As a fellow Dvorak user, I thought I'd share my own experience, to at least add a little bit more to the anecdotal information.
For me, Dvorak also did not greatly increase speed or efficiency; however, I have mild tendonitis in one of my wrists, and it IMMENSELY increased the comfort for me. I never have to hyperextend my fingers, as I would have to occasionally do with Qwerty. Learning it was total torture for about 3 weeks for me.
Re:I made the switch years ago
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 0, Troll
Have you ever used Dvorak? It's very easy to keep the keystrokes in the right order.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't find this funny. I even find it a little bit offensive. Dvorak proponents have to deal with ridicule from people too lazy or thickheaded to see the benefit all the time, and it really is quite irritating, particularly when it mostly comes from intelligent people who purport to be [and usually are] open-minded about most things.
Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
The one that really bugs me is ls (which would be like typing 'p;' on a QWERTY board). Everything else, Dvorak is better for, but for typing ls over and over QWERTY winds hands down.
It's true that there are over four times as many Chinese people as Americans; however, please bear in mind that the average American is over five times more massive than the average Chinese (even more if you don't grant them Yao's contribution!), and it logically follows that we consume more beer.
Of course, me being the sympathetic soul that I am, I try to do my part to level the playing field for our Chinese friends by not drinking Budweiser.
Am I the only atheist who was slightly offended by the parent post? I understand the main point, and agree with the sentiment, but the last clause seems tacked on to me. It also seems to display a fundamental misunderstanding of atheism (at least as I and most of my atheist friends understand the term). Atheism is tantamount to skepticism in the religious arena. From what I can see, the linked article makes no mention of 'God' except for the almost afterthought 'Some might call it the mind of God.' This is true, some might call it the mind of God; some others might not. This is most likely a metaphor, which most atheists would agree with depending on the context, but at the same time not agree with as a confirmation of the traditional 'God' figure. The parent post makes a valid, but slightly misguided, point, as well as an unintentional attack on a belief system it also appears to actually support.
Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down.
on
LokiTorrent Shut Down
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· Score: 1
Not that I personally like the RIAA/MPAA, but to be fair, just as copyright infringement is not clearly immoral, it is'nt clearly moral either. Just because it's the will of the people doesn't make it right. See Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.
(Note: all I'm trying to point out is that it is not a wholly one-sided issue)
It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest, a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.
Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.
Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound, SuperCollider, and TaoSynth, which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.
There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.
If you want to have people going to Linux for the games, you need more than just late ports of great PC games.
But is this really the goal? Perhaps the goal isn't to get people to necessarily go to Linux because of its games, but to just not have to stay with Windows for its games. If the gaming experience on Linux and Windows were equal, many people would be a lot more willing to ditch Windows for all the other benefits of Linux.
The first is the haptic glove line from Immersion Corp. At my old office we had a Sensable Phantom, which was somewhat neat in a "that's completely useless" sort of way, but this one really excites me. If the market for these grew and the price came down, I think it would be a great breakthrough for games and other simulations in particular. Imagine playing Black & White with one of these!
The second is an entire new field, combining bioinformatics and computing closer than ever. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a burgeoning field, with a lot of research being done at universities such as Duke. I'm sure you've all heard of things such as the rhesus monkey controlling a robot arm via neurosensors embedded in its brain, for instance. There are also less intrusive methods available utilising EEG, such as the headbands from IBVA, cheesy as they may be. Obviously, though, these latter technologies don't have the same potential quality as their intrusive counterports.
And a third I thought of while writing this is Nintendo. Really. Their DS system has a lot of innovative features, what with its built in touchpad and microphone, and lack of mouse and keyboard, which means "traditional" methods are out of the question. Who knows what they're planning with their Revolution system? If it's something in the same vein, I think it will be a great boon for HCI. Of course, some of these could turn out to be flukes, but simply having someone with the exposure and resources of Nintendo (and their third parties) so actively involved in experimental input methods is very exciting.
Needless to say I felt like a stupid/ethnocentric American the whole week.
Whenever I get to down on myself for this, I just think of England. Somehow, despite being in the middle of it all, the English seem to be as monolingual as we.
I've seen that happen quite a few times - people relying on the Outlook/Word spellchecked and it corrects their email by inserting correctly spelled, but irrelevant words.
The most entertaining case I've seen of this was a coworker of mine at our college computer support department. He suffers from diagnosed severe dyslexia, so he decided to put a spell checker which automatically 'corrects' all his outgoing emails. He was replying to a professor's request one day, and somehow this spell checker managed to replace the professor's last name with the closest word it could find, which happened to be 'ovary.'
I can't believe Blizzard could come up with such a poor BitTorrent client. It seems they fundamentally misunderstand how BitTorrent is meant to work. From a staff member on the forums I found:
'The dev team continues to work on the Blizzard Downloader to ensure that the difference between upload and download rates are as small as possible.'
Their client attempts to lock your upload/download speed at 1:1. This is not how BitTorrent should work. Each client should upload at whatever maximum speed the user deems reasonable, and try to download as fast as it possibly can. The p2p network itself is responsible for regulating how fast the user downloads, using a Tit-for-Tat approach. If you cap your upload rate at 1KB/s, that's perfectly fine, your peers will just choose not to serve you as quickly as other more generous nodes. Artificially locking the download rate in the client program itself is just stupid.
In addition to the download/upload ratio being artificially modified by the client, there is no way using the supplied installer to limit the rate. It will saturate the upstream, and at least for me, caused me to not be able to do much else on the net at the same time. I could stay connected to IRC, but I couldn't get to any websites or even ping google.com. This is also stupid.
A solution: I tried searching the web for unofficial.torrents, but the only ones I found seemed to no longer work. Luckily, Blizzard has made it easy to extract the torrent from it's installer executable. It's just embedded as a resource file, so using Visual Studio it's easy to extract them. I found three torrents embedded: bin108.torrent, bin112.torrent, and bin119.torrent. These are all somewhat modified with some proprietary data, but bin108.torrent (which seems to contain most or all of the installer data) seems to work nicely in the original BitConjurer client (with which I can actually cap my upload rate!) Now, instead of down/up at 40/40, I'm doing about 120/15.
Sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me off. I generally expect better from Blizzard:-)
I was able to hold my hand on the heatsink and it was barely warm.
It could be because there's inadequate conduction between the CPU core and the heatsink. Check the temperature monitors to make sure it's actually as cool as you hope it to be. It could be that just most of the heat is staying in on the CPU, which would be a bad thing. Hopefully you've already checked this though.
Sign language is unique in the fact that some of the language is what some people would guess, correctly, what it was. Like sticking out your thumb and pinkie and holding up to your ear for "phone".
But it's not really unique, maybe. This is just the equivalent of onomatopoeia in a different domain. So in that sense, it's a deeper phenomenon.
Nobody, most of all Wired (which tries to coin terms and screw with the language unsuccessfully on a very frequent basis) has the ability to just decree that everyone is going to change capitalization or spelling of a word. The includes dictionaries -- they just codify common usage.
Don't forget pronunciations. I find it somewhat sickening that m-w.com now lists 'nucular' (a la Dubya) as an acceptable alternate pronunciation for nuclear.
I'm waiting for the day when I hear someone say, 'That game sounds so great, I have to buy it!'
I'm a semi-pro musician, and I was discussing coding Csound instruments with a friend of mine the other day. We were lamenting the lack of a centralized online repository of free instruments, but the problem is the number of instruments to wade through quickly becomes unmanageable (easy to recognize, difficult to solve). Why is this?
Because audio clips can't really be shown as thumbnails. Where you can show one page of sized down images and have the surfer quickly navigate to whatever catches his eye, there is no parallel for audio clips. They essentially must be listened to independently and sequentially. And of course people won't take the time for this.
That's why people don't get as excited about game sound. Marketers can't use it to affect excitement. They can't demo it [intuitively] on web pages, print ads, or even on the game boxes themselves, so graphics are used solo for promotion.
Of course, 'left' and 'right' are horribly inadequate terms too. This holds true too for the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal', as demonstrated by one of my favorite recent sayings: 'Bush: he's liberal in all the wrong ways!' (sorry, can't recall whom to credit) Reducing political inclination to a single spectrum is a vast and rather ridiculous oversimplification. As another responder pointed out, there is also an orthogonal issue of 'libertarian-authoritarian' tendencies.
A nice site to check out might be The Political Compass, which nicely illustrates the fundamental issue with projecting everything into a single left-right/liberal-conservative axis. Of course, even two axes probably isn't enough, but it's much closer to an accurate representation. Hope it's at least a little bit enlightening.
Slashdot Mirror
As a fellow Dvorak user, I thought I'd share my own experience, to at least add a little bit more to the anecdotal information. For me, Dvorak also did not greatly increase speed or efficiency; however, I have mild tendonitis in one of my wrists, and it IMMENSELY increased the comfort for me. I never have to hyperextend my fingers, as I would have to occasionally do with Qwerty. Learning it was total torture for about 3 weeks for me.
Have you ever used Dvorak? It's very easy to keep the keystrokes in the right order. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't find this funny. I even find it a little bit offensive. Dvorak proponents have to deal with ridicule from people too lazy or thickheaded to see the benefit all the time, and it really is quite irritating, particularly when it mostly comes from intelligent people who purport to be [and usually are] open-minded about most things.
The one that really bugs me is ls (which would be like typing 'p;' on a QWERTY board). Everything else, Dvorak is better for, but for typing ls over and over QWERTY winds hands down.
Mod this funny, not troll. I suppose it all depends on knowledge of the reference though.
It's true that there are over four times as many Chinese people as Americans; however, please bear in mind that the average American is over five times more massive than the average Chinese (even more if you don't grant them Yao's contribution!), and it logically follows that we consume more beer.
Of course, me being the sympathetic soul that I am, I try to do my part to level the playing field for our Chinese friends by not drinking Budweiser.
And more, how easy are your women?
Well... Apparently, relatively easy.
I've used normalizer plugins in both XMMS and Winamp. They aren't perfect, but they're generally alright.
Check out http://volnorm.sourceforge.net/ for an XMMS plugin, or one of the many Winamp plugins here.
Am I the only atheist who was slightly offended by the parent post? I understand the main point, and agree with the sentiment, but the last clause seems tacked on to me. It also seems to display a fundamental misunderstanding of atheism (at least as I and most of my atheist friends understand the term). Atheism is tantamount to skepticism in the religious arena. From what I can see, the linked article makes no mention of 'God' except for the almost afterthought 'Some might call it the mind of God.' This is true, some might call it the mind of God; some others might not. This is most likely a metaphor, which most atheists would agree with depending on the context, but at the same time not agree with as a confirmation of the traditional 'God' figure. The parent post makes a valid, but slightly misguided, point, as well as an unintentional attack on a belief system it also appears to actually support.
Not that I personally like the RIAA/MPAA, but to be fair, just as copyright infringement is not clearly immoral, it is'nt clearly moral either. Just because it's the will of the people doesn't make it right. See Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.
(Note: all I'm trying to point out is that it is not a wholly one-sided issue)
It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest, a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.
Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.
Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound, SuperCollider, and TaoSynth, which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.
There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.
If you want to have people going to Linux for the games, you need more than just late ports of great PC games.
But is this really the goal? Perhaps the goal isn't to get people to necessarily go to Linux because of its games, but to just not have to stay with Windows for its games. If the gaming experience on Linux and Windows were equal, many people would be a lot more willing to ditch Windows for all the other benefits of Linux.
The first is the haptic glove line from Immersion Corp. At my old office we had a Sensable Phantom, which was somewhat neat in a "that's completely useless" sort of way, but this one really excites me. If the market for these grew and the price came down, I think it would be a great breakthrough for games and other simulations in particular. Imagine playing Black & White with one of these!
The second is an entire new field, combining bioinformatics and computing closer than ever. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a burgeoning field, with a lot of research being done at universities such as Duke. I'm sure you've all heard of things such as the rhesus monkey controlling a robot arm via neurosensors embedded in its brain, for instance. There are also less intrusive methods available utilising EEG, such as the headbands from IBVA, cheesy as they may be. Obviously, though, these latter technologies don't have the same potential quality as their intrusive counterports.
And a third I thought of while writing this is Nintendo. Really. Their DS system has a lot of innovative features, what with its built in touchpad and microphone, and lack of mouse and keyboard, which means "traditional" methods are out of the question. Who knows what they're planning with their Revolution system? If it's something in the same vein, I think it will be a great boon for HCI. Of course, some of these could turn out to be flukes, but simply having someone with the exposure and resources of Nintendo (and their third parties) so actively involved in experimental input methods is very exciting.
Needless to say I felt like a stupid/ethnocentric American the whole week.
Whenever I get to down on myself for this, I just think of England. Somehow, despite being in the middle of it all, the English seem to be as monolingual as we.
I've seen that happen quite a few times - people relying on the Outlook/Word spellchecked and it corrects their email by inserting correctly spelled, but irrelevant words.
The most entertaining case I've seen of this was a coworker of mine at our college computer support department. He suffers from diagnosed severe dyslexia, so he decided to put a spell checker which automatically 'corrects' all his outgoing emails. He was replying to a professor's request one day, and somehow this spell checker managed to replace the professor's last name with the closest word it could find, which happened to be 'ovary.'
Oddly enough, the professor never brought it up.
I can't believe Blizzard could come up with such a poor BitTorrent client. It seems they fundamentally misunderstand how BitTorrent is meant to work. From a staff member on the forums I found:
Their client attempts to lock your upload/download speed at 1:1. This is not how BitTorrent should work. Each client should upload at whatever maximum speed the user deems reasonable, and try to download as fast as it possibly can. The p2p network itself is responsible for regulating how fast the user downloads, using a Tit-for-Tat approach. If you cap your upload rate at 1KB/s, that's perfectly fine, your peers will just choose not to serve you as quickly as other more generous nodes. Artificially locking the download rate in the client program itself is just stupid.
In addition to the download/upload ratio being artificially modified by the client, there is no way using the supplied installer to limit the rate. It will saturate the upstream, and at least for me, caused me to not be able to do much else on the net at the same time. I could stay connected to IRC, but I couldn't get to any websites or even ping google.com. This is also stupid.
A solution: I tried searching the web for unofficial .torrents, but the only ones I found seemed to no longer work. Luckily, Blizzard has made it easy to extract the torrent from it's installer executable. It's just embedded as a resource file, so using Visual Studio it's easy to extract them. I found three torrents embedded: bin108.torrent, bin112.torrent, and bin119.torrent. These are all somewhat modified with some proprietary data, but bin108.torrent (which seems to contain most or all of the installer data) seems to work nicely in the original BitConjurer client (with which I can actually cap my upload rate!) Now, instead of down/up at 40/40, I'm doing about 120/15.
Sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me off. I generally expect better from Blizzard :-)
I was able to hold my hand on the heatsink and it was barely warm.
It could be because there's inadequate conduction between the CPU core and the heatsink. Check the temperature monitors to make sure it's actually as cool as you hope it to be. It could be that just most of the heat is staying in on the CPU, which would be a bad thing. Hopefully you've already checked this though.
I know that many European countries (Italy, for example) have "communist parties"
I hate to single this out from a post based entirely on inductive reasoning and speculation, but the United States has a Communist Party too.
Sign language is unique in the fact that some of the language is what some people would guess, correctly, what it was. Like sticking out your thumb and pinkie and holding up to your ear for "phone".
But it's not really unique, maybe. This is just the equivalent of onomatopoeia in a different domain. So in that sense, it's a deeper phenomenon.
Actually, they interchangably use the terms "World Wide Web" and "Internet." They're not Wired.
In order to avoid to reduce patch sizes Maybe you should've done a doctoral thesis on reading over what you write before submitting it to Slashdot.
Don't forget pronunciations. I find it somewhat sickening that m-w.com now lists 'nucular' (a la Dubya) as an acceptable alternate pronunciation for nuclear.
If you're wondering when the word "hacker" came to mean something sinister, the answer is 1987.
While there may have been some earlier hints at the new meaning, it didn't become something really sinister until, oh, let's say 1995.
I'm waiting for the day when I hear someone say, 'That game sounds so great, I have to buy it!'
I'm a semi-pro musician, and I was discussing coding Csound instruments with a friend of mine the other day. We were lamenting the lack of a centralized online repository of free instruments, but the problem is the number of instruments to wade through quickly becomes unmanageable (easy to recognize, difficult to solve). Why is this?
Because audio clips can't really be shown as thumbnails. Where you can show one page of sized down images and have the surfer quickly navigate to whatever catches his eye, there is no parallel for audio clips. They essentially must be listened to independently and sequentially. And of course people won't take the time for this.
That's why people don't get as excited about game sound. Marketers can't use it to affect excitement. They can't demo it [intuitively] on web pages, print ads, or even on the game boxes themselves, so graphics are used solo for promotion.
But will the bibles be inflatable as well?
Personally, I'd be more interested in them being deflatable.
Of course, 'left' and 'right' are horribly inadequate terms too. This holds true too for the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal', as demonstrated by one of my favorite recent sayings: 'Bush: he's liberal in all the wrong ways!' (sorry, can't recall whom to credit) Reducing political inclination to a single spectrum is a vast and rather ridiculous oversimplification. As another responder pointed out, there is also an orthogonal issue of 'libertarian-authoritarian' tendencies.
A nice site to check out might be The Political Compass, which nicely illustrates the fundamental issue with projecting everything into a single left-right/liberal-conservative axis. Of course, even two axes probably isn't enough, but it's much closer to an accurate representation. Hope it's at least a little bit enlightening.