if i could stick with DVORAK and not have to worry about switching back and forth, i would be perfectly content.
I never actually learned to touch-type properly because the first keyboards I used were the old teletype master consoles commonly used for Burroughs mainframe machines back in the '70s. The action on those things was so stiff that it was impossible to touch-type on them, so we all evolved a thumb + 2 (sometimes 3)-finger "sledgehammer" approach to entering commands or other input.
It is actually quite possible to attain a respectable wpm score that way, and if you do it for long enough, the habit's hard to break.
But I just don't worry too much about my typing speed, since I spend more time thinking than typing anyway.
The other thing about handwriting is that you can do it one handed at decent speed.
...though not necessarily in a form that a computer can readily parse. I have what many regard as an attractive script, developed back in the days when everybody wrote with a proper nib, and I haven't found an OCR implementation that copes with it very well. If I have to print, then that really slows me down.
Incidentally, and somewhat OT: everyone seems to have accepted the assumption that Apple will introduce some form of tablet computer. It will be amusing if they pull out something completely different, like an electric navel lint remover...;-P
I know it's a solecism to reply to oneself, but this one is necessary owing to my brainfart: the output of the preceding command is, of course, fed into the next command.
All of them. The example given is an illustration of "pipes", where the output of succesive commands is fed into the preceding command. Once you get the hang of this, it's a very useful and powerful feature.
As soon as you standardise a password template, you reduce the amount of work someone has to do to crack it. Though of course it doesn't take long to brute-force the stupid "password" passwords.
What bothers me is the number of institutions (including, I am ashamed to say, one of my banks*) that actually *limit* password length to 8 characters and/or don't allow the use of any non-alphanumerics.
What I'm saying is that it is perfectly possible (in fact easy) to construct good passwords based on some memorable phrase such as "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky," -> "1mds2tsa,2tls&75," which is strong enough to resist brute-forcing and not easy to catch by shoulder-surfing. Of course, not everybody is going to be constitutionally adept at memorising longer and more complex passwords or passphrases, but given that just about any computer system is capable of dealing with them, there is absolutely no reason to prevent users constructing them.
* Fuck it, in the public interest, I'll name names: guilty parties here in.au are Bendigo Bank which has BOTH an 8-character limit and a prohibition against non-alphanumerics, and St. George Bank which appears to just restrict the use of non-alphanumerics. To be fair, the former does at least offer a one-time keygen device to supplement security, while the latter asks for your PIN, but I see no objective purpose for such a limited authentication code.
So this proves that !RTFA is a viable and profitable strategy. Why criticize?
The synopses supplied by Google News tend to be fairly succinct, which is hardly a bad thing when the majority of the articles to which they refer are just fluff. Most of the news sites just recycle the same articles from Reuter's, the Telegraph or whatever, with little if any editing, and any mug with an opinion and a soapbox can call himself (or herself) a columnist and sell their tripe to the supposed "quality" newspapers to fill the space between ads.
I don't want to come across as a luddite, but I'm inclined to think we saw better journalism in the newspapers when they were forced to keep a full contingent of their own staff on active duty. Obviously there's little incentive for them to do so any more, but for the same reason there's little incentive for us to pay subscriptions to view second-hand articles we can get for free elsewhere.
Indeed. Many Firefox users are old Mozilla users. In fact I used to maintain a build of Mozilla as a browser-only program (i.e. without the mail and html authoring stuff) for several years including the period when Firefox was still known as Phoenix. It took some time before I became satisfied that Firefox offered a useful (or usable) alternative.
If I could "own" (even with DRM) a book for $2.50, I would never bother making a trip to a library.
I can't argue with that. In fact, I agree.
But some publishers have indeed been making noises about libraries==piracy, and as far as I'm concerned they can go get fucked. The institution of the public library is well enough established by now to be regarded as a right. If publishers can't find a business model that is just, then they can go jump on their heads.
If you say "I'm gonna kill you," I don't think you deserve a life sentence but six months in prison would be warranted. That'll give you an opportunity to practice self-restraint.
Nonsense. That is a remark we might expect from someone who takes himself way too seriously. Otherwise Steve Ballmer would have spent a few months in the slammer for simply saying "I'm gonna fucking bury Google". A sense of perspective is a Good Thing(TM).
say anything and leave it up to the reader to make sense of it!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Far be it from me to make jokes about blowing up British airports. Their staff go so far out of their way to be as officious and obstructive as possible, adding to the generally miserable experience of travel by air, there have been many times when I would have cheerfully blown them to hell in deadly earnest.
Blowing off, making jokes about something that frustrates you, is a legitimate use of humour. Time for some people to learn to live with that.
I believe vesa driver developers would be interested in finding out which nvidia graphics cards their drivers fail to work with.
I've used the framebuffer with every nVidia card since the Riva series, and it has worked impeccably with every one. But it's this remark the parent made that puzzles me:
For quite some time, the only way I've been able to easily install Ubuntu on several of my Nvidia machines has been by swapping out the graphics card(s) for ATI, installing the OS and nvidia drivers, then installing the Nvidia cards again.
Ubuntu isn't my distro of choice (I keep trying it, getting annoyed and returning to Arch), but failure to support nVidia chipsets isn't a fault that I have observed. One might make the comment (giving the parent the benefit of the doubt and assuming he isn't trolling) that if his distro gives that much trouble, then he *should* consider using using another. You should never need to pull cards to get it to work.
Actually, that isn't true. The various shells are all standard interfaces, i.e. they are essentially the same on all *nix boxes. And OS X has bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and (my favourite) zsh installed in/bin by default.
Can't say I've seen any of those, and my machines are up for weeks or months at a time, and in more or less constant use (but with Gnome/Compiz-Fusion, not KDE).
So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?
Indeed, I have no problem with that. I've been using Linux or long enough to remember having to spend a lot of time getting around issues of hardware compatibility. Nvidia was in there quite early on providing good drivers for its chipsets at a time when just about every other manufacturer just shrugged its shoulders and told us to "Fuck off, We don't support Linux."
That alone has promoted a lot of goodwill as far as I'm concerned, and so nVidia chipsets are right at the top of my preferred brands list. So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.
Not to mention that the whole Apple fanism is based on the belief that MS stole their software.
In my case, you're completely wrong about that. The quibble about MS pinching Apple's software is old news (~1988?) and nobody gives a shit any more. I happen to quite like the fact that OS X behaves like a conventional Unix box if I pull up a terminal window.
Microsoft has persisted in imposing its own standards and interfaces, which just don't suit the way I work.
Slashdot Mirror
if i could stick with DVORAK and not have to worry about switching back and forth, i would be perfectly content.
I never actually learned to touch-type properly because the first keyboards I used were the old teletype master consoles commonly used for Burroughs mainframe machines back in the '70s. The action on those things was so stiff that it was impossible to touch-type on them, so we all evolved a thumb + 2 (sometimes 3)-finger "sledgehammer" approach to entering commands or other input.
It is actually quite possible to attain a respectable wpm score that way, and if you do it for long enough, the habit's hard to break.
But I just don't worry too much about my typing speed, since I spend more time thinking than typing anyway.
On paper, however, my writing in unreadable. Even by me. ...like that nice little quote attributed to Robert Browning:
"Only God and I knew what it meant when I wrote it, now only God knows"
The other thing about handwriting is that you can do it one handed at decent speed.
...though not necessarily in a form that a computer can readily parse. I have what many regard as an attractive script, developed back in the days when everybody wrote with a proper nib, and I haven't found an OCR implementation that copes with it very well. If I have to print, then that really slows me down.
;-P
Incidentally, and somewhat OT: everyone seems to have accepted the assumption that Apple will introduce some form of tablet computer. It will be amusing if they pull out something completely different, like an electric navel lint remover...
I know it's a solecism to reply to oneself, but this one is necessary owing to my brainfart: the output of the preceding command is, of course, fed into the next command.
Your example is several commands. Which one?
All of them. The example given is an illustration of "pipes", where the output of succesive commands is fed into the preceding command. Once you get the hang of this, it's a very useful and powerful feature.
Oops, of course SHA-11 isn't quite ready yet - my meatspace preview facility isn't up to scratch this evening...
if they do that, does it imply that they're storing the passwords in plaintext...
That's what it implies to me. I don't see how anyone can easily extract a useful pattern from a SHA-11 or MD5 hash.
As soon as you standardise a password template, you reduce the amount of work someone has to do to crack it. Though of course it doesn't take long to brute-force the stupid "password" passwords.
.au are Bendigo Bank which has BOTH an 8-character limit and a prohibition against non-alphanumerics, and St. George Bank which appears to just restrict the use of non-alphanumerics. To be fair, the former does at least offer a one-time keygen device to supplement security, while the latter asks for your PIN, but I see no objective purpose for such a limited authentication code.
What bothers me is the number of institutions (including, I am ashamed to say, one of my banks*) that actually *limit* password length to 8 characters and/or don't allow the use of any non-alphanumerics.
What I'm saying is that it is perfectly possible (in fact easy) to construct good passwords based on some memorable phrase such as "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky," -> "1mds2tsa,2tls&75," which is strong enough to resist brute-forcing and not easy to catch by shoulder-surfing. Of course, not everybody is going to be constitutionally adept at memorising longer and more complex passwords or passphrases, but given that just about any computer system is capable of dealing with them, there is absolutely no reason to prevent users constructing them.
* Fuck it, in the public interest, I'll name names: guilty parties here in
So this proves that !RTFA is a viable and profitable strategy. Why criticize?
The synopses supplied by Google News tend to be fairly succinct, which is hardly a bad thing when the majority of the articles to which they refer are just fluff. Most of the news sites just recycle the same articles from Reuter's, the Telegraph or whatever, with little if any editing, and any mug with an opinion and a soapbox can call himself (or herself) a columnist and sell their tripe to the supposed "quality" newspapers to fill the space between ads.
I don't want to come across as a luddite, but I'm inclined to think we saw better journalism in the newspapers when they were forced to keep a full contingent of their own staff on active duty. Obviously there's little incentive for them to do so any more, but for the same reason there's little incentive for us to pay subscriptions to view second-hand articles we can get for free elsewhere.
Holy assumption Batman. Citation please.
Indeed. Many Firefox users are old Mozilla users. In fact I used to maintain a build of Mozilla as a browser-only program (i.e. without the mail and html authoring stuff) for several years including the period when Firefox was still known as Phoenix. It took some time before I became satisfied that Firefox offered a useful (or usable) alternative.
If I could "own" (even with DRM) a book for $2.50, I would never bother making a trip to a library.
I can't argue with that. In fact, I agree.
But some publishers have indeed been making noises about libraries==piracy, and as far as I'm concerned they can go get fucked. The institution of the public library is well enough established by now to be regarded as a right. If publishers can't find a business model that is just, then they can go jump on their heads.
If you say "I'm gonna kill you," I don't think you deserve a life sentence but six months in prison would be warranted. That'll give you an opportunity to practice self-restraint.
Nonsense. That is a remark we might expect from someone who takes himself way too seriously. Otherwise Steve Ballmer would have spent a few months in the slammer for simply saying "I'm gonna fucking bury Google". A sense of perspective is a Good Thing(TM).
say anything and leave it up to the reader to make sense of it!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
At this point in history we need some sense of personal responsibility.
At this particular point in history, we need a sense of humour much, much more.
A twit is someone who tweets on Twitter.
No, that's a twat.
Far be it from me to make jokes about blowing up British airports. Their staff go so far out of their way to be as officious and obstructive as possible, adding to the generally miserable experience of travel by air, there have been many times when I would have cheerfully blown them to hell in deadly earnest.
Blowing off, making jokes about something that frustrates you, is a legitimate use of humour. Time for some people to learn to live with that.
I believe vesa driver developers would be interested in finding out which nvidia graphics cards their drivers fail to work with.
I've used the framebuffer with every nVidia card since the Riva series, and it has worked impeccably with every one. But it's this remark the parent made that puzzles me:
For quite some time, the only way I've been able to easily install Ubuntu on several of my Nvidia machines has been by swapping out the graphics card(s) for ATI, installing the OS and nvidia drivers, then installing the Nvidia cards again.
Ubuntu isn't my distro of choice (I keep trying it, getting annoyed and returning to Arch), but failure to support nVidia chipsets isn't a fault that I have observed. One might make the comment (giving the parent the benefit of the doubt and assuming he isn't trolling) that if his distro gives that much trouble, then he *should* consider using using another. You should never need to pull cards to get it to work.
UNIX doesn't have a "standard interface"
/bin by default.
Actually, that isn't true. The various shells are all standard interfaces, i.e. they are essentially the same on all *nix boxes. And OS X has bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and (my favourite) zsh installed in
Be nice not to have strange lockups.
Can't say I've seen any of those, and my machines are up for weeks or months at a time, and in more or less constant use (but with Gnome/Compiz-Fusion, not KDE).
So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?
Indeed, I have no problem with that. I've been using Linux or long enough to remember having to spend a lot of time getting around issues of hardware compatibility. Nvidia was in there quite early on providing good drivers for its chipsets at a time when just about every other manufacturer just shrugged its shoulders and told us to "Fuck off, We don't support Linux."
That alone has promoted a lot of goodwill as far as I'm concerned, and so nVidia chipsets are right at the top of my preferred brands list. So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.
All new zealand has is rubber boots.
;-D
And sheep. Never forget the sheep...
Jobs has become a vile, nasty little piece of work, but in this case he's not far wrong. Microsoft has produced a lot of stupendously crappy output.
Check out the difference between "there" and "their". It will enrich your life and maybe help to prevent you from pissing off your readers.
Not to mention that the whole Apple fanism is based on the belief that MS stole their software.
In my case, you're completely wrong about that. The quibble about MS pinching Apple's software is old news (~1988?) and nobody gives a shit any more. I happen to quite like the fact that OS X behaves like a conventional Unix box if I pull up a terminal window.
Microsoft has persisted in imposing its own standards and interfaces, which just don't suit the way I work.
may be all it takes for you to completely miss the cyclist coming down the road
Never mind the unicyclist in the clown suit with the SEP field...