Re:Is there a DVORAK version?
on
Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
Even better, make it switchable, so that my wife doesn't complain about the layout (I use Dvorak) when using my computer. And Wireless, and apple-look compatible, and ergonomic.
Still not right: Feature List
on
Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've yet to find a perfect keyboard, I like some of the things this one has though. Here's my feature list:
Hardwired dvorak/us switch (I use Dvorak, but it'd be easier to share this way)
Black or transparent (looks good), better when used with a mac
You don't need to do misterious readings of other ammendments to come up with the conclusion that "The People" have a right to privacy. It is VERY clearly spelled out in ammendments 9th and 10th:
"IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
"X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I've done this TWICE!
Shake slimfast, open my slimfast (I drink it for the meal replacement value, more than for it's weight loss properties), set aside while coding next line, go back to slimfast, shake slimfast, realize slimfast was already open, apologize to cube neighboors, clean everything, including keyboard.
Sorry, his name was (IIRC) Lumpawarrump, Lumpy for short, just as Chewbacca was Chewy. I had a children's book with another Lumpy story and I fondly remember reading it over and over.
DownsizeDC has been spearheading this effort for a while, as well as other efforts to slov the growth of government (it's too early to try to stop it, let alone reverse it!).
I get emails from this organization: www.downsizedc.org. They've been working against this for a while, and they have tons of information about *exactly* why a national ID card is a bad idea. They have a very easy form to contact your senator on this issue.
They are also working on a law proposal that would force lawmakers to read the laws before they get to vote on them. A good idea and well presented.
I briefly looked at it. To me, payroll is a must have. I do like the idea of web-based accounting, just because it is really so easy to do from anywhere. It must also be able to print federal 940, 941 and California tax forms, or at least calculate them. This is of course for business. For personal I am sticking (at least for a while) with doing nothing.
As far as Quickbooks, etc, have you ever tried GnuCash? It may have what you're looking for, and it's included on several Live CD's - take a look over on Distrowatch.com, pick one or ten, and try them out.
I have... as much as I dislike Quickbooks for its very bad user interface there is nothing in the open source world that comes close, particularly lacking are the payroll features and the tax reporting issues. And Quickbooks does not work under wine (it has a "bronze" in the database, hardly adequate for business critical software, and that's for an old version). I'd love to replace Quickbooks, but it has to be something much better (or at least much more complete) than gnu cash.
On top of that gnu cash is ugly as hell, and barely useable. I was a MS Money user through like 5 versions, and there was a moment when it was a very slick and useable application, then it started getting full of ads, clutter, bugs, etc. When I finally switched to Linux for most of my work I replaced MS Money with...nothing! And you know what? I feel very liberated about not having to enter every single transaction into a database to "simulate" my real banking situation.
Yeah, sucks, kinda, I used to read them at my university's library when I was in school (11 years ago). I now reading at my corp's library (large, two letter acronym company mostly known for its printers). I'm not sure if public libraries carry them, or if your local community college might have them available for browsing.
If you are doing this for a living, and your company is at all supportive of process improvement the cost can be justified. If you do this on your own, think of it as a (tax-deductible) cost of doing business, not too much.
I'll reply to you, but it applies to many other comments in this thread.
Of course the company that uses Agile processes and encourages prototyping will probably get to market way before the dinosaur company.
I hate most generalizations of this sort. Agile is no silver bullet: there are no silver bullets. The methods involved in Agile applied judiciously (and independently) by experienced professionals can help ***some*** projects a lot, and seriously hurt others. One difference between an Engineer and a technician is that the Engineer gathers tons of tools, and figures out when to apply each. You don't use the same methodologies for writing space shuttle software as you do for pacemaker software as you do for bank websites as you do for MS word as you do for console games: that's just stupid.
When you are porting an accounting application to a new platform for the 10th time the waterfall process works pretty good, the lack of iterations is actually a good thing. The same approach applied to a totally untested product would just not work.
As for prototyping... another great tool, when appropriate, and mostly as company to a well written (i.e. not paper weight) SRS, but a prototype is not design: it is requirements.
That's why you go to school. Much of the learning is formative, you'll use little of it in "the real world", but you'll learn "how to learn". Do I use all those years of integrals and derivatives? No, but they trained my mind into the proper engineering mode. While in school, follow the excercises, once you are outside you'll quickly figure out what works and what doesn't, and sometimes, you'll find yourself coming back to things you learn in school a long time ago.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by Design document, I've seen many software shops. Some call the requirements document design, while others define the design document as the document that describes the high level description of the internal architecture of the system (system diagram, major modules, client/server decomposition, class diagram).
Either way, I like to start with some templates I created based on IEEE standards, a few come to mind, Here's the list:
Some of these are very documentation intensive, but I find that at least reading through them when starting a new project helps me direct my thoughts and make sure I don't forget anything that might be relevant to the phase in question (what? I need to think about the maintainability? the stability? the robustness?) pick and choose those things that apply to your project.
On a totally serious note, This group is proposing passing a law that would force congress critters to read a bill before voting on it. The idea is well presented.
For what is worth, I learned Esperanto almost wholly online, it was a few months of learning before I actually talked to someone else face to face. It was amazingly easy. Resources to do so abound. It was also a great mind exercise.
Of course, the knife cuts both ways. If you comment everything and then the logic changes during maintenance without a corresponding change to the comments, they becomse worse than convoluted code (at least convoluted code can run through a debugger to give you an idea of what's happening).
That would then be because your commented the wrong thing. Comments should have nothing to say on what is being done, that should be obvious by the code, comments have much more value, become obsolete less often and make code cleaner when they explain why things are done: comments give the big picture, the code the details. Steve McConnel's "Code Complete" is a wonderful treatise on this and other good things.
As a trivial example:
int a = b + 1;//Make a equal b plus one
That's clearly stupid, but it's surprising how often I see code like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, make it switchable, so that my wife doesn't complain about the layout (I use Dvorak) when using my computer. And Wireless, and apple-look compatible, and ergonomic.
- Hardwired dvorak/us switch (I use Dvorak, but it'd be easier to share this way)
- Black or transparent (looks good), better when used with a mac
- Not only ergonomic, but Adjustably ergonomic This is what I use today.
- I'll take the blank keys from this one
- I'll also take the variable force springs
- Wireless
- Ability to add a separate numeric keypad for those rare times when I need to input lots of numbers
- A row of buttons for macros
I'd be willing to put $150.00 for these features.You don't need to do misterious readings of other ammendments to come up with the conclusion that "The People" have a right to privacy. It is VERY clearly spelled out in ammendments 9th and 10th:
"IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
"X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
You might be interested in this organization.
So how do I ask for my replacement battery if the site is slashdotted?
I've done this TWICE! Shake slimfast, open my slimfast (I drink it for the meal replacement value, more than for it's weight loss properties), set aside while coding next line, go back to slimfast, shake slimfast, realize slimfast was already open, apologize to cube neighboors, clean everything, including keyboard.
Sorry, his name was (IIRC) Lumpawarrump, Lumpy for short, just as Chewbacca was Chewy. I had a children's book with another Lumpy story and I fondly remember reading it over and over.
Or apache: News on Harmony
DownsizeDC has been spearheading this effort for a while, as well as other efforts to slov the growth of government (it's too early to try to stop it, let alone reverse it!).
I get emails from this organization: www.downsizedc.org. They've been working against this for a while, and they have tons of information about *exactly* why a national ID card is a bad idea.
They have a very easy form to contact your senator on this issue.
They are also working on a law proposal that would force lawmakers to read the laws before they get to vote on them. A good idea and well presented.
Well, Java's just ziz langvage, you know?
Don't worry, it's ok as long as you don't combine it with water cooling.
Sure, send it down once inside javascript, have javascript load all of your dropdowns for you.
I briefly looked at it. To me, payroll is a must have. I do like the idea of web-based accounting, just because it is really so easy to do from anywhere. It must also be able to print federal 940, 941 and California tax forms, or at least calculate them. This is of course for business. For personal I am sticking (at least for a while) with doing nothing.
As far as Quickbooks, etc, have you ever tried GnuCash? It may have what you're looking for, and it's included on several Live CD's - take a look over on Distrowatch.com, pick one or ten, and try them out.
I have... as much as I dislike Quickbooks for its very bad user interface there is nothing in the open source world that comes close, particularly lacking are the payroll features and the tax reporting issues. And Quickbooks does not work under wine (it has a "bronze" in the database, hardly adequate for business critical software, and that's for an old version).
I'd love to replace Quickbooks, but it has to be something much better (or at least much more complete) than gnu cash.
On top of that gnu cash is ugly as hell, and barely useable. I was a MS Money user through like 5 versions, and there was a moment when it was a very slick and useable application, then it started getting full of ads, clutter, bugs, etc. When I finally switched to Linux for most of my work I replaced MS Money with...nothing! And you know what? I feel very liberated about not having to enter every single transaction into a database to "simulate" my real banking situation.
But for business? It's quickbooks. Unfortunately.
Yeah, sucks, kinda, I used to read them at my university's library when I was in school (11 years ago). I now reading at my corp's library (large, two letter acronym company mostly known for its printers). I'm not sure if public libraries carry them, or if your local community college might have them available for browsing.
If you are doing this for a living, and your company is at all supportive of process improvement the cost can be justified. If you do this on your own, think of it as a (tax-deductible) cost of doing business, not too much.
I'll reply to you, but it applies to many other comments in this thread.
Of course the company that uses Agile processes and encourages prototyping will probably get to market way before the dinosaur company.
I hate most generalizations of this sort. Agile is no silver bullet: there are no silver bullets. The methods involved in Agile applied judiciously (and independently) by experienced professionals can help ***some*** projects a lot, and seriously hurt others. One difference between an Engineer and a technician is that the Engineer gathers tons of tools, and figures out when to apply each. You don't use the same methodologies for writing space shuttle software as you do for pacemaker software as you do for bank websites as you do for MS word as you do for console games: that's just stupid.
When you are porting an accounting application to a new platform for the 10th time the waterfall process works pretty good, the lack of iterations is actually a good thing. The same approach applied to a totally untested product would just not work.
As for prototyping... another great tool, when appropriate, and mostly as company to a well written (i.e. not paper weight) SRS, but a prototype is not design: it is requirements.
That's why you go to school. Much of the learning is formative, you'll use little of it in "the real world", but you'll learn "how to learn". Do I use all those years of integrals and derivatives? No, but they trained my mind into the proper engineering mode. While in school, follow the excercises, once you are outside you'll quickly figure out what works and what doesn't, and sometimes, you'll find yourself coming back to things you learn in school a long time ago.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by Design document, I've seen many software shops. Some call the requirements document design, while others define the design document as the document that describes the high level description of the internal architecture of the system (system diagram, major modules, client/server decomposition, class diagram).
Either way, I like to start with some templates I created based on IEEE standards, a few come to mind, Here's the list:
IEEE standards pertaining to sofware engineering. In particular take a look at the Software Requirement Specifications and the software design descriptions.
Some of these are very documentation intensive, but I find that at least reading through them when starting a new project helps me direct my thoughts and make sure I don't forget anything that might be relevant to the phase in question (what? I need to think about the maintainability? the stability? the robustness?) pick and choose those things that apply to your project.
On a totally serious note, This group is proposing passing a law that would force congress critters to read a bill before voting on it. The idea is well presented.
I refreshed a couple of times and even got it to give me the firefox slashdot bug!
Where are my mod points when I need them? Zombie Pope....hee, hee
Wrong, Marc
For what is worth, I learned Esperanto almost wholly online, it was a few months of learning before I actually talked to someone else face to face. It was amazingly easy. Resources to do so abound. It was also a great mind exercise.
Of course, the knife cuts both ways. If you comment everything and then the logic changes during maintenance without a corresponding change to the comments, they becomse worse than convoluted code (at least convoluted code can run through a debugger to give you an idea of what's happening). //Make a equal b plus one
That's clearly stupid, but it's surprising how often I see code like this.
That would then be because your commented the wrong thing. Comments should have nothing to say on what is being done, that should be obvious by the code, comments have much more value, become obsolete less often and make code cleaner when they explain why things are done: comments give the big picture, the code the details. Steve McConnel's "Code Complete" is a wonderful treatise on this and other good things.
As a trivial example:
int a = b + 1;