Someone else with the same ergonomic setup as me. Model M + Trackman Marble FX is what I've been using since 1999. I lucked out this last year and ended up with 4-5 more of the Trackmans for free, which is great since I can see obvious signs of deterioration in the smaller bits of internal plastic on my original one. I've also got at least 2-3 more of the Model M's as backups, courtesy of a local thrift store.
I'm amazed (considering how cheap decent options now are) that so few people pay any attention to ergonomics. Ease of physical interface makes such a difference when you use a computer for 8+ hours a day.
Now if I could just get my display situation under control...
Pretty much the same here. I have hated dress clothes since I was a small child, and have never felt comfortable in them, no matter how well made or fitting. I always feel very conspicuous when dressed up, as well as awkward and concerned about damaging clothes that are several orders of magnitude more expensive than anything I would normally wear.
In addition, I find the western notion of formal dress extremely boring. Suits are uniforms and badges of conformity. They advertise a person that I really have nothing to do with, and it makes me uncomfortable to be in the position of pretending to a societal role in which I have no interest. But I don't expect my job interviews would go all that well if I showed up in faded jeans and a worn T-shirt. If I wanted to dress up, I would want what I wore to express some creative notion of my own person or at least amuse me when I looked in the mirror.
I find judging people by their adherence to societal clothing dictates very dull and tiresome. It seems a holdover from an age and culture where people openly believed in social classes as destiny, and in dress as a visible manifestation and reinforcement of class.
I've made this mistake more than once. I refuse to do so anymore. It's ok to do tech support for yourself when you succumb to the lure of cheap/free hardware. It's utterly AWFUL to do it for someone else. Sure, you can get your parents a shiny new PC for less than $300 using parts from that guy at the computer fair who always has the hot deals on stuff whose serial numbers seem to have somehow gotten rubbed off, but do you really want to? What you don't realize at the time is that $300 is really just the first installment on the new system. You'll be carving fleshy screaming bits off your soul for the next 5 years and trading them in for known-good replacement computer parts in an attempt to figure out just WTF is wrong with the system you built. All the while you get to reside in Tech Support Purgatory, wincing whenever caller ID announces that it's Mom & Dad on the line, because they never call unless the PC you got for them is on the fritz.
Save the risk-taking for your own system. If your relatives won't shell out the $$$ for a decent new/used system or at least decent parts for the system, they'll have to learn to support the crap they buy themselves.
Being the solution here. I.e. - materials not susceptible to typical organic decomposition w/o the breaking of a particular set of chemical bonds.
And yeah, I remember when durable goods were durable. I also remember when fashion wasn't the driving force behind the turnover of consumer goods. (e.g. - cell phones)
In any case, today's goods fall apart anyways while you're using them. Wouldn't it be better if they were actually breaking down into something you could throw on a compost heap rather than a brittle mess of plastic that is compacted and sits for a few thousand years?
Sooner or later all mass-produced, consumer-level products will be biodegradable, or, more accurately, "key-enabled" biodegradable - products which become biodegradable when exposed to a particular chemical key. It's really the only thing that makes sense in a world of 6+ billion consumers and industrialized mass production. We live in an ecosystem evolved to readily break down particular organic compounds. We can either create our own, separate artificial ecosystem designed to recycle our inorganic waste, or we can engineer our products to fit into the natural decomposition/recycling process going on all around us. Much effort is being put into the first plan, but ultimately I believe that the 2nd one is the only long-term solution to our waste/pollution problem.
In step with our population explosion, we have moved away from use of natural materials (wood, plant fibers, bone), and increased the amount of decomposition-resistent (i.e. - dead) materials in our environment exponentially. These artificial materials have enabled us to make great advances in the construction of strong, durable items. But we have been limited by our extremely crude - relative to what goes on inside our bodies - ability to generate and manipulate complicated organic molecules. As this ability improves and decreases in cost, it will become increasingly expedient to shift to producing manufactured items out of materials that break down easily and harmlessly when no longer needed. Otherwise our waste stream will eventually smother us and our supply of essential raw materials will end up completely locked awy in crushed cars and dirty diapers.
And this is the point that drives me crazy, the unexamined assumption behind the "American" crusade to remake the world in its own image.
We get fed again and again this idea that it is our duty as the "Democractic leader of the western world" to bring liberty and freedom to the other nations. The unspoken subtext of this message is, of course, that the only kinds of liberty and freedom which exist are those we in the United States supposedly enjoy.
It's like that quote from Henry Ford which goes something like:
"You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black."
I wish I had a bunch of mod points to push your post into a more visible position. This is the question we ought to be considering as a nation. We need to re-evaluate what sort of role we should be playing in the affairs of the rest of the world, and realize just how many of our problems result from our insistence on meddling in foreign affairs for our own benefit, and our refusal to let other peoples sort out their own issues.
"...write first, format later" is what came immediately to mind as I read the article. It may be in part due to the fact that my first few word processor experiences were with programs like Wordstar, Appleworks, and WP 5.1, but I have no enthusiasm for auto-reformatting, WYSIWYG, auto-correcting, auto-suggesting, auto-anything design. What I want is what I suspect most people want: Let me get my thoughts out of my head and into an editable, recoverable medium as rapidly as possible.
Who needs formatting before you have the text? A program that continually shuffles words around on the screen as it auto-formats, pops up little flags to tell me that it doesn't like my grammar or spelling, scrolls at the speed of molasses, and in any other way interrupts my train of thought is more hinderance than help. What is important is being able to get maximum use out of what creative thoughts you have. Spelling can be fixed later. Grammar can be examined later. Deciding how the text fill fit on the page can be dealt with later. (Unless perhaps you're into the sort of poetry whose impact depends on its arrangement on the page.) If you don't get your thoughts down on the page before they're gone, no amount of pop-up dialogs will retrieve them.
Yes, I know that most such features can be turned off, but why are they on by default? Who prefers such? A good tool does not get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish.
These Windows vs Linux vs X discussions almost always end up confused. People argue right past each other because the arguments starts WITHOUT EVER AGREEING ON BASIC ASSUMPTIONS.
Like in mathematics, if you don't set out initial assumptions, no one knows whether or not they should agree with your conclusions.
A lot of invective and heated prose goes into posts about how "Linux needs to change in way X" to "win" against Microsoft. But consider the assumptions that go into these posts:
(1) Linux and Microsoft are competing. Are they really? How much do the different operating philosophies and divergent costs of operation endear them to entirely separate groups of people?
(2) It is possible to "win" against Microsoft. What does winning mean? Does it mean that MS is wiped off the surface of the planet? Does it mean that Linux attains a market share greater than MS-Windows in the home/business/server market? Would it be good enough for Linux to reach the desktop market share and support level of Apple's Macintosh line?
(3) That there is a good reason to want to "win" against MS, other than simple dislike for the company, its buggy software, and its business practices. Too often posts about "winnning" devolve into tirades about how awful Windows is and how Linux needs to change in ways X, Y, and Z to make it a suitable replacement. What would it mean for Linux to change in this way? I'm not sure it would necessarily be good. Most of the arguments I've seen on this issue center around
(a) Standardization
(b) Ease of use
Some standardization is useful. For example, when Linux distros adhere to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, it makes moving between distros much easier and compiling packages much simpler. The real question is: "How much standardization is useful, and how much is unneccesarily restrictive?" For example, I personally do not want to see one window manager or desktop defined as standard. Part of the richness of the Linux/Free Software movement is being able to try alternatives and figure out what is best for you. Defining standards in this will only marginalize those WM not selected. Besides which, there are often underlying standards which these types of programs adhere to (Such as ICCM compliance for WM) which guarantee at least a certain level of back-end predictability.
Ease of use is, to some people, identical with standardization. Many of the arguments for standardizing on one packaging system, one window manager, one file system, etc. are based on ease of use. But ease of use is about more than just never having to figure out a new interface. Would you want to use your automobile's driving interface to control your washing machine? Or a chainsaw? There are good reasons why different tools have different interfaces, and no reason why software tools are exempt from these reasons. Moreover, the best interface possible for a tool is not always easy to pin down. Why do two different driers have two different interfaces? Part of determining the best interface for a tool is having room to experiment. In addition, what constitutes ease of use varies from person to person. Why do we have handicapped ramps for buildings? Why was braille invented? Why do some people prefer to read books to learn while others learn better from listening to lectures? Why do some people prefer to look at lists of files in text while others prefer fields of icons?
(4) Linux is not a corporation. What gets labelled as "Linux" is really a lot of different software (No, I am not just an RMS troll.), developed by a lot of different people. How does anyone propose that this be standardized? How can anyone expect that a large set of software developed by groups of people acting independently be forced into a particular mold? And, vitally, who is going to call the shots as to what shape it would take? I don't think Linus is up for that. I suspect that this point of view is antithetical to RMS's core beliefs. I doubt that an
Slashdot Mirror
Yes!
Someone else with the same ergonomic setup as me. Model M + Trackman Marble FX is what I've been using since 1999.
I lucked out this last year and ended up with 4-5 more of the Trackmans for free, which is great since I can see
obvious signs of deterioration in the smaller bits of internal plastic on my original one. I've also got at least 2-3 more of the Model M's as backups, courtesy of a local thrift store.
I'm amazed (considering how cheap decent options now are) that so few people pay any attention to ergonomics. Ease of physical interface makes such a difference when you use a computer for 8+ hours a day.
Now if I could just get my display situation under control...
sz
Some random reactions...
Pretty much the same here. I have hated dress clothes since I was a small child, and have never felt comfortable in them, no matter how well made or fitting. I always feel very conspicuous when dressed up, as well as awkward and concerned about damaging clothes that are several orders of magnitude more expensive than anything I would normally wear.
In addition, I find the western notion of formal dress extremely boring. Suits are uniforms and badges of conformity. They advertise a person that I really have nothing to do with, and it makes me uncomfortable to be in the position of pretending to a societal role in which I have no interest. But I don't expect my job interviews would go all that well if I showed up in faded jeans and a worn T-shirt. If I wanted to dress up, I would want what I wore to express some creative notion of my own person or at least amuse me when I looked in the mirror.
I find judging people by their adherence to societal clothing dictates very dull and tiresome. It seems a holdover from an age and culture where people openly believed in social classes as destiny, and in dress as a visible manifestation and reinforcement of class.
Blargh.
sz
I've made this mistake more than once. I refuse to do so anymore. It's ok to do tech support for yourself when you succumb to the lure of cheap/free hardware. It's utterly AWFUL to do it for someone else. Sure, you can get your parents a shiny new PC for less than $300 using parts from that guy at the computer fair who always has the hot deals on stuff whose serial numbers seem to have somehow gotten rubbed off, but do you really want to? What you don't realize at the time is that $300 is really just the first installment on the new system. You'll be carving fleshy screaming bits off your soul for the next 5 years and trading them in for known-good replacement computer parts in an attempt to figure out just WTF is wrong with the system you built. All the while you get to reside in Tech Support Purgatory, wincing whenever caller ID announces that it's Mom & Dad on the line, because they never call unless the PC you got for them is on the fritz.
Save the risk-taking for your own system. If your relatives won't shell out the $$$ for a decent new/used system or at least decent parts for the system, they'll have to learn to support the crap they buy themselves.
sz
Being the solution here. I.e. - materials not susceptible to typical organic decomposition w/o the breaking of a particular set of chemical bonds.
And yeah, I remember when durable goods were durable. I also remember when fashion wasn't the driving force behind the turnover of consumer goods. (e.g. - cell phones)
In any case, today's goods fall apart anyways while you're using them. Wouldn't it be better if they were actually breaking down into something you could throw on a compost heap rather than a brittle mess of plastic that is compacted and sits for a few thousand years?
sz
Sooner or later all mass-produced, consumer-level products will be biodegradable, or, more accurately, "key-enabled" biodegradable - products which become biodegradable when exposed to a particular chemical key. It's really the only thing that makes sense in a world of 6+ billion consumers and industrialized mass production. We live in an ecosystem evolved to readily break down particular organic compounds. We can either create our own, separate artificial ecosystem designed to recycle our inorganic waste, or we can engineer our products to fit into the natural decomposition/recycling process going on all around us. Much effort is being put into the first plan, but ultimately I believe that the 2nd one is the only long-term solution to our waste/pollution problem.
In step with our population explosion, we have moved away from use of natural materials (wood, plant fibers, bone), and increased the amount of decomposition-resistent (i.e. - dead) materials in our environment exponentially. These artificial materials have enabled us to make great advances in the construction of strong, durable items. But we have been limited by our extremely crude - relative to what goes on inside our bodies - ability to generate and manipulate complicated organic molecules. As this ability improves and decreases in cost, it will become increasingly expedient to shift to producing manufactured items out of materials that break down easily and harmlessly when no longer needed. Otherwise our waste stream will eventually smother us and our supply of essential raw materials will end up completely locked awy in crushed cars and dirty diapers.
sz
And this is the point that drives me crazy, the unexamined assumption behind the "American" crusade to remake the world in its own image.
We get fed again and again this idea that it is our duty as the "Democractic leader of the western world" to bring liberty and freedom to the other nations. The unspoken subtext of this message is, of course, that the only kinds of liberty and freedom which exist are those we in the United States supposedly enjoy.
It's like that quote from Henry Ford which goes something like:
"You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black."
I wish I had a bunch of mod points to push your post into a more visible position. This is the question we ought to be considering as a nation. We need to re-evaluate what sort of role we should be playing in the affairs of the rest of the world, and realize just how many of our problems result from our insistence on meddling in foreign affairs for our own benefit, and our refusal to let other peoples sort out their own issues.
SZ
Well, in base 6002 it's now old enough to drive.
SZ
to Psychiatrists.
In related news, Dr. David Spiegel commits hairy Kari.
SZ
"I'm sorry boss, but SETI demands that I be alloted more than .7 days a month to potentially receive alien transmissions."
Side note: Maybe AIDS was just an inter-office memo that got out of hand.
Side note #2: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of sick people!...Um. Ok. Maybe not.
S.Z., dodging pink lasers since 1972
"...write first, format later" is what came immediately to mind as I read the article. It may be in part due to the fact that my first few word processor experiences were with programs like Wordstar, Appleworks, and WP 5.1, but I have no enthusiasm for auto-reformatting, WYSIWYG, auto-correcting, auto-suggesting, auto-anything design. What I want is what I suspect most people want: Let me get my thoughts out of my head and into an editable, recoverable medium as rapidly as possible.
Who needs formatting before you have the text? A program that continually shuffles words around on the screen as it auto-formats, pops up little flags to tell me that it doesn't like my grammar or spelling, scrolls at the speed of molasses, and in any other way interrupts my train of thought is more hinderance than help. What is important is being able to get maximum use out of what creative thoughts you have. Spelling can be fixed later. Grammar can be examined later. Deciding how the text fill fit on the page can be dealt with later. (Unless perhaps you're into the sort of poetry whose impact depends on its arrangement on the page.) If you don't get your thoughts down on the page before they're gone, no amount of pop-up dialogs will retrieve them.
Yes, I know that most such features can be turned off, but why are they on by default? Who prefers such? A good tool does not get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish.
I still write stuff in vi.
Zeke
These Windows vs Linux vs X discussions almost always end up confused. People argue right past each other because the arguments starts WITHOUT EVER AGREEING ON BASIC ASSUMPTIONS.
Like in mathematics, if you don't set out initial assumptions, no one knows whether or not they should agree with your conclusions.
A lot of invective and heated prose goes into posts about how "Linux needs to change in way X" to "win" against Microsoft. But consider the assumptions that go into these posts:
(1) Linux and Microsoft are competing. Are they really? How much do the different operating philosophies and divergent costs of operation endear them to entirely separate groups of people?
(2) It is possible to "win" against Microsoft. What does winning mean? Does it mean that MS is wiped off the surface of the planet? Does it mean that Linux attains a market share greater than MS-Windows in the home/business/server market? Would it be good enough for Linux to reach the desktop market share and support level of Apple's Macintosh line?
(3) That there is a good reason to want to "win" against MS, other than simple dislike for the company, its buggy software, and its business practices. Too often posts about "winnning" devolve into tirades about how awful Windows is and how Linux needs to change in ways X, Y, and Z to make it a suitable replacement. What would it mean for Linux to change in this way? I'm not sure it would necessarily be good. Most of the arguments I've seen on this issue center around
(a) Standardization
(b) Ease of use
Some standardization is useful. For example, when Linux distros adhere to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, it makes moving between distros much easier and compiling packages much simpler. The real question is: "How much standardization is useful, and how much is unneccesarily restrictive?" For example, I personally do not want to see one window manager or desktop defined as standard. Part of the richness of the Linux/Free Software movement is being able to try alternatives and figure out what is best for you. Defining standards in this will only marginalize those WM not selected. Besides which, there are often underlying standards which these types of programs adhere to (Such as ICCM compliance for WM) which guarantee at least a certain level of back-end predictability.
Ease of use is, to some people, identical with standardization. Many of the arguments for standardizing on one packaging system, one window manager, one file system, etc. are based on ease of use. But ease of use is about more than just never having to figure out a new interface. Would you want to use your automobile's driving interface to control your washing machine? Or a chainsaw? There are good reasons why different tools have different interfaces, and no reason why software tools are exempt from these reasons. Moreover, the best interface possible for a tool is not always easy to pin down. Why do two different driers have two different interfaces? Part of determining the best interface for a tool is having room to experiment. In addition, what constitutes ease of use varies from person to person. Why do we have handicapped ramps for buildings? Why was braille invented? Why do some people prefer to read books to learn while others learn better from listening to lectures? Why do some people prefer to look at lists of files in text while others prefer fields of icons?
(4) Linux is not a corporation. What gets labelled as "Linux" is really a lot of different software (No, I am not just an RMS troll.), developed by a lot of different people. How does anyone propose that this be standardized? How can anyone expect that a large set of software developed by groups of people acting independently be forced into a particular mold? And, vitally, who is going to call the shots as to what shape it would take? I don't think Linus is up for that. I suspect that this point of view is antithetical to RMS's core beliefs. I doubt that an