Well, learning a new style of typing needn't be hard -- it depends which aspects you have to relearn.
For instance, I found that learning to type on a kinesis contour took only about 3 days, and that's with moving the shift keys around and using an extra layer for programming punctuation. Big win!
I also found that learning to type Dvorak on that same keyboard was about 3 months of utter misery, delivering no clear benefits and permanently confusing my muscle memory as to which key is on which finger.
I think the hardest change to make is to associate a letter with a new finger. Doesn't matter if it's a new movement, provided it's on the same finger. The designers of this tooth thing seem to agree.
As to whether the tooth thing is more comfortable -- it looks to me as if it takes constant pressure inward from the palms to prevent it from dropping to the floor. If that's the case, it sounds _horrible_. To be honest, I'd only see the point if it could be used one handed -- otherwise, how is holding a big black tooth any easier than resting a big beige plank?
one of our secondary databases crashes... we have to wait a day or two until we can get a reboot of the system because the main database runs on the same server
Dude... Windows 2000 is not your problem. You have bigger problems. Actually, this being/., I guess Windows is automatically to blame, but it really sounds as if your computers are being managed in a manner both unusual and unpleasant.
I am genuinely disturbed that a hospital can be being run like this.
Relativity effects make rules based on length of occupation difficult. If I find 10 objects that are travelling in a group at some vast speed relative to earth, I can easily stay on each of them for a year (earth time) without having to even unroll my space sleeping bag.
Of course, my claim, travelling as a radio message, may not arrive on earth for years... my lord, think of the effect on patent law! *shudder*
Well, I was sitting here (in UK) planning about how I was going to go to the store on Oxford Street and buy a copy of Doom 3, like I bought my last game, and then reading your post I find I have to wait for HOW long, TANTALIZED by those glowing reviews??
Time to fire up the ol' bittorrent, after which I may or may not bother to buy a copy, depending on whether I have anything better to do.
I honestly have no clue why companies do this -- excuse me, why consumer-oriented companies who seem to rely on extreme apathy in their chosen market do this.
So, taking a look at the HUD screenshots, I see that the suit runs windows and supplies health information via a java applet (not app, applet).
This is wrong, seems to me personally, in many ways, which I will not enumerate here.
(although I'd have time to enumerate them twice over in the time it'll take that java applet to start up on Windows on the hardware that fits into that helmet)
Looks like some much-neglected subsectors of the defense contractor world have finally got a strategy to take a slice of the pie away from the aerospace and logistical sectors, who traditionally do well.
We could be looking at a new area of defense lobbying opening up -- and a greater diversity of defense-related investments, too.
A fundamentally 3d rendering system, based on the gpu not the cpu, would certainly have a deep effect on the way I work with vim. For instance......hmm, actually I guess I can go back to sleep.
Thank the good lord there are people other than me who remember what the IBM-dominated world was like and how MS and the microcomputer revolution freed everyone -- and how nice it would be _not_ to go back there.
Graham is right -- there are nice monolithic problems that hackers love, and fiddly 'multiple small arbitrary items' problems, usually about integrating existing crap software and processes, that hackers hate.
Guess which one is harder to actually get done effectively? Guess which one is least well understood? Guess which one is needed more often?
I can find a 'great hacker' who can solve a great big algorithm problem in any CS department. Solving 'interface this broken business process with this broken 40mb excel spreadsheet so that it's all a bit less broken' is actually _hard_.
When I bought one of those mini Vaios on whim without knowing what it was, Sony support helped me figure out what model it was (Australian, but redone as korean by some third party, it seems), why I couldn't boot linux on it, how to change the keyboard config from Korean to Japanese, and all with a laptop that I got off the back of a truck without proper papers.
Nono, it's all about _what_ luxury items you buy. Each person only understands the point of the particular types of items they happen to care about. They always consider other expensive items to be silly, if not downright immoral.
For instance, _your_ $1000 remote controls are a ridiculous waste of resources, whereas _my_ $4000 bicycle was worth it because hey, feel that quality.
Great, great, I YESTERDAY put in an order for an SB75G2!!! And now a whole new shuttle that would be way more fun to play with has come out! Admittedly, this new one is a bit big and I don't want PCIX... but DAMMIT ANYWAY!
Unfortunately, the GIMP cannot be fixed by everyone just fixing the little bit that's bothering them. That's more like the way it got into the current (imperfect although still very useful) state.
What it needs is for a _small_ group of people to look at and, where necessary, restructure the _whole_ edifice. Having each complainer fix the bit that they are complaining about is not a scalable way to create an application.
There's a lesson there in there for OSS development in general. Possibly.
1. Language. Most Indian languages are indeed Indo-European and interoperate well with English. Many millions, however, speak non-Indo-European Dravidian languages. I would say that educated Indians _and_ educated Chinese speak better English than English and American people, though, anyway...
2. I agree that India is very heterogenous. China, however, also retains some heterogeneity, and although that diversity is being wiped out at a great rate and with huge brutality, it will be a long time before everyone in China is Han, let alone until everyone in China speaks Mandarin (which seems to be the long-term goal).
3. In theory, China's dictatorship is scarier than India's democracy. In practise, though, they are both so corrupt as to be closer to just plain survival of the fittest than to any particular political ideal -- and furthermore, China's government has the power and will to enforce economic rules and controls when necessary (witness last year's anti-boom manoevres -- heaven forbid a Western government should try to actually fix problems).
Anyway, those were _my_ 2c. Going back to sleep now.
know what you're really saying; the rest of the world thinks we are loud, crass, and uncivil. They think so because we come with more common sense and know-how, and we call things like they are.
Could it be that they see you as loud, crass, and uncivil because you say things like the above?
You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part.
You see where it says 'Browser'? Right there, in the sentence you yourself wrote? See it? Good. Now, let's ask ourselves -- does it say 'authoring tool'? It doesn't, does it? It says 'browser'. Not a tool for creating pages -- that can be done by other tools. A tool for _browsing_ pages. Do you see the connection now? It's a _browser_... its primary function is to _browse_. Okay, I'm going to leave you to work on that thought for a bit.
(I decided to pick on that one sentence pretty much at random -- there were many candidates.)
This article appears to have been cooked up from an old but popular recipe:
1 -- Take a guy from academia 2 -- Add no real applications, userland experience, or reality checks 3 -- Leave him to stew in his own juice for a few years, becoming more and more focused on his own tiny pet academic theory. During this step, take care not to expose the academic to the actual work being done by scientists, designers, and regular people. 4 -- When he is convinced he has a 'message' about the 'state of the industry/nation/world', put a keyboard in front of him!
It's a popular dish, but I'd rather see it served in Wired or the sunday papers than here at/.
I was generally struck by how much better daggerfall was. Vast stretches of nothing, bugs, really really random dungeons, yes. But still somehow so much to do with your character -- spell design, item design that worked and did something, ships, vampires, _different vampire clans_ if you cared to research that far.
If morrowind had been properly balanced, they could perhaps have included more varied items and something like the smithing and spell design of Daggerfall. As it is, I just stuck a few Golden Saint souls on 'regenerate hp' and won the game without having to reload -- which is lucky because I couldn't have put up with the zillions of random, inappropriate dull dialog choices for a second longer.
I will say, though, that parts of Morrowind were superbly atmospheric, visually.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, learning a new style of typing needn't be hard -- it depends which aspects you have to relearn.
For instance, I found that learning to type on a kinesis contour took only about 3 days, and that's with moving the shift keys around and using an extra layer for programming punctuation. Big win!
I also found that learning to type Dvorak on that same keyboard was about 3 months of utter misery, delivering no clear benefits and permanently confusing my muscle memory as to which key is on which finger.
I think the hardest change to make is to associate a letter with a new finger. Doesn't matter if it's a new movement, provided it's on the same finger. The designers of this tooth thing seem to agree.
As to whether the tooth thing is more comfortable -- it looks to me as if it takes constant pressure inward from the palms to prevent it from dropping to the floor. If that's the case, it sounds _horrible_. To be honest, I'd only see the point if it could be used one handed -- otherwise, how is holding a big black tooth any easier than resting a big beige plank?
one of our secondary databases crashes... we have to wait a day or two until we can get a reboot of the system because the main database runs on the same server
/., I guess Windows is automatically to blame, but it really sounds as if your computers are being managed in a manner both unusual and unpleasant.
Dude... Windows 2000 is not your problem. You have bigger problems. Actually, this being
I am genuinely disturbed that a hospital can be being run like this.
In fact PLEASE FIX IT.
American laws are based on the bible?
I could have sworn they were the product of a secular legislature in a country that admits all faitns as equal
Mm... bag of chips...
Relativity effects make rules based on length of occupation difficult. If I find 10 objects that are travelling in a group at some vast speed relative to earth, I can easily stay on each of them for a year (earth time) without having to even unroll my space sleeping bag.
Of course, my claim, travelling as a radio message, may not arrive on earth for years... my lord, think of the effect on patent law! *shudder*
That game is keytastic.
There are still a lot of arcades in Japan where virtuoso typists go all through TotD with perfect scores... it's absolutely terrifying.
Pity about the voice acting, though
Well, I was sitting here (in UK) planning about how I was going to go to the store on Oxford Street and buy a copy of Doom 3, like I bought my last game, and then reading your post I find I have to wait for HOW long, TANTALIZED by those glowing reviews??
Time to fire up the ol' bittorrent, after which I may or may not bother to buy a copy, depending on whether I have anything better to do.
I honestly have no clue why companies do this -- excuse me, why consumer-oriented companies who seem to rely on extreme apathy in their chosen market do this.
Well, not what they're _for_. But it's certainly one feature of the relationship.
Except you keep killing them yourselves, you naughty people.
But nobody seems to mind much, for some reason.
So that's okay.
So, taking a look at the HUD screenshots, I see that the suit runs windows and supplies health information via a java applet (not app, applet).
This is wrong, seems to me personally, in many ways, which I will not enumerate here.
(although I'd have time to enumerate them twice over in the time it'll take that java applet to start up on Windows on the hardware that fits into that helmet)
Looks like some much-neglected subsectors of the defense contractor world have finally got a strategy to take a slice of the pie away from the aerospace and logistical sectors, who traditionally do well.
We could be looking at a new area of defense lobbying opening up -- and a greater diversity of defense-related investments, too.
Koreans have about the same amount of trouble with the L/R thing as Japanese, I'd say.
Also, Koreans have trouble distinguishing F and P. Cue hilarity, I guess.
What bothers me more is that Americans English seems to be losing distinct vowel phonemes so rapidly. *sigh* entropy entropy
A fundamentally 3d rendering system, based on the gpu not the cpu, would certainly have a deep effect on the way I work with vim. For instance...
Thank the good lord there are people other than me who remember what the IBM-dominated world was like and how MS and the microcomputer revolution freed everyone -- and how nice it would be _not_ to go back there.
Graham is right -- there are nice monolithic problems that hackers love, and fiddly 'multiple small arbitrary items' problems, usually about integrating existing crap software and processes, that hackers hate.
Guess which one is harder to actually get done effectively? Guess which one is least well understood? Guess which one is needed more often?
I can find a 'great hacker' who can solve a great big algorithm problem in any CS department. Solving 'interface this broken business process with this broken 40mb excel spreadsheet so that it's all a bit less broken' is actually _hard_.
I am comforted to see that there are still people who not merely say but _write_ 'youse', completely without irony.
I just wanted to share that with y'all.
given-in to the Made-in-China junk market
Junk and non-junk alike, it's pretty much all made in China. Or 'China and Taiwan' if you prefer.
Except mobiles and mp3 players. Those all seem to come from Korea.
When I bought one of those mini Vaios on whim without knowing what it was, Sony support helped me figure out what model it was (Australian, but redone as korean by some third party, it seems), why I couldn't boot linux on it, how to change the keyboard config from Korean to Japanese, and all with a laptop that I got off the back of a truck without proper papers.
But ymmv. And sony are still wayyy overpriced.
It did go to feed the hungry -- hungry bicycle makers.
Trickle-down economics in action
Nono, it's all about _what_ luxury items you buy. Each person only understands the point of the particular types of items they happen to care about. They always consider other expensive items to be silly, if not downright immoral.
For instance, _your_ $1000 remote controls are a ridiculous waste of resources, whereas _my_ $4000 bicycle was worth it because hey, feel that quality.
Great, great, I YESTERDAY put in an order for an SB75G2!!! And now a whole new shuttle that would be way more fun to play with has come out! Admittedly, this new one is a bit big and I don't want PCIX... but DAMMIT ANYWAY!
*fume*
PS I still love shuttles anyway.
Unfortunately, the GIMP cannot be fixed by everyone just fixing the little bit that's bothering them. That's more like the way it got into the current (imperfect although still very useful) state.
What it needs is for a _small_ group of people to look at and, where necessary, restructure the _whole_ edifice. Having each complainer fix the bit that they are complaining about is not a scalable way to create an application.
There's a lesson there in there for OSS development in general. Possibly.
I'd like to annotate a bit...
1. Language. Most Indian languages are indeed Indo-European and interoperate well with English. Many millions, however, speak non-Indo-European Dravidian languages. I would say that educated Indians _and_ educated Chinese speak better English than English and American people, though, anyway...
2. I agree that India is very heterogenous. China, however, also retains some heterogeneity, and although that diversity is being wiped out at a great rate and with huge brutality, it will be a long time before everyone in China is Han, let alone until everyone in China speaks Mandarin (which seems to be the long-term goal).
3. In theory, China's dictatorship is scarier than India's democracy. In practise, though, they are both so corrupt as to be closer to just plain survival of the fittest than to any particular political ideal -- and furthermore, China's government has the power and will to enforce economic rules and controls when necessary (witness last year's anti-boom manoevres -- heaven forbid a Western government should try to actually fix problems).
Anyway, those were _my_ 2c. Going back to sleep now.
know what you're really saying; the rest of the world thinks we are loud, crass, and uncivil. They think so because we come with more common sense and know-how, and we call things like they are.
Could it be that they see you as loud, crass, and uncivil because you say things like the above?
You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part.
/.
You see where it says 'Browser'? Right there, in the sentence you yourself wrote? See it? Good. Now, let's ask ourselves -- does it say 'authoring tool'? It doesn't, does it? It says 'browser'. Not a tool for creating pages -- that can be done by other tools. A tool for _browsing_ pages. Do you see the connection now? It's a _browser_... its primary function is to _browse_. Okay, I'm going to leave you to work on that thought for a bit.
(I decided to pick on that one sentence pretty much at random -- there were many candidates.)
This article appears to have been cooked up from an old but popular recipe:
1 -- Take a guy from academia
2 -- Add no real applications, userland experience, or reality checks
3 -- Leave him to stew in his own juice for a few years, becoming more and more focused on his own tiny pet academic theory. During this step, take care not to expose the academic to the actual work being done by scientists, designers, and regular people.
4 -- When he is convinced he has a 'message' about the 'state of the industry/nation/world', put a keyboard in front of him!
It's a popular dish, but I'd rather see it served in Wired or the sunday papers than here at
I was generally struck by how much better daggerfall was. Vast stretches of nothing, bugs, really really random dungeons, yes. But still somehow so much to do with your character -- spell design, item design that worked and did something, ships, vampires, _different vampire clans_ if you cared to research that far.
If morrowind had been properly balanced, they could perhaps have included more varied items and something like the smithing and spell design of Daggerfall. As it is, I just stuck a few Golden Saint souls on 'regenerate hp' and won the game without having to reload -- which is lucky because I couldn't have put up with the zillions of random, inappropriate dull dialog choices for a second longer.
I will say, though, that parts of Morrowind were superbly atmospheric, visually.