In fact, the Trade Federation characters' resemblance to Asian stereotypes did raise eyebrows, to the extent that their accents were changed after the first movie.
But yeah, in hindsight Jar-Jar is probably no worse than the Ewoks.
To me, this is a good thing if it joins with and speeds up Razor-QT development. Many times I wished for a lightweight QT-based desktop (but realistically, I'm so content with XFCE+openbox I'll probably never switch)
A small, nearly forgotten utility, but the one that opened the door of the internet for many.
In the same category, I might also mention Slirp, which I and many others used to suck full web access through our university shell accounts. Ah, the memories.
That's a fair question. I use Openbox with XFCE because you can customize keybindings for any kind of window manipulation you like - shoving windows to the left and right border, resizing, vertical maximizing, flipping between workspaces...
It's a nice middle-of-the-road solution for people who are sick and tired of fiddling with windows with the mouse but aren't ready to go whole hog with a tiling WM or setting up a desktop with panels, etc. from scratch.
The opposite-hand-of-the-mouse reason makes sense. But since I'm going to type with two hands anyway to search for something, it still seems faster to hit slash than a Ctrl+F stretch.
Anyway, as someone said, it's all about muscle memory we've developed. When I bang the slash key and nothing happens, that's immediate negative feedback when I'm using Chrome.
I don't have a smartphone yet, but I know the same thing will happen to me. In fact, that's the universal testimony: "I thought I didn't need it and now I can't live without it."
Have you ever thought about why? It's because this is the closest we've come to having our brains plugged directly into the intertubes 24/7. Information is a powerful drug. Getting used to having a smartphone changes YOU, even if only a little. Maybe it's ultimately for the good, but people should carefully weigh this before jumping on. I say if it helps you interact with the real world better and be more efficient in it, good. If it just makes you an even-more-distracted, angry-birds-playing information junkie, then not good.
I've used xfce since forever, sometimes trying more 'leet' window managers but I could never get proficient enough to do everything I wanted with them. Recently I replaced xfce's built-in window manager with openbox and I couldn't be happier. It's easy to define all the shortcut keys you want for flipping windows around, and I keep the advantage of xfce's panel, session management, etc. It was a big productivity boost for a minimal investment.
Yes, human creativity is still providing us with clever new ways to describe the act of defecation. As for me, I always take my Kindle to the bathroom.
Amen. The productivity-killing chiclet keyboard disease is spreading from Apple and infecting laptops and even desktop keyboards everywhere. Does nobody realize there was a *reason* key caps have been concave for the past, oh, 100 years? As you said, if they don't do any real work, they don't notice.
"My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word twenty. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles." --Abe Simpson
Just substitute "Steve Jobs" for "the Kaiser" and "pod" for "twenty", and there you go! History repeats itself.
Using DRM to create artificial scarcity for digital media can never be more than a stopgap solution.
As for the question "How will authors get paid" -- have you considered that just maybe the world might be a better place if *fewer* people were able to make a living by writing?
If you produce something that's not a good or service that tangibly contributes to human welfare, it should be harder to earn money from it. This is already the case to some extent.
I'm not saying that writing and arts and other intangibles cannot contribute to human welfare--on the contrary, they can do so in ways that ordinary goods and services cannot. What I AM saying is that 90%+ of books and CDs are steaming piles of manure written to make a buck and contribute absolutely nothing. Maybe artificial scarcity of media has made it too easy to get paid for producing something of zero worth.
If someone has a strong enough passion for writing/creating, they will create no matter what. Some of those will be recognized and compensated in their lifetimes, and others will not. Of course, it's not "fair". But is it less fair than the way the big publishers, who rely absolutely on scarcity, treat content creators now?
I still feel the quality of discourse in society would greatly improve if the only people who were writers were people who were at least willing to be poor for it.
You could, because counting the lines of assembled code would tell us exactly what we want to know: the level of complexity of the program that is being executed. It's just that the number of lines of C code is much easier to count, and anyway the relationship between the number lines of C code and number of lines of assembled code is fairly constant. It's a good enough metric for all practical purposes.
If your real concern is how hard it is for humans to maintain the codebase, then lines of code (with or without comments) is not such an informative metric in the first place.
I've held for a while that the best "beginner" keyboard interface ever is what's in the pico/nano editors. Start it up, and you see two rows at the bottom of the screen showing you which control key combination to press to open, save, spellcheck, etc. One of the shortcuts listed acts to replace those two rows with a new set showing less-commonly-used commands.
When I TA for the introductory programming course, it's the first editor I tell the students to use while they're trying to get used to UNIX. When a person types "nano" and looks at the screen, they immediately know what to do. Yet the keys you eventually learn by heart after staring at those rows are the same commands that make you a "power keyboard user." It's a totally natural learning curve toward keyboard productivity.
There will always be a small group of people with the motivation to learn vi/emacs well enough to become really powerful with them. I think pico/nano is a good compromise that doesn't leave "the rest of us" too far behind.
I recently replaced my ancient Kyocera "candy bar" with the most basic Nokia candy bar model VZW offered. I was deeply disappointed with how much clunkier the interface is. On the Kyocera, as soon as you started pushing numbers it started matching up the possible letter combinations with entries in the phone book. As soon as you get the unique match, press -send- and off you go. Or punch in two or three numbers and scroll down once or twice.
Silly me, I thought this was so obviously 'the right way' that *every* phone should behave similarly. But my new Nokia forces you to navigate all the menus in the clunkiest way possible. I guess they're scared of confusing somebody.
Let's compare calling "mom" on each phone: Kyocera: 6-6-6 -send- Nokia: -down- 6 *wait for cursor* 6-6-6 *wait* 6 -send-
That's not quite right. Yes, one double-precision float can measure a hydrogen atom's width in meters. But funny things start happening when you start subtracting and dividing limited-precision numbers. You can get numerical instability and errors increasing exponentially. Most any numerical algorithm that uses floating-point has to be written very carefully to avoid these sorts of problems. Check out a textbook on numerical methods.
I read the article's justifications. And I don't doubt that the number of elevation prompts seen in 'normal' usage will decrease as the betas roll on, to a number that most people will just learn to live with.
But I can't shake the feeling that their idea of increased security is, "WE decide, case by case, what operations are safe for you to do on your computer." Especially with sentences like this: "The hope here is that the user won't need to launch many administrative applications." Or, "Why can't my child run the anti-virus checker?" "They're not supposed to."
Sounds to me like by the time Vista goes gold, Microsoft will have successfully determined what set of operations we should be allowed to do with our computers to make the system somewhat usable by MOST users, MOST of the time.
Does that sound scary to anybody else? PC's with Microsoft OS's are becoming more and more like appliances with just a fixed set of day-in, day-out tasks, e.g. media center, gaming box, office productivity tool.
Fine, then. If that's all people want, I guess they should have an OS that conditions them not to do stupid things. The good result of this might be that Microsoft OS's will be even less desirable for people who still want to use a PC as a tool for exploration, research, and hacking. The bad result will be that, if M$ stays ubiquitous, fewer and fewer young people will even realize that that's what PC's at their best can be.
Slashdot Mirror
In the "keep it simple" school, I like Cherrytree:
http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/
Basic hierarchical rich text notebooks.
Just copy or sync the single XML or Sqlite notebook file.
In fact, the Trade Federation characters' resemblance to Asian stereotypes did raise eyebrows, to the extent that their accents were changed after the first movie.
But yeah, in hindsight Jar-Jar is probably no worse than the Ewoks.
To me, this is a good thing if it joins with and speeds up Razor-QT development. Many times I wished for a lightweight QT-based desktop (but realistically, I'm so content with XFCE+openbox I'll probably never switch)
Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1.
A small, nearly forgotten utility, but the one that opened the door of the internet for many.
In the same category, I might also mention Slirp, which I and many others used to suck full web access through our university shell accounts. Ah, the memories.
That's a fair question. I use Openbox with XFCE because you can customize keybindings for any kind of window manipulation you like - shoving windows to the left and right border, resizing, vertical maximizing, flipping between workspaces...
It's a nice middle-of-the-road solution for people who are sick and tired of fiddling with windows with the mouse but aren't ready to go whole hog with a tiling WM or setting up a desktop with panels, etc. from scratch.
The opposite-hand-of-the-mouse reason makes sense. But since I'm going to type with two hands anyway to search for something, it still seems faster to hit slash than a Ctrl+F stretch.
Anyway, as someone said, it's all about muscle memory we've developed. When I bang the slash key and nothing happens, that's immediate negative feedback when I'm using Chrome.
Do any of them let you map forward-slash to searching within the page?
I don't have a smartphone yet, but I know the same thing will happen to me. In fact, that's the universal testimony: "I thought I didn't need it and now I can't live without it."
Have you ever thought about why? It's because this is the closest we've come to having our brains plugged directly into the intertubes 24/7. Information is a powerful drug. Getting used to having a smartphone changes YOU, even if only a little. Maybe it's ultimately for the good, but people should carefully weigh this before jumping on. I say if it helps you interact with the real world better and be more efficient in it, good. If it just makes you an even-more-distracted, angry-birds-playing information junkie, then not good.
I've used xfce since forever, sometimes trying more 'leet' window managers but I could never get proficient enough to do everything I wanted with them. Recently I replaced xfce's built-in window manager with openbox and I couldn't be happier. It's easy to define all the shortcut keys you want for flipping windows around, and I keep the advantage of xfce's panel, session management, etc. It was a big productivity boost for a minimal investment.
Yes, human creativity is still providing us with clever new ways to describe the act of defecation. As for me, I always take my Kindle to the bathroom.
That's amazing! I'm still teaching my 3-year-old how to self-wipe.
Amen. The productivity-killing chiclet keyboard disease is spreading from Apple and infecting laptops and even desktop keyboards everywhere. Does nobody realize there was a *reason* key caps have been concave for the past, oh, 100 years? As you said, if they don't do any real work, they don't notice.
"My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word twenty. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles."
--Abe Simpson
Just substitute "Steve Jobs" for "the Kaiser" and "pod" for "twenty", and there you go! History repeats itself.
Using DRM to create artificial scarcity for digital media can never be more than a stopgap solution.
As for the question "How will authors get paid" -- have you considered that just maybe the world might be a better place if *fewer* people were able to make a living by writing?
If you produce something that's not a good or service that tangibly contributes to human welfare, it should be harder to earn money from it. This is already the case to some extent.
I'm not saying that writing and arts and other intangibles cannot contribute to human welfare--on the contrary, they can do so in ways that ordinary goods and services cannot. What I AM saying is that 90%+ of books and CDs are steaming piles of manure written to make a buck and contribute absolutely nothing. Maybe artificial scarcity of media has made it too easy to get paid for producing something of zero worth.
If someone has a strong enough passion for writing/creating, they will create no matter what. Some of those will be recognized and compensated in their lifetimes, and others will not. Of course, it's not "fair". But is it less fair than the way the big publishers, who rely absolutely on scarcity, treat content creators now?
I still feel the quality of discourse in society would greatly improve if the only people who were writers were people who were at least willing to be poor for it.
Can't believe no one posted that one yet.
Yo dawg, I heard you like smartphones so I put a VM on your smartphone so you can smartphone while you smartphone.
You could, because counting the lines of assembled code would tell us exactly what we want to know: the level of complexity of the program that is being executed. It's just that the number of lines of C code is much easier to count, and anyway the relationship between the number lines of C code and number of lines of assembled code is fairly constant. It's a good enough metric for all practical purposes.
If your real concern is how hard it is for humans to maintain the codebase, then lines of code (with or without comments) is not such an informative metric in the first place.
I've held for a while that the best "beginner" keyboard interface ever is what's in the pico/nano editors. Start it up, and you see two rows at the bottom of the screen showing you which control key combination to press to open, save, spellcheck, etc. One of the shortcuts listed acts to replace those two rows with a new set showing less-commonly-used commands.
When I TA for the introductory programming course, it's the first editor I tell the students to use while they're trying to get used to UNIX. When a person types "nano" and looks at the screen, they immediately know what to do. Yet the keys you eventually learn by heart after staring at those rows are the same commands that make you a "power keyboard user." It's a totally natural learning curve toward keyboard productivity.
There will always be a small group of people with the motivation to learn vi/emacs well enough to become really powerful with them. I think pico/nano is a good compromise that doesn't leave "the rest of us" too far behind.
Don't worry. You can use both the internets. The President has been.
I recently replaced my ancient Kyocera "candy bar" with the most basic Nokia candy bar model VZW offered. I was deeply disappointed with how much clunkier the interface is. On the Kyocera, as soon as you started pushing numbers it started matching up the possible letter combinations with entries in the phone book. As soon as you get the unique match, press -send- and off you go. Or punch in two or three numbers and scroll down once or twice.
/whine.
Silly me, I thought this was so obviously 'the right way' that *every* phone should behave similarly. But my new Nokia forces you to navigate all the menus in the clunkiest way possible. I guess they're scared of confusing somebody.
Let's compare calling "mom" on each phone:
Kyocera: 6-6-6 -send-
Nokia: -down- 6 *wait for cursor* 6-6-6 *wait* 6 -send-
Absolutely maddening by comparison.
That's not quite right. Yes, one double-precision float can measure a hydrogen atom's width in meters. But funny things start happening when you start subtracting and dividing limited-precision numbers. You can get numerical instability and errors increasing exponentially. Most any numerical algorithm that uses floating-point has to be written very carefully to avoid these sorts of problems. Check out a textbook on numerical methods.
The body cannot live without the mind.
Am I the only one whose first thought on reading the headline was "edible packing material"?
I actually know someone who got a candy shipment as a gift, opened the box, and tried to eat those styrofoam packing peanuts.
In European Russia, you crawl through the wormbot's intestines!
I read the article's justifications. And I don't doubt that the number of elevation prompts seen in 'normal' usage will decrease as the betas roll on, to a number that most people will just learn to live with.
But I can't shake the feeling that their idea of increased security is, "WE decide, case by case, what operations are safe for you to do on your computer." Especially with sentences like this: "The hope here is that the user won't need to launch many administrative applications." Or, "Why can't my child run the anti-virus checker?" "They're not supposed to."
Sounds to me like by the time Vista goes gold, Microsoft will have successfully determined what set of operations we should be allowed to do with our computers to make the system somewhat usable by MOST users, MOST of the time.
Does that sound scary to anybody else? PC's with Microsoft OS's are becoming more and more like appliances with just a fixed set of day-in, day-out tasks, e.g. media center, gaming box, office productivity tool.
Fine, then. If that's all people want, I guess they should have an OS that conditions them not to do stupid things. The good result of this might be that Microsoft OS's will be even less desirable for people who still want to use a PC as a tool for exploration, research, and hacking. The bad result will be that, if M$ stays ubiquitous, fewer and fewer young people will even realize that that's what PC's at their best can be.