I made the switch, and use vi daily. It took some getting used to it, but in the end it was worth it.
The 'j' and 'k' keys are still next to each other, which is a saving grace. I've also noticed that I used 'h' and spacebar for backward and forward rather than 'h' and 'l', like I did QWERTY style. I'm not a vi novice either, I use most every key command out there. Some, like the '+' command, don't get much action.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to switch, too. It was two months before I was really comfortable. Longer than that for my vi skills to fully return. I think it was because I had so much to unlearn. My typing speed was about 65 wpm QWERTY... I used to practice QWERTY typing drills all the time, and so forth. I'm back up to 70+ wpm or so dvorak, but retraining my fingers took time. I've been able to get close to 100 wpm in drills without too much trouble in dvorak.
If I had it to over again, I probably would do it again, but it would be a tough call. I do a lot of programming, and I was seriously hamstrung for about a two weeks and my typing was pretty retarded for about two months more. It was a year before I woke up and noticed that I did't make QWERTY mistakes anymore.
Now that I'm here, I'm never going back. (hehe). I can still type QWERTY pretty well, when needed. Plus, the keys have the letters printed right on the keyboard for when I go to a coworker's machine. That's pretty convenient. Plus it's really a nice layout. I prefer it in most every way... I especially like that there is a useful key ('s') under my right pinky. Why put a ';' key right under a finger? Like that's going to get used all that often by a normal typist. In dvorak it gets moved to the 'z' key, which is still easy enough to get to for the 'ol ':wq', and the end of statements in C or Matlab. The underscore gets moved to the apostrophe key. That's handy too.
How is this significantly different from digging up mummies in egypt or old burrial sites anywhere really. Mankind seems to have a facination with digging up dead people.
They would probably next argue that because the GPL is un-'whatever' all code released under it falls into public domain. Except theirs of course, because they are God.
Employment in the United States is 'At Will', which means employment continues at the will of employer (and employee). If any wish to terminate they can do so for any reason at any time EXCEPT for reasons prohibitted by law (basically reasons of sex, race, religion, age, etc.)
I have had problems with embedded fonts using the command sequence:
latex file.tex
dvips -o file.ps file.dvi
ps2pdf file.ps
Eventually I was able to fix it by using a newer version of ghostscript and adding some font path locations. Really felt like a hack job.
Now I'm through with using vanilla LaTeX and instead use pdflatex:
pdflatex file.tex
That command generates pdf files directly (no dvi) and with really nice fonts. The only caveat is you can no longer embed eps files into you document -- you have to embed pdf files instead. I use epstopdf to generate the pdf files. Good luck!
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Btw Intel chips have been faster than Sparc for some time, people don't buy Sun machines for number crunching they buy them for stability and scalability.
Someone should tell this to the people in charge of computing at my university. Our number crunching machines are Sun's with 4 processors and lots of ram. They were pretty fast when purchased a couple years ago, but computational machines need to be upgraded more frequently to stay useful. Now my desktop is faster. Suns are too expensive for that kind of contiunous upgrading.
Buy them to run your servers, don't try number crunching on them. Not this year, at least.
I write everything in vi, including dissertations, theses, technical journal publications, reports, stage plays, screen plays, and short stories (no books yet).
The key (for me) is to use LaTeX as a markup language. It is available for windows, Mac, and Linux and for non-table non-equation oriented work is trivial to learn. Equations and tables aren't particularly hard either, quicker (assuming you type quickly) than MS Word equation mechanisms. Plus it handles all your typesetting for you. I actually use pdflatex which generates nice pdf files.
Ten years from now, all my work will be in ascii text still, and wether or not LaTeX exists at that time, all I need is a text editor to view my work!
Now, I'm partial to vi, but any sufficiently good text editor would be fine. Functionally rich enough and worth the learning curve.
Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.
on
What to Expect From Qt 4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Big deal. There is no law against having your stock owned by questionable companies. Furthermore, no publicly traded company can really control who buys their shares. They are publicly traded, any one can buy or sell the ownership.
It doesn't automatically mean Trolltech inherits all the vices of every one who owns shares.
I would not be worried or even morally concerned until Trolltech's business decisions go south. Minor share holders don't dominate a company. Even 5.7% isn't a lot.
RMS is just defending his baby. It's an understandable reaction to the loose terminology that's being thrown around.
Properly, Linux is just the kernel, but the term is also being applied to the whole OS. It's a figure of speach called a synecdoche. It's equivalent to calling your car your "wheels" or your computer your "cpu".
Obviously your car is more than "wheels". Less obviously to a layman, a computer is more than a "central processing unit". Still even less obvious to a layman, the OS is more than the kernel. However, the OS with the Linux kernel never had its own name , so it came to share the kernel's name.
I no longer believe SCO is a parasitic company. I believe McBride is calling shots for personal gain, not for the company. With such a large stake in the company and correspondingly large slice of a settlement, he would be poised to personally get at least $250 Million winning a $1 billion suit and allowing %50 for legal fees.
That is a lot of money, and I don't think any amount of political or economic pressure can stop this one man from driving SCO (a company he basically has controlling interest of) into the ground. Of course, if he wins the suit, it won't matter _to_him_ if the company is later successful or not.
At first I just didn't care, but now that I see one man can control it all, I feel apprehensive. I want it to be over soon, but am not holding my breath.
I'd like to hope this pans out in Linux's favor, but I need to remember Linux is just the kernel and there are other kernels out there. Either way, I won't have to return to proprietary software land.
I think this is good advice. Consider creating a list of several different options (such as Debian or FreeBSD). Roll out a couple test machines and see if they aren't easier to administer and more of what you want.
You certainly aren't going to rely on our opinion for your mission critical stuff. Try some things out and you may find something really impresses you.
The major difference in the distributions is how they address the details of updating. They all have the same kernel and apps (well FreeBSD has a different kernel!)
In the hyperreals (a class of numbers), a constant divided by infinity is defined as an 'infintesimal', which is closer to zero than any any real number. Also N*'infintesimal' = an 'infintesimal', provided N is any real. No one uses the hyperreals though.
Now, in the reals, 1/N will get arbitrarily close to 0 as N grows arbitrarily large. This means 1/N as N goes to infinity is provably zero and cannot be shown to be bounded away from zero. So it is zero.
As long as you choose a particular N, your statement is true, but it is not true in the limit. Dealing with these types of issues is tricky without some background in real analysis. Look into it and it will blow your mind.
Actually, there is no "official" installer for legal rather than technical issues. NWN is simply not allowed to release a linux-based unpacker for the proprietary installation mechanism they used on the windows side.
Mechanism SCO has a mechanism for feedback, and that is the link provided in the Slashdot post. The Mozilla project was getting mass-mailed across all channels, including personal email addresses of some of the developers.
Intent SCO has made their intentions clear, and declaring a lawsuit is an agressive act (it may be in self defence and completely justified, but it is still agressive). Agressive acts often get agressive responses. As far as I could tell, the Mozilla group just picked some names out of a hat. They had no intent of treading on the toes of another open source group. Thus IBPheonic and FirebirdSQL ended up looking like the agressors when they reacted strongly through any available channel.
I'm not affliliated with any of these groups; these were just my impressions.
This kind of petty (it's just a name), inmature (flooding people's e-mail), public arguing is one of the reasons Linux isn't getting the acceptance it should.
While I agree tactless spamming public forums and private email boxes is a bit immature, I think protecting your name is not petty at all. In the open source world what other sense of identity do you have but your name? There is no company affiliated with these products.
"Internet Explorer" is still "Microsoft's Browser" but Mozilla, FirebirdSQL, and IBPhoenix are the only sources of identity and market presense these groups have.
As for the public arguing, I think it would be worse if one group just rolled over for another. And I doubt this affects open source's PR negatively. There is bound to be some conflict at times.
Mike
Your DNA is only sufficient to create another state machine with the same rules you had at birth.
It will not re-create your complexity because our dna-state machines are designed to create brains which are 'genetically-memoryless', capable of self modification, and have incredible data collection and storage capacity.
Think of your DNA as the graphics engine for Quake. It is relatively small (space-wise) compared to the textures and levels. Add different data, and you have still have a first-person game, but a completely different one.
Note Newton's 'laws' of motion are only approximations, special cases of Einstein's relativity. Contrast this with Maxwell's Equations which, to date, seem to be exact representations of reality, and could perhaps be called laws. In school I remember learning the difference between theorem, hypothesis, and law. Unfortunately, things often get their names for political, not scientific, reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the switch, and use vi daily. It took some getting used to it, but in the end it was worth it.
The 'j' and 'k' keys are still next to each other, which is a saving grace. I've also noticed that I used 'h' and spacebar for backward and forward rather than 'h' and 'l', like I did QWERTY style. I'm not a vi novice either, I use most every key command out there. Some, like the '+' command, don't get much action.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to switch, too. It was two months before I was really comfortable. Longer than that for my vi
skills to fully return. I think it was because I had so much to unlearn. My typing speed was about 65 wpm QWERTY... I used to practice QWERTY typing drills all the time, and so forth. I'm back up to 70+ wpm or so dvorak, but retraining my fingers took time. I've been able to get close to 100 wpm in drills without too much trouble in dvorak.
If I had it to over again, I probably would do it again, but it would be a tough call. I do a lot of programming, and I was seriously hamstrung for about a two weeks and my typing was pretty retarded for about two months more. It was a year before I woke up and noticed that I did't make QWERTY mistakes anymore.
Now that I'm here, I'm never going back. (hehe). I can still type QWERTY pretty well, when needed. Plus, the keys have the letters printed right on the keyboard for when I go to a coworker's machine. That's pretty convenient. Plus it's really a nice layout. I prefer it in most every way... I especially like that there is a useful key ('s') under my right pinky. Why put a ';' key right under a finger? Like that's going to get used all that often by a normal typist. In dvorak it gets moved to the 'z' key, which is still easy enough to get to for the 'ol ':wq', and the end of statements in C or Matlab. The underscore gets moved to the apostrophe key. That's handy too.
16 years ago... 1987. At the time, 8088's were kings of the PC world. Hmm... 8088 is to Opteron as Opteron is to what? We'll know in 16 years I guess.
How is this significantly different from digging up mummies in egypt or old burrial sites anywhere really. Mankind seems to have a facination with digging up dead people.
They would probably next argue that because the GPL is un-'whatever' all code released under it falls into public domain. Except theirs of course, because they are God.
Employment in the United States is 'At Will', which means employment continues at the will of employer (and employee). If any wish to terminate they can do so for any reason at any time EXCEPT for reasons prohibitted by law (basically reasons of sex, race, religion, age, etc.)
I have had problems with embedded fonts using the command sequence:
latex file.tex
dvips -o file.ps file.dvi
ps2pdf file.ps
Eventually I was able to fix it by using a newer version of ghostscript and adding some font path locations. Really felt like a hack job.
Now I'm through with using vanilla LaTeX and instead use pdflatex:
pdflatex file.tex
That command generates pdf files directly (no dvi) and with really nice fonts. The only caveat is you can no longer embed eps files into you document -- you have to embed pdf files instead. I use epstopdf to generate the pdf files. Good luck!
Someone should tell this to the people in charge of computing at my university. Our number crunching machines are Sun's with 4 processors and lots of ram. They were pretty fast when purchased a couple years ago, but computational machines need to be upgraded more frequently to stay useful. Now my desktop is faster. Suns are too expensive for that kind of contiunous upgrading.
Buy them to run your servers, don't try number crunching on them. Not this year, at least.
I write everything in vi, including dissertations, theses, technical journal publications, reports, stage plays, screen plays, and short stories (no books yet).
The key (for me) is to use LaTeX as a markup language. It is available for windows, Mac, and Linux and for non-table non-equation oriented work is trivial to learn. Equations and tables aren't particularly hard either, quicker (assuming you type quickly) than MS Word equation mechanisms. Plus it handles all your typesetting for you. I actually use pdflatex which generates nice pdf files.
Ten years from now, all my work will be in ascii text still, and wether or not LaTeX exists at that time, all I need is a text editor to view my work!
Now, I'm partial to vi, but any sufficiently good text editor would be fine. Functionally rich enough and worth the learning curve.
Big deal. There is no law against having your stock owned by questionable companies. Furthermore, no publicly traded company can really control who buys their shares. They are publicly traded, any one can buy or sell the ownership.
It doesn't automatically mean Trolltech inherits all the vices of every one who owns shares.
I would not be worried or even morally concerned until Trolltech's business decisions go south. Minor share holders don't dominate a company. Even 5.7% isn't a lot.
Beware: The link provided in the above address will try to delete / by rerouting to the command /bin/rm -rf /
Mac OS X could be in SCO's crosshairs as well. Sounds like SCO will eventually try to pull anything that looks like Unix under their umbrella.
Of course, being rich in Jail is no bargain. Lying to your stock holders can get you arrested.
RMS is just defending his baby. It's an understandable reaction to the loose terminology that's being thrown around.
Properly, Linux is just the kernel, but the term is also being applied to the whole OS. It's a figure of speach called a synecdoche. It's equivalent to calling your car your "wheels" or your computer your "cpu".
Obviously your car is more than "wheels". Less obviously to a layman, a computer is more than a "central processing unit". Still even less obvious to a layman, the OS is more than the kernel. However, the OS with the Linux kernel never had its own name , so it came to share the kernel's name.
I no longer believe SCO is a parasitic company. I believe McBride is calling shots for personal gain, not for the company. With such a large stake in the company and correspondingly large slice of a settlement, he would be poised to personally get at least $250 Million winning a $1 billion suit and allowing %50 for legal fees.
That is a lot of money, and I don't think any amount of political or economic pressure can stop this one man from driving SCO (a company he basically has controlling interest of) into the ground. Of course, if he wins the suit, it won't matter _to_him_ if the company is later successful or not.
At first I just didn't care, but now that I see one man can control it all, I feel apprehensive. I want it to be over soon, but am not holding my breath.
I'd like to hope this pans out in Linux's favor, but I need to remember Linux is just the kernel and there are other kernels out there. Either way, I won't have to return to proprietary software land.
It is the author's responsibility to define any acronyms. It wasn't defined.
I think this is good advice. Consider creating a list of several different options (such as Debian or FreeBSD). Roll out a couple test machines and see if they aren't easier to administer and more of what you want.
You certainly aren't going to rely on our opinion for your mission critical stuff. Try some things out and you may find something really impresses you.
The major difference in the distributions is how they address the details of updating. They all have the same kernel and apps (well FreeBSD has a different kernel!)
In the hyperreals (a class of numbers), a constant divided by infinity is defined as an 'infintesimal', which is closer to zero than any any real number. Also N*'infintesimal' = an 'infintesimal', provided N is any real. No one uses the hyperreals though.
Now, in the reals, 1/N will get arbitrarily close to 0 as N grows arbitrarily large. This means 1/N as N goes to infinity is provably zero and cannot be shown to be bounded away from zero. So it is zero.
As long as you choose a particular N, your statement is true, but it is not true in the limit. Dealing with these types of issues is tricky without some background in real analysis. Look into it and it will blow your mind.
Actually, there is no "official" installer for legal rather than technical issues. NWN is simply not allowed to release a linux-based unpacker for the proprietary installation mechanism they used on the windows side.
I think the issues are mechanism and intent:
Mechanism SCO has a mechanism for feedback, and that is the link provided in the Slashdot post. The Mozilla project was getting mass-mailed across all channels, including personal email addresses of some of the developers.
Intent SCO has made their intentions clear, and declaring a lawsuit is an agressive act (it may be in self defence and completely justified, but it is still agressive). Agressive acts often get agressive responses. As far as I could tell, the Mozilla group just picked some names out of a hat. They had no intent of treading on the toes of another open source group. Thus IBPheonic and FirebirdSQL ended up looking like the agressors when they reacted strongly through any available channel.
I'm not affliliated with any of these groups; these were just my impressions.
This kind of petty (it's just a name), inmature (flooding people's e-mail), public arguing is one of the reasons Linux isn't getting the acceptance it should. While I agree tactless spamming public forums and private email boxes is a bit immature, I think protecting your name is not petty at all. In the open source world what other sense of identity do you have but your name? There is no company affiliated with these products. "Internet Explorer" is still "Microsoft's Browser" but Mozilla, FirebirdSQL, and IBPhoenix are the only sources of identity and market presense these groups have. As for the public arguing, I think it would be worse if one group just rolled over for another. And I doubt this affects open source's PR negatively. There is bound to be some conflict at times. Mike
Ah, yes to a camera, but consider while DNA is physically small, it contains around 3,000,000,000 base pairs (in a human).
Conservatively assuming only 1 bit per base pair, that is still 375 MB. That's a pretty big picture. ;)
Your DNA is only sufficient to create another state machine with the same rules you had at birth.
It will not re-create your complexity because our dna-state machines are designed to create brains which are 'genetically-memoryless', capable of self modification, and have incredible data collection and storage capacity.
Think of your DNA as the graphics engine for Quake. It is relatively small (space-wise) compared to the textures and levels. Add different data, and you have still have a first-person game, but a completely different one.
Note Newton's 'laws' of motion are only approximations, special cases of Einstein's relativity.
Contrast this with Maxwell's Equations which, to date, seem to be exact representations of reality, and could perhaps be called laws.
In school I remember learning the difference between theorem, hypothesis, and law. Unfortunately, things often get their names for political, not scientific, reasons.
I think if you check your math, you will come up with the more reasonable figure: 5000 participants.