I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Bush rolled back ergonomic safety regulations and trivialized the nature of RSI.
It used to be possible to get your employeer to repair poor ergonomic conditions by law. It used to be easier to get compensiation and medical costs covered for these types of injuries. No longer. Thanks George!
I am not a doctor either, but I am someone who used to suffer with CTS and have since all but eliminated most of my problems. I have some disagreements with titaniam.
Ride a bike, play some tennis
Lots of bike riding can furtheraggrivate Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Tennis, on the otherhand, can cause it's own set of problems. I am not a tennis player, but I am an advid biker, so I can only offer advice on biking. Biking gloves help mitigate the problem, but they do not eliminate it. Padding anywhere on the grip surfaces is always a plus. However, biking remains one of the worst activities for your hands and wrists.
Then you go on to mention frisbee and masturbation (which is implied by porn). I am not sure either one of these activities is all that great. You see, the fundamental problem with Repetitive Stress Injuries (like CTS) are repetitive motions. (Imagine that?) You want to do engage in activities that have a wide range of motions. Nothing you mention does.
While you're at it, get a laptop or some type of trackball or touchpad, so you can work half the time with a non-mouse pointer.
This is not necessarily true. With a standard mouse, you are forced to a degree to use your whole arm to achieve motion. At least it's an option. With a trackball or trackpad, that motion is reduced to a single digit on your hand, which may contribute to the problem. In this case, ask an ergonomst.
Take care of this problem using common-sense techniques like mentioned above, as going to the doctor for carpal-tunnel will likely not help at all.
Have you considered that when any kind of RSI is diagnosed by a physician early, treatments such as anti-inflamatory drugs can seriously reduce the damage done to your joints? In fact, visiting your doctor early and often regarding this problem can eliminate the need to have surgery.
I think overall we are learning here that a lot of advice on Slashdot is quite bad.
In other news, automated cameras have been installed, issuing tickets to those who run red lights in the middle of the night when there's no other traffic, including police, around.
They are absolutely everywhere in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (surrounding cities included, like Alexandria, Arlington, Rockville, and so forth). The only redeming factor here is that they do not assign blame to anyone in particular. The offended municipality simply mails a fine (a co-worker got 50USD) to the registered owner of the vehilce, since the images cannot prove who is actually driving.
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway also has signs up that indicate your speed is being clocked by video camera. I don't know if this is true, but may be yet another example of ever-expanding surveillance.
Now I feel the urge to rant! At what point does monitoring stop? When are people going to realize that all of this violates the First Ammendment (anonymous freedom of associaton). It's a shame that groups with so much money and power don't use their resources to fight this kind of nonsense. Instead, they are fighting to destroy the very establishment that gave them the rights and privileges to achieve such success in the first place.
Thank you for a well-written post. It's such a shame that so many people argue Java performance without even understanding how the damn thing works. (It's funny that at the present, you have to explicitly turn off native execution via the -Xint flag.)
More people need to read the Hotspot Whitepaper before they open their mouths.
This thread is already full of very knowledgable people expoudning at great length as to why Java is not slower (and infact, is often faster than "native code"). Therefore, I will not waste my time writing an indepth response to those who would argue that 1 + 1 in Java is somehow slower than 1 + 1 in C/C++. This post does that quite well. What that comment does not do, however, is explain why some Java programs do, in fact, feel slower than native programs.
I'll simplify this as much as I can without diverging from the technical truth too much. Most complaints that Java is slow come from two sources. First, you must wait for the virtual machine to load, and depending on the libraries used by the program, that can be costly in terms of IO, which is always very slow. Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight--they do a lot and many programs take advantage of much of the functionality they provide. I won't embark into the details, but to those inclined to find out why should read more about Swing and what Java2D libraries offer. Because of all they do, many Java programs with GUIs feel a little sluggish. Of course, keep in mind that most software sits idle 99% of the time while the user decides what to do. So otherwise, Java code that is not bound by user response time is very fast.
One quick post script: because the Java language is object oriented, complex software will do a great deal of memory allocation and garbage collection as objects come in and out of use. That too, is very expensive. However, there is no reason that you have to use the Java programming language to code for the virtual machine. Case in point: Jasmin. In theory, you could write compilers that generate JVM bytecode from any language (and a former professor of mine is currently in the proceess of writing a book that explains precisely how to do that).
I can't stand it when people bitch and moan about a some technology being too <negative_adjective> when it comes to open source. (Especially when people like you make complaints and don't even bother to substantiate them in any way. What you offer is purely opinion.) If you're in a position to use KDE, then you are not using Windows. If you are not using Windows, then you are in a position of choice.
And that's really the whole point, isn't it?
KDE is a desktop environment, not a window manager like you are asking for. In this case, KDE is trying to provide a platform that is both easy to use and serves the needs of rapid application development. These are things that will help make it a more viable alternative to Windows and tools like VisualBASIC which can be great for quick prototyping. Of course, I don't know what the point is of defending it on these grounds. It's a tool, one of many, well suited to certain tasks and perhaps not so well suited to others.
And maybe this will be read in China, they'll put me on a "banned" list, and they'll stop sending me all that "big5" spam
You know, there's an interesting thought that'll really bake your noodle.
If China has such a draconia, extremely restrictive firewall on Internet access for its denizens, how on earth is it that so much spam about penis enlargement and other scams gets through?
Does my car look like a ricer to you? No, didn't think so.:)
Re:$179? No problem.
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't see any particular problem with paying for software I need and $179 really isn't that much.
That is an outrageous price when talking about software that is both Free and free. I can see paying that much for support services, but not for the actual software itself. Given that you cannot download RedHat Enterprise for free, you aren't paying for support.
No, I have NO intention of moving to some
boutique distro that requires a Linux Guru to manage.
All systems require some degree of competence and understanding to setup and administer correctly. If you aren't afraid of learning new skills and expanding your knowledge, I would highly recommend Debian as an alternative. It is really the easiest distro to maintain. In addition, it will always be free and never chock full of much of the annoying crap many distros like SuSE and Mandrake throw in (silly logos, hyperactive themes, silly tools that pretend to do something useful, etc).
I don't quite understand why people that will pay $200 plus on an iPod, big cash in the latest game toy / case mod / whoop-dee-doo / sushi bar excess, why $179 for an OS is a proble.
Probably has something to do with the fact that when you're buying software, you're actually just buying a piece of plastic and aluminum with a certain configuration of bumps on it. And even then, you really don't own anything, you're really just renting or borrowing. You cannot even sell it.
If you buy and iPod, you actually own it. It is yours. You can take it apart, you can smash it, and it has value with you can recoup.
For the sake of completeness, if you have way too much money to burn, there's also megaCar. They do a complete vehicle outfitting except for a few more zeros on the price.
Another cool thing I'd like is a heads up display projected on my windshield (yes, very much like the cockpit of a fighter jet). The idea is to have things like my tac, speed, etc. directly in my line of sight so that I wouldn't have to divert my eyes from traffic to get vehicle stats.
Do they even exist? Does anybody know of any shops that build and install these kinds of systems? (How about in the Washington, DC area?:) How customizable are they? For example, I drive a Civic Hybrid and I'd like to have the battery charge, assist/charge guage, and other fun stats on the display as well.
Spatial interafaces are not new or revolutionary, but they are extremely effective. I'll let Ars Technica do the talking: they have a really good article that discusses the MacOS Finder and what a spatial interface is. It will give you a better understanding about what Nautilus is trying to accomplish.
<rant mode="troll">Mr. Bush, I'd like to point out that you've had nearly four years to involve yourself in such domestic progress. You've spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on war and completely forgotten us. Those resources could have sent us to Mars. Those resources could have improved our nation's quality of life by providing services like broadband. There's so much that could have been done, yet the emphasis was purely on destruction.
Frankly, Mr. Bush, you need to can it. A pile of false promises that could have been done will not win the American people. You've already lost. You, sir, are a miserable failure.</rant>
Most Windows users couldn't install Windows either. The guys sitting there playing games and downloading porn probably got machines with Windows preinstalled as most people do. If your system came packaged with Linux, you'd be playing games and downloading porn right out of the box.
Have you ever actually gotten a message from higher-ups? Or sales people, or lawyers??
I have, but they all have grammar skills and at least run spell check on their emails before sending. Hell, even our status reports tend to be well written.
You're thinking too geeky. "I'm doing something subversive. Make it clean, neat, nice... blah blah." These people don't think like that. It's just another day at the fast paced office.
and I'm sure ESR would have gone to great lengths to validate the document before going public
Wait, are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
And if you're not, exactly how would ESR go about doing that, hmm? If he knows the identity of whoever leaked it, he would have to reveal that in court. As far as I know, the source is anonymous. Is it possible to go to the investors and get the numbers on how much was contributed? Is that knowledge even public yet?
Either the author of the leaked document in question was in extreme haste, or he has lackluster grammar skills. The document is full of errors like: "The will help us a lot", "componients", "shoudl", "wjich", and so on. That isn't exactly the kind of document you send out when you are trying to convince people to do something shady. You'd think the author would at least had the initiative to spell check the thing before sending it out. Perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt, and by that, I mean deer salt licks.
I just heard some sad news on BillMaher's web log - Baseball manager and bigot bitch Marge Schott was found dead in her Louisiana home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss her - even if you didn't enjoy her work, there's no denying her contributions to racist southern culture. Truly an American icon.
Slashdot Mirror
Sixth Post!
I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Bush rolled back ergonomic safety regulations and trivialized the nature of RSI.
It used to be possible to get your employeer to repair poor ergonomic conditions by law. It used to be easier to get compensiation and medical costs covered for these types of injuries. No longer. Thanks George!
I am not a doctor either, but I am someone who used to suffer with CTS and have since all but eliminated most of my problems. I have some disagreements with titaniam.
Lots of bike riding can further aggrivate Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Tennis, on the otherhand, can cause it's own set of problems. I am not a tennis player, but I am an advid biker, so I can only offer advice on biking. Biking gloves help mitigate the problem, but they do not eliminate it. Padding anywhere on the grip surfaces is always a plus. However, biking remains one of the worst activities for your hands and wrists.
Then you go on to mention frisbee and masturbation (which is implied by porn). I am not sure either one of these activities is all that great. You see, the fundamental problem with Repetitive Stress Injuries (like CTS) are repetitive motions. (Imagine that?) You want to do engage in activities that have a wide range of motions. Nothing you mention does.
This is not necessarily true. With a standard mouse, you are forced to a degree to use your whole arm to achieve motion. At least it's an option. With a trackball or trackpad, that motion is reduced to a single digit on your hand, which may contribute to the problem. In this case, ask an ergonomst.
Have you considered that when any kind of RSI is diagnosed by a physician early, treatments such as anti-inflamatory drugs can seriously reduce the damage done to your joints? In fact, visiting your doctor early and often regarding this problem can eliminate the need to have surgery.
I think overall we are learning here that a lot of advice on Slashdot is quite bad.
They are absolutely everywhere in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (surrounding cities included, like Alexandria, Arlington, Rockville, and so forth). The only redeming factor here is that they do not assign blame to anyone in particular. The offended municipality simply mails a fine (a co-worker got 50USD) to the registered owner of the vehilce, since the images cannot prove who is actually driving.
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway also has signs up that indicate your speed is being clocked by video camera. I don't know if this is true, but may be yet another example of ever-expanding surveillance.
Now I feel the urge to rant! At what point does monitoring stop? When are people going to realize that all of this violates the First Ammendment (anonymous freedom of associaton). It's a shame that groups with so much money and power don't use their resources to fight this kind of nonsense. Instead, they are fighting to destroy the very establishment that gave them the rights and privileges to achieve such success in the first place.
This was an opportunity to test the GPL in court, but yet again, that will be delayed if SCO dies by other means. The court case must play out.
Thank you for a well-written post. It's such a shame that so many people argue Java performance without even understanding how the damn thing works. (It's funny that at the present, you have to explicitly turn off native execution via the -Xint flag.)
More people need to read the Hotspot Whitepaper before they open their mouths.
This thread is already full of very knowledgable people expoudning at great length as to why Java is not slower (and infact, is often faster than "native code"). Therefore, I will not waste my time writing an indepth response to those who would argue that 1 + 1 in Java is somehow slower than 1 + 1 in C/C++. This post does that quite well. What that comment does not do, however, is explain why some Java programs do, in fact, feel slower than native programs.
I'll simplify this as much as I can without diverging from the technical truth too much. Most complaints that Java is slow come from two sources. First, you must wait for the virtual machine to load, and depending on the libraries used by the program, that can be costly in terms of IO, which is always very slow. Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight--they do a lot and many programs take advantage of much of the functionality they provide. I won't embark into the details, but to those inclined to find out why should read more about Swing and what Java2D libraries offer. Because of all they do, many Java programs with GUIs feel a little sluggish. Of course, keep in mind that most software sits idle 99% of the time while the user decides what to do. So otherwise, Java code that is not bound by user response time is very fast.
One quick post script: because the Java language is object oriented, complex software will do a great deal of memory allocation and garbage collection as objects come in and out of use. That too, is very expensive. However, there is no reason that you have to use the Java programming language to code for the virtual machine. Case in point: Jasmin. In theory, you could write compilers that generate JVM bytecode from any language (and a former professor of mine is currently in the proceess of writing a book that explains precisely how to do that).
If you hate it so much, then don't use it.
I can't stand it when people bitch and moan about a some technology being too <negative_adjective> when it comes to open source. (Especially when people like you make complaints and don't even bother to substantiate them in any way. What you offer is purely opinion.) If you're in a position to use KDE, then you are not using Windows. If you are not using Windows, then you are in a position of choice.
And that's really the whole point, isn't it?
KDE is a desktop environment, not a window manager like you are asking for. In this case, KDE is trying to provide a platform that is both easy to use and serves the needs of rapid application development. These are things that will help make it a more viable alternative to Windows and tools like VisualBASIC which can be great for quick prototyping. Of course, I don't know what the point is of defending it on these grounds. It's a tool, one of many, well suited to certain tasks and perhaps not so well suited to others.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
So the artist can continue producing art.
Oh? Where at?.
You know, there's an interesting thought that'll really bake your noodle.
If China has such a draconia, extremely restrictive firewall on Internet access for its denizens, how on earth is it that so much spam about penis enlargement and other scams gets through?
(For humor sake; please don't burn me.)
Does my car look like a ricer to you? No, didn't think so. :)
That is an outrageous price when talking about software that is both Free and free. I can see paying that much for support services, but not for the actual software itself. Given that you cannot download RedHat Enterprise for free, you aren't paying for support.
All systems require some degree of competence and understanding to setup and administer correctly. If you aren't afraid of learning new skills and expanding your knowledge, I would highly recommend Debian as an alternative. It is really the easiest distro to maintain. In addition, it will always be free and never chock full of much of the annoying crap many distros like SuSE and Mandrake throw in (silly logos, hyperactive themes, silly tools that pretend to do something useful, etc).
Probably has something to do with the fact that when you're buying software, you're actually just buying a piece of plastic and aluminum with a certain configuration of bumps on it. And even then, you really don't own anything, you're really just renting or borrowing. You cannot even sell it.
If you buy and iPod, you actually own it. It is yours. You can take it apart, you can smash it, and it has value with you can recoup.
It's really not all that subtle of a distinction.
For the sake of completeness, if you have way too much money to burn, there's also megaCar. They do a complete vehicle outfitting except for a few more zeros on the price.
Another cool thing I'd like is a heads up display projected on my windshield (yes, very much like the cockpit of a fighter jet). The idea is to have things like my tac, speed, etc. directly in my line of sight so that I wouldn't have to divert my eyes from traffic to get vehicle stats.
Do they even exist? Does anybody know of any shops that build and install these kinds of systems? (How about in the Washington, DC area? :) How customizable are they? For example, I drive a Civic Hybrid and I'd like to have the battery charge, assist/charge guage, and other fun stats on the display as well.
Spatial interafaces are not new or revolutionary, but they are extremely effective. I'll let Ars Technica do the talking: they have a really good article that discusses the MacOS Finder and what a spatial interface is. It will give you a better understanding about what Nautilus is trying to accomplish.
<rant mode="troll">Mr. Bush, I'd like to point out that you've had nearly four years to involve yourself in such domestic progress. You've spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on war and completely forgotten us. Those resources could have sent us to Mars. Those resources could have improved our nation's quality of life by providing services like broadband. There's so much that could have been done, yet the emphasis was purely on destruction.
Frankly, Mr. Bush, you need to can it. A pile of false promises that could have been done will not win the American people. You've already lost. You, sir, are a miserable failure.</rant>
Would an auction for a unique tie get shut down by these guys?
Most Windows users couldn't install Windows either. The guys sitting there playing games and downloading porn probably got machines with Windows preinstalled as most people do. If your system came packaged with Linux, you'd be playing games and downloading porn right out of the box.
I have, but they all have grammar skills and at least run spell check on their emails before sending. Hell, even our status reports tend to be well written.
You're probably correct. :)
I'm not so sure you can present evidence in court that was acquired illegally.
Wait, are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
And if you're not, exactly how would ESR go about doing that, hmm? If he knows the identity of whoever leaked it, he would have to reveal that in court. As far as I know, the source is anonymous. Is it possible to go to the investors and get the numbers on how much was contributed? Is that knowledge even public yet?
Either the author of the leaked document in question was in extreme haste, or he has lackluster grammar skills. The document is full of errors like: "The will help us a lot", "componients", "shoudl", "wjich", and so on. That isn't exactly the kind of document you send out when you are trying to convince people to do something shady. You'd think the author would at least had the initiative to spell check the thing before sending it out. Perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt, and by that, I mean deer salt licks.
I just heard some sad news on BillMaher's web log - Baseball manager and bigot bitch Marge Schott was found dead in her Louisiana home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss her - even if you didn't enjoy her work, there's no denying her contributions to racist southern culture. Truly an American icon.