The article you link is specious. One of the main ideas behind Dvorak is that it allows you to alternate keys; this guy claims the opposite (that QWERTY has more alternating hands.) Better is this site, which explains both the pros and cons of the layout.
To chip in on the main question, I've been using Dvorak for 5 years now and I can still touch type on QWERTY. I learned to touch-type Dvorak in about two weeks by taping a copy of the layout on my monitor.
I don't know about the studies, but all anecdotal evidence shows that dvorak is easier on the hands. Besides having more common keys on the home row, most english words are typed from the outside-in on the Dvorak layout, which is much easier to do (try tapping either way on your desk).
Hasn't the novelty of amateur online satire worn off by now? "Wow it's a webpage so it looks like my mediocre humour is FOR REAL BIG TIME PUBLISHED! I'm sure the nerds on slashdot will LOVE it!"
Oh, I get it - it's funny because it's making fun of windows. Let's start a fight over which Linux distro is best on the desktop just to make sure we churn through all the tedious motions.
You only get spam these days because you want spam or are too dumb to do anything about it...
I've seen/.'ers use the word "dumb" or "stupid" to describe people who don't know how to update a CVS tree or install linux or, in your case know 5 spam-blocking tools off the top of their heads.
Being a computer geek doesn't make you wise or even intelligent.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I, for one, said no such thing. In fact, it's obvious that you are making great achievements in coding.
Further, I can't really fault you for bragging because you are bringing the innovation. Unfortunately, that doesn't make your style less annoying or distracting to your readers.
The article is highly technical. But if Dan had explained his work succinctly instead of bragging, there would have been more interesting conversation. I think people were put off by Dan's purple style as much as the difficulty of the material.
The tech stuff doesn't come until more than halfway through the article, starting with the link to paketto. Come on, Lingua Reseux? This kind of over-done, flowery arrogance is what is and was always lame about Wired and their make-believe digeratti horseshit. The lack of that pretention here is part of what is cool about/. - You may think Slashdotters are dummy case-modders but at least they're down to earth.
Sure, and in the future, people will wear clothes made out of shiny space-blanket material and cook all their food in microwaves, and decorate their walls with pictures of fractals. Feh.
As much as I'm sure you'd like to think your toys are paradigm-shattering conceptual breakthroughs, you know they only continue along the same path that Gutenburg forged.
The ASCII character set is nothing more than a new way to implement the character set used by the press. The important advancements made possible by the press are only re-codified by computers. Ebooks are nothing more another way to store a text, and a crappy way at that. Audio books are even worse because they're not even texts. You can't highlight or mark on ebooks (yet), and more importantly, you can't pass a cherished old ebook to your child as as heirloom.
The physicality of books is important and wonderful, and you're cheating yourself if you don't appreciate the experience of reading a real book in a quiet place. You should curl up with a real book in a room with no computer and get some perspective on this technological terror you've created.
Re:wow... that popup question was worth the hype.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
do people really disable the ads on slashdot? The ads on this site are so unobtrusive, the idea never even occured to me.
And furthermore, the banners on slashdot are some of the only ones that I've actually clicked through on purpose!
That's a completely irresponsible attitude toward the problem. China being willing to take a handout for dangerous material that will poison its citizens (and not the politicians who make this decision) does not absolve the US of its own moral responsibilities.
Yes, we should be able to just sell this stuff and from thre it would become the buyer's responsibility, but here we have evidence that this stuff is hurting people.
Also, RTFA: "The transfer of hazardous waste is restricted by a 1989 treaty known as the Basel Convention, but the United States has not ratified it."
What a nice gesture, for Stephen Hawking to read the whole thing!
Re:The World Trade Center apparently never existed
on
History of Video Games
·
· Score: 1
I know that Flight Simulator doesn't display big landmarks if you set the sim's date to before those landmarks were built. So does FS display the twin towers again if you set the date to when they were still standing? To me, that just makes the sim consistent.
Has anyone played FS2000? Does it behave like this, or does it pretend the towers never existed?
Well if it has this fast parallel memory access, it should make a great box for doing intensive GIMP - or better, CAD type applications. Even better if one could hack a bigger hard drive to it. Or, if it's fast enough, get at one over a network.
Is already known to be highly saturated. Will VIA's chips be signifigantly cheaper than the Celrons or Durons (or at least have a better cost-to-performance ratio?) If so, will that margin be enough to keep the company afloat?
This sounds like something that would have been a great idea a year or two ago, but in this competitive (and now saturated) market, it will be tough going for the guys at VIA.
Computer literacy will never be as important as print literacy. Computers and technology in general are having an unprecedented (positive) effect on the world, but not everyone is interested in computers - I think you're losing your perspective, as "the importance of computers," whatever turgid definition you're using, is ubiquitous, while the skills to manipulate computers are increasingly specialized and will always be a vocational skill.
As a geek, you should understand the importance of going into a large-scale rollout like this with a definate set of goals - and Angus King hasn't presented any compelling reason for shelling out the cash for these things when it could go toward teacher salaries, or even public computer equipment.
I live in Maine, and I think the tax money would be better spent elsewhere. My high school had a great computer lab and an AP COS that taught the equivalent of a college COS 160. If the money were spent on more public computer lab equipment and COS courses, it would go further to teach computer literacy than these cheesy thin client half-ass laptop things will ever do. I don't think these laptops are about computer literacy at all. They are a spaced out attempt to "make teaching fun" by making the classroom into some kind of heinleinian, asimovian technocratic learning center.
I broke about 30 warranty stickers at an install fair last year, and two weeks from now I'll probably break 50 more, and I never once thought about it.
I wonder if my Resnet department could get sued if someone were inclined to do so...
You wouldn't even neeed 200mhz. I have a p90 I use for mining p2p that runs win98 and Morpheus - even under that crufty load, it plays mp3s without skipping. Sort of.
An optimized linux miniboard boxed with a standard laptop IDE drive and an LCD display from those black&white Nuts & Volts ads and a couple of buttons would be a pretty hip guerilla rio. I would opt for the optional duct tape trimming.
Near-space altitude obviates the need for warhead && propellant, leaving volume and mass for substantial avionic capabilities in such a bomb. One version proposed includes a heavily medicated kamakazi monkey with video goggles and a joystick.
Look, what are the vast majority of those people running on the hardware they're making so cheap all by themselves? Sure, Windows is crufty, but it's also ubiquitus. And Bad Boy Bill made the decision to stay out of the hardware game, so the free market is competing to make cheap, reliable i386 parts. Also, we're talking about XP, which is a step away from the legacy MS-DOS architecture, being based on a brand-new (and relatively stable) kernel.
What are you going to play with that force-feedback joystick? I own one, and I play Mechwarrior 4, Falcon4, Combat Flight Sim 2, and FS2000 on it. Most games are still designed for windows, all hardware is designed for windows, and that's part of why hardware is cheap: the gamer market.
You're performing a monstrous feat of doublethink if you blame MS for making hardware more expensive. Let's not lose clarity in our blind hatred for the enemy, when in fact MS is not the enemy at all, but simply a giant dinosaur which is destined to be out-evolved.
But what if Microsoft were to flounder? Does the open-source crowd really want that?
The wintel gravy train is responsible for affordable i386-based hardware. Compare Wintel to the only existing equivalent: Apple. (though we all still shed bitter tears now and then for the ill-fated Amiga) Years after PCs broke the sub-$1000 market, Apple is still catering to moneyed non-geeks (How many rich, non-geek kernel coders are there?). Windows should be seen as a boon to the efforts of the open-source movement if the basic precepts of OSS are true: namely, that OSS products will steadily, inexorably improve until they eclipse Windows in its own market space, on the same hardware. Until that happens, Microsoft is keeping the hardware cheap by putting it in the hands of non-geek consumers. I say, go forth, XP, and further fuel the demand that keeps Moore's Law happening!
Imagine a world where Windows hasn't beaten the Mac and Apple has been running the show all this time. Motorola/MacOS is still slower and more expensive than the wintel platform. Without independant hardware vendors releasing specs, development on the Linux drivers would be much slower. Also, think of all the geeks who have had access to a pseudo-unix command line all this time, and especially before 1995. There are certainly other factors I'm not thinking of as well.
I know I'm jumping into the furnace when I say so, but Windows should be acknowledged at least for its place in making cheap computers economically viable.
I work for the Resnet department at the university I go to, and we install NICs in a lot of computers, and a lot of those computers are Emachines. Even this simple upgrade is a mighty pain with an Emachine (most of which run WinME: cheap hardware, buggy software, big headache)
Even worse was a Dell(I think) mini-computer that was standard hardware, but with dimensions like a double-thick laptop with cute styling. It had rear slots that were too small for standard PCI cards. I got a network card into the first one I saw by unscrewing the NIC's rear plate and just floating the NIC without any support, other than being jammed into the PCI slot. Didn't tell the boss. We eventually got USB NICs for computers like this.
All of our difficulties with these increasingly closed computers were watched over by helpless and nervous freshmen who just wanted to move into their dorm rooms, who hoped we weren't breaking their computers as we struggled to pry the counter-intuitive cases apart. I was always glad I was working for the university's captive customers and not a for-profit company with the customers breathing down my neck.
Point being, will even a layman want a computer that can't take a simple NIC upgrade? You can't squeeze everything into a USB port. I think there will always be some level of flex, even in non-server hardware, and that will keep the DIY market alive.
Slashdot Mirror
The article you link is specious. One of the main ideas behind Dvorak is that it allows you to alternate keys; this guy claims the opposite (that QWERTY has more alternating hands.) Better is this site, which explains both the pros and cons of the layout.
To chip in on the main question, I've been using Dvorak for 5 years now and I can still touch type on QWERTY. I learned to touch-type Dvorak in about two weeks by taping a copy of the layout on my monitor.
I don't know about the studies, but all anecdotal evidence shows that dvorak is easier on the hands. Besides having more common keys on the home row, most english words are typed from the outside-in on the Dvorak layout, which is much easier to do (try tapping either way on your desk).
Why didn't you hire him? company policy?
This is supposed to be funny?
Hasn't the novelty of amateur online satire worn off by now? "Wow it's a webpage so it looks like my mediocre humour is FOR REAL BIG TIME PUBLISHED! I'm sure the nerds on slashdot will LOVE it!"
Oh, I get it - it's funny because it's making fun of windows. Let's start a fight over which Linux distro is best on the desktop just to make sure we churn through all the tedious motions.
You only get spam these days because you want spam or are too dumb to do anything about it...
/.'ers use the word "dumb" or "stupid" to describe people who don't know how to update a CVS tree or install linux or, in your case know 5 spam-blocking tools off the top of their heads.
I've seen
Being a computer geek doesn't make you wise or even intelligent.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I, for one, said no such thing. In fact, it's obvious that you are making great achievements in coding.
Further, I can't really fault you for bragging because you are bringing the innovation. Unfortunately, that doesn't make your style less annoying or distracting to your readers.
The article is highly technical. But if Dan had explained his work succinctly instead of bragging, there would have been more interesting conversation. I think people were put off by Dan's purple style as much as the difficulty of the material.
/. - You may think Slashdotters are dummy case-modders but at least they're down to earth.
The tech stuff doesn't come until more than halfway through the article, starting with the link to paketto. Come on, Lingua Reseux? This kind of over-done, flowery arrogance is what is and was always lame about Wired and their make-believe digeratti horseshit. The lack of that pretention here is part of what is cool about
true that - I got a tetris watch out of a box of cereal when I was a kid, it was the coolest toy I ever had!
But it was so vulnerable to water that it broke on the back of my toilet while I was taking a steamy shower - from the moisture of the shower!
I've noticed this phemomenon in X as well. It happens when you reboot without powering down, and the video RAM is kept alive the whole time.
Also, if I am in windows, and reboot into linux, when I start X, I often see a mangled version of my windows desktop background.
Sure, and in the future, people will wear clothes made out of shiny space-blanket material and cook all their food in microwaves, and decorate their walls with pictures of fractals. Feh.
As much as I'm sure you'd like to think your toys are paradigm-shattering conceptual breakthroughs, you know they only continue along the same path that Gutenburg forged.
The ASCII character set is nothing more than a new way to implement the character set used by the press. The important advancements made possible by the press are only re-codified by computers. Ebooks are nothing more another way to store a text, and a crappy way at that. Audio books are even worse because they're not even texts. You can't highlight or mark on ebooks (yet), and more importantly, you can't pass a cherished old ebook to your child as as heirloom.
The physicality of books is important and wonderful, and you're cheating yourself if you don't appreciate the experience of reading a real book in a quiet place. You should curl up with a real book in a room with no computer and get some perspective on this technological terror you've created.
do people really disable the ads on slashdot? The ads on this site are so unobtrusive, the idea never even occured to me.
And furthermore, the banners on slashdot are some of the only ones that I've actually clicked through on purpose!
That's a completely irresponsible attitude toward the problem. China being willing to take a handout for dangerous material that will poison its citizens (and not the politicians who make this decision) does not absolve the US of its own moral responsibilities.
Yes, we should be able to just sell this stuff and from thre it would become the buyer's responsibility, but here we have evidence that this stuff is hurting people.
Also, RTFA: "The transfer of hazardous waste is restricted by a 1989 treaty known as the Basel Convention, but the United States has not ratified it."
What a nice gesture, for Stephen Hawking to read the whole thing!
I know that Flight Simulator doesn't display big landmarks if you set the sim's date to before those landmarks were built. So does FS display the twin towers again if you set the date to when they were still standing? To me, that just makes the sim consistent.
Has anyone played FS2000? Does it behave like this, or does it pretend the towers never existed?
Well if it has this fast parallel memory access, it should make a great box for doing intensive GIMP - or better, CAD type applications. Even better if one could hack a bigger hard drive to it. Or, if it's fast enough, get at one over a network.
Is already known to be highly saturated. Will VIA's chips be signifigantly cheaper than the Celrons or Durons (or at least have a better cost-to-performance ratio?) If so, will that margin be enough to keep the company afloat?
This sounds like something that would have been a great idea a year or two ago, but in this competitive (and now saturated) market, it will be tough going for the guys at VIA.
I'll elaborate.
Computer literacy will never be as important as print literacy. Computers and technology in general are having an unprecedented (positive) effect on the world, but not everyone is interested in computers - I think you're losing your perspective, as "the importance of computers," whatever turgid definition you're using, is ubiquitous, while the skills to manipulate computers are increasingly specialized and will always be a vocational skill.
As a geek, you should understand the importance of going into a large-scale rollout like this with a definate set of goals - and Angus King hasn't presented any compelling reason for shelling out the cash for these things when it could go toward teacher salaries, or even public computer equipment.
I live in Maine, and I think the tax money would be better spent elsewhere. My high school had a great computer lab and an AP COS that taught the equivalent of a college COS 160. If the money were spent on more public computer lab equipment and COS courses, it would go further to teach computer literacy than these cheesy thin client half-ass laptop things will ever do. I don't think these laptops are about computer literacy at all. They are a spaced out attempt to "make teaching fun" by making the classroom into some kind of heinleinian, asimovian technocratic learning center.
I broke about 30 warranty stickers at an install fair last year, and two weeks from now I'll probably break 50 more, and I never once thought about it. I wonder if my Resnet department could get sued if someone were inclined to do so...
I, for one, cannot bring the proper and tremendous effort of concentration to bear on my opening game without three Red Bulls and a hypermint.
Everything looks really bright and the edges are very clear. Isn't this kind of like what cocaine is supposed to be like?
You wouldn't even neeed 200mhz. I have a p90 I use for mining p2p that runs win98 and Morpheus - even under that crufty load, it plays mp3s without skipping. Sort of.
An optimized linux miniboard boxed with a standard laptop IDE drive and an LCD display from those black&white Nuts & Volts ads and a couple of buttons would be a pretty hip guerilla rio. I would opt for the optional duct tape trimming.
Near-space altitude obviates the need for warhead && propellant, leaving volume and mass for substantial avionic capabilities in such a bomb. One version proposed includes a heavily medicated kamakazi monkey with video goggles and a joystick.
Look, what are the vast majority of those people running on the hardware they're making so cheap all by themselves? Sure, Windows is crufty, but it's also ubiquitus. And Bad Boy Bill made the decision to stay out of the hardware game, so the free market is competing to make cheap, reliable i386 parts. Also, we're talking about XP, which is a step away from the legacy MS-DOS architecture, being based on a brand-new (and relatively stable) kernel.
What are you going to play with that force-feedback joystick? I own one, and I play Mechwarrior 4, Falcon4, Combat Flight Sim 2, and FS2000 on it. Most games are still designed for windows, all hardware is designed for windows, and that's part of why hardware is cheap: the gamer market.
You're performing a monstrous feat of doublethink if you blame MS for making hardware more expensive. Let's not lose clarity in our blind hatred for the enemy, when in fact MS is not the enemy at all, but simply a giant dinosaur which is destined to be out-evolved.
But what if Microsoft were to flounder? Does the open-source crowd really want that?
The wintel gravy train is responsible for affordable i386-based hardware. Compare Wintel to the only existing equivalent: Apple. (though we all still shed bitter tears now and then for the ill-fated Amiga) Years after PCs broke the sub-$1000 market, Apple is still catering to moneyed non-geeks (How many rich, non-geek kernel coders are there?). Windows should be seen as a boon to the efforts of the open-source movement if the basic precepts of OSS are true: namely, that OSS products will steadily, inexorably improve until they eclipse Windows in its own market space, on the same hardware. Until that happens, Microsoft is keeping the hardware cheap by putting it in the hands of non-geek consumers. I say, go forth, XP, and further fuel the demand that keeps Moore's Law happening!
Imagine a world where Windows hasn't beaten the Mac and Apple has been running the show all this time. Motorola/MacOS is still slower and more expensive than the wintel platform. Without independant hardware vendors releasing specs, development on the Linux drivers would be much slower. Also, think of all the geeks who have had access to a pseudo-unix command line all this time, and especially before 1995. There are certainly other factors I'm not thinking of as well.
I know I'm jumping into the furnace when I say so, but Windows should be acknowledged at least for its place in making cheap computers economically viable.
...as daunting a prospect as that may be.
I work for the Resnet department at the university I go to, and we install NICs in a lot of computers, and a lot of those computers are Emachines. Even this simple upgrade is a mighty pain with an Emachine (most of which run WinME: cheap hardware, buggy software, big headache)
Even worse was a Dell(I think) mini-computer that was standard hardware, but with dimensions like a double-thick laptop with cute styling. It had rear slots that were too small for standard PCI cards. I got a network card into the first one I saw by unscrewing the NIC's rear plate and just floating the NIC without any support, other than being jammed into the PCI slot. Didn't tell the boss. We eventually got USB NICs for computers like this.
All of our difficulties with these increasingly closed computers were watched over by helpless and nervous freshmen who just wanted to move into their dorm rooms, who hoped we weren't breaking their computers as we struggled to pry the counter-intuitive cases apart. I was always glad I was working for the university's captive customers and not a for-profit company with the customers breathing down my neck.
Point being, will even a layman want a computer that can't take a simple NIC upgrade? You can't squeeze everything into a USB port. I think there will always be some level of flex, even in non-server hardware, and that will keep the DIY market alive.