Maybe some of us old timers can get together and make a Frequently Repeated Inaccuracies list (FRI -- it could be the greatest thing since FAQ!). Instead of wasting time correcting people all the time, a link could be posted. Maybe there could even be a -1, FRI moderation. --
Hey, if it weren't for yours, there might not have been any:-)
Personally, I'm tired all these analogies. A computer is not like a car. A host is not like a house. Ports are not like doors. Looking around someone's ${HOME} is not like looking around someone's home. Fuckin' deal with it. --
A couple of people have mentioned this but I think it's worth stressing. Read the letter. Its tone is reasonable and non-threatening. They appeal to Jeff to limit Amazon's used book brokering to out of print titles with this rationale:
We're all in this business together. Without talented authors producing a large number of new titles every year, Amazon's sales will certainly suffer. If book authors and publishers aren't adequately compensated for their work, however, then more and more writers will be compelled to pursue other creative outlets and professions. For the sake of authors, publishers, readers and Amazon, a compromise must be found that will not discourage writers from writing or consumers from buying new books.
OK, so the use of the word "must" is a little threatening, but overall the letter is definitely a plea, not a demand, ultimatum, or cease and decist order as some people who only read the headline have been assuming. There's no reason to get worked up about it. --
The fact that the Navy study that found the Dvorak layout so much more efficient was conducted by Dvorak himself casts doubt on the results. The urban legends article you linked to mentions that other studies "indicated no need to switch to the Dvorak keyboard", which pretty much ruins the credibility of Dvorak's findings if they ever had any.
But it does not automatically follow that the Dvorak layout is not more efficient (or better for reasons other than efficiency).
I took an interest in Dvorak a year ago or so and tried to retrain myself to use it. It was too hard and I gave up, but I still think Dvorak is clearly superior to QWERTY. That doesn't mean I think it's a lot better, just better, and that it's clear that it is. It also doesn't mean I think it's worth switching for someone with QWERTY experience.
So why do I think it's clearly better? Because it's clear to me that less finger movement is better and Dvorak puts more of the common letters on the home row. If you list the words in the English language, in decreasing order of frequency, and mark the ones that can be typed using only the home row on a Dvorak keyboard with a D and the ones that can be typed using only the home row on a QWERTY keyboard with a Q, you get a lot more D's than Q's, especially near the beginning of the list. This affects typing speed, but I also think it affects the risk of injury, which no study has dealt with as far as I know.
It's worth mentioning that I'm not impressed with studies showing subjects achieving greater typing speed after switching to Dvorak from QWERTY. They had to train to become that fast on a Dvorak. Who's to say the same amount of training on a QWERTY keyboard wouldn't have improved their speed even more?
BTW, I've heard the name of this Dvorak is pronounced pretty much like it's spelled, unlike the name of the composer. Is that correct? What about the columnist? --
GTK can be fast or slow depending on the theme. But the thing is, Mozilla isn't just using GTK, it's using its own XPFE toolkit and the GTK/XPFE interaction is strange. Try this exercise: Click Mozilla's file menu and move the mouse quickly across the menu bar to the QA menu. Now drag a corner of the Mozilla window to make the window small and then large again. In both cases you'll see that when Mozilla redraws its interface, it doesn't do it onece, but twice. First with the gtk theme, then with the XPFE chrome (try it using a garish gradient or pixmap gtk theme if you don't see it). I haven't used the Windows version in a while, but I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is avoided there.
I don't know why it has to be done like this. I'm pretty sure GTK apps can specify their own theme and have GTK draw (once!) using that rather than drawing on top of what GTK has already drawn. Perhaps someone can offer an explanation.
You might want to checkout some browsers that use Mozilla's rendering engine and straight GTK for the interface instead of Mozilla's XPFE. Galeon and SkipStone are two examples, but unfortunately I find they crash a lot more than Mozilla. --
It depends on the driver. I have a GF2 and am using the "NVidia" driver (the closed source one from NVidia rather than the open "nv" driver that the Xfree people wrote) and had frequent crashes until I disabled AGP ( Option "NVAGP" "0" ). Since then, all has been well. With 3.3.x, I'd be nervous every time I ran a fullscreen OpenGL game. Often if they crashed, I'd be left with a messed up display and sometimes the whole system would go down. I haven't had any of that lately.
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"Should I be subscribing to the official Slashdot doctrine?" I'm sorry if I've made you feel like the rebel, proudly standing up to the oppression of the conformity-demanding majority. When I said "Are you new here?", I was referring to your apparent ignorance of facts frequently discussed here. Now it's clear that you actually are aware of these facts, even though you ended your original post with "This is no different.", which, knowing what you know, you must know is false.
--
Are you new here? This isn't about people's ability to view porn in libraries; it's about people's ability to view material that censorware products erroniously classify as porn in libraries. --
More like wandering through a mall and seeing what stores are open, I'd say.
The "wander around your house looking at stuff" analogy is traditionally used to describe a situation where a person has gotten in, like through a known hole or weak password, and is looking at information that was assumed and intended to be private without altering or deleting it. That's not even in the same ballpark as portscanning. --
The fan noise at least can be eliminated by disabling the fans. Sure, the box will heat up enough to make you really nervous at first, but it won't melt down for quite a while. I put a computer in the living room for my parents to use and disabled the fans. At first, I used an AMD K6-2 266MHz, underclocked as low as it would go (133, I think), and now a P2-400 at rated speed.
We (well, at least those of us who remember when we were supposed to take of our clothes and stand in a tub of water when handling CPU's or RAM) tend to think of compters as very fragile, but in my experience, they're incredibly resilient. Just the other day I was adding a 128MB DIMM to my main machine and like a total idiot, actually managed to insert it the wrong way (it was hard to see past all the cables and I felt a small click as if the second retainer had snapped into place). The machine wouldn't boot and I took another look and realised what had happened. I disconnected the power and reached in to remove the DIMM and as I touched it, it felt like something had bit my finger, it was so hot. "Oh shit! I've wasted a brand new stick of RAM and probably destroyed the other one too, if not the whole motherboard." But when I inserted it correctly (after waiting quite a while for it to cool down to the point where I could touch it), the machine and both DIMMs were fine.
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They take up very little space (try hanging a power mower from the garage wall).
When I was younger, my family had an electric lawnmower (with a very long extension cord). It hovered. Great fun for a kid to use. And we did hang it on the garage wall, so take that!:-)
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I haven't bought a lot of commercial Linux software (just Q3A and VMWare) but that may actually have something to do with the fact that there ISN'T ANY!
Take DVD players for instance. I would buy Intervideo LinDVD RIGHT NOW if they'd just fucking release it. It's not really sensible to look at a marketplace with thousands of potential buyers and just a handful of vendors and say "Look, nobody's buying anything! There's no way to make money off these people."
And Q3A is a really bad example, for reasons that have been discussed to death already.
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As I read in The Hacker's Diet, it's really not realistic to expect to lose a lot of weight through exersise alone. An hour of aerobics (about 400 clories) is barely enough to cover a dab of salad dressing, let alone a Big Mac (about 560 calories).
Exercise is still important, but the "effort ratio" between eating n+m calories and working m calories off over just eating n calories is so huge that you could just forget that first option.
On the other hand, it's been said that exercising regularly enables your body to regulate your food intake better. That is, if you get enugh exersise, you won't be hungry unless you really need food.
--
"Never any strange movements or jumps"? What, you've never seen a wheel appear to slow down and start spinning backwards when it speeds up?
"I never notice far-away objects not showing up"? You've never been at sea, have you?
So much for your theory. Hah! The universe is not hardware accelerated, it's rendered with handcoded i386 assembly, utilizing every dirty trick known to the Assembly '95 contestants. --
Try harder. Isn't it equally unthinkable to you that, say, Mitsubishi would sell you a car with an EULA that prohibits you from publishing "benchmarks" for the car without their approval? Yet that's the kind of deal you get when you "buy" Oracle.
Repeat after me: A computer is not like a car!
Shit happens in the computer world that has no parallels in the rest of the world. --
If what I just read is Theo putting on the charm, I don't want to experience him being himself;
I'd rather read more from easy going Richard M. "Get Along" Stallman.
But seriously, the picture painted of Theo by some people is so horrid that it just can't be true. And even if it were true, why should I care? Honestly, Theo could kick puppies and trick his retarded sister into blowing him for all I care. It doesn't diminish the worth of his code or his opinions about code quality. --
First, proper servers and clients must be written. I run a freenet node (when I'm not in Windows playing cstrike) and the current server would definitely turn off any sysadmin running a major FTP server. It's written in Java, doesn't background itself and detach from the terminal, writes debug info to the console, and eats up a gigantic amount of CPU power for even a single connection (I don't know how much of that is Java's fault and how much is necessary because of the encrypion freenet uses).
There are no really good clients either.
Naturally, these problems will go away in time, but I think even then the big boys will not want to run freenet servers for legal reasons. Let's say you're a sysadmin for a large ISP or college and you're running a freenet node. The nature of freenet dictates that after a while, your node will have become basically a proxy cache for your freenet using clients. Now let's say some of your clients fetch a lot of kiddie porn from freenet. You have now become a distributor of child pornography. You don't know that yet. You have plausible deniability because freenet doesn't allow you to see what you're storing on your disk and pushing over your pipes on behalf of other freenet clients. But if law enforcement has decided that freenet is bad, they will have no qualms about going after your freenet server (and leaving your http and ftp proxies in peace, even though the legal situation is exactly the same there). --
Apart from the prior art, those jokes hardly satisfy the non-obviousness criteria.
Hey, I have an idea. Allow Slashdot readers to filter based on posters' "age". New users should, I think, be in read-only mode for the first few weeks but I wouldn't want to enforce that belief on others, so allow me to make the decision only for myself. --
Of that amount, state officials said, 4,000 megawatts were from plant breakdowns. Another 4,500 were from scheduled maintenance and 2,500 were from plants closed because they had reached the state's annual limit for pollution.
This is interesting. Do they really do it this way? A plant runs until it's done with its pollution quota and they shut it down until Jan 1 (presumably)? That kind of stop and go operation can't be good. --
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some of us old timers can get together and make a Frequently Repeated Inaccuracies list (FRI -- it could be the greatest thing since FAQ!). Instead of wasting time correcting people all the time, a link could be posted. Maybe there could even be a -1, FRI moderation.
--
Personally, I'm tired all these analogies. A computer is not like a car. A host is not like a house. Ports are not like doors. Looking around someone's ${HOME} is not like looking around someone's home. Fuckin' deal with it.
--
That would be the one with the calc.exe which would display "0.0" when you calculated 3.11-3.1.
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--
But it does not automatically follow that the Dvorak layout is not more efficient (or better for reasons other than efficiency).
I took an interest in Dvorak a year ago or so and tried to retrain myself to use it. It was too hard and I gave up, but I still think Dvorak is clearly superior to QWERTY. That doesn't mean I think it's a lot better, just better, and that it's clear that it is. It also doesn't mean I think it's worth switching for someone with QWERTY experience.
So why do I think it's clearly better? Because it's clear to me that less finger movement is better and Dvorak puts more of the common letters on the home row. If you list the words in the English language, in decreasing order of frequency, and mark the ones that can be typed using only the home row on a Dvorak keyboard with a D and the ones that can be typed using only the home row on a QWERTY keyboard with a Q, you get a lot more D's than Q's, especially near the beginning of the list. This affects typing speed, but I also think it affects the risk of injury, which no study has dealt with as far as I know.
It's worth mentioning that I'm not impressed with studies showing subjects achieving greater typing speed after switching to Dvorak from QWERTY. They had to train to become that fast on a Dvorak. Who's to say the same amount of training on a QWERTY keyboard wouldn't have improved their speed even more?
BTW, I've heard the name of this Dvorak is pronounced pretty much like it's spelled, unlike the name of the composer. Is that correct? What about the columnist?
--
I don't know why it has to be done like this. I'm pretty sure GTK apps can specify their own theme and have GTK draw (once!) using that rather than drawing on top of what GTK has already drawn. Perhaps someone can offer an explanation.
You might want to checkout some browsers that use Mozilla's rendering engine and straight GTK for the interface instead of Mozilla's XPFE. Galeon and SkipStone are two examples, but unfortunately I find they crash a lot more than Mozilla.
--
Isn't it time men stopped thinking of women as devices?
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It depends on the driver. I have a GF2 and am using the "NVidia" driver (the closed source one from NVidia rather than the open "nv" driver that the Xfree people wrote) and had frequent crashes until I disabled AGP ( Option "NVAGP" "0" ). Since then, all has been well. With 3.3.x, I'd be nervous every time I ran a fullscreen OpenGL game. Often if they crashed, I'd be left with a messed up display and sometimes the whole system would go down. I haven't had any of that lately.
--
"Should I be subscribing to the official Slashdot doctrine?" I'm sorry if I've made you feel like the rebel, proudly standing up to the oppression of the conformity-demanding majority. When I said "Are you new here?", I was referring to your apparent ignorance of facts frequently discussed here. Now it's clear that you actually are aware of these facts, even though you ended your original post with "This is no different.", which, knowing what you know, you must know is false.
--
Are you new here? This isn't about people's ability to view porn in libraries; it's about people's ability to view material that censorware products erroniously classify as porn in libraries.
--
I really enjoyed Chromium B.S.U. (screenshot).
--
The "wander around your house looking at stuff" analogy is traditionally used to describe a situation where a person has gotten in, like through a known hole or weak password, and is looking at information that was assumed and intended to be private without altering or deleting it. That's not even in the same ballpark as portscanning.
--
We (well, at least those of us who remember when we were supposed to take of our clothes and stand in a tub of water when handling CPU's or RAM) tend to think of compters as very fragile, but in my experience, they're incredibly resilient. Just the other day I was adding a 128MB DIMM to my main machine and like a total idiot, actually managed to insert it the wrong way (it was hard to see past all the cables and I felt a small click as if the second retainer had snapped into place). The machine wouldn't boot and I took another look and realised what had happened. I disconnected the power and reached in to remove the DIMM and as I touched it, it felt like something had bit my finger, it was so hot. "Oh shit! I've wasted a brand new stick of RAM and probably destroyed the other one too, if not the whole motherboard." But when I inserted it correctly (after waiting quite a while for it to cool down to the point where I could touch it), the machine and both DIMMs were fine.
--
--
I haven't bought a lot of commercial Linux software (just Q3A and VMWare) but that may actually have something to do with the fact that there ISN'T ANY!
Take DVD players for instance. I would buy Intervideo LinDVD RIGHT NOW if they'd just fucking release it. It's not really sensible to look at a marketplace with thousands of potential buyers and just a handful of vendors and say "Look, nobody's buying anything! There's no way to make money off these people."
And Q3A is a really bad example, for reasons that have been discussed to death already.
--
Exercise is still important, but the "effort ratio" between eating n+m calories and working m calories off over just eating n calories is so huge that you could just forget that first option.
On the other hand, it's been said that exercising regularly enables your body to regulate your food intake better. That is, if you get enugh exersise, you won't be hungry unless you really need food.
--
--
"I never notice far-away objects not showing up"? You've never been at sea, have you?
So much for your theory. Hah! The universe is not hardware accelerated, it's rendered with handcoded i386 assembly, utilizing every dirty trick known to the Assembly '95 contestants.
--
Repeat after me: A computer is not like a car!
Shit happens in the computer world that has no parallels in the rest of the world.
--
--
But seriously, the picture painted of Theo by some people is so horrid that it just can't be true. And even if it were true, why should I care? Honestly, Theo could kick puppies and trick his retarded sister into blowing him for all I care. It doesn't diminish the worth of his code or his opinions about code quality.
--
People (well, this person at least) aren't annoyed at the Lotes Notes interface just because it's different, but because it's also bad.
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There are no really good clients either.
Naturally, these problems will go away in time, but I think even then the big boys will not want to run freenet servers for legal reasons. Let's say you're a sysadmin for a large ISP or college and you're running a freenet node. The nature of freenet dictates that after a while, your node will have become basically a proxy cache for your freenet using clients. Now let's say some of your clients fetch a lot of kiddie porn from freenet. You have now become a distributor of child pornography. You don't know that yet. You have plausible deniability because freenet doesn't allow you to see what you're storing on your disk and pushing over your pipes on behalf of other freenet clients. But if law enforcement has decided that freenet is bad, they will have no qualms about going after your freenet server (and leaving your http and ftp proxies in peace, even though the legal situation is exactly the same there).
--
Hey, I have an idea. Allow Slashdot readers to filter based on posters' "age". New users should, I think, be in read-only mode for the first few weeks but I wouldn't want to enforce that belief on others, so allow me to make the decision only for myself.
--
--