But yesterday I just 'apt-get upgrade'd my Debian potato system, like any other day. It automagically upgraded to October Gnome (there was careful work done this time to make sure that all the distros had packages ready the day it came out). Everything worked perfectly, since the distro is continuously updated and checked.
Debian unstable is up to 4050-odd packages comprising everything ever anywhere. I'm up to 537 of them installed.
After I upgraded to October Gnome, I went to a CMU-LUG meeting where Jacob Berkman (the gnome-core maintainer and panel hacker) talked about October Gnome!
When Reagan sold off the LANDSAT program to the private sector, a company named something like EEOS (I honestly don't remember) bought the thing, then started selling the images back to the public. The last LANDSAT that worked (one was lost) was something like IV, and it had (among other equipment) a 1-meter res imager in a couple of bands.
LANDSAT VII (Launched or about to be launched) should be back in the public domain, and will provide similar res images in a great many more bands (200+ iirc).
Amazing how you can apply what you learning in Geoscience!
You could just buy an Electrohome Marquee series digital projector. My friend has one he got for free. Sure, it's a bit bulky (about 4'x2'x3', 150 lbs) but it will project a 20' image easily. 1600x1200 and super bright.
These are the projectors they use in the lecture halls here at CMU.
I've spent a lot of time both on 16 meg Windows and Linux machines.
I found no way to keep Windows from thrashing madly every time you change applications; there's no way to fit that much stuff into memory. Those are 2 of the most bloated apps for Win95.
Similarly, Netscape and KDE are some of the most bloated apps for X. On the 16 meg machines, I used fvwm2, which helped a lot. There's no way around Netscape (I detest it, but need it...). I suggest AbiWord and nedit as some light weight editors (taking 4.4 and 3 megs of ram respectively at the moment). Nedit is a programmers editor, and AbiWord is an MSWord compatible Word Processor.
You're still going to get some thrashing, but things should improve. Also, go through and kill stuff that doesn't need to be running. No dock apps, no panels (just a root menu should suffice), no extra daemons.
The truth is, if you want the flashy graphics stuff you're going to have to pay. I don't find Gtk+ (I happen to use GNOME) any slower than the Win95 GUI, but I don't find it any faster or smaller either. But the great thing about Linux is its modularity; you can build a solution that leaves out the extraneous stuff, resulting in a much friendlier experience on old hardware.
I find the Win95/98 GUI a great deal less stable (in the sense that it's very often explorer.exe that crashes), and not particularly any faster.
I can't remember the last time X crashed. And while the standard way for clients to use the X server is on the slow side, to prove network transparency (a feature I rely on every day), there are ways to get around the slowness -- X shared memory, and direct framebuffer access. Both of these are available to apps that really need them.
I have to say I would like to see better speed on the part of GLX. My Ultra2 is noticably slower under Linux than under windows, due to the architecture of the GLX Xserver/GL extensions.
Louis XIV was the Sun King. He was an absolute monarch who finally managed to get the nobles under control (which Louis XIII, of Muketeer and Cardinal Richelieu fame, had never managed to do).
Louis XV was an even more extreme successor. His famous quote was, "After me, the deluge", and he lived like he believed it.
Louis XVI was a genuinely nice guy who was not totally unamenable to reforms towards a more constitutional monarchy. But the rabble cut his head off anyway. Honestly, I'm a fluent French speaker, and I don't understand the French either:)
I rag on ATI as much as anyone for being habitually behind the times (and I have used every major video card on the market now except GeForce, which I'm planning on getting fairly soon).
You should know that 3dfx, the recognized performance leader for most of the last 2 years (this of course may be changing) has been using the exact same old technology for quite some time. Voodoo2 is just a someone updated Voodoo1 chip (they added hardware support for the lighting calculation along the edges of the triangle, iirc). Voodoo3 is just an overclocked SLI Voodoo2 (Voodoo3 2000 has exactly the same performance numbers as a V2 SLI rig, as we measured it). Voodoo4 will have some new stuff (tho no one knows exactly what yet), but it is definitely still a direct descendent of SST1, the core Voodoo technology.
Similarly, TNT2 is just a massively overclocked TNT (GeForce does appear to be quite different).
I will give ATI the benafit of the doubt till I see the performance numbers.
Hilariously, the Maxx has 2x as much memory as the high-end Rage 128, for a whopping 64 megs, which is totally absurd. That's as much memory as my entire system! (and of course I can't afford more ram now:(... )
You know the weird thing? I just read about Maxx on ATI's webpage yesterday. When I woke up (4 minutes ago) I realized I had a dream about it. Then I came here, and there was a story about it! Man, I must be sad....
Time to go email ATI...maybe I'll ask them for nice open Linux drivers.
No signal to noise. And I've seen much better results for landscape generation: check out MetaCreations Bryce, based on the work of the grandfather of procedural texturing, Ken Musgrave. It's stunningly beautiful.
"But this could be promising!..." True. I'll believe when I see promising artworks. This reporter obviously got carried away; I'm in computer games and I'm just not impressed.
"But Bryce isn't realtime!" True enough as well. Bryce is a raytracer; it takes a long time to render. Oooooooooooh.....I wish I could talk to you about this... comments, Rosenthal or Scherer? I'm sorry, I just don't feel at liberty to disclose anything. Those of you that know us and our work, trust us...
I do disagree with you on one point: No reason a 22 year old can't do this. Everyone in the basement is 19 or younger.
Alphas come out slightly faster, as was mentioned, due to clockspeed. PA-RISCs are faster clock-per clock (tho 21364 hasn't come out yet...)
But Alphas are very different machines than HPs. Alphas are pure number crunching machines. I don't think anyone's using HPs who doesn't have legacy reasons to do so. HP-UX is a pretty miserable UNIX, and the machines themselves are quite expensive (moreso than Alphas, I believe). Alphas are relatively cheap as workstations go. HPs tend to be popular in engineering applications, where the people have been using them for a long time and are very comfortable with them.
I always assumed Victorinox was the original. Wenger seems to have a trademark on the phrase "The Genuine Swiss Army Knife", which means they are kinda by definition:). But who was there first?
Victorinox are very good. My dad had one for 25 years, and the little clip with the ring broke. He sent it back, and they promptly replaced it with a new one -- the exact same model.
I'm happy with my SPARCBook3. Cost me $230 shipping included, a bloody sight less than most PDAs.
Sure it's a bit heavy (gotta love that magnesium case). But it runs real OSs (Solaris 2.5/6/7, NetBSD, Linux). It's got great features (builtin sound, ethernet, 2 modems, ISDN ). And it meets my criterion: since it runs a perfectly stable OS (Sol 2.5.1), I can just suspend it and resume it in about 30 seconds each. So I can arrive somewhere and be hacking without waiting for boot. Granted the battery life isn't amazing, just enough for a 90 minute lecture, though newer laptops are much better for that.
It can dhcp in any lecture hall with netbars, and if I wasn't too cheap to spring for wireless it could do that too i think (might need a newer Solaris version).
I spend my class and between class time this morning half listning to lectures, half hacking madly at Verilog. It was a great productivity boost considering my ECE lab tonight. I also use it to take notes that are actually readable for once -- definitely worth the flexibility tradoff verses pen & paper.
Spend an equivalent amount of money on a PDA that's smaller but can only take a few terse notes and keep my appointments? Forget it.
"...his [Torvalds'] company..." is just an expression.
This is all speculation, of course: I'm sure they gave Linus a nice chunk of stock, but he doesn't own all of it or even a controlling interest. It doesn't seem to me he'd want one.
Paul Allen was a founder, right? He's prolly got a nice big chunk.
The problem of how to break something like RSA is a mathematical one: either some operation is easy to do in one direction and hard to do in another, or it's in fact easy in both directions. Factoring is one example of such an operation.
The proposed quantum scheme relieson the fact that whether a photon will pass through a filter polarized at 45 degrees to the photon's own aligment is random at a quantum level, eg. can't be determined. Eve is screwed at a fundamental physics level. The only thing that could crack this would be major changes in our understanding of particle physics.
It's open to debate whether this is more or less likely than finding a quick factoring method (or in the case of RSA, a quick way to find Phi(n) from n). . .
But on different hardware every time, always late model hardware, and on full machines.
I work at a video game company. We don't use standard computers, we use rather high-end gaming systems. We use the latest video cards, sent to us by the manufacturers.
The last machines I installed had serious issues because they had so many peripherals, they used every one of their IRQs even after you disabled the parallel port, the serial ports, and anything else you could find. None of the hardware was unsupported by Windows -- it was all fairly standard stuff. Multiple IDE and SCSI HDs, Plextor SCSI burners/CD drives, vid cards, 3Com NICs, MS mice (USB I think, or maybe PS/2).
Of course, if you set up the same machine every time, you can get it down pat and efficient. Setting up the second of these two identical machines was much easier than setting up the first. Similarly, installing windows on standard hardware is very easy (assuming you know enough and have good drivers ready etc etc), but I find this no different from Linux.
Have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch on a computer (Win95, win31 was a pleasant breeze as long as you had the disks on a network. We used to set up Win31 machines with scripts in like 2minutes each)?
It's a royal pain in the ass.
You sit there searching for drivers for your hardware that works (unless you get shafted and something happens like the protected mode drivers for the IDE controller are on a CD-ROM... which doesn't work because you're using the realmode drivers).
It's even worse if, like this guy, you don't even know what hardware you have.
Win95 tries to plug-and-play. It invariably screws up complex machines.
Several of my friends built high-end machines this summer. Dual-slocket Celerons, DVD drives, CD burners, sound cards, NICs. We were using a variety of standard video cards while waiting for G400s. The only piece of hardware that didn't give us any trouble was the one that doesn't work in Linux -- the DVDs. Everything would have been fine in Linux, where I could have configured it without the bloody PnP drivers magically making up rules, and the operating system idiotically failing to detect conflicts as it assigned IRQs. It took several days to get those systems working with Win98. (NT was unhappy with the large HDs and never quite worked right, though I don't remember if it was the 20gig IDEs or 18gig SCSIs it didn't like, or if it was just a partition size thing).
Face it. You think windows is easy because you buy computers with it already installed. It's way more of a nightmare than Linux. At least someone who knows hardware and Linux can install Linux quite easily. I'm an extremely experienced windows user, and I can't necessarily make windows work right.
There's quite a bit of RSI-type problems here at CMU. I type as much as anyone here probably, but I'm careful, and so far I haven't had any problems.
There are some serious problems in the above (as well as in several other threads), and also some good advice.
The best thing you can do is take a month off from using the computer. Abso-frikkin-lutely.
get an ultra-ergonomic keyboard . ..Also, get some of those wrist-braces to immobilize your wrists while you type . . . Actually, while the wrist braces make make everything feel okay, you can continue to damage your hands while using them. Use them if you must, but avoid it.
Gel wrist rests may feel good, but they also encourage you to move the mouse or reach the keys with the small muscles of your hand rather than the big muscles of your arm -- a very bad thing. It's better to only ever rest your wrists lightly and move your hand with the whole arm.
The truth of the matter is, anytime you feel pain, you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't try to mask it -- you should try to fix it. Several of my friends have hurt themselves (fortunately none of them permanently) by using poorly set up college dorm desks and chairs. A good desk/chair/keyboard can help a lot, but isn't magic. I like a nice high comfy task chair, the keyboard at a reasonable height on the desk or in my lap, and a good keyboard. I don't go for the fancy ergo keyboards (tho some people like them a lot) -- I use exclusively good tactile clicky boards. I switch between an old IBM PS/2 (the amazing indestructible mid-80s kind... very hard to find now) and Sun type-4s (also quite good, properly positioned Ctrl key:), with occasional (never extreme) use of my laptop keyboard.
But having a good workstation won't protect you if you strain small muscles/tendons by repeatedly using them in ways they weren't designed (and no form of typing as we know it is what any of those muscles was designed for... evolution will take a long time to save use:). The best possible thing you can do is take breaks and change positions. Vary between putting your keyboard on the desk and on your lap. Move around in your chair. And take breaks at least every 15 minutes for a few minutes -- don't work more than 45 minutes out of the hour.
I'm no doctor (tho I've been exposed to a lot of material, good and bad, on the subject). But I'm a CMU CS student, I use computers constantly, and I play violin. I've also never had an instance of repetitive strain injury... I must be doing something right.
The real capital of the Internet is not in the backwoods commonwealth of Virginia.
Everyone knows that a disproportionate chunk of the Internet is centered in the Independent Privateer Republic of Fairfax (made up of Fairfax and Arlington counties and the city of Alexandria).
We have nothing to do with the rest of the state. We don't get along with them particularly well either.
My house is 1/2 mile from the UUNet building in Tysons to the north and 1/2 mile from the other UUNet building to the south (on 50). Novell is with AOL out in Dulles (AOL used to be near me in Vienna). In Tysons is Sprint, MCI, TCI, AT&T, Unisys, and just about everyone else.
It's a great place to live, much better than Pittsburgh (CMU should up and move)... but the traffic is lousy (2nd only to LA! woohoo!)
Coda would be overkill -- the depot-style requirements are intended for a distributed environment like a university, in which all the clients constantly accessing the servers to do anything would kill the system. Actually, afs (which is currently used at CMU) is intended to work similarly -- clients build updated caches of appropriate application directories for their architectures, with the result that machines running a constantly out-of-date minimal core OS are served a centralized set of applications...
For home network purposes, where a few users are unlikely to overwhelm the server, use NFS. It's easy, it's well supported across OSs, its performance may not be incredible but nothing you're likely to do will strain it. Even if you're moving huge files around, you're not going to have 10 people moving huge files around simultaneously.
Actually, there's one more fun option to consider: Inter-Mezzo, a distributed fs written in PERL in a few weeks by the creator of CODA, Peter Braam. It's small, it's pretty quick (the speed-critical parts are in C:), it's cool... it can do a lot of the things CODA can, but it's much lighterweight, doesn't require its own fstype. I don't have the link handy, and I don't know if it has the same caching requirements as CODA...
Slashdot Mirror
But yesterday I just 'apt-get upgrade'd my Debian potato system, like any other day. It automagically upgraded to October Gnome (there was careful work done this time to make sure that all the distros had packages ready the day it came out). Everything worked perfectly, since the distro is continuously updated and checked.
Debian unstable is up to 4050-odd packages comprising everything ever anywhere. I'm up to 537 of them installed.
After I upgraded to October Gnome, I went to a CMU-LUG meeting where Jacob Berkman (the gnome-core maintainer and panel hacker) talked about October Gnome!
When Reagan sold off the LANDSAT program to the private sector, a company named something like EEOS (I honestly don't remember) bought the thing, then started selling the images back to the public. The last LANDSAT that worked (one was lost) was something like IV, and it had (among other equipment) a 1-meter res imager in a couple of bands.
LANDSAT VII (Launched or about to be launched) should be back in the public domain, and will provide similar res images in a great many more bands (200+ iirc).
Amazing how you can apply what you learning in Geoscience!
You could just buy an Electrohome Marquee series digital projector. My friend has one he got for free. Sure, it's a bit bulky (about 4'x2'x3', 150 lbs) but it will project a 20' image easily. 1600x1200 and super bright.
These are the projectors they use in the lecture halls here at CMU.
I've spent a lot of time both on 16 meg Windows and Linux machines.
...). I suggest AbiWord and nedit as some light weight editors (taking 4.4 and 3 megs of ram respectively at the moment). Nedit is a programmers editor, and AbiWord is an MSWord compatible Word Processor.
I found no way to keep Windows from thrashing madly every time you change applications; there's no way to fit that much stuff into memory. Those are 2 of the most bloated apps for Win95.
Similarly, Netscape and KDE are some of the most bloated apps for X. On the 16 meg machines, I used fvwm2, which helped a lot. There's no way around Netscape (I detest it, but need it
You're still going to get some thrashing, but things should improve. Also, go through and kill stuff that doesn't need to be running. No dock apps, no panels (just a root menu should suffice), no extra daemons.
The truth is, if you want the flashy graphics stuff you're going to have to pay. I don't find Gtk+ (I happen to use GNOME) any slower than the Win95 GUI, but I don't find it any faster or smaller either. But the great thing about Linux is its modularity; you can build a solution that leaves out the extraneous stuff, resulting in a much friendlier experience on old hardware.
I find the Win95/98 GUI a great deal less stable (in the sense that it's very often explorer.exe that crashes), and not particularly any faster.
I can't remember the last time X crashed. And while the standard way for clients to use the X server is on the slow side, to prove network transparency (a feature I rely on every day), there are ways to get around the slowness -- X shared memory, and direct framebuffer access. Both of these are available to apps that really need them.
I have to say I would like to see better speed on the part of GLX. My Ultra2 is noticably slower under Linux than under windows, due to the architecture of the GLX Xserver/GL extensions.
you've been suffering needlessly. You know why it's called Englightenment, don't you?
- "What are you doing?"
- "Waiting for Englightenment"
has been the running joke about starting up E for quite some time.
Yeah it looks pretty cool, but the heavily pixmapped themes are pretty bloody expensive (along with just about everything else).
If you want raw speed and lightweight, use fvwm. It flies on a 486, where Windows feels slow (and is a major memory hog).
If you want a nice compromise, try Sawmill (current favorite of the GNOME hackers) or WindowMaker. They run quite fast, and are nice and lightweight.
I wondered about you when you came aboard /.
;)
But the History of the World, Part I references, plus the extremely cool session at AWE, have convinced me you're a cool guy
So far to support Linux, either as far as providing open or closes drivers, or releasing hardware specs.
But that was Louis XVI.
:)
Louis XIV was the Sun King. He was an absolute monarch who finally managed to get the nobles under control (which Louis XIII, of Muketeer and Cardinal Richelieu fame, had never managed to do).
Louis XV was an even more extreme successor. His famous quote was, "After me, the deluge", and he lived like he believed it.
Louis XVI was a genuinely nice guy who was not totally unamenable to reforms towards a more constitutional monarchy. But the rabble cut his head off anyway. Honestly, I'm a fluent French speaker, and I don't understand the French either
I rag on ATI as much as anyone for being habitually behind the times (and I have used every major video card on the market now except GeForce, which I'm planning on getting fairly soon).
:( ... )
You should know that 3dfx, the recognized performance leader for most of the last 2 years (this of course may be changing) has been using the exact same old technology for quite some time. Voodoo2 is just a someone updated Voodoo1 chip (they added hardware support for the lighting calculation along the edges of the triangle, iirc). Voodoo3 is just an overclocked SLI Voodoo2 (Voodoo3 2000 has exactly the same performance numbers as a V2 SLI rig, as we measured it). Voodoo4 will have some new stuff (tho no one knows exactly what yet), but it is definitely still a direct descendent of SST1, the core Voodoo technology.
Similarly, TNT2 is just a massively overclocked TNT (GeForce does appear to be quite different).
I will give ATI the benafit of the doubt till I see the performance numbers.
Hilariously, the Maxx has 2x as much memory as the high-end Rage 128, for a whopping 64 megs, which is totally absurd. That's as much memory as my entire system! (and of course I can't afford more ram now
You know the weird thing? I just read about Maxx on ATI's webpage yesterday. When I woke up (4 minutes ago) I realized I had a dream about it. Then I came here, and there was a story about it! Man, I must be sad....
Time to go email ATI...maybe I'll ask them for nice open Linux drivers.
I can't show you what's next. But I promise it's much more beautiful than this guy's lame stuff. And has some very excellent properties.
And it was all written by 18-19 year olds.
No signal to noise. And I've seen much better results for landscape generation: check out MetaCreations Bryce, based on the work of the grandfather of procedural texturing, Ken Musgrave. It's stunningly beautiful.
... comments, Rosenthal or Scherer? I'm sorry, I just don't feel at liberty to disclose anything. Those of you that know us and our work, trust us...
"But this could be promising!..."
True. I'll believe when I see promising artworks. This reporter obviously got carried away; I'm in computer games and I'm just not impressed.
"But Bryce isn't realtime!"
True enough as well. Bryce is a raytracer; it takes a long time to render. Oooooooooooh.....I wish I could talk to you about this
I do disagree with you on one point: No reason a 22 year old can't do this. Everyone in the basement is 19 or younger.
Alphas come out slightly faster, as was mentioned, due to clockspeed. PA-RISCs are faster clock-per clock (tho 21364 hasn't come out yet...)
But Alphas are very different machines than HPs. Alphas are pure number crunching machines. I don't think anyone's using HPs who doesn't have legacy reasons to do so. HP-UX is a pretty miserable UNIX, and the machines themselves are quite expensive (moreso than Alphas, I believe). Alphas are relatively cheap as workstations go. HPs tend to be popular in engineering applications, where the people have been using them for a long time and are very comfortable with them.
I always assumed Victorinox was the original. Wenger seems to have a trademark on the phrase "The Genuine Swiss Army Knife", which means they are kinda by definition :). But who was there first?
Victorinox are very good. My dad had one for 25 years, and the little clip with the ring broke. He sent it back, and they promptly replaced it with a new one -- the exact same model.
I'm happy with my SPARCBook3. Cost me $230 shipping included, a bloody sight less than most PDAs.
Sure it's a bit heavy (gotta love that magnesium case). But it runs real OSs (Solaris 2.5/6/7, NetBSD, Linux). It's got great features (builtin sound, ethernet, 2 modems, ISDN ). And it meets my criterion: since it runs a perfectly stable OS (Sol 2.5.1), I can just suspend it and resume it in about 30 seconds each. So I can arrive somewhere and be hacking without waiting for boot. Granted the battery life isn't amazing, just enough for a 90 minute lecture, though newer laptops are much better for that.
It can dhcp in any lecture hall with netbars, and if I wasn't too cheap to spring for wireless it could do that too i think (might need a newer Solaris version).
I spend my class and between class time this morning half listning to lectures, half hacking madly at Verilog. It was a great productivity boost considering my ECE lab tonight. I also use it to take notes that are actually readable for once -- definitely worth the flexibility tradoff verses pen & paper.
Spend an equivalent amount of money on a PDA that's smaller but can only take a few terse notes and keep my appointments? Forget it.
He probably owns a nice piece of it. Making it very much "his" company.
"...his [Torvalds'] company..." is just an expression.
This is all speculation, of course: I'm sure they gave Linus a nice chunk of stock, but he doesn't own all of it or even a controlling interest. It doesn't seem to me he'd want one.
Paul Allen was a founder, right? He's prolly got a nice big chunk.
The problem of how to break something like RSA is a mathematical one: either some operation is easy to do in one direction and hard to do in another, or it's in fact easy in both directions. Factoring is one example of such an operation.
The proposed quantum scheme relieson the fact that whether a photon will pass through a filter polarized at 45 degrees to the photon's own aligment is random at a quantum level, eg. can't be determined. Eve is screwed at a fundamental physics level. The only thing that could crack this would be major changes in our understanding of particle physics.
It's open to debate whether this is more or less likely than finding a quick factoring method (or in the case of RSA, a quick way to find Phi(n) from n). . .
But on different hardware every time, always late model hardware, and on full machines.
I work at a video game company. We don't use standard computers, we use rather high-end gaming systems. We use the latest video cards, sent to us by the manufacturers.
The last machines I installed had serious issues because they had so many peripherals, they used every one of their IRQs even after you disabled the parallel port, the serial ports, and anything else you could find. None of the hardware was unsupported by Windows -- it was all fairly standard stuff. Multiple IDE and SCSI HDs, Plextor SCSI burners/CD drives, vid cards, 3Com NICs, MS mice (USB I think, or maybe PS/2).
Of course, if you set up the same machine every time, you can get it down pat and efficient. Setting up the second of these two identical machines was much easier than setting up the first. Similarly, installing windows on standard hardware is very easy (assuming you know enough and have good drivers ready etc etc), but I find this no different from Linux.
Have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch on a computer (Win95, win31 was a pleasant breeze as long as you had the disks on a network. We used to set up Win31 machines with scripts in like 2minutes each)?
... which doesn't work because you're using the realmode drivers).
It's a royal pain in the ass.
You sit there searching for drivers for your hardware that works (unless you get shafted and something happens like the protected mode drivers for the IDE controller are on a CD-ROM
It's even worse if, like this guy, you don't even know what hardware you have.
Win95 tries to plug-and-play. It invariably screws up complex machines.
Several of my friends built high-end machines this summer. Dual-slocket Celerons, DVD drives, CD burners, sound cards, NICs. We were using a variety of standard video cards while waiting for G400s. The only piece of hardware that didn't give us any trouble was the one that doesn't work in Linux -- the DVDs. Everything would have been fine in Linux, where I could have configured it without the bloody PnP drivers magically making up rules, and the operating system idiotically failing to detect conflicts as it assigned IRQs. It took several days to get those systems working with Win98. (NT was unhappy with the large HDs and never quite worked right, though I don't remember if it was the 20gig IDEs or 18gig SCSIs it didn't like, or if it was just a partition size thing).
Face it. You think windows is easy because you buy computers with it already installed. It's way more of a nightmare than Linux. At least someone who knows hardware and Linux can install Linux quite easily. I'm an extremely experienced windows user, and I can't necessarily make windows work right.
There's quite a bit of RSI-type problems here at CMU. I type as much as anyone here probably, but I'm careful, and so far I haven't had any problems.
.Also, get some of those wrist-braces to immobilize your wrists while you type . . .
... very hard to find now) and Sun type-4s (also quite good, properly positioned Ctrl key :), with occasional (never extreme) use of my laptop keyboard.
... evolution will take a long time to save use :). The best possible thing you can do is take breaks and change positions. Vary between putting your keyboard on the desk and on your lap. Move around in your chair. And take breaks at least every 15 minutes for a few minutes -- don't work more than 45 minutes out of the hour.
... I must be doing something right.
There are some serious problems in the above (as well as in several other threads), and also some good advice.
The best thing you can do is take a month off from using the computer.
Abso-frikkin-lutely.
get an ultra-ergonomic keyboard . .
Actually, while the wrist braces make make everything feel okay, you can continue to damage your hands while using them. Use them if you must, but avoid it.
Gel wrist rests may feel good, but they also encourage you to move the mouse or reach the keys with the small muscles of your hand rather than the big muscles of your arm -- a very bad thing. It's better to only ever rest your wrists lightly and move your hand with the whole arm.
The truth of the matter is, anytime you feel pain, you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't try to mask it -- you should try to fix it. Several of my friends have hurt themselves (fortunately none of them permanently) by using poorly set up college dorm desks and chairs. A good desk/chair/keyboard can help a lot, but isn't magic. I like a nice high comfy task chair, the keyboard at a reasonable height on the desk or in my lap, and a good keyboard. I don't go for the fancy ergo keyboards (tho some people like them a lot) -- I use exclusively good tactile clicky boards. I switch between an old IBM PS/2 (the amazing indestructible mid-80s kind
But having a good workstation won't protect you if you strain small muscles/tendons by repeatedly using them in ways they weren't designed (and no form of typing as we know it is what any of those muscles was designed for
I'm no doctor (tho I've been exposed to a lot of material, good and bad, on the subject). But I'm a CMU CS student, I use computers constantly, and I play violin. I've also never had an instance of repetitive strain injury
The real capital of the Internet is not in the backwoods commonwealth of Virginia.
... but the traffic is lousy (2nd only to LA! woohoo!)
Everyone knows that a disproportionate chunk of the Internet is centered in the Independent Privateer Republic of Fairfax (made up of Fairfax and Arlington counties and the city of Alexandria).
We have nothing to do with the rest of the state. We don't get along with them particularly well either.
My house is 1/2 mile from the UUNet building in Tysons to the north and 1/2 mile from the other UUNet building to the south (on 50). Novell is with AOL out in Dulles (AOL used to be near me in Vienna). In Tysons is Sprint, MCI, TCI, AT&T, Unisys, and just about everyone else.
It's a great place to live, much better than Pittsburgh (CMU should up and move)
One-time losses such as purchasing another company are generally not counted against a company financially.
i.e. if Amazon buys someone else, they don't have to count that one-time expense as a loss when calculating their yearly expenses.
That should be "Peter Braam, one of the authors of CODA", you're quite correct.
If you keep up correctly with every intesting project that goes on here, and all the personalities involved, I'm impressed.
Coda would be overkill -- the depot-style requirements are intended for a distributed environment like a university, in which all the clients constantly accessing the servers to do anything would kill the system. Actually, afs (which is currently used at CMU) is intended to work similarly -- clients build updated caches of appropriate application directories for their architectures, with the result that machines running a constantly out-of-date minimal core OS are served a centralized set of applications ...
:), it's cool ... it can do a lot of the things CODA can, but it's much lighterweight, doesn't require its own fstype. I don't have the link handy, and I don't know if it has the same caching requirements as CODA ...
For home network purposes, where a few users are unlikely to overwhelm the server, use NFS. It's easy, it's well supported across OSs, its performance may not be incredible but nothing you're likely to do will strain it. Even if you're moving huge files around, you're not going to have 10 people moving huge files around simultaneously.
Actually, there's one more fun option to consider: Inter-Mezzo, a distributed fs written in PERL in a few weeks by the creator of CODA, Peter Braam. It's small, it's pretty quick (the speed-critical parts are in C