If my page is so unpopular that it only gets one hit per day, I'm not likely to be updating it much either. No harm done if it gets cached and no one requests it for another 5 days.
But if I'm mr popularity, then I may be getting hundreds or thousands of hits per day on my page. I'm obviously not updating it thousands of times per day, so even a 10 second cache will reduce database trips for my page. That's a good thing, esp when multiplied by the total number of popular users.
Factor in the fact that you can cache components separately, especially anything that is unchanged from page to page within a group on the site, or in some cases unchanged across the whole entire site, and you realize still more savings.
I don't use Facebook, but what I've observed from a friend of mine who does use it is that he is part of a circle of about 10 people, each of whom is a part of another circle, and so on. Within that 10-person circle, the hit rate will be around once every five minutes per page during peak times.
What happens then is that the majority of the page remains unchanged every time the page is loaded, but the comment stream changes every few minutes.
You could cache the comment stream on any given page for 15 seconds and no one would notice because as soon as you post a comment on your own page, the cache for your page would be recreated. 5 seconds later your refresh your page and nothing has changed. But 10 seconds later, you refresh your page and any of your friends new comments show up. The server has just saved itself from at least one database trip. Multiply that by the 5 friends all doing the same thing, and then multiply that by all the other 'circles of friends' on FB concurrently and it starts to really add up.
You cache pages on your server so that instead of going to the database to fetch info, the info is already there.
Until you have a good reason to believe the info has changed. Say, the user updated something or someone posted a message. Then you go back and get new data and cache it again.
You also cache page components. Parts of the page that are on a different update schedule than other parts of the page may be cached separately or not at all (like ads).
I should point out that computer component manufacturers are constantly working to make their products more efficient.
That's the big fish here.
Saying use C++ instead of PHP is like saying you should figure out your life so that you only drive out to the market once a week and you carpool with all your neighbors (or take orders from them to bring it back with you), and when you do it, you make sure it's at a time when there will be no traffic and the lights will all be in your favor and your tires are at the perfect pressure and you and your neighbors have figured out all your other errands and planned the most energy efficient route needed to stop at each place necessary to complete the errand after having run an energy-optimization analysis of whether to go to CVS or Walgreens. And the whole time, the decision driver is energy efficiency. Not price paid. Not time spent. Not convenience. Not quality of life.
Seems to me the better way to deal with it is to be reasonably aware of your energy use and avoid being wantonly wasteful, and as a society to keep figuring out ways to make vehicles and neighborhood plans more efficient, and less polluting.
I would think that with all the common routines being used in php all the time, it should be fairly easy to make a compiler whose job is too simply reorganize php code so that commonality is centralized within an efficient executable and the customized overhead is tacked on as an extension.
There could even be conventions that seasoned php programmers follow to make their code more compiler friendly. Even better, if there is a way for a senior programmer to come in after the fact to make something a junior programmer wrote last year into something more compiler-friendly. This gives you all the advantages of rapid development while granting you the ability to come back later and tighten things up when you have more time or resources.
At the minimum however, this ideal "compiler" would still make just about any php code at least about 20% more efficient. Not 1000% times more efficient, but every little bit helps.
Throw caching on top of the pile, especially database caching, routine caching, page component caching, whole page caching, and browser caching, and you'd end up with something pretty comparable to a site written in C++.
The advantage of php is that it frees up developers to do other stuff. Sure they're still all polluting the environment in their cars regardless of whether they're developing facebook or something else, but the best thing is ALWAYS to reduce the human input required to produce something. Eventually robots will be greener than humans at production. Let the humans go find new ways to do new things. Free up those resources to find ways to reduce emissions elsewhere, or to do something charitable, or to invent something that makes society better off and more efficient using less paper or less delivery fuel or less disposable trash associated with eating take out, or to work form home instead of having to be in cubes next to the other developers figuring out why something isn't the way it should be and getting screamed at by some UI / Marketing guy that their code is just not meeting the needs.
Point is, sure, let's find a way to make running code more energy efficient. The way to do that is not to demonize PHP because C++ has its own inefficiencies and there's no reliable way to draw a real-world full impact comparison between the two. Maybe Facebook would never have gotten off the ground if they used C++ and it's impossible to tell what the long term environmental impact of a facebookless world is vs one with it. It's lunacy to even try.
So we recognize there's en energy efficiency problem that can be solved. We're using PHP so that frees up resources to figure out how to be more energy efficient. Either at Facebook, or at Zend, or wherever. Tying up extra resources trying to keep Facebook running ain't the way though. And as pointed out by many others, it's the database stupid. The energy efficiencies between C++ and PHP for running facebook do exist and may even be significant, but they are not 10 to 1, and that's only a small part of the energy story.
Anyway, I've always felt that the ideal solution would use very strict class roles as a concept to start with, but to make your characters abilities more context-aware.
At bare minimum, that would mean you would be in a specific silo whenever grouped or engaged in PVP, and then you'd have much broader abilities when soloing pve.
You could refine this so that depending on quest and your level, the skills are similarly broadened or narrowed, and by making some quests require groups and some not.
This would greatly change the dynamic of play so that people could easily grind solo, and enjoy the team-player aspect when playing with friends or groups.
We evolved to seek revenge (punish) because it deters others from fucking with us. We punish to make a point, to say "don't do that again or else!" or "He is bad, he deserves to suffer! Don't be bad like him kiddies!"
Punishing people for fucking with themselves is a novel concept that seems to have sprouted from a feeling of moral duty to prevent others from doing stuff we don't like, or to show disapproval and make an example of them. The fact that prisons get excused as 'deterrents' masks their true purpose: punishment. It makes people feel good to put those they disapprove of or fear under their thumb.
So we're down to punishment and segregation. 2, not 3.
Segregation is to varying extents based a valid purpose for having prisons, or islands, or institutions. However, segregation is really only a small part of the story, which what I was trying to say, and which Courageous illustrated better in reply. Segregation is surely not the real reason pot smokers go to jail. It's not the reason Madoff went to jail. It's not the reason people who commit murder due to temporary insanity / crime of passion. And as someone else mentioned, it's not the reason people get released after they do their time.
It's all about crime and punishment and 'crime' is something whose definition morphs due to culture and fashion.
Considering most people in jail are there for drug offenses, I think that bolsters the statistics behind the Economists premise.
If you stop jailing people for drug offenses, then that leaves dealing with sociopaths, as you say, crimes of passion, and otherwise normal people who have trouble controlling their impulses and behavior (reckless drivers, drunk drivers, public disturbers, sex offenders and johns, tax evaders, etc).
I do think people who are irreparably violent need to be removed from society. It's the rest of the people in prison I think stand a chance at becoming decent members of society, or for whom other carrots or sticks (preferably before an offense ever occurs) would be more effective.
Prison is only ostensibly to separate us from criminals. The real reason things never get better is that the public believes criminals gave up their rights and should not be on 'resort vacations' or eating 'gourmet food' or whatever. That they should be 'locked up and throw away the key' and the 'victim's rights' interests demand that people get locked up for a long long time, never to see daylight again.
It's all driven by emotion, not by what is sensible or statistically the best way to diminish crime.
The Economist had a great writeup on this a month back or so. I can't be bothered to find the link, so trust me or not. Fact is, they did statistical analysis on the problem and found that a punitive legal system has far worse results than a curative legal system.
Police state crap started long ago. At least with McCarthy.
The Republicans are certainly as much or more to blame as the dems.
Obama won't make a stand on this issue because he already got into hot water for a vote he made that the republicans tried to twist into him supporting child predators. The last thing he wants to do is derail his agenda over a polarizing issue like this. No one will fix this as long as there are other issues that are more popular to fix.
When the population as a whole wakes up to police state insanity, then there will be politicians with the backbone to do something. Otherwise, don't hold your breath for anyone from any party.
I came to read this posting thinking there would be some great discussion on the weight of information. What's the difference in weight between a full hard drive and an empty hard drive for instance, and what can qualify as empty (since it's possible having a series of alternating 1s and 0s is lighter than pure 0s for instance... I wouldn't know).. point being, that there is a difference between the average drive containing random or "no" bits encoded on it, and one that does actually contain information encoded on it by intention.
But instead this was all about the weight of devices storing said data. Humbug!
I want to know how much all the data (and only the data) on all devices and transmitting on all lines actually weighs. Because the media can and probably will become lighter with time, but information itself can not become any lighter.
I hope some mods gives you some points because this was the best post on here today. Of course, I'm late to the party and this is waaay down the page, so who knows if mods will ever make it down this far:|
I find one of the most unpleasant feelings in the world is to feel both full and hungry.
My body typically is very good at telling me what I need. If I haven't eaten enough protein, I can eat as many carbs as I want and still feel like crap. Vice versa, not enough carbs, and no matter how much protein I eat, I'm still hungry for carbs. The same holds true for fat.
What I have found that seems to work well, is to eat something high in fiber, water, and protein, until I've had a reasonable portion... it should be supplemented with some complex carbs like broccoli and a little bit of traditional carbs like pasta or rice...
I then finish this off with a very small desert. Say two squares of Ritter Sport chocolate. That tiny bit of extra fat and sugar take me over the top and I feel full and satsified.
I'm losing weight very, very slowly on this plan (about 1lb every month or two). But it has definitely been going in the right direction for the last two years, and at least I'm not gaining.
There's two kinds of viewers: those who are going to mute/skip/walk out/ignore/avoid commercials, and those who don't and the same person can be either or both depending on different factors.
Trying to mandate watching commercials is bound to fail. Those who don't want to watch them will go to whatever lengths necessary to avoid them. You've already lost their eyeballs so forget about them, you never had them even before DVRs.
The audience you need to target are those who either enjoy commercials or are not actively avoiding them.
I think the whole point of the patent is so Apple can profit share should any apps choose to run ads on their devices. For example, if you install an app on your iphone that pops up ads and behaves in any modal way that makes the iphone inoperable, Apple might not like that. In addition to any TOU and contractual obligations imposed on app developers, this gives Apple a patent should an app designer manage to circumvent the TOU in any way.
I don't begrudge anyone questioning pharma's motives or considering them with a suspicious eye; they deserve it. That said, being anti-vaccine is going a little out of hand.
How SAD it is that our culture has gotten to the point where we need ads and overt commercialism to validate an experience as 'real.'
This is the same problem that plagues the movie industry now, where entire plotlines revolve around using famous TV anchors, Larry King et al, or pretend news reels, and copious doses of ads and famous logos to make something unbelievable seem more real.
Oh gee, if they're interviewing that space alien on Oprah and he's feeling depressed and she's helping give him a sense of self worth then it MUST be real and we laugh along knowingly because it fits in with our mental schema of the real world. WTF.
Your handedness influences which hand you use for the phone. In this way, you have trained your right ear to pay better attention to crappy noise:signal conversations. Hence your right ear is now better at hearing the spoken word through noise.
My left ring finger can press the 'a' key at the same time as my pinky is on the shift key. Pretty simple.
USS PORTLAND USS SAN ANTONIO
I just did that using my method and it took no more time to type than it would typing in lowercase (about 1 second apiece). I invite anyone to try it out. It's not so hard. Like I said, for me, it's faster and more intuitive than using caps lock because the whole engage and disengage thing trips me up and I lose time changing gears in my mental map. I only ever get utility out of caps lock if I have to type more than some 40 capital letters sequentially. Maybe it's because I got so much practice using my pinky like this from early-days HTML programming where I constantly had to type all-caps tags and attributes alternated with lowercase content and attribute values. I was never able to incorporate caps lock into that workflow effectively.
You seem to be closed minded about people like me and what appears to be a majority of the slashdot population who hate this key. In contrast, I was open to your assertion that this might not be comfortable for you and others and thus suggested the use of alternate keyboards for those who prefer that, or some software solution like sticky keys. Or perhaps the capslock key could be shrunk down to the size of a regular letter-key.
As for the pool of people NOT preferring capslock... let's see, I doubt all those in the professions you cite have the same preferences as you. More importantly, only a fraction of those employed in those industries use computers as part of their job regularly. And surely you don't mean to suggest that even if they all used computers all the time to fulfill their jobs where they have to type in uppercase often and had the same preference as you to change paradigms into and out of caps-lock mode instead of using pinky acrobatics like me.... that that population is larger than the rest of the computer using population including grandmothers, gamers, students, bloggers, programmers.... is that what you're asserting? Forgive me for being skeptical, but biased or not, I'll stick with my premise as seeming more believable.
I have no statistics to back up my belief that those who prefer caps lock represent a tiny majority, but it seems like a very reasonable one and based on the sample I've asked, it holds up. Your assertion simply doesn't seem reasonable to me. Either way, neither of us can prove our assertion, so we're only left with trying to find compromise as the only possible constructive effort on slashdot. Indeed, I'm sure the actual majority of all users out there doesn't care as much about having it or missing it as you and I do. So either of us could also twist that population into the defense of our position.
I accept not having it handicaps you and many others like you. I ask that you accept that having it handicaps me and many others like me. Now let's find the solution.
On my macbook, I have the caps lock key disabled. What's a shame is that they let me remap it to some other function/control key, but not to tab, and anything I do remap it to behaves in a sticky fashion where I have to turn it on, and then turn it off. I would prefer I could remap it and also change the behavior so that it only is triggered as long as it is depressed.
Btw, I suppose you used caps lock to be so emphatic when you 'shouted' about "those of us who already know how to type?"
I can see how there are niche use cases where caps lock comes in handy. For most of those, software-powered, post-typed conversion is ideal as it offloads the responsibility from the user and guarantees proper data entry. Considering js in a browser can handle this easily, there's no reason any executable can't handle it as well.
For those few cases where software doesn't help, for instance when having to type lots of acronyms alternated with regularly cased type, from my own personal experience, I have found keeping my left pinky held on the shift key while I type with all my other fingers works great. For me, at least, it works better than alternately engaging and disengaging caps lock. That said, I can see how for you, who is used to operating in this mode all the time, having a dedicated utility like caps lock is preferable to stressing your pinky.
But now we're talking about a tiny minority of use cases. I think either a specialized keyboard, or having caps lock elsewhere (as suggested earlier to place it near num lock et al), or else using a sticky keys approach where rapidly double-clicking the shift key (or both shift keys at once) would be preferable to imposing caps lock on all the other use cases. I'd much rather have a larger tab key as that is the one key I use quite a lot, and which if you are aiming to avoid the caps lock key causes you to sometimes aim too high and hit the tilde or even the escape key instead. A big fat tab key I think is something a lot of people would like, a lot of the time.
a reasonable operating system assumes you want a number pad far far more often than a zany overly detailed set of arrow keys that aren't even printed with arrow marks by default (mac)
Windows at the very least should make the number pad always default to numbers and create an 'arrows lock' key somewhere out of the way just for people who feel the need to move the cursor northwest or some other non-cardinal direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you mean by "far too low."
If my page is so unpopular that it only gets one hit per day, I'm not likely to be updating it much either. No harm done if it gets cached and no one requests it for another 5 days.
But if I'm mr popularity, then I may be getting hundreds or thousands of hits per day on my page. I'm obviously not updating it thousands of times per day, so even a 10 second cache will reduce database trips for my page. That's a good thing, esp when multiplied by the total number of popular users.
Factor in the fact that you can cache components separately, especially anything that is unchanged from page to page within a group on the site, or in some cases unchanged across the whole entire site, and you realize still more savings.
I don't use Facebook, but what I've observed from a friend of mine who does use it is that he is part of a circle of about 10 people, each of whom is a part of another circle, and so on. Within that 10-person circle, the hit rate will be around once every five minutes per page during peak times.
What happens then is that the majority of the page remains unchanged every time the page is loaded, but the comment stream changes every few minutes.
You could cache the comment stream on any given page for 15 seconds and no one would notice because as soon as you post a comment on your own page, the cache for your page would be recreated. 5 seconds later your refresh your page and nothing has changed. But 10 seconds later, you refresh your page and any of your friends new comments show up. The server has just saved itself from at least one database trip. Multiply that by the 5 friends all doing the same thing, and then multiply that by all the other 'circles of friends' on FB concurrently and it starts to really add up.
You cache pages on your server so that instead of going to the database to fetch info, the info is already there.
Until you have a good reason to believe the info has changed. Say, the user updated something or someone posted a message. Then you go back and get new data and cache it again.
You also cache page components. Parts of the page that are on a different update schedule than other parts of the page may be cached separately or not at all (like ads).
I should point out that computer component manufacturers are constantly working to make their products more efficient.
That's the big fish here.
Saying use C++ instead of PHP is like saying you should figure out your life so that you only drive out to the market once a week and you carpool with all your neighbors (or take orders from them to bring it back with you), and when you do it, you make sure it's at a time when there will be no traffic and the lights will all be in your favor and your tires are at the perfect pressure and you and your neighbors have figured out all your other errands and planned the most energy efficient route needed to stop at each place necessary to complete the errand after having run an energy-optimization analysis of whether to go to CVS or Walgreens. And the whole time, the decision driver is energy efficiency. Not price paid. Not time spent. Not convenience. Not quality of life.
Seems to me the better way to deal with it is to be reasonably aware of your energy use and avoid being wantonly wasteful, and as a society to keep figuring out ways to make vehicles and neighborhood plans more efficient, and less polluting.
I would think that with all the common routines being used in php all the time, it should be fairly easy to make a compiler whose job is too simply reorganize php code so that commonality is centralized within an efficient executable and the customized overhead is tacked on as an extension.
There could even be conventions that seasoned php programmers follow to make their code more compiler friendly. Even better, if there is a way for a senior programmer to come in after the fact to make something a junior programmer wrote last year into something more compiler-friendly. This gives you all the advantages of rapid development while granting you the ability to come back later and tighten things up when you have more time or resources.
At the minimum however, this ideal "compiler" would still make just about any php code at least about 20% more efficient. Not 1000% times more efficient, but every little bit helps.
Throw caching on top of the pile, especially database caching, routine caching, page component caching, whole page caching, and browser caching, and you'd end up with something pretty comparable to a site written in C++.
The advantage of php is that it frees up developers to do other stuff. Sure they're still all polluting the environment in their cars regardless of whether they're developing facebook or something else, but the best thing is ALWAYS to reduce the human input required to produce something. Eventually robots will be greener than humans at production. Let the humans go find new ways to do new things. Free up those resources to find ways to reduce emissions elsewhere, or to do something charitable, or to invent something that makes society better off and more efficient using less paper or less delivery fuel or less disposable trash associated with eating take out, or to work form home instead of having to be in cubes next to the other developers figuring out why something isn't the way it should be and getting screamed at by some UI / Marketing guy that their code is just not meeting the needs.
Point is, sure, let's find a way to make running code more energy efficient. The way to do that is not to demonize PHP because C++ has its own inefficiencies and there's no reliable way to draw a real-world full impact comparison between the two. Maybe Facebook would never have gotten off the ground if they used C++ and it's impossible to tell what the long term environmental impact of a facebookless world is vs one with it. It's lunacy to even try.
So we recognize there's en energy efficiency problem that can be solved. We're using PHP so that frees up resources to figure out how to be more energy efficient. Either at Facebook, or at Zend, or wherever. Tying up extra resources trying to keep Facebook running ain't the way though. And as pointed out by many others, it's the database stupid. The energy efficiencies between C++ and PHP for running facebook do exist and may even be significant, but they are not 10 to 1, and that's only a small part of the energy story.
freakin paladins!
Anyway, I've always felt that the ideal solution would use very strict class roles as a concept to start with, but to make your characters abilities more context-aware.
At bare minimum, that would mean you would be in a specific silo whenever grouped or engaged in PVP, and then you'd have much broader abilities when soloing pve.
You could refine this so that depending on quest and your level, the skills are similarly broadened or narrowed, and by making some quests require groups and some not.
This would greatly change the dynamic of play so that people could easily grind solo, and enjoy the team-player aspect when playing with friends or groups.
You've stumbled into semantics.
Punishment = deterrent.
We evolved to seek revenge (punish) because it deters others from fucking with us. We punish to make a point, to say "don't do that again or else!" or "He is bad, he deserves to suffer! Don't be bad like him kiddies!"
Punishing people for fucking with themselves is a novel concept that seems to have sprouted from a feeling of moral duty to prevent others from doing stuff we don't like, or to show disapproval and make an example of them. The fact that prisons get excused as 'deterrents' masks their true purpose: punishment. It makes people feel good to put those they disapprove of or fear under their thumb.
So we're down to punishment and segregation. 2, not 3.
Segregation is to varying extents based a valid purpose for having prisons, or islands, or institutions. However, segregation is really only a small part of the story, which what I was trying to say, and which Courageous illustrated better in reply. Segregation is surely not the real reason pot smokers go to jail. It's not the reason Madoff went to jail. It's not the reason people who commit murder due to temporary insanity / crime of passion. And as someone else mentioned, it's not the reason people get released after they do their time.
It's all about crime and punishment and 'crime' is something whose definition morphs due to culture and fashion.
Considering most people in jail are there for drug offenses, I think that bolsters the statistics behind the Economists premise.
If you stop jailing people for drug offenses, then that leaves dealing with sociopaths, as you say, crimes of passion, and otherwise normal people who have trouble controlling their impulses and behavior (reckless drivers, drunk drivers, public disturbers, sex offenders and johns, tax evaders, etc).
I do think people who are irreparably violent need to be removed from society. It's the rest of the people in prison I think stand a chance at becoming decent members of society, or for whom other carrots or sticks (preferably before an offense ever occurs) would be more effective.
That's what you believe, yet it's not true.
Prison is only ostensibly to separate us from criminals. The real reason things never get better is that the public believes criminals gave up their rights and should not be on 'resort vacations' or eating 'gourmet food' or whatever. That they should be 'locked up and throw away the key' and the 'victim's rights' interests demand that people get locked up for a long long time, never to see daylight again.
It's all driven by emotion, not by what is sensible or statistically the best way to diminish crime.
The Economist had a great writeup on this a month back or so. I can't be bothered to find the link, so trust me or not. Fact is, they did statistical analysis on the problem and found that a punitive legal system has far worse results than a curative legal system.
Police state crap started long ago. At least with McCarthy.
The Republicans are certainly as much or more to blame as the dems.
Obama won't make a stand on this issue because he already got into hot water for a vote he made that the republicans tried to twist into him supporting child predators. The last thing he wants to do is derail his agenda over a polarizing issue like this. No one will fix this as long as there are other issues that are more popular to fix.
When the population as a whole wakes up to police state insanity, then there will be politicians with the backbone to do something. Otherwise, don't hold your breath for anyone from any party.
Thank you!!!
I came to read this posting thinking there would be some great discussion on the weight of information. What's the difference in weight between a full hard drive and an empty hard drive for instance, and what can qualify as empty (since it's possible having a series of alternating 1s and 0s is lighter than pure 0s for instance... I wouldn't know) .. point being, that there is a difference between the average drive containing random or "no" bits encoded on it, and one that does actually contain information encoded on it by intention.
But instead this was all about the weight of devices storing said data. Humbug!
I want to know how much all the data (and only the data) on all devices and transmitting on all lines actually weighs. Because the media can and probably will become lighter with time, but information itself can not become any lighter.
I hope some mods gives you some points because this was the best post on here today. Of course, I'm late to the party and this is waaay down the page, so who knows if mods will ever make it down this far :|
I find one of the most unpleasant feelings in the world is to feel both full and hungry.
My body typically is very good at telling me what I need. If I haven't eaten enough protein, I can eat as many carbs as I want and still feel like crap. Vice versa, not enough carbs, and no matter how much protein I eat, I'm still hungry for carbs. The same holds true for fat.
What I have found that seems to work well, is to eat something high in fiber, water, and protein, until I've had a reasonable portion... it should be supplemented with some complex carbs like broccoli and a little bit of traditional carbs like pasta or rice...
I then finish this off with a very small desert. Say two squares of Ritter Sport chocolate. That tiny bit of extra fat and sugar take me over the top and I feel full and satsified.
I'm losing weight very, very slowly on this plan (about 1lb every month or two). But it has definitely been going in the right direction for the last two years, and at least I'm not gaining.
There's two kinds of viewers: those who are going to mute/skip/walk out/ignore/avoid commercials, and those who don't and the same person can be either or both depending on different factors.
Trying to mandate watching commercials is bound to fail. Those who don't want to watch them will go to whatever lengths necessary to avoid them. You've already lost their eyeballs so forget about them, you never had them even before DVRs.
The audience you need to target are those who either enjoy commercials or are not actively avoiding them.
the most witty comment I've ever read on slashdot. thank you for a hearty laugh :)
I think the whole point of the patent is so Apple can profit share should any apps choose to run ads on their devices. For example, if you install an app on your iphone that pops up ads and behaves in any modal way that makes the iphone inoperable, Apple might not like that. In addition to any TOU and contractual obligations imposed on app developers, this gives Apple a patent should an app designer manage to circumvent the TOU in any way.
There's an awful lot of scarmongering been going on here on slashdot over the flu vaccines.
You should read http://antiantivax.flurf.net/ for a good debate on the anti-vaccine stance.
I don't begrudge anyone questioning pharma's motives or considering them with a suspicious eye; they deserve it. That said, being anti-vaccine is going a little out of hand.
touche
How SAD it is that our culture has gotten to the point where we need ads and overt commercialism to validate an experience as 'real.'
This is the same problem that plagues the movie industry now, where entire plotlines revolve around using famous TV anchors, Larry King et al, or pretend news reels, and copious doses of ads and famous logos to make something unbelievable seem more real.
Oh gee, if they're interviewing that space alien on Oprah and he's feeling depressed and she's helping give him a sense of self worth then it MUST be real and we laugh along knowingly because it fits in with our mental schema of the real world. WTF.
brilliant post. mod up and close entire discussion. nothing more need be said.
Music existed long before the RIAA, and will live on long after.
That should be a bumper sticker
Your handedness influences which hand you use for the phone. In this way, you have trained your right ear to pay better attention to crappy noise:signal conversations. Hence your right ear is now better at hearing the spoken word through noise.
My left ring finger can press the 'a' key at the same time as my pinky is on the shift key. Pretty simple.
USS PORTLAND USS SAN ANTONIO
I just did that using my method and it took no more time to type than it would typing in lowercase (about 1 second apiece). I invite anyone to try it out. It's not so hard. Like I said, for me, it's faster and more intuitive than using caps lock because the whole engage and disengage thing trips me up and I lose time changing gears in my mental map. I only ever get utility out of caps lock if I have to type more than some 40 capital letters sequentially. Maybe it's because I got so much practice using my pinky like this from early-days HTML programming where I constantly had to type all-caps tags and attributes alternated with lowercase content and attribute values. I was never able to incorporate caps lock into that workflow effectively.
You seem to be closed minded about people like me and what appears to be a majority of the slashdot population who hate this key. In contrast, I was open to your assertion that this might not be comfortable for you and others and thus suggested the use of alternate keyboards for those who prefer that, or some software solution like sticky keys. Or perhaps the capslock key could be shrunk down to the size of a regular letter-key.
As for the pool of people NOT preferring capslock... let's see, I doubt all those in the professions you cite have the same preferences as you. More importantly, only a fraction of those employed in those industries use computers as part of their job regularly. And surely you don't mean to suggest that even if they all used computers all the time to fulfill their jobs where they have to type in uppercase often and had the same preference as you to change paradigms into and out of caps-lock mode instead of using pinky acrobatics like me.... that that population is larger than the rest of the computer using population including grandmothers, gamers, students, bloggers, programmers.... is that what you're asserting? Forgive me for being skeptical, but biased or not, I'll stick with my premise as seeming more believable.
I have no statistics to back up my belief that those who prefer caps lock represent a tiny majority, but it seems like a very reasonable one and based on the sample I've asked, it holds up. Your assertion simply doesn't seem reasonable to me. Either way, neither of us can prove our assertion, so we're only left with trying to find compromise as the only possible constructive effort on slashdot. Indeed, I'm sure the actual majority of all users out there doesn't care as much about having it or missing it as you and I do. So either of us could also twist that population into the defense of our position.
I accept not having it handicaps you and many others like you. I ask that you accept that having it handicaps me and many others like me. Now let's find the solution.
On my macbook, I have the caps lock key disabled. What's a shame is that they let me remap it to some other function/control key, but not to tab, and anything I do remap it to behaves in a sticky fashion where I have to turn it on, and then turn it off. I would prefer I could remap it and also change the behavior so that it only is triggered as long as it is depressed.
Btw, I suppose you used caps lock to be so emphatic when you 'shouted' about "those of us who already know how to type?"
I can see how there are niche use cases where caps lock comes in handy. For most of those, software-powered, post-typed conversion is ideal as it offloads the responsibility from the user and guarantees proper data entry. Considering js in a browser can handle this easily, there's no reason any executable can't handle it as well.
For those few cases where software doesn't help, for instance when having to type lots of acronyms alternated with regularly cased type, from my own personal experience, I have found keeping my left pinky held on the shift key while I type with all my other fingers works great. For me, at least, it works better than alternately engaging and disengaging caps lock. That said, I can see how for you, who is used to operating in this mode all the time, having a dedicated utility like caps lock is preferable to stressing your pinky.
But now we're talking about a tiny minority of use cases. I think either a specialized keyboard, or having caps lock elsewhere (as suggested earlier to place it near num lock et al), or else using a sticky keys approach where rapidly double-clicking the shift key (or both shift keys at once) would be preferable to imposing caps lock on all the other use cases. I'd much rather have a larger tab key as that is the one key I use quite a lot, and which if you are aiming to avoid the caps lock key causes you to sometimes aim too high and hit the tilde or even the escape key instead. A big fat tab key I think is something a lot of people would like, a lot of the time.
how is the parent a troll?? that's some pretty harsh modding
a reasonable operating system assumes you want a number pad far far more often than a zany overly detailed set of arrow keys that aren't even printed with arrow marks by default (mac)
Windows at the very least should make the number pad always default to numbers and create an 'arrows lock' key somewhere out of the way just for people who feel the need to move the cursor northwest or some other non-cardinal direction.
astute post