shift: difficult to use until you understand it, then easy to do almost anything. vim takes it that much furthur, and vim on Debian does fun things like changing the xterm title. vim has my vote, even if it doesn't exist here. (I'm not going to discuss vigor because it passes the boundry into graphical. But hilarious, nontheless.)
and we even had an evil Win98 box sitting next to my Linux notebook. My notebook ran my customized JBC, displaying both the date and the time. Minor amusement to watch it roll over... my mom insisted on stockpiling water in the bathtub in case the water stopped so we still could flush, even though the local paper ran a front-page story on how the water supply was safe unless Newton's law of universal gravitation was repealed. I dropped a cork just to prove that it hasn't. Good thing the laws of physics still hold.
This is probably a Pandora's box we don't want to open, but I did take the opportunity provided by learning Dvorak to program myself to use both shift keys. In QWERTY, I used only the right shift key, but I started using both after I switched layouts. (I love Dvorak, but let's not go there at the moment. It helps to have a privlaged login to the local computer lab so I can change keyboard settings when necessary...)
Once I got used to my notebook's integrated trackball, I found it was great not to have to move my right hand a quarter of a meter to the right to access my mouse simply to change the focus or something. What would take a second or two on my desktop took only a fraction of a second. The trackball is directly below the spacebar, so I can reach down with my right thumb and nudge it around without moving my fingers off the home row.
I don't know how pratical this would be for this situation, but it does seem to me that trackballs are nicer on hands that mice -- you don't have to move your wrist at all. Perhaps I should convince the trackball module I rescued from an integrated keyboard/trackball combo I traded for some junk a while back to work properly. Then I'd have three major classes of pointing devices on my desk -- a mouse for my primary workstation, a touchpad for my secondary (I was too cheep to get a monitor/keyboard/mouse switch and settled for a monitor/keyboard switch, and I had the touchpad floating around gathering dust anyway), and a trackball thrown in for variety. (I do like the touchpad, though, and would use it more if it had three buttons. The best part of mine is that tapping once on it will single click -- some notebook touchpads I've seen don't do that, and it drives me nuts.)
We were trying to cut the drive mounting bracket so another motheboard and a cpu fan would fit. The operation was successful, but it was moot because the board (or the chip) was toast.
In my high school, the boxen in the English level computer lab were named after famous writers and the boxen in the science computer lab were scientists. I thought it was appropiate that the three Dells (in a sea of powermacs) were Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. (the three guys Data played poker with in "Descent".) The Linux server was Lorien, but I never could get anyone to tell me why.
I started out with Federation starships, but female sci-fi charcters are more attractive. (I've contemplated renaming my notebook to a female name so I can sleep with her...)
My box: Defiant (fighting the good fight against the Borg)
My notebook: Yukon (a DS9 runabout; it got taken over by a changling and got toasted by Defiant; at first, it ran Windows 95)
A hideously underpowered server: Ganges (another DS9 runabout, this one from the early days of the show)
Other boxen in the Commune:
Nerys (she has an attitude, possibally because she dual-boots to Windows 95 and BeOS)
Seven (of Nine) (she's still assimilated)
Zhaan (from Farscape)
My college names its boxen after Peanuts charcters: Snoopy, Charlie, Marcie... The one Linux server is Harriet; we should have gotten Linus, but the library took the name first.
The one true illumination source. Just enough ambient light to see the keyboard, nothing more. Perfect for coding when roommates want to sleep. (If only mine didn't shift colors from blue to orange...)
Several months ago, I was at CompUSA buying a hub (desperate -- we needed to get out of the colocation cabinet that night) and, to my amazment, I found a whole shelf with various shrink-wrapped Linux stuff: multiple distros, WordPerfect, and Civ: Call to Power for Linux. Apparently that day was the first day the store got CTP. I was highly impressed.
Who are the morons who come up with these patents? Anyone ever notice how patents and copyrights were supposed to protect intelectual property and now end up doing strange things like this?
Exact details seem sketchy, though. Exactly how does its patented system of assembling information about user preferences work?
I can't quote it exactly, but sometime in the mid-eighties the United States passed a law stating that everything affixed in permanent form is automatically copyrighted. Putting the copyright notice makes it a little stronger. To be totally bulletproof, one must register the copyright with the appropiate governing body, of course.
Borland won't even bother to discuss y2k compliance of the latest version of TP. Forget anything older than that. (And 7.0 -- I used it for my freshman cs class last year -- won't run properly on some newer machines. Delphi lacks console-mode capability for the moment -- they tell us it'll come with the next release. It seems Borland is intent on killing pascal... at least they did *something* clueful.)
Water doesn't actually get denser as it gets deeper, but rather the pressure increases. (I don't exactly understand quite how that works, but they tell me it does.) The differences between gasses and liquids is that liquids (and solids, for that matter) have constant density, while gasses change pressure with respect to volume and pressure. PV=nRT, for gasses
Great, 26 April is the first day of my last week of classes this semester. There goes my grades this semester... I wasted many hours playing civ classic and civ2. I still have my civ2 cd floating around here somewhere... (hm, or mabye it's at home) seems like just yesterday I wasted many otherwise useful hours...
What's worse? That Microsoft is offering it, or that some people are stupid enough to buy it? I'm just glad I bailed while I still had something resembling sanity left.
May the Source be with us.
The cost of retraining is worth paying
on
The Myth of QWERTY
·
· Score: 1
I have typed on QWERTY for years (hm, I'm 18 now, have been coding for the past decade) and switched to Dvorak over Christmas break this school year. The cost of my retraining was definatly worth paying. I haven't timed myself, but I do belive I am faster than I was on QWERTY. I also feel faster.
Some friends of mine decided they were going to switch at the beginning of the school year, and I followed a little behind them for a little while, but I didn't make the entire plunge. I kept my QWERTY knowledge while gradually building up my Dvorak. I slacked off for a while, but then during Christmas break, I took the full plunge, which took me a week before I felt up to speed in Dvorak. (During that time, however, my typing speed suffered. That's why I switched over a break in which I had enough time to spare.) My friends tell me they spent two weeks the cold turkey method before they were up to speed.
And let us not forget that Dvorak is perscribed by doctors (I do need a reference for this) for patients with RSI. Of all of the computer users out there, we are the ones who need to worry about it.
My point: the cost of retraining is worth paying. If I had to do it over, I probably would have switched years ago. (However, it is convient to have a group of people around you also switch, so you can build up infrastructure. In the local computer lab (albeit populated by evil win 95 boxen), one of my Dvorak friends wrote a Delphi program to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)
I'm here in a computer lab and therefore I don't have my cookie. The point being that it says "over 100 comments: printing index only" even when there are only a few comments.
They need to quit doing world conspiracies and go back to unrelated episodes with closure.
You seem to forget that no X Files episodes have closure, or at least not much. Remember "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'"? Scully tells Jose that the story they experienced had more closure than most things they encounter. And even then we still don't really have any clue what happened. Where did that guy from the center of the Earth come from?
Last year, my high school celebrated 12 pi day -- 12 pi years of the school's operation. It was a nice fun day to attempt to get people excited about math. Of course, I found it entertaining, but I'm already excited about math. My calculus teacher started it 2 pi years ago just after the school's 30th anniversary, at which point he wondered why we find it necessary to celebrate specific anniversaries -- if we celebrate 30 years, why shouldn't we celebrate 12 pi years?
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Ok, so i'll start the emacs versus vi flamewar right now. I just like vi's interface: it's like a stick shift: difficult to use until you understand it, then easy to do almost anything. vim takes it that much furthur, and vim on Debian does fun things like changing the xterm title. vim has my vote, even if it doesn't exist here. (I'm not going to discuss vigor because it passes the boundry into graphical. But hilarious, nontheless.)
Sorry about not closing out my a tag there. I feel *stupid* now.
Try this: http://defiant.festing.org:8080/geekcam .jpg Not perfect; my Nikon 900s at max zoom, which is still horrible. But I'm saving the images as fast as they come in and will probably stitch together an animation of it.
and we even had an evil Win98 box sitting next to my Linux notebook. My notebook ran my customized JBC, displaying both the date and the time. Minor amusement to watch it roll over... my mom insisted on stockpiling water in the bathtub in case the water stopped so we still could flush, even though the local paper ran a front-page story on how the water supply was safe unless Newton's law of universal gravitation was repealed. I dropped a cork just to prove that it hasn't. Good thing the laws of physics still hold.
This is probably a Pandora's box we don't want to open, but I did take the opportunity provided by learning Dvorak to program myself to use both shift keys. In QWERTY, I used only the right shift key, but I started using both after I switched layouts. (I love Dvorak, but let's not go there at the moment. It helps to have a privlaged login to the local computer lab so I can change keyboard settings when necessary...)
I don't know how pratical this would be for this situation, but it does seem to me that trackballs are nicer on hands that mice -- you don't have to move your wrist at all. Perhaps I should convince the trackball module I rescued from an integrated keyboard/trackball combo I traded for some junk a while back to work properly. Then I'd have three major classes of pointing devices on my desk -- a mouse for my primary workstation, a touchpad for my secondary (I was too cheep to get a monitor/keyboard/mouse switch and settled for a monitor/keyboard switch, and I had the touchpad floating around gathering dust anyway), and a trackball thrown in for variety. (I do like the touchpad, though, and would use it more if it had three buttons. The best part of mine is that tapping once on it will single click -- some notebook touchpads I've seen don't do that, and it drives me nuts.)
We were trying to cut the drive mounting bracket so another motheboard and a cpu fan would fit. The operation was successful, but it was moot because the board (or the chip) was toast.
Well, that makes two of us... Who needs to belive anything when we can program iMonks to do it for us?
In my high school, the boxen in the English level computer lab were named after famous writers and the boxen in the science computer lab were scientists. I thought it was appropiate that the three Dells (in a sea of powermacs) were Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. (the three guys Data played poker with in "Descent".) The Linux server was Lorien, but I never could get anyone to tell me why.
Welcome to zeus.mycompany.com
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania NT box #1
zeus login:
(ok, so nt boxen typically don't have issues. so sue me.)
- My box: Defiant (fighting the good fight against the Borg)
- My notebook: Yukon (a DS9 runabout; it got taken over by a changling and got toasted by Defiant; at first, it ran Windows 95)
- A hideously underpowered server: Ganges (another DS9 runabout, this one from the early days of the show)
Other boxen in the Commune:- Nerys (she has an attitude, possibally because she dual-boots to Windows 95 and BeOS)
- Seven (of Nine) (she's still assimilated)
- Zhaan (from Farscape)
My college names its boxen after Peanuts charcters: Snoopy, Charlie, Marcie... The one Linux server is Harriet; we should have gotten Linus, but the library took the name first.The one true illumination source. Just enough ambient light to see the keyboard, nothing more. Perfect for coding when roommates want to sleep. (If only mine didn't shift colors from blue to orange...)
Several months ago, I was at CompUSA buying a hub (desperate -- we needed to get out of the colocation cabinet that night) and, to my amazment, I found a whole shelf with various shrink-wrapped Linux stuff: multiple distros, WordPerfect, and Civ: Call to Power for Linux. Apparently that day was the first day the store got CTP. I was highly impressed.
Exact details seem sketchy, though. Exactly how does its patented system of assembling information about user preferences work?
Please not. Proof that, no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.
I can't quote it exactly, but sometime in the mid-eighties the United States passed a law stating that everything affixed in permanent form is automatically copyrighted. Putting the copyright notice makes it a little stronger. To be totally bulletproof, one must register the copyright with the appropiate governing body, of course.
Borland won't even bother to discuss y2k compliance of the latest version of TP. Forget anything older than that. (And 7.0 -- I used it for my freshman cs class last year -- won't run properly on some newer machines. Delphi lacks console-mode capability for the moment -- they tell us it'll come with the next release. It seems Borland is intent on killing pascal... at least they did *something* clueful.)
Water doesn't actually get denser as it gets deeper, but rather the pressure increases. (I don't exactly understand quite how that works, but they tell me it does.) The differences between gasses and liquids is that liquids (and solids, for that matter) have constant density, while gasses change pressure with respect to volume and pressure. PV=nRT, for gasses
Great, 26 April is the first day of my last week of classes this semester. There goes my grades this semester... I wasted many hours playing civ classic and civ2. I still have my civ2 cd floating around here somewhere... (hm, or mabye it's at home) seems like just yesterday I wasted many otherwise useful hours...
May the Source be with us.
Some friends of mine decided they were going to switch at the beginning of the school year, and I followed a little behind them for a little while, but I didn't make the entire plunge. I kept my QWERTY knowledge while gradually building up my Dvorak. I slacked off for a while, but then during Christmas break, I took the full plunge, which took me a week before I felt up to speed in Dvorak. (During that time, however, my typing speed suffered. That's why I switched over a break in which I had enough time to spare.) My friends tell me they spent two weeks the cold turkey method before they were up to speed.
And let us not forget that Dvorak is perscribed by doctors (I do need a reference for this) for patients with RSI. Of all of the computer users out there, we are the ones who need to worry about it.
My point: the cost of retraining is worth paying. If I had to do it over, I probably would have switched years ago. (However, it is convient to have a group of people around you also switch, so you can build up infrastructure. In the local computer lab (albeit populated by evil win 95 boxen), one of my Dvorak friends wrote a Delphi program to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)
Power to Dvorak. Death to QWERTY.
I'm here in a computer lab and therefore I don't have my cookie. The point being that it says "over 100 comments: printing index only" even when there are only a few comments.
You seem to forget that no X Files episodes have closure, or at least not much. Remember "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'"? Scully tells Jose that the story they experienced had more closure than most things they encounter. And even then we still don't really have any clue what happened. Where did that guy from the center of the Earth come from?
Last year, my high school celebrated 12 pi day -- 12 pi years of the school's operation. It was a nice fun day to attempt to get people excited about math. Of course, I found it entertaining, but I'm already excited about math. My calculus teacher started it 2 pi years ago just after the school's 30th anniversary, at which point he wondered why we find it necessary to celebrate specific anniversaries -- if we celebrate 30 years, why shouldn't we celebrate 12 pi years?