select text (usually if it's a good bit away from the present cursor location or would take a couple moments to get right with the keyboard)
move the cursor (usually if it's a good bit away from the present cursor location)
scrolling (sometimes with code; more commonly for web pages and email)
to click on links in the web browser when I'm looking up documentation (usually)
sometimes to move windows around (at least on Windows; on Linux I use a tiling window manager)
sometimes to open files (if I have an explorer/similar window open)
usually to operate CVS (Tortoise makes many operations much easier, like committing most but not all of your changed files; with command line CVS, you have to type in every file that is changed, while with Tortoise you simply uncheck those you don't want to commit)
invoke many infrequently-used commands
I would take some offense if someone labeled me a n00b who just hasn't discovered the wonders of keyboards; I'm reasonably efficient with Emacs (and use the mouse for some cursor navigation but rarely more), I've got the LOL extension for Firefox installed so when I don't feel like using a mouse I can still click on links, and I use a tiling window manager (and am considering trying a Windows port of dwm)! I have no doubt that people can use the computer very efficiently with a mouse, but to think that a mouse has little place at a programmer's desk is, I think, just stupid.
IMO, it's better than a trackpad, but still sucks in comparison to a mouse or trackball. You can either have the acceleration & speed set slow enough that you get precision or high enough to make using it not painfully slow to cross the screen, but, at least at my level of skill, not both. It's okay if you're using the laptop as a laptop (e.g. on a plane as someone else suggested) but I would quit a job where I was at a desk using it all day.
Does that mean it's right? If you think that it's okay for a reporter to try to guess a voicemail PIN, is it okay for them to go through an unlocked door? If not, what's the essential difference? Would it be okay for the reporters to manually try all 1000 4-digit PINs? It'd only take a couple days. What about doing it with an autodialer?
Perhaps a better analogy would be, "If you do not draw the curtains, everyone will see what you are doing."
The original analogy was too strong, but IMO that's too weak. Yours doesn't require any affirmative actions on the part of the observer; happening to walk by and look towards the house is sufficient. I said in another reply that dialing voicemail and attempting to guess the password is, I think, closer to actually going up to the door, checking to see if it's unlocked, and if it is, going inside (but not taking anything).
Thanks for the suggestion... the reason I'm running multiple systems now though is because I want to be able to easily run a Windows box and a Linux one, so xdmx has limited utility in that environment unfortunately. (With Cygwin I suppose I could move Linux windows onto the Windows desktop, and maybe Cygwin X programs onto the Linux desktop, but I don't suppose I could move native Windows programs onto the Linux desktop, which is REALLY what I want to be able to do. (I have a Windows laptop with a 12" screen and a Linux desktop with two 19" screens.))
I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.
Wow, that's some HTML fail on my part. Let me try that again:
"I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java < C#" isn't necessarily true either). VB gets somewhat of a bad rap; VB.Net's worst aspect is really that it offers almost no benefit over C# and a few drawbacks. Pre-.Net VB was rather worse, but it still wasn't terrible; the worst things about it are that it didn't have features that real OO languages rely on despite trying a little to be OO, the need to have the VB runtime, and that it spawned lots of crappy apps."
And what Java v. C++ isn't the war of the languages?
Yeah, but the part I said at first was much more tongue-in-cheek than the longer notes after it. It's not entirely unfounded in my opinions (especially the Lisp suggestion), but even I will say that C++ no longer qualifies as a "you really should know this" language.
Learn C++ || Java > C# > dogshit > VB
I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.
I've been in Java webdev crap for 5x years and I'll tell you it's a great language but there is a point where manual control; even to this day; would be nice. Oh wait java has that what am I saying.
I'm not saying Java's a bad language, even if I mostly don't like it personally. If you're looking to start programming and want a more "traditional" language than focusing purely on something like Ruby or Python or Lisp, Java's fine.
No, no, no! Learn Java instead, and learn Perl instead of Ruby. Or Python.
No, no, no! Learn C++, and learn Lisp instead of Perl, Ruby, or Python.;-)
(Truth be told, I'm closest to the C#/Python person here, but it depends what you want to do of course. C# is a bit nicer language than Java, and programming with Windows Forms beats the crap off of Swing. I would say that it easily should be your choice before VB, even with the improvements in.Net that make them almost the same language with different syntax. The downside to C# is the tie to Windows you get from it. (This is a pretty big downside; whether it's a deal-breaker depends on your personal goals and ideology.) Perl v. Python is a big holy war, but I fall squarely into the Python camp between the two.)
Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.
Maybe if you compare % of computer users who can program, but I would bet any money that the difference is more than made up by the increased prevalence of PCs since the early 80s' generation.
(And yes, I was born in the early-to-mid 80s and started programming BASIC in 3rd grade.)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
Chrome does it on Windows and it's okay.
Why not just have rendering worker threads?
There are two benefits to switching to this. First, it will become more responsive as one tab is much less likely able to eat CPU for a while and delay others (something that happens to me enough I have to restart Firefox for that reason every day or two). But the second reason is that if one tab causes a crashing bug to manifest, it is much harder to bring down the whole browser, and instead it just brings down that tab.
Threading gives you the first benefit, but not the second. Processes give you both.
I'm not sure how important the second reason is, but I do get crashes from time to time because of Flash.
It's not usually that hard for students to get a copy of the next-most-recent edition: they're all over places like Amazon and Half.com.
A lot of students don't have credit cards, which makes that more difficult since they have to arrange with their parents or friends or whatever to order the books for them.
Also, it's only very recently that the university I went to undergrad at started actually releasing book information with enough lead time to comfortably order them online. When I was there, I did the half.com thing the last couple years and it worked okay, but it was also a bit rushed, because I would show up to campus a few days before the semester started, go to the book store, make a list of the books, go home and order, then actually get the books a week or more into the semester.
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
I don't buy this for a second, especially not for science & engineering professors. First, have you looked at how hard it is to get a professorship somewhere recently? It's almost certainly a lot more competitive than your typical industry job. Second, you don't put yourself through a Ph.D. program unless you want to do research (or perhaps if you want to teach at a non-research institution), so most professors are in it because they want to research.
About the most you can say is (1) they are in a university because they can't cut it in an industry research lab (but that's not saying much, at least in CS, because the industry research labs are also very good and competitive), and/or (2) they are in a job that doesn't have a particular industry counterpart (outside of research labs), like theory people or pure math profs, or perhaps profs in liberal arts. (I don't know what, if anything, is available for, say, an English PhD outside of a professorship.)
Add that to the fact that any major Linux distro today supports software RAID. And so do the *BSDs. And Mac OS X. And Solaris.... Hell, you could buy one of these one of these and throw the drives in it, connect it to your network switch, and presto -- instant RAID+NAS.
So basically your "other options" are "use a different OS than what you want to" and "buy more stuff"?
You better not own a computer then, because it can run DRM'd software.
And in case you can't figure out what I'm getting at, just because you buy a Kindle doesn't mean that you have to use with DRM'd information. There are sites you can get non-DRM books from, and you can even get free books from Project Gutenberg and such, or read PDFs from an academic journal.
That was about the worst wording you can attempt for what you just tried to imply. Oh, and I was referring to you, not to me. You got a reply to your other comment where someone used 3.1 to run the example documents that were provided and were showing screenshot results. Or did you fail to notice that?
Read my comment again, because you apparently failed the first time.
The other poster did not open (with OpenOffice) the example document that was provided; he converted the document that was provided with an external tool and opened the result of that conversion.
My original comment was that Impress's PPTX importer sucks. Converting it with something else then using the PPT importer does not demonstrate anything that is related to this discussion.
For OO to have one version that is imperfect and then the next one (or even a patch a week later) fixes the problem and then nobody bothers to check and just writes off the software can be either viewed as misleading, misunderstanding, or ignorant.
Finally, I just "pretty well confirmed"* (to a higher standard that Dick Cheney's "pretty well confirmed") that the version I tested this with in this discussions (i.e. the screenshots I say is 3.1.0 is the exact same version (and not just the same version number, 3.1.0) as that which you get if you go to openoffice.org and download what they say.
* I confirmed that I had an existing OpenOffice installer sitting around the hard drive, and that it was byte-identical to one I downloaded fresh from the OO.org website. This computer is only a month or two old, and I'm quite sure that I didn't download an OO installer since installing it.
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I don't know about you, but I open character map and copy and paste each letter that I need.
This post only took about 10 minutes to write, so I don't think it's slowing me down that much.
I use the mouse to:
I would take some offense if someone labeled me a n00b who just hasn't discovered the wonders of keyboards; I'm reasonably efficient with Emacs (and use the mouse for some cursor navigation but rarely more), I've got the LOL extension for Firefox installed so when I don't feel like using a mouse I can still click on links, and I use a tiling window manager (and am considering trying a Windows port of dwm)! I have no doubt that people can use the computer very efficiently with a mouse, but to think that a mouse has little place at a programmer's desk is, I think, just stupid.
IMO, it's better than a trackpad, but still sucks in comparison to a mouse or trackball. You can either have the acceleration & speed set slow enough that you get precision or high enough to make using it not painfully slow to cross the screen, but, at least at my level of skill, not both. It's okay if you're using the laptop as a laptop (e.g. on a plane as someone else suggested) but I would quit a job where I was at a desk using it all day.
These point-and-click developers and system administrators need to actually learn what it is they are doing underneath that click.
I agree. That's why I program machine code in hexl mode.
There are 10,000 4 digit PINs.
Okay, so it takes a couple man-weeks instead of a couple man-days.
If your phone isn't secured, it should get "hacked"
"If your house isn't secured, it should get 'hacked'."
I'm still failing to see the essential difference here.
Frankly, the wireless carriers should not allow 5 consecutive PIN failures.
Whee denial of service attacks!
Does that mean it's right? If you think that it's okay for a reporter to try to guess a voicemail PIN, is it okay for them to go through an unlocked door? If not, what's the essential difference? Would it be okay for the reporters to manually try all 1000 4-digit PINs? It'd only take a couple days. What about doing it with an autodialer?
Perhaps a better analogy would be, "If you do not draw the curtains, everyone will see what you are doing."
The original analogy was too strong, but IMO that's too weak. Yours doesn't require any affirmative actions on the part of the observer; happening to walk by and look towards the house is sufficient. I said in another reply that dialing voicemail and attempting to guess the password is, I think, closer to actually going up to the door, checking to see if it's unlocked, and if it is, going inside (but not taking anything).
More like "if you don't lock the door then someone can wander through your house and take photos."
Thanks for the suggestion... the reason I'm running multiple systems now though is because I want to be able to easily run a Windows box and a Linux one, so xdmx has limited utility in that environment unfortunately. (With Cygwin I suppose I could move Linux windows onto the Windows desktop, and maybe Cygwin X programs onto the Linux desktop, but I don't suppose I could move native Windows programs onto the Linux desktop, which is REALLY what I want to be able to do. (I have a Windows laptop with a 12" screen and a Linux desktop with two 19" screens.))
Actually running on separate systems, but Synergy makes it feel like one.
What I would love to see is a melding of Synergy and VNC so that you can drag windows from one computer to the other. That would be awesome.
I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.
Wow, that's some HTML fail on my part. Let me try that again:
"I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java < C#" isn't necessarily true either). VB gets somewhat of a bad rap; VB.Net's worst aspect is really that it offers almost no benefit over C# and a few drawbacks. Pre-.Net VB was rather worse, but it still wasn't terrible; the worst things about it are that it didn't have features that real OO languages rely on despite trying a little to be OO, the need to have the VB runtime, and that it spawned lots of crappy apps."
And what Java v. C++ isn't the war of the languages?
Yeah, but the part I said at first was much more tongue-in-cheek than the longer notes after it. It's not entirely unfounded in my opinions (especially the Lisp suggestion), but even I will say that C++ no longer qualifies as a "you really should know this" language.
Learn C++ || Java > C# > dogshit > VB
I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.
I've been in Java webdev crap for 5x years and I'll tell you it's a great language but there is a point where manual control; even to this day; would be nice. Oh wait java has that what am I saying.
I'm not saying Java's a bad language, even if I mostly don't like it personally. If you're looking to start programming and want a more "traditional" language than focusing purely on something like Ruby or Python or Lisp, Java's fine.
No, no, no! Learn Java instead, and learn Perl instead of Ruby. Or Python.
No, no, no! Learn C++, and learn Lisp instead of Perl, Ruby, or Python. ;-)
(Truth be told, I'm closest to the C#/Python person here, but it depends what you want to do of course. C# is a bit nicer language than Java, and programming with Windows Forms beats the crap off of Swing. I would say that it easily should be your choice before VB, even with the improvements in .Net that make them almost the same language with different syntax. The downside to C# is the tie to Windows you get from it. (This is a pretty big downside; whether it's a deal-breaker depends on your personal goals and ideology.) Perl v. Python is a big holy war, but I fall squarely into the Python camp between the two.)
Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.
Maybe if you compare % of computer users who can program, but I would bet any money that the difference is more than made up by the increased prevalence of PCs since the early 80s' generation.
(And yes, I was born in the early-to-mid 80s and started programming BASIC in 3rd grade.)
The biggest problem nowadays isn't memory leaks but rather fragmentation.
Of course, the multiprocess architecture helps with that too.
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
Chrome does it on Windows and it's okay.
Why not just have rendering worker threads?
There are two benefits to switching to this. First, it will become more responsive as one tab is much less likely able to eat CPU for a while and delay others (something that happens to me enough I have to restart Firefox for that reason every day or two). But the second reason is that if one tab causes a crashing bug to manifest, it is much harder to bring down the whole browser, and instead it just brings down that tab.
Threading gives you the first benefit, but not the second. Processes give you both.
I'm not sure how important the second reason is, but I do get crashes from time to time because of Flash.
Then switch to textbooks published by a publisher who supports more than one edition at once.
Oooo, and they could even deliver it on unicorns!
It's not usually that hard for students to get a copy of the next-most-recent edition: they're all over places like Amazon and Half.com.
A lot of students don't have credit cards, which makes that more difficult since they have to arrange with their parents or friends or whatever to order the books for them.
Also, it's only very recently that the university I went to undergrad at started actually releasing book information with enough lead time to comfortably order them online. When I was there, I did the half.com thing the last couple years and it worked okay, but it was also a bit rushed, because I would show up to campus a few days before the semester started, go to the book store, make a list of the books, go home and order, then actually get the books a week or more into the semester.
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
I don't buy this for a second, especially not for science & engineering professors. First, have you looked at how hard it is to get a professorship somewhere recently? It's almost certainly a lot more competitive than your typical industry job. Second, you don't put yourself through a Ph.D. program unless you want to do research (or perhaps if you want to teach at a non-research institution), so most professors are in it because they want to research.
About the most you can say is (1) they are in a university because they can't cut it in an industry research lab (but that's not saying much, at least in CS, because the industry research labs are also very good and competitive), and/or (2) they are in a job that doesn't have a particular industry counterpart (outside of research labs), like theory people or pure math profs, or perhaps profs in liberal arts. (I don't know what, if anything, is available for, say, an English PhD outside of a professorship.)
You need RAID AND A DECENT BACKUP.
This is, of course, idea.
That said, if you're going to have only one... go with the backup.
Add that to the fact that any major Linux distro today supports software RAID. And so do the *BSDs. And Mac OS X. And Solaris. ... Hell, you could buy one of these one of these and throw the drives in it, connect it to your network switch, and presto -- instant RAID+NAS.
So basically your "other options" are "use a different OS than what you want to" and "buy more stuff"?
I'm very skeptical of your claims that anything is likely to hose your filesystem other than user error, or maybe malware
As someone who has had two HDD crashes over the years, you should not call BS on things you don't know much about.
(And for the record, what user error or malware will make my HDD sound like "whrrrrrr CHUNK, whrrrr CHUNK"?)
You better not own a computer then, because it can run DRM'd software.
And in case you can't figure out what I'm getting at, just because you buy a Kindle doesn't mean that you have to use with DRM'd information. There are sites you can get non-DRM books from, and you can even get free books from Project Gutenberg and such, or read PDFs from an academic journal.
That was about the worst wording you can attempt for what you just tried to imply. Oh, and I was referring to you, not to me. You got a reply to your other comment where someone used 3.1 to run the example documents that were provided and were showing screenshot results. Or did you fail to notice that?
Read my comment again, because you apparently failed the first time.
The other poster did not open (with OpenOffice) the example document that was provided; he converted the document that was provided with an external tool and opened the result of that conversion.
My original comment was that Impress's PPTX importer sucks. Converting it with something else then using the PPT importer does not demonstrate anything that is related to this discussion.
For OO to have one version that is imperfect and then the next one (or even a patch a week later) fixes the problem and then nobody bothers to check and just writes off the software can be either viewed as misleading, misunderstanding, or ignorant.
Finally, I just "pretty well confirmed"* (to a higher standard that Dick Cheney's "pretty well confirmed") that the version I tested this with in this discussions (i.e. the screenshots I say is 3.1.0 is the exact same version (and not just the same version number, 3.1.0) as that which you get if you go to openoffice.org and download what they say.
* I confirmed that I had an existing OpenOffice installer sitting around the hard drive, and that it was byte-identical to one I downloaded fresh from the OO.org website. This computer is only a month or two old, and I'm quite sure that I didn't download an OO installer since installing it.