The ability of marketing people to forget anything that happened more than five years ago is truly amazing. The "Tablet PC" is just a renaming of the equally unsuccessful "pen computing" boondoggle of the early 90's.
There are a number of reasons why pen computing failed that are equally applicable to tablet PCs, including the oft-overlooked fact that even if handwriting recognition was as reliable as typing, a mediocre typist can still type faster than he can write.
The main reason tablets have failed for a second time is this: there's no general demand for them, and the niche applications they do appeal to are better served by small, cheap devices.
I started with sendmail and ended up with [something else].
You'd be surprised how often this happens. No, wait, you started with sendmail, so I guess you wouldn't be surprised.;)
I send my mail through my earthlink server which works but now I must watch my volume (no mailing lists hosted here I'm afraid) because of my 'terms-of-service'. Something about being a little guy or something like that.
I have the same problem with my local ISP. Outbound packets to port 25 are filtered unless they go through my ISP's smtp server. From a practical standpoint, this wasn't much of an issue -- I just set postfix to use the ISP's smtp server as a relay host. OTOH, as a matter of principle, it annoyed the hell out of me. Getting pissed at the ISP -- in my case, it's actually a dinky little local ISP, not a Giant Corporate Entity -- is missing the point. They're just trying to prevent their consumer broadband services from being abused by spammers, which gets the ISP in trouble with its peers, as well as drives up costs.
Spammers must be stopped. Since attacking the suppliers has failed, maybe it's time to attack the customers. Make responding to a spam a felony. Cheap v1agra is not worth a visit from Herr Ashcroft.
This will put a stop to unauthorized transmission of information too stupid to cut and paste! It's about time Microsoft moved to punish the clueless market segment.
Oh wait, they've been doing that all along.
In all seriousness, though, I wonder if the decision-makers at MS know that this is a useless feature being used as marketing fluff, or if they really are dumb enough to believe their own hype.
Let's face it - none of us like forking over our hard-earned cash every month just to use the phone. Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free by using the Internet?
That sounds great, but the funny thing is that I'm paying a monthly fee for my DSL service. The same thing happened with my cable modem, and before that, with my dialup ISP. Now, I can juggle the numbers a little bit, but the long and short of it appears to be that while some VoIP service or other may be free, the underlying internet connection isn't.
Although many of us may hate to admit it, aesthetics matter even to hard-headed techies. Our software is skinnable,
I'm not sure that colorizing my gcc output counts as skinning.
our email is filled with HTML
Not in pine, it's not. Detecting HTML is, in any event, a nearly 100% certain way of rejecting spam. No individual with anything worth saying is saying it in HTML emails.
and our cases glow with colorful lights.
Pfaw. The power and drive activity lights are indeed colorful, but adding more would only mean more waste heat to dispose of.
Graphic design is pervasive and expected.
In magazines. I tend to omit it from my source code, though.
Programming style is debated endlessly
Yes, but only in terms of readability and maintainability, and occasionally compatibility with some editor feature or other. Programming "style" wouldn't be recognizable as such by an interior designer.
and many of us lust after Apple hardware which can command a premium price in part because of its styling.
I suspect that many more of us lust after high-performance hardware and don't care much how it looks, especially since there's only so much styling that can take place in one or two rack units.
The age of aesthetics is here
The age of fluffy bullshit has been here since the first time neolithic potters tried to cover up inferior clay with pretty designs.
Real beauty comes from elegant design. Form, if it is beautiful, is an inevitable expression of elegant functioning. Mathematicians and programmers understand this well; l337 dudes who think case styling makes them kewl are just wanking off.
You know, every time this buggy, insecure, over-complicated sack of crap is the source of a security hole, I make a post here to the effect that BIND is a buggy, insecure, over-complicated sack of crap and that its maintainers evidently lack either the will or the ability to fix it, and that there is more than one good alternative, including, but not limited to, djbdns.
And every time, someone comes back and says no, it's really fixed this time, it's really finally stable, the developers really are both concerned and competent.
I no longer bother replying anymore. Usually CERT does it for me.
BIND must go. The only thing it does reliably is diminish the credibility of open source. (And make sendmail look good by comparison, which is no mean feat, either.)
It's easy enough to get started, but takes years to get really good
Doing it fast doesn't mean doing it well
It's the little details that continue to amaze you
You don't learn it from a book
On the other hand, also like sex, it won't take as many years to get really good if you do bother to read some well-written books on the subject. Perl books tend not to have as many pictures, though.
Anybody ever do things like disguise a 4 GHz P4 in an ancient 8086 machine box?
Well, I started using computers before the 8086, so I don't really think of them as "ancient". The machines I learned on used punch cards and had dials and flashing lights. (I'm not actually that old -- these were abandoned 1970's IBM minicomputers donated to my high school in the late 80's. They were Model/3's, if you care.)
I still routinely use software from 1979-1984 written for the Apple II series. I mostly do this in an emulator now because 5.25" floppies are getting hard to find, but I still use a IIe and a IIc. Aside from games, I use a "word processor" called AppleWriter, which is slightly more sophisticated than pico. It's built-in formatting codes seem to be loosely based on troff -- when I first moved to Linux in the mid-90's and started writing man pages, I remember wondering why Linux boxes kept their docs in AppleWriter's obscure format!
I do it partly out of nostalgia, and partly out of habit -- I'm comfortable writing fiction on it after twenty years. But I also do it because AppleWriter is a 24k binary that can do more than pico can with 171k, and do it on a 1 MHz 8-bit CPU.
I'm getting pretty frustrated at how inefficient so-called cutting edge software has become. The hardware has become many orders of magnitude more powerful than in the old days, but sloppy-ass coding has soaked up most of that power, and the growth in useful new features accounts for only a small fraction of it. If the boneheaded "throw more hardware at it" philosophy hadn't become dominant, the average user could get by with computers costing tens -- instead of thousands -- of dollars.
As far as I see it, the biggest impediment to a successfully open source journal is peer review. The quality of the journal has to be insured.
I wouldn't worry about it. For example, as your peer, I would like to point out that the verb you are looking for is "ensured", not "insured". Some other peer will no doubt come along and note that "insured" is a permissible, though not preferred, term for the usage you have in mind, and so on.
The system breaks down, however, for truly awful misspellings like "rediculous", or people who cannot distinguish between "lose" and "loose" or "choose" and "chose". Those people are not my peers, and I will not stoop to correct them.
I find that nearly everyone who criticizes [INSERT LANGUAGE HERE] is either using an ancient implementation... or they simply haven't explored the language fully.
This is an excellent template for recognizing language bigotry. Try this as a template for recognizing language agnosticism:
"I can enumerate dozens of less-than-perfect features in my favorite language."
Until you understand the weaknesses as well as the strengths of your favorite language, you either haven't explored it fully or you don't know enough languages well enough to have a basis for comparison. (C|C++|Java|Perl|AWK|Python|COBOL|RPG|Fortran|BASI C|PHP|Forth|6502 Assembly|Forth) all suck if you're only looking at their flaws, and they all rock if you're only looking at their strengths. If you're not looking at both, you're not getting it.
Well, looks like I'll be hurriedly downloading the rest of the Beggar's Banquet/4AD catalog and then cancelling my subscription and going back to the usual licit (used CD stores, eBay, GEMM) and illicit (Usenet) sources.
Sooner or later, the music industry will get a handle on the concept of "the highest price the market will bear". For me, it actually was more than ten bucks a month, but it's well under fifty. For fifty bucks, I expect to see the band live, thankyouverymuch.
It amazes me that BIND (and, for that matter, Sendmail) still ship as defaults with RH and some of the other distributions.
There are still a few obscure cases where Sendmail does a job no other MTA can -- though they are getting obscurer by the minute -- but there really is no excuse to have a copy of BIND running anywhere, on any machine, at any time. It's bloated, unstable, unsafe, poorly coded and, as its long track record demonstrates, its developers lack either the intention or the ability to fix it. Why it remains lauded as some sort of grand tradition is entirely beyond me, as it is proof that open source programmers can produce software as bad as or worse than Microsoft with vastly smaller resources. This isn't a Unix vulnerability, it's a sign that there are too many lazy admins who won't spend the half-hour it takes to understand djbdns or one of the other free/open DNS packages.
Some one tell me how we ended up three control keys. On Windows machines we have the window key, the control key, and the alt key.
Sigh. They're not control keys, they're meta keys, and there are four if you count the Windows key (which I don't, since I don't have one). The other meta key is "shift".
The reason you have them is that, back before the point-and-drool interface was invented, even before drop-down text menus, everything other than straight text entry was driven by various meta key combinations. Drop-down menus, in fact, were originally intended to teach you the keyboard shortcuts -- you were not expected to keep using the menu any more than you would training wheels on a bike. (This tactic probably would have actually worked if menu items had disappeared after you used the shortcuts a few times, but we were still operating under the illusion that end-users were smart, hardworking people, eager to learn. Ah, those heady days...)
I wonder if bloat stated with the keyboard and expanded into the software.
Actually, as the above suggests, the bloat in software originated with the resistance of new end-users to learning how to use the keyboard and went downhill from there. Back in the day, there was a common saying: If you design a system that an idiot can use, only an idiot will want to use it. And so now we have pictures of buttons on the screen to be clicked by people who didn't want to click real buttons.
Anyway, ALT is not a replacement for ESC, as ESC is designed to send a signal on its own, and ALT is meant to modify the meaning of another key.
Delete and backspace are heavily implementation-dependent in modern programs, but originally corresponded to ASCII control codes that would move the cursor back and delete the previous character, or just move the cursor back without deleting the previous character. On older machines, there was no backspace because it was the same key as the left arrow, but this goes back before the IBM PC.
I mean it looks cool and hi tech and all, but who needs to look hi tech in the 21st century?
Those of us who actually use those keys to get work done quickly without using the mouse to cut our productivity. This applies to everything from emacs to "modern" apps like MS Word and Photoshop. I suspect a lot of gamers would probably miss a lot of those keys, too. You could ditch the "redundant" numeric keypad, too, but I doubt very many people could maintain the 14,000 keystroke-per-hour data entry rate that is pretty normal for ten-key users with the regular numeric keys.
As it happens, there are simplified mini keyboards available for cheap if all you do with your computer is chat and post on Slashdot.
At the going rate, fifty years from now, the meaning of "innovation" will have shifted from its current meaning to "an unimaginative and unethical marketing tactic".
Now, if you'll pardon me, I've got to go write a Pac Man clone in which the power pellets are square and blue.
Not flattering? The main problem with this bio is that it is poorly written fluff by some hack with a lot of space to fill. There's substantially better journalism in People. Ignore this junk.
"Government Waste" alone should set your bullshit detector going. When people talk about waste and inefficiency in government, they are almost always talking about programs that help individuals -- public libraries, schools, lunch programs, medical care, scientific research, arts programs, and so on. What they are seldom ever talking about is funneling money into the pockets of large corporate contractors, like, fr'example, Microsoft.
Remember the GOP's "Contract with America" and its pledge to cut out corporate welfare? It's amazing how quickly they shut up about that once they had gained control of Congress. Of course, they don't talk much about out-of-control deficit spending anymore, either.
I do all of my literary writing in either an old shareware DOS text editor called QEdit (later renamed TSE Jr. and still available), or in a freeware Apple II "word processor" called AppleWriter II (which I nowadays run in an emulator, mainly for ease of transferring the files to a PC later).
It's not that I don't like modern word processors or that I don't use them extensively -- I do -- but for actual creative writing, the ambience and simplicity of tools I've been using for upwards of twenty years suits me fine. (I typically do later drafts in MS Word or, increasingly, OpenOffice.org.) This may be the result of the same instinct that has me logging far more time playing Galaga in MAME than I do playing GTA: Vice City.
As Harris points out, the fact that the manufacturers sem so dead-set on avoiding paper printing seems almost sinister
It's not almost sinister, it's prima facie evidence of criminal intent. There is absolutely no reason at all, none, nada, zip, for wanting to reduce the verifiability of a voting system, unless you want to commit vote fraud. Period.
Think of a parallel case -- accounting systems. Can you think of even one far-fetched honest reason to actively resist the inclusion of auditing capabilities? The absence of verifiability would render any accounting system absolutely useless for any honest purpose. Either the people at Diebold have IQs on a par with severely retarded chimpanzees or they are actively working to subvert the democratic process. There is no plausible third alternative.
Who in their right mind would Slashdot a GeoCities site? Criminy, I can do that with a single copy of lynx on a 286.
Re:What's with all of the bellyaching about speed?
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 1
The performance argument is a red herring.
So how come so many applications run slow as shit on anything but the latest and most expensive hardware?
Geez, I wish programmers who start mouthing off about how unimportant it is to write tight, fast code were required to eat their own dogfood. Just because MS has trained the masses to accept that their 2.4GHz Pentium boxes seem to run no faster than a 286 doesn't mean we ought to accept it ourselves or inflict it on our own users.
I'm sure I'll be marked as flamebait or troll by some Java loving mod, but what I've stated are facts and experiences from real life Java development. The results are in and frankly... Java sucks!
You're right -- you will instantly be marked as a troll, even by people who feel much the same way. That being said, there's not much I can disagree with there, except that I haven't developed software in Java -- I do C, C++, and Perl -- so I can't speak to what it's like as a developer. Some people rave about it, some hate it, just the same as every other language.
What I can say is that as a user Java sucks ass. I'm sure I'll get modded as a troll, too, but that's been my experience. Every damn time I've tried a Java app, it has been slow and memory hungry. And most times I've tried installing a large and complex Java application, especially under Linux but also to a lesser degree under Windows, getting the Java runtime environment and the usual long laundry list of required libraries set up properly has been a major pain in the ass. Speaking from the user side of the fence, there's not much reason for me to spend several hours -- or even fifteen minutes -- trying to get Java to work when there's an RPM or MSI that painlessly installs an equivalent compiled C or C++ application with a single commandline or click.
Mind you, I wanted Java to live up to its promise. Near as I can tell, though, it has yet to be as fast, reliable, or even as cross-platform as ISO/ANSI C.
When I was in high school, I had a crazy biology teacher who was convinced -- sincerely, I think -- that the way to keep students from skipping class was to take the first student caught skipping each semester and hang him in front of the school until he rotted.
It used to be that I thought old Mr. Hatcher was nutty as a bedbug, but every time I read about some probably-borderline-legal but outrageously, screamingly unethical behavior on the part of moneygrubbing corporate executives, I move a little closer to seeing his point.
What we need is a lottery for corpo-rats. Enter them all by popular acclaim, and every quarter, just yank one of them at random out of the boardroom and pump him full of lead. Leave him to rot on the steps of the Federal Reserve.
Most of them will try to play it a little cooler. A few, like Darl McBride, won't. But that's okay, because you can't win if you don't play.
I once took a piece of water-damaged paper that had grown a few patches of fungus and scanned them in at 1200dpi. I thought it was pretty cool-looking.
What did not occur to me -- and this is obviously why I am not climbing the ranks of academia -- was to call it an optical biocomputer and write a paper about how the underlying shipping manifest was altered in "interesting and meaningful ways."
Of course, if I was sloshing beer all over my music collection, there's no telling what I might come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
The ability of marketing people to forget anything that happened more than five years ago is truly amazing. The "Tablet PC" is just a renaming of the equally unsuccessful "pen computing" boondoggle of the early 90's.
There are a number of reasons why pen computing failed that are equally applicable to tablet PCs, including the oft-overlooked fact that even if handwriting recognition was as reliable as typing, a mediocre typist can still type faster than he can write.
The main reason tablets have failed for a second time is this: there's no general demand for them, and the niche applications they do appeal to are better served by small, cheap devices.
I started with sendmail and ended up with [something else].
;)
You'd be surprised how often this happens. No, wait, you started with sendmail, so I guess you wouldn't be surprised.
I send my mail through my earthlink server which works but now I must watch my volume (no mailing lists hosted here I'm afraid) because of my 'terms-of-service'. Something about being a little guy or something like that.
I have the same problem with my local ISP. Outbound packets to port 25 are filtered unless they go through my ISP's smtp server. From a practical standpoint, this wasn't much of an issue -- I just set postfix to use the ISP's smtp server as a relay host. OTOH, as a matter of principle, it annoyed the hell out of me. Getting pissed at the ISP -- in my case, it's actually a dinky little local ISP, not a Giant Corporate Entity -- is missing the point. They're just trying to prevent their consumer broadband services from being abused by spammers, which gets the ISP in trouble with its peers, as well as drives up costs.
Spammers must be stopped. Since attacking the suppliers has failed, maybe it's time to attack the customers. Make responding to a spam a felony. Cheap v1agra is not worth a visit from Herr Ashcroft.
This will put a stop to unauthorized transmission of information too stupid to cut and paste! It's about time Microsoft moved to punish the clueless market segment.
Oh wait, they've been doing that all along.
In all seriousness, though, I wonder if the decision-makers at MS know that this is a useless feature being used as marketing fluff, or if they really are dumb enough to believe their own hype.
Let's face it - none of us like forking over our hard-earned cash every month just to use the phone. Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free by using the Internet?
That sounds great, but the funny thing is that I'm paying a monthly fee for my DSL service. The same thing happened with my cable modem, and before that, with my dialup ISP. Now, I can juggle the numbers a little bit, but the long and short of it appears to be that while some VoIP service or other may be free, the underlying internet connection isn't.
Although many of us may hate to admit it, aesthetics matter even to hard-headed techies. Our software is skinnable,
I'm not sure that colorizing my gcc output counts as skinning.
our email is filled with HTML
Not in pine, it's not. Detecting HTML is, in any event, a nearly 100% certain way of rejecting spam. No individual with anything worth saying is saying it in HTML emails.
and our cases glow with colorful lights.
Pfaw. The power and drive activity lights are indeed colorful, but adding more would only mean more waste heat to dispose of.
Graphic design is pervasive and expected.
In magazines. I tend to omit it from my source code, though.
Programming style is debated endlessly
Yes, but only in terms of readability and maintainability, and occasionally compatibility with some editor feature or other. Programming "style" wouldn't be recognizable as such by an interior designer.
and many of us lust after Apple hardware which can command a premium price in part because of its styling.
I suspect that many more of us lust after high-performance hardware and don't care much how it looks, especially since there's only so much styling that can take place in one or two rack units.
The age of aesthetics is here
The age of fluffy bullshit has been here since the first time neolithic potters tried to cover up inferior clay with pretty designs.
Real beauty comes from elegant design. Form, if it is beautiful, is an inevitable expression of elegant functioning. Mathematicians and programmers understand this well; l337 dudes who think case styling makes them kewl are just wanking off.
You know, every time this buggy, insecure, over-complicated sack of crap is the source of a security hole, I make a post here to the effect that BIND is a buggy, insecure, over-complicated sack of crap and that its maintainers evidently lack either the will or the ability to fix it, and that there is more than one good alternative, including, but not limited to, djbdns.
And every time, someone comes back and says no, it's really fixed this time, it's really finally stable, the developers really are both concerned and competent.
I no longer bother replying anymore. Usually CERT does it for me.
BIND must go. The only thing it does reliably is diminish the credibility of open source. (And make sendmail look good by comparison, which is no mean feat, either.)
On the other hand, also like sex, it won't take as many years to get really good if you do bother to read some well-written books on the subject. Perl books tend not to have as many pictures, though.
Anybody ever do things like disguise a 4 GHz P4 in an ancient 8086 machine box?
Well, I started using computers before the 8086, so I don't really think of them as "ancient". The machines I learned on used punch cards and had dials and flashing lights. (I'm not actually that old -- these were abandoned 1970's IBM minicomputers donated to my high school in the late 80's. They were Model/3's, if you care.)
I still routinely use software from 1979-1984 written for the Apple II series. I mostly do this in an emulator now because 5.25" floppies are getting hard to find, but I still use a IIe and a IIc. Aside from games, I use a "word processor" called AppleWriter, which is slightly more sophisticated than pico. It's built-in formatting codes seem to be loosely based on troff -- when I first moved to Linux in the mid-90's and started writing man pages, I remember wondering why Linux boxes kept their docs in AppleWriter's obscure format!
I do it partly out of nostalgia, and partly out of habit -- I'm comfortable writing fiction on it after twenty years. But I also do it because AppleWriter is a 24k binary that can do more than pico can with 171k, and do it on a 1 MHz 8-bit CPU.
I'm getting pretty frustrated at how inefficient so-called cutting edge software has become. The hardware has become many orders of magnitude more powerful than in the old days, but sloppy-ass coding has soaked up most of that power, and the growth in useful new features accounts for only a small fraction of it. If the boneheaded "throw more hardware at it" philosophy hadn't become dominant, the average user could get by with computers costing tens -- instead of thousands -- of dollars.
As far as I see it, the biggest impediment to a successfully open source journal is peer review. The quality of the journal has to be insured.
I wouldn't worry about it. For example, as your peer, I would like to point out that the verb you are looking for is "ensured", not "insured". Some other peer will no doubt come along and note that "insured" is a permissible, though not preferred, term for the usage you have in mind, and so on.
The system breaks down, however, for truly awful misspellings like "rediculous", or people who cannot distinguish between "lose" and "loose" or "choose" and "chose". Those people are not my peers, and I will not stoop to correct them.
I find that nearly everyone who criticizes [INSERT LANGUAGE HERE] is either using an ancient implementation ... or they simply haven't explored the language fully.
I C|PHP|Forth|6502 Assembly|Forth) all suck if you're only looking at their flaws, and they all rock if you're only looking at their strengths. If you're not looking at both, you're not getting it.
This is an excellent template for recognizing language bigotry. Try this as a template for recognizing language agnosticism:
"I can enumerate dozens of less-than-perfect features in my favorite language."
Until you understand the weaknesses as well as the strengths of your favorite language, you either haven't explored it fully or you don't know enough languages well enough to have a basis for comparison. (C|C++|Java|Perl|AWK|Python|COBOL|RPG|Fortran|BAS
Does this guy have a legal defense fund? If he does, I'll gladly donate the $25 I was going to spend on CDs this month.
Oh wait, make that CD. You can't buy two CDs for only $25.
Well, looks like I'll be hurriedly downloading the rest of the Beggar's Banquet/4AD catalog and then cancelling my subscription and going back to the usual licit (used CD stores, eBay, GEMM) and illicit (Usenet) sources.
Sooner or later, the music industry will get a handle on the concept of "the highest price the market will bear". For me, it actually was more than ten bucks a month, but it's well under fifty. For fifty bucks, I expect to see the band live, thankyouverymuch.
It amazes me that BIND (and, for that matter, Sendmail) still ship as defaults with RH and some of the other distributions.
There are still a few obscure cases where Sendmail does a job no other MTA can -- though they are getting obscurer by the minute -- but there really is no excuse to have a copy of BIND running anywhere, on any machine, at any time. It's bloated, unstable, unsafe, poorly coded and, as its long track record demonstrates, its developers lack either the intention or the ability to fix it. Why it remains lauded as some sort of grand tradition is entirely beyond me, as it is proof that open source programmers can produce software as bad as or worse than Microsoft with vastly smaller resources. This isn't a Unix vulnerability, it's a sign that there are too many lazy admins who won't spend the half-hour it takes to understand djbdns or one of the other free/open DNS packages.
Some one tell me how we ended up three control keys. On Windows machines we have the window key, the control key, and the alt key.
Sigh. They're not control keys, they're meta keys, and there are four if you count the Windows key (which I don't, since I don't have one). The other meta key is "shift".
The reason you have them is that, back before the point-and-drool interface was invented, even before drop-down text menus, everything other than straight text entry was driven by various meta key combinations. Drop-down menus, in fact, were originally intended to teach you the keyboard shortcuts -- you were not expected to keep using the menu any more than you would training wheels on a bike. (This tactic probably would have actually worked if menu items had disappeared after you used the shortcuts a few times, but we were still operating under the illusion that end-users were smart, hardworking people, eager to learn. Ah, those heady days...)
I wonder if bloat stated with the keyboard and expanded into the software.
Actually, as the above suggests, the bloat in software originated with the resistance of new end-users to learning how to use the keyboard and went downhill from there. Back in the day, there was a common saying: If you design a system that an idiot can use, only an idiot will want to use it. And so now we have pictures of buttons on the screen to be clicked by people who didn't want to click real buttons.
Anyway, ALT is not a replacement for ESC, as ESC is designed to send a signal on its own, and ALT is meant to modify the meaning of another key.
Delete and backspace are heavily implementation-dependent in modern programs, but originally corresponded to ASCII control codes that would move the cursor back and delete the previous character, or just move the cursor back without deleting the previous character. On older machines, there was no backspace because it was the same key as the left arrow, but this goes back before the IBM PC.
I mean it looks cool and hi tech and all, but who needs to look hi tech in the 21st century?
Those of us who actually use those keys to get work done quickly without using the mouse to cut our productivity. This applies to everything from emacs to "modern" apps like MS Word and Photoshop. I suspect a lot of gamers would probably miss a lot of those keys, too. You could ditch the "redundant" numeric keypad, too, but I doubt very many people could maintain the 14,000 keystroke-per-hour data entry rate that is pretty normal for ten-key users with the regular numeric keys.
As it happens, there are simplified mini keyboards available for cheap if all you do with your computer is chat and post on Slashdot.
At the going rate, fifty years from now, the meaning of "innovation" will have shifted from its current meaning to "an unimaginative and unethical marketing tactic".
Now, if you'll pardon me, I've got to go write a Pac Man clone in which the power pellets are square and blue.
Not flattering? The main problem with this bio is that it is poorly written fluff by some hack with a lot of space to fill. There's substantially better journalism in People. Ignore this junk.
"Government Waste" alone should set your bullshit detector going. When people talk about waste and inefficiency in government, they are almost always talking about programs that help individuals -- public libraries, schools, lunch programs, medical care, scientific research, arts programs, and so on. What they are seldom ever talking about is funneling money into the pockets of large corporate contractors, like, fr'example, Microsoft.
Remember the GOP's "Contract with America" and its pledge to cut out corporate welfare? It's amazing how quickly they shut up about that once they had gained control of Congress. Of course, they don't talk much about out-of-control deficit spending anymore, either.
I do all of my literary writing in either an old shareware DOS text editor called QEdit (later renamed TSE Jr. and still available), or in a freeware Apple II "word processor" called AppleWriter II (which I nowadays run in an emulator, mainly for ease of transferring the files to a PC later).
It's not that I don't like modern word processors or that I don't use them extensively -- I do -- but for actual creative writing, the ambience and simplicity of tools I've been using for upwards of twenty years suits me fine. (I typically do later drafts in MS Word or, increasingly, OpenOffice.org.) This may be the result of the same instinct that has me logging far more time playing Galaga in MAME than I do playing GTA: Vice City.
As Harris points out, the fact that the manufacturers sem so dead-set on avoiding paper printing seems almost sinister
It's not almost sinister, it's prima facie evidence of criminal intent. There is absolutely no reason at all, none, nada, zip, for wanting to reduce the verifiability of a voting system, unless you want to commit vote fraud. Period.
Think of a parallel case -- accounting systems. Can you think of even one far-fetched honest reason to actively resist the inclusion of auditing capabilities? The absence of verifiability would render any accounting system absolutely useless for any honest purpose. Either the people at Diebold have IQs on a par with severely retarded chimpanzees or they are actively working to subvert the democratic process. There is no plausible third alternative.
Who in their right mind would Slashdot a GeoCities site? Criminy, I can do that with a single copy of lynx on a 286.
The performance argument is a red herring.
So how come so many applications run slow as shit on anything but the latest and most expensive hardware?
Geez, I wish programmers who start mouthing off about how unimportant it is to write tight, fast code were required to eat their own dogfood. Just because MS has trained the masses to accept that their 2.4GHz Pentium boxes seem to run no faster than a 286 doesn't mean we ought to accept it ourselves or inflict it on our own users.
I'm sure I'll be marked as flamebait or troll by some Java loving mod, but what I've stated are facts and experiences from real life Java development. The results are in and frankly... Java sucks!
You're right -- you will instantly be marked as a troll, even by people who feel much the same way. That being said, there's not much I can disagree with there, except that I haven't developed software in Java -- I do C, C++, and Perl -- so I can't speak to what it's like as a developer. Some people rave about it, some hate it, just the same as every other language.
What I can say is that as a user Java sucks ass. I'm sure I'll get modded as a troll, too, but that's been my experience. Every damn time I've tried a Java app, it has been slow and memory hungry. And most times I've tried installing a large and complex Java application, especially under Linux but also to a lesser degree under Windows, getting the Java runtime environment and the usual long laundry list of required libraries set up properly has been a major pain in the ass. Speaking from the user side of the fence, there's not much reason for me to spend several hours -- or even fifteen minutes -- trying to get Java to work when there's an RPM or MSI that painlessly installs an equivalent compiled C or C++ application with a single commandline or click.
Mind you, I wanted Java to live up to its promise. Near as I can tell, though, it has yet to be as fast, reliable, or even as cross-platform as ISO/ANSI C.
When I was in high school, I had a crazy biology teacher who was convinced -- sincerely, I think -- that the way to keep students from skipping class was to take the first student caught skipping each semester and hang him in front of the school until he rotted.
It used to be that I thought old Mr. Hatcher was nutty as a bedbug, but every time I read about some probably-borderline-legal but outrageously, screamingly unethical behavior on the part of moneygrubbing corporate executives, I move a little closer to seeing his point.
What we need is a lottery for corpo-rats. Enter them all by popular acclaim, and every quarter, just yank one of them at random out of the boardroom and pump him full of lead. Leave him to rot on the steps of the Federal Reserve.
Most of them will try to play it a little cooler. A few, like Darl McBride, won't. But that's okay, because you can't win if you don't play.
I once took a piece of water-damaged paper that had grown a few patches of fungus and scanned them in at 1200dpi. I thought it was pretty cool-looking.
What did not occur to me -- and this is obviously why I am not climbing the ranks of academia -- was to call it an optical biocomputer and write a paper about how the underlying shipping manifest was altered in "interesting and meaningful ways."
Of course, if I was sloshing beer all over my music collection, there's no telling what I might come up with.
U.S. Funds Anonymizer for Iranians
At first reading, that sounded like a money laundering service.
"Don Corleone, we will need to pump the payment through the Funds Anonymizer to avoid attracting the attention of the police."