In the same vein as Esperanto, Lojban http://www.lojban.org/ is a culturally neutral, machine parsable (written in Lex/Yacc, see the website) artifical language.
It was originally designed to study the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesi s, but has since developed a rich following from computer scientists as a potential human-computer interface tool. Err, at least that's why THIS computer scientist is interested in it.;-)
It is my not-so-humble opinion that a lot of this Word mindset that is present in the Windows world stems from a lack of a gtkspell-ish component in Windows.
I have heard of people (and maybe folks still do, for all I know) who use Word as their email composition component. Can you imagine: firing up a copy of Word each time you press Reply?
I mention this because I was thinking about why Word docs are so ubiquitous in the business world when 90% of the docs I have seen contain absolutely no formatting or other "word processing" type functionality. What would one need to replace in order to get the B.A.s off of Word?
I believe the secret sauce is: spell checking.
I believe strongly that IE ('cause you can forget a BA using something other than the icon labeled "The Internet") with the Google toolbar (to provide speel chekking) against a versioned Wiki would go a long way toward answering TFA's need.
There is something to be said for a slightly more formalized requirements architecture (akin to http://xmlbasedsrs.tigris.org/), but I believe strongly that the presentation/editing of that data should be a light-weight as possible.
I couldn't agree more. I was even sad when they switched from the Natural to the Natural Elite (with the goofy-ass pageup/pagedn block turned 90 degrees). Still, I stocked up on the Elite, just like you.
Although they are now defunct, I also have a Dvorak TouchStream LP that I love dearly. It had a MONSTER learning curve to it, because of my poor typing habits. I "cheat" with my hand positioning and key travel, which the LP does NOT tolerate one bit.
Once I learned to be more accurate with my finger travel, the keyboard paid for itself in not having to move my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I also really love the shortcuts built into it.
It's just too bad they couldn't get the cost of manufacturing down, so they'd still be in business. Every new job I went to, lots of people wanted to try one but the cost of entry was too high (in their minds, not mine!).
I honestly don't just want to say "me, too!" but I found that to be the greatest step my hands have known.
I got the burn my junior year in college, during a graphics programming class with OpenGL.
Fortunately, I had been using Linux since I got to school, so I was able to flip the keyboard back and forth with xmodmap.
I had the additional advantage of being a touch-typist (thank you Mrs. Frix!), so I was training my fingers, not my eyes. I taped a post-it note to my monitor with the Dvorak layout and built up my "typing vocabulary" as I needed new keys. It's a good thing C is such a very terse language, so I didn't need a lot of chars to complete my work.
It's the strangest thing, though. Now, when I wake up in the morning, my hands remember QWERTY or Dvorak. Whichever I type in first, they remember. But once I've typed in Dvorak, I can no longer remember the QWERTY "bindings". Not that it matters, as typing in QWERTY is noticeably more painful for me now.
My USD$0.02,
--/v\atthew
Re:Is this compatible with consumer VoIP?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
I wanted to chime in as a long-standing Speakeasy.net customer who subscribed to their VoIP package about 6 months ago.
I strongly agree with the child post who raved about Speakeasy.net as an ISP. I have been absolutely happy and it will take a physical relocation for me to cancel my service with them.
I have not been as happy with their VoIP service. It's not that it's broken, or disruptive or whatever. It's a touch expensive (I don't have the number in front of me, but ~$30/mo seems right), they required a 12 month contract (in contrast to my ISP service with them which was month-to-month: a major selling point for me) and (the biggest of all points) the new system for managing one's VoIP account is terrible.
First, a little background: when I first signed up, they had one system. It was bland, and would occassionally catch phone calls in voicemail that should have been forwarded to my cell, but generally pretty much what I expected from a VoIP solution. That's the Old System(tm).
The New System(tm) is much more bland and seems immature. Unlike the Old System, the New System does not allow one to download their voicemail messages over the web.
I feel bad not supporting my argument with more facts, but the main point of the message is to shop around before committing with what is otherwise an outstanding ISP.
On the contrary, I bet dollars to donuts that a well worded Freedom of Information Act request would divuldge any calculations you wanted to know.
It's your tax dollars, you have a right to know whether their scientists are playing pong or actually trying to keep foam from flying off things at the wrong times.
I have followed Lojban for quite some time now and I think that it, or something like it, represents the future of human-computer voice interaction. It is parseable and phonetically spelled, making it very computer friendly.
This does not beat the problem you brought up about Joe User, but for someone whose profession depends upon interaction with computers, learning a new way of typing (dvorak), writing (Graffiti) or speaking (Lojban) is a small price to pay. It even lends itself more toward the model of Shadowrunish futures where computer professionals are almost a separate race.:-)
Be careful, as some versions of Eudora use IE to render the message text (yes, even if you explicitly uncheck that option). If you can right click on your email and choose "View Source", you're in trouble.
Just a thought, but I agree with you - I also use Eudora. --/v\atthew
Has anyone else noticed that you can't search for the name "C#" on 85% of the search bots for websites? (I am not talking about the engines like google - I haven't tried them)
I find it especially funny that you can't use "C#" on search.microsoft.com, either.
Everytime one of these flame-wars break out (I mean, honestly, this is like asking "which editor should I use?"), Inprise AppServer is left out of the discussion. Ergo, I am mentioning that in terms of adhering to standards and being faster-than-hell, IAS 4.0.1 does it for us.
But, like the other poster said, it will really depend on your needs. I recommend taking the 2-3 weeks to get a simple app going with each of the servers and see what the snags you can live with are.
And BTW, I am a strong anti-BEA advocate. 4.5.1 was a complete farce, and 5.x has been in-line with Microsoft's tactics: let the marketing folks sell what the tech boys can't. But, as I am sure someone will point out, we were trying to get it to do a finite set of things.
My USD$0.02. --/v\atthew
Re:It depends on what kind of quality you're looki
on
Archiving Home Movies?
·
· Score: 1
If you just want to get the films in a digital format, you can get a cheap television card for you're computer, and capture the videos in raw video format and then convert them to MPEG.
Unless you have REALLY short home movies, you probably don't want to go the AVI-to-MPEG route. Not only is it slower than Christmas, it also eats harddrive space like it is going out of style. Also, most of the TV capture cards you will find (in the price range you would want to pay) do a pretty crappy job. I have an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 that I picked up for $112 at onsale.com and it captures MPEG2 in hardware.
There is a review of this card on ArsTechnica.com, if you want to know more.
I had a similar problem, but a new Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI fixed it. Come to find out my ISA 16-bit SB clone (ESS AudioDrive) wosn't recording well enough for VV.
I got my Ensoniq with a rebate program at Office Depot (~$10 after rebate). Especially with their return policy it can't hurt to try...
Slashdot Mirror
In the same vein as Esperanto, Lojban http://www.lojban.org/ is a culturally neutral, machine parsable (written in Lex/Yacc, see the website) artifical language.
i s, but has since developed a rich following from computer scientists as a potential human-computer interface tool. Err, at least that's why THIS computer scientist is interested in it. ;-)
/v\atthew
It was originally designed to study the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothes
--
It is my not-so-humble opinion that a lot of this Word mindset that is present in the Windows world stems from a lack of a gtkspell-ish component in Windows.
/v\atthew
I have heard of people (and maybe folks still do, for all I know) who use Word as their email composition component. Can you imagine: firing up a copy of Word each time you press Reply?
I mention this because I was thinking about why Word docs are so ubiquitous in the business world when 90% of the docs I have seen contain absolutely no formatting or other "word processing" type functionality. What would one need to replace in order to get the B.A.s off of Word?
I believe the secret sauce is: spell checking.
I believe strongly that IE ('cause you can forget a BA using something other than the icon labeled "The Internet") with the Google toolbar (to provide speel chekking) against a versioned Wiki would go a long way toward answering TFA's need.
There is something to be said for a slightly more formalized requirements architecture (akin to http://xmlbasedsrs.tigris.org/), but I believe strongly that the presentation/editing of that data should be a light-weight as possible.
--
I'll see your the sibling posts, and raise you a "keyboard layout" notion.
/v\atthew
I first switched over to vim (after years as an *emacs-er) when my hands caught fire and I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout.
Now that the X and C characters are nowhere near one another, it makes all those "cute" macros damn hard to execute.
One of the [almost infinite] reasons I prefer vim because it is kb layout agnostic.
--
I couldn't agree more. I was even sad when they switched from the Natural to the Natural Elite (with the goofy-ass pageup/pagedn block turned 90 degrees). Still, I stocked up on the Elite, just like you.
/v\atthew
Although they are now defunct, I also have a Dvorak TouchStream LP that I love dearly. It had a MONSTER learning curve to it, because of my poor typing habits. I "cheat" with my hand positioning and key travel, which the LP does NOT tolerate one bit.
Once I learned to be more accurate with my finger travel, the keyboard paid for itself in not having to move my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I also really love the shortcuts built into it.
It's just too bad they couldn't get the cost of manufacturing down, so they'd still be in business. Every new job I went to, lots of people wanted to try one but the cost of entry was too high (in their minds, not mine!).
--
I honestly don't just want to say "me, too!" but I found that to be the greatest step my hands have known.
/v\atthew
I got the burn my junior year in college, during a graphics programming class with OpenGL.
Fortunately, I had been using Linux since I got to school, so I was able to flip the keyboard back and forth with xmodmap.
I had the additional advantage of being a touch-typist (thank you Mrs. Frix!), so I was training my fingers, not my eyes. I taped a post-it note to my monitor with the Dvorak layout and built up my "typing vocabulary" as I needed new keys. It's a good thing C is such a very terse language, so I didn't need a lot of chars to complete my work.
It's the strangest thing, though. Now, when I wake up in the morning, my hands remember QWERTY or Dvorak. Whichever I type in first, they remember. But once I've typed in Dvorak, I can no longer remember the QWERTY "bindings". Not that it matters, as typing in QWERTY is noticeably more painful for me now.
My USD$0.02,
--
I wanted to chime in as a long-standing Speakeasy.net customer who subscribed to their VoIP package about 6 months ago.
/v\atthew
I strongly agree with the child post who raved about Speakeasy.net as an ISP. I have been absolutely happy and it will take a physical relocation for me to cancel my service with them.
I have not been as happy with their VoIP service. It's not that it's broken, or disruptive or whatever. It's a touch expensive (I don't have the number in front of me, but ~$30/mo seems right), they required a 12 month contract (in contrast to my ISP service with them which was month-to-month: a major selling point for me) and (the biggest of all points) the new system for managing one's VoIP account is terrible.
First, a little background: when I first signed up, they had one system. It was bland, and would occassionally catch phone calls in voicemail that should have been forwarded to my cell, but generally pretty much what I expected from a VoIP solution. That's the Old System(tm).
The New System(tm) is much more bland and seems immature. Unlike the Old System, the New System does not allow one to download their voicemail messages over the web.
I feel bad not supporting my argument with more facts, but the main point of the message is to shop around before committing with what is otherwise an outstanding ISP.
--
Well, it's possible they meant it as in "suicide is a way out". It's true!
How do you know?
On the contrary, I bet dollars to donuts that a well worded Freedom of Information Act request would divuldge any calculations you wanted to know.
It's your tax dollars, you have a right to know whether their scientists are playing pong or actually trying to keep foam from flying off things at the wrong times.
NASA has a page dedicated to this:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/FOIA/
I have followed Lojban for quite some time now and I think that it, or something like it, represents the future of human-computer voice interaction. It is parseable and phonetically spelled, making it very computer friendly.
This does not beat the problem you brought up about Joe User, but for someone whose profession depends upon interaction with computers, learning a new way of typing (dvorak), writing (Graffiti) or speaking (Lojban) is a small price to pay. It even lends itself more toward the model of Shadowrunish futures where computer professionals are almost a separate race. :-)
Be careful, as some versions of Eudora use IE to render the message text (yes, even if you explicitly uncheck that option). If you can right click on your email and choose "View Source", you're in trouble.
/v\atthew
Just a thought, but I agree with you - I also use Eudora.
--
Has anyone else noticed that you can't search for the name "C#" on 85% of the search bots for websites? (I am not talking about the engines like google - I haven't tried them)
I find it especially funny that you can't use "C#" on search.microsoft.com, either.
Everytime one of these flame-wars break out (I mean, honestly, this is like asking "which editor should I use?"), Inprise AppServer is left out of the discussion. Ergo, I am mentioning that in terms of adhering to standards and being faster-than-hell, IAS 4.0.1 does it for us.
/v\atthew
But, like the other poster said, it will really depend on your needs. I recommend taking the 2-3 weeks to get a simple app going with each of the servers and see what the snags you can live with are.
And BTW, I am a strong anti-BEA advocate. 4.5.1 was a complete farce, and 5.x has been in-line with Microsoft's tactics: let the marketing folks sell what the tech boys can't. But, as I am sure someone will point out, we were trying to get it to do a finite set of things.
My USD$0.02.
--
Unless you have REALLY short home movies, you probably don't want to go the AVI-to-MPEG route. Not only is it slower than Christmas, it also eats harddrive space like it is going out of style. Also, most of the TV capture cards you will find (in the price range you would want to pay) do a pretty crappy job. I have an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 that I picked up for $112 at onsale.com and it captures MPEG2 in hardware.
There is a review of this card on ArsTechnica.com, if you want to know more.
Hope this helps...
--I had a similar problem, but a new Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI fixed it. Come to find out my ISA 16-bit SB clone (ESS AudioDrive) wosn't recording well enough for VV.
/v\atthew
I got my Ensoniq with a rebate program at Office Depot (~$10 after rebate). Especially with their return policy it can't hurt to try...
--