what do you think would be the best device to play ego-shooters like Quake? Keyboard just can't be the solution, kbd+mouse is dumb be- cause there's never enough space on the mouse pad.
Maybe keyboard plus trackball? Or do you have ideas for a special input device that would fit exactly to the needs of your ego-shooters?
Interesting article. But the reason such dialogues pop up at all is not to let the user find the "OK"/"Accept" button as fast as possible, but to make him/her *think* about what the program is going to do. Do you *really* want to format C:? Or wasn't it your Temp data partition D: you wanted to format?
That's why the "Cancel" button should also have the default focus (for "Enter"). The program asks something important and the user is con- fronted with "Cancel" and has to read the text the program is presenting.
I'm missing examples of interactive CLI tools that also ask you stupid questions sometimes.
Starts with "Install here [type "yes" or a different path]" and ends with programs needing you to type 'y' or 'n' on a German keyboard, where 'y' and 'z' are swapped and pressing 'y' just doesn't make the program do anything.. Explain this to a newbie.
My all-time favorite is still the "Do you really want to quit?" Requester after you close an app- lication's window..
There are only a few reasons why industry concen- trates on making smaller chips:
o Nobody wants a computer huge as a garage at home
o Material is expensive
Imagine if there would be a way to a) make the amount of material needed to produce a chip unimportant (let's say, some kind of StarTrek "replicator") and b) make the amount of space it needs unimportant.
See: Would you care how large or huge your new computer is as long as you won't have to place it in your living room?
Maybe in the future we will spend some money for a computer (if in 2010 computing power isn't flowing just through a plug in the wall), some company will materialize it for us on Mars and some new technology allows us to access it there in real time.
Bigger than a house? No problem. Sharing the computing power of a really good machine with 20.000 other people? Doesn't matter, as long as privacy remains and it's fast enough for me.
Forget the "Personal Computer". Noone really *needs* to own the hardware anyway. Think of a "CC", a "Community Computer".
It has always been true that the average programmer has a better equipped system than the user that will work with his/her programs. So today there are enough "programmers" (VB and Co.) who own 450MHz boxes and ask: "Why should I even *think* about optimizing this piece of code? It runs in 0.1 seconds on my box, can't be that much slower on the target machine!"
That's the real reason why faster computers sell that good: Older machines are "getting slower" because software written today just doesn't fulfill the processor's (or RAM's) potential anymore.
MTV doesn't play my music all the day, MTV doesn't comment on hackers right all the day.
It's right, they're sending what their audience thinks it already knows a little bit of. I remember at school when everybody was sooo cool talking about how some systems could be cracked and how to send trojan horses by eMail. That was so cool for them, they didn't even ask if they were right at all.
Once I talked to a "hacker", a student on my old school, 19 years old, and he told me there was a way to hide viri inside of a JPEG which would be started the first time you view that picture from your hard disk.
Well, nobody can force one to keep a tcp connection alive until all data has been sent. One cannot be sued because the phone connection drops while you're downloading a web document.
Actually, copyrighting all their phonebook data is exactly what the German Telecom is trying to do at the moment. And, if I'm informed correctly, they just won against other companies selling phonebook CDs.
Well, *I* never gave them the copyright on my phone-no and especially not my address.:-(
Will they ever learn? Who intents to earn money by fiddling with the glide interface? It will lead to more programs use the Voodoo cards. Trying to sue the developers is just braindead, IMHO.
With no disk drive, where exactly were you going to install that software?
Sorry, Germanism, I think. For me, "disk drive" simply means "floppy disk drive".
mmh, even with winchester drives (hard drives?), it wouldn't make much sense. I'm backing up and restoring data far too often, and I really don't care on what disk the data goes if I write a partition back from the streamer (I have 6..8 IDE drives I swap quite often).
That reminds me of a story I read a while ago about a person who called his computer manufacturer and wanted to buy a new cup holder for his PC because the old one was broken.
After some confusion, the man at the company wanted to know where the cup holder had been placed before. The guy explained, and it was clear that for about half a year he had used the moveable part of his CD-ROM as a holder for his coffee cup. Then it broke.
Excuse me if I am wrong, but isn't it possible to read the serial number of disk drives (and floppies for that mater) via software. Wouldn't this identify a particular machine just as well as a CPU ID?
Well, I don't have a disk drive connected to my x86 box. I don't think some company will be going to say that I will not be allowed to install their software on my box.
I think the point is that there's either a standardized ID mechanism for all users (which I don't think will ever happen) or no IDs at all.
This will not work anyway. You're speaking about Oracle? For example, is Oracle only selling software for Pentium-IIIs? Are they even only selling software for x86s only? A company cannot restrict the use of its software to architectures that have IDs.
I consider this to be a Good Thing, and hope that nobody will start selling its software in "standard" and "P3 only" versions.
I have absolutely no problem with a company setting up (maybe expensive) servers to serve the data to people, but as long as they don't own the data, it should be allowed for everyone to grab the whole bunch of data and make his/her own CDDB server.
Yes, such a huge collection of CD data is money. But it cannot be anybody's property.
(Actually, I think it can, but only of artists or record companies, but not of somebody who just gets it from others.)
Let's establish an Open CD Base then. It's unbelievable (although we saw ago that CDDB became comercialized, which was as bad as this, IMHO), since what do they think they got their data from? I entered dozends of CDs to their database before it became comercial. Will they pay me?
Overclocking is evil. And, more important, I think it hurts software development, especially in OpenSource (mostly people that work at home, on their own boxes), because working on systems that might be instable once in a while leads to unneccessary bug-hunting.
Well, Pentiums are interesting chips (on the ix86 market), but the reason why you have to try hard to find a Pentium box to buy is that Intel stopped production.
So, if you only want Intel x86 chips (yes, some do), and Intel'd stop producing PII/Cel, what would you buy? yupp. A company with a "good name"'s way to sell their latest chips: Just stop selling the older ones.
And yes, this will all change while AMD/whatever's reputation raises. But, for example, I haven't seen even a single AMD tv spot here in Germany. Intel does. And geeks are a minority in PC buyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
what do you think would be the best device to
play ego-shooters like Quake? Keyboard just
can't be the solution, kbd+mouse is dumb be-
cause there's never enough space on the mouse
pad.
Maybe keyboard plus trackball? Or do you have
ideas for a special input device that would fit
exactly to the needs of your ego-shooters?
The "bionic rats" article you point to has
expired on Yahoo and is no longer available.
Where can I read about this story?
Please check the links before reposting elder
stories.
> That's counter intuitive.
Interesting article. But the reason such dialogues
pop up at all is not to let the user find the
"OK"/"Accept" button as fast as possible, but
to make him/her *think* about what the program
is going to do.
Do you *really* want to format C:? Or wasn't it
your Temp data partition D: you wanted to format?
That's why the "Cancel" button should also
have the default focus (for "Enter"). The program
asks something important and the user is con-
fronted with "Cancel" and has to read the text
the program is presenting.
I'm missing examples of interactive CLI tools
that also ask you stupid questions sometimes.
Starts with "Install here [type "yes" or a different
path]" and ends with programs needing you
to type 'y' or 'n' on a German keyboard,
where 'y' and 'z' are swapped and pressing
'y' just doesn't make the program do anything..
Explain this to a newbie.
My all-time favorite is still the "Do you really
want to quit?" Requester after you close an app-
lication's window..
There are only a few reasons why industry concen-
trates on making smaller chips:
o Nobody wants a computer huge as a garage
at home
o Material is expensive
Imagine if there would be a way to a) make the
amount of material needed to produce a chip
unimportant (let's say, some kind of StarTrek
"replicator") and b) make the amount of space
it needs unimportant.
See: Would you care how large or huge your new
computer is as long as you won't have to place
it in your living room?
Maybe in the future we will spend some money for
a computer (if in 2010 computing power isn't flowing
just through a plug in the wall), some company
will materialize it for us on Mars and some new
technology allows us to access it there in
real time.
Bigger than a house? No problem.
Sharing the computing power of a really good machine
with 20.000 other people? Doesn't matter, as
long as privacy remains and it's fast enough
for me.
Forget the "Personal Computer". Noone really
*needs* to own the hardware anyway. Think of
a "CC", a "Community Computer".
It has always been true that the average programmer
has a better equipped system than the user that
will work with his/her programs.
So today there are enough "programmers" (VB and Co.)
who own 450MHz boxes and ask: "Why should I even
*think* about optimizing this piece of code? It
runs in 0.1 seconds on my box, can't be that much
slower on the target machine!"
That's the real reason why faster computers sell
that good: Older machines are "getting slower"
because software written today just doesn't fulfill
the processor's (or RAM's) potential anymore.
MTV doesn't play my music all the day, MTV doesn't
comment on hackers right all the day.
It's right, they're sending what their audience
thinks it already knows a little bit of. I remember
at school when everybody was sooo cool talking
about how some systems could be cracked and how
to send trojan horses by eMail. That was so cool
for them, they didn't even ask if they were right
at all.
Once I talked to a "hacker", a student on my old
school, 19 years old, and he told me there was
a way to hide viri inside of a JPEG which would
be started the first time you view that picture
from your hard disk.
No comment.
Well, what about the great days when one was able to view an ASCII movie just by using his/her terminal emulation?
I want to see it, too, but am not able to use Java. (Please don't say "Netscape" now)
Well, nobody can force one to keep a tcp connection
alive until all data has been sent. One cannot
be sued because the phone connection drops while
you're downloading a web document.
Actually, copyrighting all their phonebook data
:-(
is exactly what the German Telecom is trying to
do at the moment. And, if I'm informed correctly,
they just won against other companies selling
phonebook CDs.
Well, *I* never gave them the copyright on
my phone-no and especially not my address.
Because "world domination" sounds a bit like understatement in this aspect.
Will they ever learn? Who intents to earn money by fiddling with the glide interface? It will lead to more programs use the Voodoo cards. Trying to sue the developers is just braindead, IMHO.
Interesting for business people. I myself won't buy it. Porting this package won't make it less buggy.
And what happens if I upgrade my CPU?
Simple. A digit is appended to your previous ID.
With no disk drive, where exactly were you going to install that software?
Sorry, Germanism, I think. For me, "disk drive" simply means "floppy disk drive".
mmh, even with winchester drives (hard drives?), it wouldn't make much sense. I'm backing up and restoring data far too often, and I really don't care on what disk the data goes if I write a partition back from the streamer (I have 6..8 IDE drives I swap quite often).
Seems like it didn't. =:-)
That reminds me of a story I read a while ago about a person who called his computer manufacturer and wanted to buy a new cup holder for his PC because the old one was broken.
After some confusion, the man at the company wanted to know where the cup holder had been placed before. The guy explained, and it was clear that for about half a year he had used the moveable part of his CD-ROM as a holder for his coffee cup. Then it broke.
Strange world.
Excuse me if I am wrong, but isn't it possible to read the serial number of disk drives (and floppies for that mater) via software. Wouldn't this identify a particular machine just as well as a CPU ID?
Well, I don't have a disk drive connected to my x86 box. I don't think some company will be going to say that I will not be allowed to install their software on my box.
I think the point is that there's either a standardized ID mechanism for all users (which I don't think will ever happen) or no IDs at all.
I prefer the latter.
This will not work anyway. You're speaking about Oracle? For example, is Oracle only selling software for Pentium-IIIs? Are they even only selling software for x86s only? A company cannot restrict the use of its software to architectures that have IDs.
I consider this to be a Good Thing, and hope that nobody will start selling its software in "standard" and "P3 only" versions.
I have absolutely no problem with a company setting up (maybe expensive) servers to serve the data to people, but as long as they don't own the data, it should be allowed for everyone to grab the whole bunch of data and make his/her own CDDB server.
Yes, such a huge collection of CD data is money. But it cannot be anybody's property.
(Actually, I think it can, but only of artists or record companies, but not of somebody who just gets it from others.)
Let's establish an Open CD Base then. It's
unbelievable (although we saw ago that CDDB
became comercialized, which was as bad as this,
IMHO), since what do they think they got their
data from? I entered dozends of CDs to their
database before it became comercial. Will they
pay me?
Overclocking is evil. And, more important, I think it hurts software development, especially in OpenSource (mostly people that work at home, on their own boxes), because working on systems that might be instable once in a while leads to unneccessary bug-hunting.
Well, Pentiums are interesting chips (on the ix86 market), but the reason why you have to try hard to find a Pentium box to buy is that Intel stopped production.
So, if you only want Intel x86 chips (yes, some do), and Intel'd stop producing PII/Cel, what would you buy? yupp. A company with a "good name"'s way to sell their latest chips: Just stop selling the older ones.
And yes, this will all change while AMD/whatever's reputation raises. But, for example, I haven't seen even a single AMD tv spot here in Germany. Intel does. And geeks are a minority in PC buyers.