Datahand gives you a use for your left thumb
on
Thumb-only Keyboard?
·
· Score: 2
Time for my weekly Datahand post.:)
On the Datahand, both thumbs are used quite a bit. The right thumb is responsible for space, backspace, number/symbol modeshift, entering mouse mode, and the alt key, and the left thumb does tab, enter, shift, entering character mode, and the ctrl key. Admittedly, I used to use my left thumb for the spacebar, but now even on normal keyboards I use my right thumb, just out of habit.
The Datahand does a good job of distributing load across all the fingers in a pretty sane way. Their mapping could be improved slightly, but not enough to complain about (as long as you don't want to play games on it).
Which renderer was this done with? I wonder if the model source would be available anywhere. Hopefully it's an open-sourced mascot like Tux is. It'd be neat to do things with this dragon, but I don't have the time or skill to do any modelling this good on my own...
damn he's cute. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
He also had a few of the common homophonic problems, such as your/you're and their/there. I don't feel like going back there to find them again though. Felt like commenting on it, but that'd ruin the email I sent to humor him and stroke his obviously-fragile ego.
Some people are so much fun. Others...aren't.;) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
slash.period.org? slashdot.period.org? slash.period-org? and, of course, "but doesn't it have to start with www and end with a com?" www.slash.periodorg.com apparently.
:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, there *is* a Windows program which lets you access an ext2 partition as a read-only fileshare or something like that. Never used it, but a Win98-using Linux-loving friend of mine claims it's decent. I'm just glad it's read-only.
As for resizable filesystems, AIX's filesystem is, sorta. It's more like the Linux logical partition thing (combining multiple partitions together to make one big logical partition), but I believe the individual partitions can be resized. I Am Not An AIX Admin, I just use it at work and have had to see our AIX admin mess around with partitions.:)
Aside from that, I pretty much agree with what's been said. The author of the article doesn't sound like he made much of an effort to understand what/why he was doing. You want an alternative to Windows? Good first step, but for now, learn what you're doing first. Generally it's a good idea to learn how to drive a car before switching from riding a bicycle. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
For how long has it been a tradition? I seem to recall it only starting a couple months ago, and it only got its own category a couple weeks ago, AFAIK. I could be wrong, of course, but... not exactly a long-term tradition with some deeply-embroiled history which simly cannot be changed.
Now, blasphemy would be to have a Linux distribution which doesn't install gnuchess/xboard by default.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Moral: It may be that programmers will happily craft code for open software that doesn't belong to any one company--the Linux operating system or free Apache for Web servers--but they balk at helping the Netscapes of the world get richer.
As we all know, this is somewhat inaccurate. I, for example, would have been more than willing to help Mozilla were it not for the fact that the code they just dumped on us wouldn't even compile, much less work. The code they released was pure and utter crap. You can't polish a turd. Now, if they'd funded an effort to write a completely new browser from scratch, I think that'd have worked a hell of a lot better for them. Or, at the very least, they could have released some functional sourcecode (i.e. Netscape 4.0 for Linux final build); at least give us something that we can run through gdb and fix the bugs in first before trying to extend functionality, yaknow?
Yes, it's called rsynth. It's kinda primitive, and the voice isn't very configurable (about all you can do is choose whether it has an American or English accent), and it's optimized for slow systems (i.e. its quality peaks at 8KHz, anything higher and it sounds like it's talking through a strainer), but it works, and it's a well-behaved UNIX program. I don't know of a simple way to get it to work as a speaking interface to a terminal, though. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I can't help but evangelize this device. It is wonderful. My wrists were at the point that they hurt constantly, painfully; I lost sleep over it. I couldn't stop using the computer, though. After about a month of using nothing but the datahand, my wrists are SO much better. I still have occasional pain and numbness, but that's usually after using normal keyboards (like in the computer lab).
Datahand + fvwm2 go together to make a WONDERFUL team in terms of customizability. Even when I'm not using my Dathand, I don't have to use the mouse much (ctrl+shift+HKJL to move coarse, ctrl+shft+alt+HKJL to move fine-grained), and when I am, the fact I can customize the interface to be exactly right for the Datahand is so wonderful...
The personal edition cost me $900 after a 10% student discount. They're not cheap. But they're worth every penny. Consider that RSI surgery is generally $10k and only treats the symptoms (not the cuase)...
Yes, but physical junkmail at least costs the sender money. Spam doesn't (in fact, most spammers go to great length to NOT spend any money). Of course, this doesn't make postal spam right, but it can be legally blocked. Ask the post office for the nice happy form that lets you to not get route-based junkmail, and all those annoying money-saving coupons from the local pizza delivery place will stop coming. (Which is why I *like* postal spam - at least it does me some good.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Gah. I know very few people who do smoke weed, and they're Mac users. That doesn't say anything about people who use various OSes as it does for statistical clustering. I can't stand pot. It smells nasty, makes me nauseous (I've never smoked it, but have had plenty of second-hand exposure), and tends to make the people who use it, well, stupid.
I had a roommate once who was a major pothead and, as such, had a major pothead entourage. They would always listen to reggae really loud while smoking weed, and have conversations which, although maybe enlightened in their minds, went something like this:
Heh, that's cool.
Uh huhuh, yeah, huh, like, totally.
Yeah, man, like... heh, that was funny when, huh, pfffffft, yeah, this is good shit!
Huh, dude, like... yeah.
Pfffft, bitchin'.
These are, of course, the same types who use Bob Marley as a martyr for the cause of smoking weed. Wow, some cause. So this guy apparently died for their right to smoke a drug which makes them stupid and hungry all the time. Great. What a thing to be remembered for.
Myself, if I want to get high, it'll be on an adrenaline rush from some good ol' FPS gaming. Hell, even a CTF botmatch (CRbot is fun to play with, even if the bot isn't all that lifelike or good; it's fun to have bots which talk smack and actually use the gestures).
I also like getting high on music. Some music, such as Cibo Matto's album "Viva La Woman," have this effect of putting me in a wonderful trance.
There are so many good things to get high on which don't involve introducing toxins into your system. Okay, sure, I abuse caffeine just as much as anyone else, but I'm trying to cut down, and caffeine doesn't affect the brain (at least, aside from being addictive).
All this time I thought that programmers "smoking crack" was just an expression.:) I know my friends often say I must be smoking crack simply because I'm either being clueless or out of it. I've never smoked crack.
There's a local employer who some friends of mine and I have had an interesting evolution for their level of crack usage. It started out with them smoking crack, but eventually they got to the level of taking crack in a suppository form.
Now the OpenSound guys... THEY have got to be smoking some serious crack.
See, it's an expression. I'm sure they don't, but they just seem to.
It took me a while to think of this, but why not use McCabe complexity to gauge the complexity of a project? (The McCabe complexity is, simply speaking, the number of branches in a program.) LOC and documentation and coding style then become a non-issue. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Myself, I puyt 20k+LOC, because that's what wc -l said for my projects from last year (if you count personal time, work and class), though I guess since only about 5k of those were for work, I could be considered a slacker, right? (The rest being either required for class or completely recreational.) My coding style is a sane one, i.e. (the _s are just because of the lack of proper code formatting here):
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { _ _ for (int i = 0; i argc; i++) _ _ _ _ printf ("Argument %d = '%s'\n", i, argv[i]); }
Of course, comparing "hello world" programs for LOC is pretty much pointless. Even with a lot of documentation, any sufficiently-complex project will have a much greater magnitude of actual code lines than of comments or whitespace (style depending, of course, but if you have more than one blank line at a time you need some serious help anyway). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No quiero Taco Bell. Yo quiero Amasita's. (Amasita's es un poco restaurante Mexicano que es cerca del laboratorio del sciencia computacion. Sus enchiladas queso con chile rojo son MUY delicioso, y son borrachos!) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
There's GNUstep, which has been around LONG before KDE or Gnome were even started, and I'm sure there's others. Just because people only know about KDE and Gnome doesn't make them the only two.
Additionally, GNUstep is much nicer than both KDE and Gnome because it doesn't tie applications to the window manager; instead, it is a set of protocols programs can use to talk to each other (and Windowmaker, the testbed WM, just happens to be one of those programs). ---
Why is it that whenever someone mentions Mike Judge, they always mention Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, but never Daria? Granted, Judge isn't as directly involved with Daria as he was with B&B or is with KotH, but Daria is probably his best creation ever. She's actually *intellectual*, and it's her mocking a stupid world, rather than being part of it. It's a slice of life from the exact point of view I had in high school, except I didn't have a proverbial Jane to give me comfort by being miserable company. ---
He specifically said "either have incredible loss or a negative compression ratio" (that is, the file gets bigger), which is the case with LZW on purely random data (the best you can hope for is to almost break even).
Slashdot Mirror
On the Datahand, both thumbs are used quite a bit. The right thumb is responsible for space, backspace, number/symbol modeshift, entering mouse mode, and the alt key, and the left thumb does tab, enter, shift, entering character mode, and the ctrl key. Admittedly, I used to use my left thumb for the spacebar, but now even on normal keyboards I use my right thumb, just out of habit.
The Datahand does a good job of distributing load across all the fingers in a pretty sane way. Their mapping could be improved slightly, but not enough to complain about (as long as you don't want to play games on it).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I love you.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, you and Jesse Berst... ;)
*grin, ducking under quills*
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Holism
Reductionism
Mu
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
damn he's cute.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, Win3.x had T-Bear, though he was an internal mascot and pretty lame.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Some people are so much fun. Others...aren't. ;)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As for resizable filesystems, AIX's filesystem is, sorta. It's more like the Linux logical partition thing (combining multiple partitions together to make one big logical partition), but I believe the individual partitions can be resized. I Am Not An AIX Admin, I just use it at work and have had to see our AIX admin mess around with partitions. :)
Aside from that, I pretty much agree with what's been said. The author of the article doesn't sound like he made much of an effort to understand what/why he was doing. You want an alternative to Windows? Good first step, but for now, learn what you're doing first. Generally it's a good idea to learn how to drive a car before switching from riding a bicycle.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Now, blasphemy would be to have a Linux distribution which doesn't install gnuchess/xboard by default. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Moral: It may be that programmers will happily craft code for open software that doesn't belong to any one company--the Linux operating system or free Apache for Web servers--but they balk at helping the Netscapes of the world get richer.
As we all know, this is somewhat inaccurate. I, for example, would have been more than willing to help Mozilla were it not for the fact that the code they just dumped on us wouldn't even compile, much less work. The code they released was pure and utter crap. You can't polish a turd. Now, if they'd funded an effort to write a completely new browser from scratch, I think that'd have worked a hell of a lot better for them. Or, at the very least, they could have released some functional sourcecode (i.e. Netscape 4.0 for Linux final build); at least give us something that we can run through gdb and fix the bugs in first before trying to extend functionality, yaknow?
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yes, it's called rsynth. It's kinda primitive, and the voice isn't very configurable (about all you can do is choose whether it has an American or English accent), and it's optimized for slow systems (i.e. its quality peaks at 8KHz, anything higher and it sounds like it's talking through a strainer), but it works, and it's a well-behaved UNIX program. I don't know of a simple way to get it to work as a speaking interface to a terminal, though.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
datahand
I can't help but evangelize this device. It is wonderful. My wrists were at the point that they hurt constantly, painfully; I lost sleep over it. I couldn't stop using the computer, though. After about a month of using nothing but the datahand, my wrists are SO much better. I still have occasional pain and numbness, but that's usually after using normal keyboards (like in the computer lab).
Datahand + fvwm2 go together to make a WONDERFUL team in terms of customizability. Even when I'm not using my Dathand, I don't have to use the mouse much (ctrl+shift+HKJL to move coarse, ctrl+shft+alt+HKJL to move fine-grained), and when I am, the fact I can customize the interface to be exactly right for the Datahand is so wonderful...
The personal edition cost me $900 after a 10% student discount. They're not cheap. But they're worth every penny. Consider that RSI surgery is generally $10k and only treats the symptoms (not the cuase)...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yes, but physical junkmail at least costs the sender money. Spam doesn't (in fact, most spammers go to great length to NOT spend any money). Of course, this doesn't make postal spam right, but it can be legally blocked. Ask the post office for the nice happy form that lets you to not get route-based junkmail, and all those annoying money-saving coupons from the local pizza delivery place will stop coming. (Which is why I *like* postal spam - at least it does me some good.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Gah. I know very few people who do smoke weed, and they're Mac users. That doesn't say anything about people who use various OSes as it does for statistical clustering. I can't stand pot. It smells nasty, makes me nauseous (I've never smoked it, but have had plenty of second-hand exposure), and tends to make the people who use it, well, stupid.
I had a roommate once who was a major pothead and, as such, had a major pothead entourage. They would always listen to reggae really loud while smoking weed, and have conversations which, although maybe enlightened in their minds, went something like this:
Heh, that's cool.
Uh huhuh, yeah, huh, like, totally.
Yeah, man, like... heh, that was funny when, huh, pfffffft, yeah, this is good shit!
Huh, dude, like... yeah.
Pfffft, bitchin'.
These are, of course, the same types who use Bob Marley as a martyr for the cause of smoking weed. Wow, some cause. So this guy apparently died for their right to smoke a drug which makes them stupid and hungry all the time. Great. What a thing to be remembered for.
Myself, if I want to get high, it'll be on an adrenaline rush from some good ol' FPS gaming. Hell, even a CTF botmatch (CRbot is fun to play with, even if the bot isn't all that lifelike or good; it's fun to have bots which talk smack and actually use the gestures).
I also like getting high on music. Some music, such as Cibo Matto's album "Viva La Woman," have this effect of putting me in a wonderful trance.
There are so many good things to get high on which don't involve introducing toxins into your system. Okay, sure, I abuse caffeine just as much as anyone else, but I'm trying to cut down, and caffeine doesn't affect the brain (at least, aside from being addictive).
Gah. Potheads just make me sick.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
There's a local employer who some friends of mine and I have had an interesting evolution for their level of crack usage. It started out with them smoking crack, but eventually they got to the level of taking crack in a suppository form.
Now the OpenSound guys... THEY have got to be smoking some serious crack.
See, it's an expression. I'm sure they don't, but they just seem to.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It took me a while to think of this, but why not use McCabe complexity to gauge the complexity of a project? (The McCabe complexity is, simply speaking, the number of branches in a program.) LOC and documentation and coding style then become a non-issue.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I like .cx myself. They give you a month free, and are about $17/year.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Um, this is a slashdot poll, as far as I know.
Myself, I puyt 20k+LOC, because that's what wc -l said for my projects from last year (if you count personal time, work and class), though I guess since only about 5k of those were for work, I could be considered a slacker, right? (The rest being either required for class or completely recreational.) My coding style is a sane one, i.e. (the _s are just because of the lack of proper code formatting here):
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
_ _ for (int i = 0; i argc; i++)
_ _ _ _ printf ("Argument %d = '%s'\n", i, argv[i]);
}
Of course, comparing "hello world" programs for LOC is pretty much pointless. Even with a lot of documentation, any sufficiently-complex project will have a much greater magnitude of actual code lines than of comments or whitespace (style depending, of course, but if you have more than one blank line at a time you need some serious help anyway).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No quiero Taco Bell. Yo quiero Amasita's. (Amasita's es un poco restaurante Mexicano que es cerca del laboratorio del sciencia computacion. Sus enchiladas queso con chile rojo son MUY delicioso, y son borrachos!)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It's BEING addressed, you moron.
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Or was that another damn april fool's article?
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There's GNUstep, which has been around LONG before KDE or Gnome were even started, and I'm sure there's others. Just because people only know about KDE and Gnome doesn't make them the only two.
Additionally, GNUstep is much nicer than both KDE and Gnome because it doesn't tie applications to the window manager; instead, it is a set of protocols programs can use to talk to each other (and Windowmaker, the testbed WM, just happens to be one of those programs).
---
Why is it that whenever someone mentions Mike Judge, they always mention Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, but never Daria? Granted, Judge isn't as directly involved with Daria as he was with B&B or is with KotH, but Daria is probably his best creation ever. She's actually *intellectual*, and it's her mocking a stupid world, rather than being part of it. It's a slice of life from the exact point of view I had in high school, except I didn't have a proverbial Jane to give me comfort by being miserable company.
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He specifically said "either have incredible loss or a negative compression ratio" (that is, the file gets bigger), which is the case with LZW on purely random data (the best you can hope for is to almost break even).
---