Typing lessons may not be the answer you're looking for- if they are anything like the lessons that I've had- lessons that fail to recognize that modern computer keyboards are wider than the typical typewriter.
To be fair, after having had "proper" typing lessons on a typewriter, my typing has improved a bit. I use all fingers of my *left* hand for typing except my thumb- I always press the space bar with the thumb of my right hand. Officially I should be alternating between the left and right thumb.
For the right hand, the "typewriter" model just doesn't work. While the left hand on either typewriter or computer keyboard would cover roughly the same area, the right hand on a computer keyboard covers the usual area PLUS the enter key at PLUS the arrow pad PLUS the numeric keypad- so it can't be static above the keyboard and reach all relevant keys.
As I press then ENTER key with my little finger (and frequently so, when I'm doing anything on the command line), there's no way I can also use that finger for the "P" as I'm supposed to, without moving around my hand unnecessarily. As a result, I end up using only the index finger, little finger and thumb of my right hand (for the space).
The questions you have to ask yourself is, "Does it matter?" and "why do I want to type 'the right way'?"
I'm officially doing it wrong, but I can type blindfolded if I have to, have never had RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome or similar, and still manage to baffle people with my typing speed.
3ix are cheap and have mysql, php, linux and in their expert package (which allows you 5 sites) also ssh. Sounded great to me so I signed up.
Turns out you have to hand over your firstborn (well okay, ID info) to get ssh access "because people have been abusing it". Good, fair enough.
Also, LivePerson support seems nice but only works if it is not manned by stupid gits. It took 45 minutes to explaining to them that if an invoice is wrong, canceled by them and replaced by a new invoice, you should not need to pay the canceled invoice anymore. I found out because they took the site down for nonpayment of said canceled invoice. (For those interested, I still have a transcript of that chat.) Not acceptable to me; I can't recommend their service.
If I had my little way, I'd go for a service that just gives me a (virtual) machine, just charges me for the bandwidth and lets me do all administration myself. Strangely enough, although this gives the provider the least possible amount of work, I haven't seen any such services at "household-affordable" rates.
Switching cost includes more the just the cost of the software itself.
Yes. in this case it also includes the cost of training people that have never worked with anything but Windows. That is, of course, if you assume you *have* to retrain your existing admins, rather than firing two of them and replacing them with a single Unix admin. In the end, it all depends on how you make the calculation. Sure, a switch *could* cost more, but it *could* also cost less depending on the scenario you choose to follow.
Re:Maybe it's time to rethink "digital everything"
on
Hardware TPM Hacked
·
· Score: 1
Maybe it's time to greatly reduce our dependency on the digital world to secure trade and state secrets.
Make sure to hand in your geek card on the way out.
"would also forbid air travelers from carrying spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in their checked-in luggage" If it's so "dangerous" to be in the checked bags, then why is it safe to be on carry-on bags?
You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, "are spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in checked-in luggage are a safety risk?" The question can be answered objectively, rather than theoretically, because people have been stashing their batteries in checked-in luggage for decades. Right, batteries in checked-in luggage are an accident waiting to happen. We've been waiting, {and waiting,}*... but nothing happened.
It's only more secure if it implements the same security measures (encryption, key based access) as current wireless (okay, if the light is infrared it may be stopped by windows.
I don't think it will be a big contender for wireless though. The killer feature of wireless is that you don't have to drill holes in your walls to have network connectivity in the entire house. But if the network is optical, it will essentially be limited to the room where the base station is. Personally, I'd stick to my trusty old wires then. Reliable, secure, fast and low-cost, what more do you want?
I run a small project about the age of yours, and it has a user base of several thousand users. It started out as a Linux alternative to a piece of commercial software. I believe the following has contributed to its success:
- I joined the existing community forums
- Made sure the software doesn't suck. I started by giving a few distinguishing features that the commercial software simply doesn't offer (data recovery, allowing the use of low cost hardware rather than $200 commercial hardware) giving it an edge over the commercial offering. Many of the distinguishing features were features *I* needed, so others likely did too.
- Made sure my project was cross-platform; although I started it as a Linux project, the majority of the user base are Windows and Mac users.
- I went on to make sure my software can do *everything* that the commercial software does.
- I did set up a website asking for feedback, feature suggestions etc. which is a great source of inspiration for new features.
-...and so are complaints about the commercial software.
- To be fair, the commercial software is no longer being developed (but it's still being sold!), which means by now Windows 7 users are starting to have trouble running it. But in any case, I'm not dealing with a moving target.
- I never worried about Google, but I did make sure to mention the link to the software on the forum if someone asked a question that the software resolved. Eventually, word of mouth got out and people outside the forum started posting the link as well.
So basically, rather than building up a new community from scratch, I built on top of an existing one. It's terribly hard to sell a fax machine if nobody else has one; but if there is a community of fax machine users out there, maybe you can build better fax machines than the company that created the market.
Finally, if nobody hears about your project, nobody will check it out. Why didn't you mention the name of your project or link to it?
While I agree with the gist of your post, what's wrong with "snitch-ing" on someone else?
Example. It's midnight. I'm driving my car. The traffic light shows red, and I stop. After a while, I decide it is silly to wait for a machine, and after making sure it is safe, I drive on (even though the light is still red). The roads are deserted and it is absolutely safe to carry on. So, although I'm officially breaking the rules, nobody is harmed and nobody is being put in danger. Someone is watching the video feed though, and I receive a ticket in the mail a few days later. You could argue that I deserve the ticket because I broke the rules. When you think about it, though, there is a REASON why those rules were made (to ensure safety, which I did myself), and those reasons are much more important than the rules derived from them. As I ensured safety (the reason for the rules), the rules did not matter.
Example 2. Arriving home around midnight, due to lack of parking space I park my car diagonally, half on the road, half on the sidewalk, making sure that on either side there's enough space to pass (either for trucks or twin pushchair). The next morning at 7am I find a ticket on my wind shield, even though my bad parking has not (and would not have) hindered anybody.
I'm sure there are plenty of other situations where someone even breaks the rules, but does not violate the reasons why those rules existed. In such cases, will snitching on each other really make our world a better place? I don't tend to believe so.
As for the one bad apple, you obviously have different experiences with the police than I do. Many of the police I've had to deal with have been corrupt/power hungry/incompetent/unreasonable/braindead/lazy.
So, why would you have a problem with a drone recording a beating by whoever? Presumably, the recording will increase the likelihood of the perpetrators (police or not) being brought to justice...
The problem is that these drones would not *only* record people being beaten up. The problem is that the majority of the time, most people are not doing anything wrong.
If I'm not doing anything wrong, why do the police need to watch me?
Furthermore, if the video streams are *not* available to the general public, you just know that the system will be abused (power corrupts). If the video streams *are* available to the general public, people will be snitching on each other. Either way, we'd be better off without these drones (or CCTV police cameras for that matter).
Finally, "if the people are afraid of the government, they've got a totalitarian state; if the government is afraid of the people, they've got freedom". If you are to vote for or against these drones, choose wisely.
and probably an obligatory one as well. If the screenshot is a (lossy) jpeg, the image recognition simply won't work unless it is at least somewhat fault-tolerant.
The idea is cool and innovative, and makes automating a point-and-click interface a breeze. It certainly has applications.
But overall, it just seems like a Bad Idea. It will be as reliable as screen-scraping in browsers and would therefore be wise to be avoided, and for the same reasons.
Even just changing the theme of your OS or the icon sizes could well be enough to confuse the image processing. The code won't be portable, and in the end, for anything but the most simple tasks, the person using it would still require some programming skills. Because of this, I think between Sikuli and command-line scripting, command-line scripting has more staying power.
As long as I see the batteries in my electric toothbrush, navigation system and laptop fail to hold more than a minute worth of charge, I'd rather not get off the ground too far in one of these.
According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds
So they have sound travelling at almost 6 times the speed of sound? That's some *serious* abuse of recursive technology there. No doubt, it works by making people's brains hurt.
Also, they're comparing apples and oranges: "Australians and Britons watch television for an average of three hours a day. In the US, where two-thirds of all adults are overweight or obese, viewing time is as much as eight hours, Dunstan said. "
So what's the maximum Australians and Britons watch per day? What's the average in the US? (I don't buy that 8 hours of TV is the daily average).
The Chinese constitution has allowed free speech since 1982 (not that that mattered much 2 years afterwards). That is, censorship is officially *against* the Chinese constitution. I'd actually like to see this go to court; if it's a fair trial, the Chinese probably will end up being better off because of it.
a) pay a lawyer, or
b) ignore the legal consequences and only deal with them if you get sued.
It takes being a bit cheeky, but you can also
c) contact the author/publisher of the old game and get (in writing) that they have no problems whatsoever with you releasing the clone.
If you're dealing with a company like Atari (who? yes, they still exist!) or anything Disney, you are probably out of luck. If you're dealing with a Scott Adams (of Pirate's adventure fame) type of person, there's probably no problem at all. As you say the game is rather obscure, so chances are they will have no problem with you releasing a remake, and they won't sue. Perhaps they can even benefit from your efforts, if you're willing to link to the original game!
If they had actually had a cousin die from whooping cough, had a sibling scarred for life from measles and had a friend who barely survived polio but will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life, I doubt they'd be so anti-vaccine.
Likewise, if they had nobody die from any of those but they saw their kid develop normally until having the vaccine, followed by a regression, of course they start suspecting the vaccine. Now this also happens to be the scenario that I've experienced first-hand; I can understand some people would become anti-vaccination. I'm trying to stay sensible about it. Correlation is not causation; although the age of onset of regressive autism correlates with the time of vaccinating, it does not imply vaccines cause autism. But AFAIK so far nobody studied changing the vaccination schedules to a bit later age, so it can't be disputed yet either. As such, of course I'll still have my youngest vaccinated, but not without a degree of suspicion.
Sure, Thiomersal/Thimerosal has been ruled out as a factor. But can we really already rule out that any link exists between vaccines and autism (or no link at all, by the way)?
Population groups that do not vaccinate for religious reasons do not develop regressive autism- regardless whether they're genetically related groups such as the Amish or groups from independent backgrounds. How do you explain that?
To put things into perspective, autism rates are now higher than the death count prevented by the vaccines. Just better diagnoses do not account for the thousand-percent increase in autism rates in the last decades, so it seems environmental factors cannot yet be ruled out.
If it turns out vaccines *can* cause (and do cause) more cases of autism than the amount of deaths they prevent, that's some serious controversy there. Which government would want to be held responsible for that?
Slashdot Mirror
Typing lessons may not be the answer you're looking for- if they are anything like the lessons that I've had- lessons that fail to recognize that modern computer keyboards are wider than the typical typewriter.
To be fair, after having had "proper" typing lessons on a typewriter, my typing has improved a bit. I use all fingers of my *left* hand for typing except my thumb- I always press the space bar with the thumb of my right hand. Officially I should be alternating between the left and right thumb.
For the right hand, the "typewriter" model just doesn't work. While the left hand on either typewriter or computer keyboard would cover roughly the same area, the right hand on a computer keyboard covers the usual area PLUS the enter key at PLUS the arrow pad PLUS the numeric keypad- so it can't be static above the keyboard and reach all relevant keys.
As I press then ENTER key with my little finger (and frequently so, when I'm doing anything on the command line), there's no way I can also use that finger for the "P" as I'm supposed to, without moving around my hand unnecessarily. As a result, I end up using only the index finger, little finger and thumb of my right hand (for the space).
The questions you have to ask yourself is, "Does it matter?" and "why do I want to type 'the right way'?"
I'm officially doing it wrong, but I can type blindfolded if I have to, have never had RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome or similar, and still manage to baffle people with my typing speed.
That explains everything- Microsoft must have been involved in the design of the car software.
3ix are cheap and have mysql, php, linux and in their expert package (which allows you 5 sites) also ssh. Sounded great to me so I signed up.
Turns out you have to hand over your firstborn (well okay, ID info) to get ssh access "because people have been abusing it". Good, fair enough.
Also, LivePerson support seems nice but only works if it is not manned by stupid gits. It took 45 minutes to explaining to them that if an invoice is wrong, canceled by them and replaced by a new invoice, you should not need to pay the canceled invoice anymore. I found out because they took the site down for nonpayment of said canceled invoice. (For those interested, I still have a transcript of that chat.) Not acceptable to me; I can't recommend their service.
If I had my little way, I'd go for a service that just gives me a (virtual) machine, just charges me for the bandwidth and lets me do all administration myself. Strangely enough, although this gives the provider the least possible amount of work, I haven't seen any such services at "household-affordable" rates.
Let me check. Yup- still running at the usual 75fps.
Pft. Call me low-tech but I don't need no stinkin' phone to look at what's in front of me.
Yes. in this case it also includes the cost of training people that have never worked with anything but Windows. That is, of course, if you assume you *have* to retrain your existing admins, rather than firing two of them and replacing them with a single Unix admin. In the end, it all depends on how you make the calculation. Sure, a switch *could* cost more, but it *could* also cost less depending on the scenario you choose to follow.
Make sure to hand in your geek card on the way out.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, "are spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in checked-in luggage are a safety risk?" The question can be answered objectively, rather than theoretically, because people have been stashing their batteries in checked-in luggage for decades. Right, batteries in checked-in luggage are an accident waiting to happen. We've been waiting, {and waiting,}* ... but nothing happened.
There's nothing wrong with having a bonsai tree on the cover of a book about software development. But he's still a copycat ;)
I'm gonna sell tinfoil underwear and become rich!
It's only more secure if it implements the same security measures (encryption, key based access) as current wireless (okay, if the light is infrared it may be stopped by windows.
I don't think it will be a big contender for wireless though. The killer feature of wireless is that you don't have to drill holes in your walls to have network connectivity in the entire house. But if the network is optical, it will essentially be limited to the room where the base station is. Personally, I'd stick to my trusty old wires then. Reliable, secure, fast and low-cost, what more do you want?
I run a small project about the age of yours, and it has a user base of several thousand users. It started out as a Linux alternative to a piece of commercial software. I believe the following has contributed to its success:
...and so are complaints about the commercial software.
- I joined the existing community forums
- Made sure the software doesn't suck. I started by giving a few distinguishing features that the commercial software simply doesn't offer (data recovery, allowing the use of low cost hardware rather than $200 commercial hardware) giving it an edge over the commercial offering. Many of the distinguishing features were features *I* needed, so others likely did too.
- Made sure my project was cross-platform; although I started it as a Linux project, the majority of the user base are Windows and Mac users.
- I went on to make sure my software can do *everything* that the commercial software does.
- I did set up a website asking for feedback, feature suggestions etc. which is a great source of inspiration for new features.
-
- To be fair, the commercial software is no longer being developed (but it's still being sold!), which means by now Windows 7 users are starting to have trouble running it. But in any case, I'm not dealing with a moving target.
- I never worried about Google, but I did make sure to mention the link to the software on the forum if someone asked a question that the software resolved. Eventually, word of mouth got out and people outside the forum started posting the link as well.
So basically, rather than building up a new community from scratch, I built on top of an existing one. It's terribly hard to sell a fax machine if nobody else has one; but if there is a community of fax machine users out there, maybe you can build better fax machines than the company that created the market.
Finally, if nobody hears about your project, nobody will check it out. Why didn't you mention the name of your project or link to it?
Example. It's midnight. I'm driving my car. The traffic light shows red, and I stop. After a while, I decide it is silly to wait for a machine, and after making sure it is safe, I drive on (even though the light is still red). The roads are deserted and it is absolutely safe to carry on. So, although I'm officially breaking the rules, nobody is harmed and nobody is being put in danger. Someone is watching the video feed though, and I receive a ticket in the mail a few days later. You could argue that I deserve the ticket because I broke the rules. When you think about it, though, there is a REASON why those rules were made (to ensure safety, which I did myself), and those reasons are much more important than the rules derived from them. As I ensured safety (the reason for the rules), the rules did not matter.
Example 2. Arriving home around midnight, due to lack of parking space I park my car diagonally, half on the road, half on the sidewalk, making sure that on either side there's enough space to pass (either for trucks or twin pushchair). The next morning at 7am I find a ticket on my wind shield, even though my bad parking has not (and would not have) hindered anybody.
I'm sure there are plenty of other situations where someone even breaks the rules, but does not violate the reasons why those rules existed. In such cases, will snitching on each other really make our world a better place? I don't tend to believe so.
As for the one bad apple, you obviously have different experiences with the police than I do. Many of the police I've had to deal with have been corrupt/power hungry/incompetent/unreasonable/braindead/lazy.
The problem is that these drones would not *only* record people being beaten up. The problem is that the majority of the time, most people are not doing anything wrong.
If I'm not doing anything wrong, why do the police need to watch me?
Furthermore, if the video streams are *not* available to the general public, you just know that the system will be abused (power corrupts). If the video streams *are* available to the general public, people will be snitching on each other. Either way, we'd be better off without these drones (or CCTV police cameras for that matter).
Finally, "if the people are afraid of the government, they've got a totalitarian state; if the government is afraid of the people, they've got freedom". If you are to vote for or against these drones, choose wisely.
thatmightbebutsomeoneshouldtellthemtostartusingthespacebar.
and probably an obligatory one as well. If the screenshot is a (lossy) jpeg, the image recognition simply won't work unless it is at least somewhat fault-tolerant.
The idea is cool and innovative, and makes automating a point-and-click interface a breeze. It certainly has applications.
But overall, it just seems like a Bad Idea. It will be as reliable as screen-scraping in browsers and would therefore be wise to be avoided, and for the same reasons.
Even just changing the theme of your OS or the icon sizes could well be enough to confuse the image processing. The code won't be portable, and in the end, for anything but the most simple tasks, the person using it would still require some programming skills. Because of this, I think between Sikuli and command-line scripting, command-line scripting has more staying power.
As long as I see the batteries in my electric toothbrush, navigation system and laptop fail to hold more than a minute worth of charge, I'd rather not get off the ground too far in one of these.
So they have sound travelling at almost 6 times the speed of sound? That's some *serious* abuse of recursive technology there. No doubt, it works by making people's brains hurt.
Also, they're comparing apples and oranges: "Australians and Britons watch television for an average of three hours a day. In the US, where two-thirds of all adults are overweight or obese, viewing time is as much as eight hours, Dunstan said. "
So what's the maximum Australians and Britons watch per day? What's the average in the US? (I don't buy that 8 hours of TV is the daily average).
"Article 35 of the 1982 State Constitution proclaims that "citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration." (see external links).
The Chinese constitution has allowed free speech since 1982 (not that that mattered much 2 years afterwards). That is, censorship is officially *against* the Chinese constitution. I'd actually like to see this go to court; if it's a fair trial, the Chinese probably will end up being better off because of it.
It takes being a bit cheeky, but you can also
c) contact the author/publisher of the old game and get (in writing) that they have no problems whatsoever with you releasing the clone.
If you're dealing with a company like Atari (who? yes, they still exist!) or anything Disney, you are probably out of luck. If you're dealing with a Scott Adams (of Pirate's adventure fame) type of person, there's probably no problem at all. As you say the game is rather obscure, so chances are they will have no problem with you releasing a remake, and they won't sue. Perhaps they can even benefit from your efforts, if you're willing to link to the original game!
Likewise, if they had nobody die from any of those but they saw their kid develop normally until having the vaccine, followed by a regression, of course they start suspecting the vaccine. Now this also happens to be the scenario that I've experienced first-hand; I can understand some people would become anti-vaccination. I'm trying to stay sensible about it. Correlation is not causation; although the age of onset of regressive autism correlates with the time of vaccinating, it does not imply vaccines cause autism. But AFAIK so far nobody studied changing the vaccination schedules to a bit later age, so it can't be disputed yet either. As such, of course I'll still have my youngest vaccinated, but not without a degree of suspicion.
Sure, Thiomersal/Thimerosal has been ruled out as a factor. But can we really already rule out that any link exists between vaccines and autism (or no link at all, by the way)?
Population groups that do not vaccinate for religious reasons do not develop regressive autism- regardless whether they're genetically related groups such as the Amish or groups from independent backgrounds. How do you explain that?
To put things into perspective, autism rates are now higher than the death count prevented by the vaccines. Just better diagnoses do not account for the thousand-percent increase in autism rates in the last decades, so it seems environmental factors cannot yet be ruled out.
If it turns out vaccines *can* cause (and do cause) more cases of autism than the amount of deaths they prevent, that's some serious controversy there. Which government would want to be held responsible for that?
So basically anyone that builds a proper doomsday device can legally get away with it? AWESOME.